Resistance (At All Costs)

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I write this review as the hyper-partisan House Democrats are poised to file articles of impeach against Donald Trump.

Last week, the Democrats had three hyper-partisan anti-Trump law professors make a political case against Trump based on, apparently, their collective belief that Trump wants to crown himself king. (Seriously, what was that crack about making Barron Trump a baron, about?) It's all incoherent and doesn't represent anything I learned about constitutional law at UCLA Law School back in 1983.

The hyperpartisan Democrats permitted a single law professor for the Republicans. Jonathan Turley announced that he had voted against Trump - so not a single witness could be described as a Trump support. However, Turley's comments mirror the theme of this book, which is that the Democrats are destroying the unwritten rules and restraints that have permitted our constitutional democracy to function. Turley pointed to the partisan behavior of the impeachment and the absence of a crime or evidence of a crime and pointed out that there would be a time when the shoe was on the other foot. When it is, then we will step lower and lower into destabilizing the country.

Author Kimberly Strassel ended her book before we got to this point. I think she stopped her narrative in the summer of 2019, but what she describes is a piece with what a real liberal like Jonathan Turley has described, the Left is destoying the county.

This book is incredibly useful for pulling together the evidence and flicking out the spin and disinformation that the Democrat/Left/Media has consciously injected into the narrative of the events of the last three years. I've been casually following along with the Democrat/Left/Media hysteria about “Russian collusion,” but I had nowhere near a coherent picture of what was going on. I've considered the Democrat/Left/Media to be unhinged and silly. I had generally dismissed the subject on the basis that “there is no there there,” which was conclusively demonstrated by the Mueller Report, so I have never gotten into the weeds. Frankly, I didn't believe that the Democrat/Left/Media was serious about their claims.

Maybe they are not serious, but they are certainly malicious.

Strassel shows us how the Democrat/Left/Media have been engaged in “battlespace preparation” while their opponents haven't even known that there was a game on. For example, based on my experience with psychopaths and liars, I noticed that they were planting the “Republicans paid for the Steele report” from the earliest point. This was clearly a lie, and has been proven a lie, but what I didn't know, and what Republicans did not know, was that the Democrat/Left/Media knew that a coterie of politicized bureaucrats - let's call them the “Deep State,” for convenience - knew that the Steele Report had been weaponized for a intelligence operation against the Trump campaign. As Strassel points out, this information was disclosed by the FBI to Obama to Congressional Democrats long before Republicans had any idea what was going on.

Another example is how the Democrat/Left/Media began a smear campaign against Devin Nunes before Trump was inaugurated for the purpose of taking him out of operation on the Intelligence Committee. They were succesful and are trying again. Now, that we know that these odd and weird accusations are not accidental, but the carefully planned actions of a coordinated enemy, we can see how much the Democrat/Left/Media fears Nunes.

Strassel catalogs the destruction of the American political system, including the unprecedented bullshit of the Kavanaugh hearing, James Comey's use of his powers to blackmail politicians, the clearly partisan manipulation of the Mueller investigation and the rest.

If you are an average American, this should be a white-knuckle read. I found myself gripping the book in rage as I listened to how the incompetent, stupid Democrat/Left/Media elites are squandering two centuries of traditions designed to restrain America from becoming a Banana Republic.

Too late. Let's have Strassel provide a few examples:

“The Logan Act is an ancient law that criminalizes negotiation by unauthorized persons with foreign governments that are in dispute with the United States. Only two defendants have ever been charged under the Logan Act—the more recent one in 1852—and neither was convicted. It is absolutely normal for members of a presidential transition team to talk to their foreign counterparts, and on all manner of subjects. Yet the Obama administration seized on the Logan Act as a pretext to escalate its investigation of the Trump team and to further fan the Russia-collusion flames. Indeed, it was on Logan Act grounds that Comey's FBI set about entrapping Flynn. On January 24, mere days after he was sworn in, Flynn got a call from Deputy FBI Director Andy McCabe, ostensibly to talk about an FBI training session. But then McCabe slipped in that he felt the FBI needed to have a few agents talk to Flynn about his Russia communications.”

And:

“This is another way that Democrats have been destroying the norms that made government policy.

Prior to Schiff as chairman, the Intelligence Committee was known as the one committee that serious hard-working Congressmen sat on to jointly work on serious issues.

//Yet none of this held a candle to the behavior of California Representative Adam Schiff, who managed in a few short months to destroy the reputation of one of the last grown-up committees in Congress. For decades, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had held themselves out as a redoubt of reasonableness and bipartisanship. Only serious members tended to ask to serve in these hard posts, and only serious members tended to be named. Committee members prided themselves on putting national security ahead of partisan politics and generally refusing to undercut one another.

Schiff, the ranking member under Nunes, officially ended all that. When Nunes exposed the information about Obama administration unmaskings, Schiff chose to berate the Republican rather than treat the information seriously. This was startlingly partisan, given that for years Democrats had made an issue about government spying, privacy, and civil liberties. The left had blown a gasket over the Republican authorization of metadata, which merely allows the government to collect telephone numbers—no names, and no eavesdropping. And Oregon Senator Ron Wyden in 2013 had introduced a bill to strengthen the ban on reverse targeting, for fear the government would use surveillance of foreign citizens to listen in on Americans. Yet now with clear proof that the Obama administration had abused its unmasking authority, Schiff moved to shoot the messenger.”

Worse still, last week, we had the pathetic example of Schiff using “reverse engineering” to monitor fellow intelligence committee member Devin Nunes and reporter John Solomon's phone records, and then release that private information to the public in the Democrat's report. This unprecedented, although the media - not interested in playing referee - has made no comment. When the shoe is on the other foot, then, certainly, the media will be roused to action, but who will care then?, inasmuch as the Democrats will have set a precedent and the media will have proven its corruption.

This was a nice country, but it will not work if everyone is not willing to play by the spirit of the rules.