I'm reading "Obama cautions freshman House Democrats about the price tag of liberal policies" (WaPo), reporting on an Obama appearance at a Democratic Party rally that happened yesterday.
I have to highlight this one sentence, because... "garner"...
While the more liberal freshmen have garnered much of the attention in Washington, many first-year Democrats hail from swing- or even red districts and have struggled with how to respond to the emboldened far-left.I just created a new tag this morning, "Obama and the Russia hoax." So this is my second post with that tag. It's not surprising that Obama doesn't want to talk about this subject, but I want to know about his role in getting the hoax rolling. Was he just a passive bystander? His party has a lot to account for. Where was his leadership?
I remember when Trump won the election. Obama sounded so gracious the morning after the election:
"We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country," Obama said in a statement in the Rose Garden. "The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy, and over the next few months we are going to show that to the world.... Everybody is sad when their side loses an election, but the day after, we have to remember that we're actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage. We're not Democrats first. We're not Republicans first. We are Americans first... This was a long and hard-fought campaign. A lot of our fellow Americans are exultant today. A lot of Americans are less so, but that's the nature of campaigns. That's the nature of democracy. It is hard and sometimes contentious and noisy. It's not always inspiring.... Sometimes you lose an argument. Sometimes you lose an election.... We try really hard to persuade people that we're right, and then people vote, and then we lose. We learn from our mistakes. We do some reflection. We lick our wounds. We brush ourselves off. We get back in the arena. We go at it. We try even harder the next time."The "arena" is the public space — politics, fought out in the open. The goal is the next election. That's not where Democrats chose to "go at it" and "try even harder." Was that Rose Garden speech a con or did he believe what he was saying at the time?
पोस्ट्स
१०५ टिप्पण्या:
ascension
I wonder if they are even aware of their messianic word choices.
Was that Rose Garden speech a con or did he believe what he was saying at the time?
Was he colluding on the investigation?
Did he expect it would be stopped once the election was over?
What was it Comey tweeted? So many questions...
Was that Rose Garden speech a con or did he believe what he was saying at the time?
It was ritual self-presentation. Obama deep down is always a piece of shit.
Oh for cryong out loud Althouse, con man gonna con.
I think he believed it at the time up until Lady MacBeth and the Clinton organization whacked him with a clue bat.
Remember what she said to Vince Foster a week before he killed himself: “You’re just a hick lawyer who will never understand!”
I would have to conclude, given what happened in the weeks after that Rose Garden speech, that Obama was lying through his teeth that morning. It is difficult to believe otherwise. And, seriously, does anyone actually believe no one informed Obama of Crossfire Hurricane, at the very least?
I'll take "con" for $1,000 Alex....
"I just created a new tag this morning..."
Better: I created a new tag just this morning.
I always wondered whether it was Obama in charge. He always seemed to me to be the piano player in the whorehouse, who had no idea what went on upstairs.
It's not surprising that Obama doesn't want to talk about this subject, but I want to know about his role in getting the hoax rolling. Was he just a passive bystander? His party has a lot to account for. Where was his leadership?
We know he was briefed on the effort.
We know the effort was manned by his loyalists.
We know he ordered the spying on a Israeli diplomats and Americans opposed to the Iran deal.
We know he used the federal government as a weapon against his opponents with the DEA, IRS, and spying on media.
Obama was a leader in the effort to fundamentally transform our republic into a police state.
This con man was the carefully crafted Enemy of the People used to rig the USA for a controlled the demolition from inside the Whitehouse. That's why the sub-Enemy of the People adored him.
"Where was his leadership? "
Seriously? He NEVER showed leadership
That's not where Democrats chose to "go at it" and "try even harder." Was that Rose Garden speech a con or did he believe what he was saying at the time?
Obama believed it, but his power in the party is limited. He left the Dems in bad shape (1000 seats lost across all levels of government) and there isn't an "Obama wing" of the party to carry on his influence. The Clintons had their loyalists in place for years, but once Hillary lost the Clinton name and influence waned.
What we have now is the far left, the academic progressives I like to call them, who are in control of the party for the first time in a long time. The pragmatic left, the blue collar Dems who don't want to go full socialism and still go to church, but voted Dem because they were members of unions or were poor, have been forced aside by the academics.
This is a new one. "Russia hoax." It sounds very much like Scott Adams. (Who tries to sound like Trump, in his own "trained hypnotist" way.
What was the "Russia hoax" exactly? There were questions, and an investigation. There were a somewhat spectacular series of developments; the president's personal attorney subjected to multiple search warrants before a guilty plea in which the president is identified as "Individual 1."
I'm not getting the "hoax" part. Not any "hoax" as I understand the term. I don't want to get too clever with Althouse. Of course there was an extended, long-running breathless theme of reporting in which many left-leaning media outlets seemed to be rooting for there to be criminal charges against the president. There may still be. It is difficult for me to imagine how "Individual 1" in the Cohen case won't himself face federal charges at some point. I'm just not getting the "hoax" aspect.
Wouldn't the prudent thing, in discussing and writing about the Mueller investigation, be to wait and read the entire report before presuming the matter to have been a "hoax"? Everyone seems to want it. Everyone in the media; everyone in the House of Representatives. AG Barr has said on several occasions that he'd like to be as public and as transparent as possible with the report. Even Trump has said he'd like the whole report to come out! With all of that, I expect that we'll all see it someday, and hopefully soon.
I can think of one reason that someone might want to brand all of this as a "hoax" right away. That is, if you were a fan of Trump and you were more or less actively campaigning for Trump, you might want to cement "hoax" as the go-to term of art for it. To pump up Trump, to diminish the media who may in the future be reporting on spun-off state and federal prosecutions of Trump, and indeed to diminish and undercut the credibility of those investigations substantively.
"It was ritual self-presentation. Obama deep down is always a piece of shit."
That is precisely what the LLR's find so "magnificent" about him.....because they are too...
Oh, how I wish a surprise warrant would issue on Obama’s bunker in Chicago.
What was Valerie Jarrett's involvement in this? That is the real question. That is where the leadership, for good or bad, came from in the O admin.
It's funny how incurious the media is with respect to Obama on this issue.
I mean it's not hard to look at a calendar. Correct me if I'm wrong but when all this purported Russian collusion was going down, sowing discord in our election, it was Fall of 2016, when Mr. Obama was President, Chief Executive Officer and boss to our then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Funny how no arrests were made before November 2016.......
The issue just kinda sprung up, ab initio, as they say, after Trump got elected.
I rarely believed anything Obama said after the "Affordable" Care Act fraud.
The "Rose Garden speech" was a monumental con. Obama wants division and chaos, not unity. Remember that Rahm Emanuel, Obama's first White House Chief of Staff's advice to his fellow party members: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
His speech was a con. His intent is not noble.
I don't think graciousness is Obama's instinctive reaction in most situations (something he has in common with his wife), I think his default is petulance but I also think he had a bit of a problem after the election because he was treated so well by George W. Bush and the Bush administration generally did everything possible to smooth the transition when Obama became president. Obama struggled to duplicate Bush's gracious behavior because he didn't really want to do it. So I think it was a bit of a con. But probably well-intentioned at the time.
Obama has always made a point of casting himself in the role of clueless bystander, often stating that he only found out stuff by reading it in the papers. Since I've never understood why he would have been invested at all in seeing Hillary Clinton elected President I'm willing to believe he just let others do whatever and didn't actively orchestrate anything himself for the most part.
"Was that Rose Garden speech a con... "
That is a tough choice: If it was a con then Obama is deeply corrupt. If it wasn't a con then Obama is essentially Chauncey Gardiner. Right?
Soon after those halcyon days immediately post election, one of Clinton’s people took him aside and said “I have a scheme.”
Maybe he knew nothing about it.
Maybe he treated his presidency the same way he did that of the Harvard Law Review, a hands off, work from home type job where most of the pay came in the form of glory.
This is an intramural scrimmage. We're not Democrats first. We're not Republicans first. We are Americans first...
This is what he wants people to believe about Dems but it's a lie. They've spent 2.5 years showing they will gleefully damage America if they think it will help their politics.
Was that Rose Garden speech a con or did he believe what he was saying at the time?
Obama hails from the Chicago political machine. What do you think?
but once Hillary lost the Clinton name and influence waned.
No, the Clinton machine had not yet accepted defeat. Mueller and Comey were both proteges of Eric Holder. You remember him, Obama’s scandal goalie and author of the Marc Rich pardon?
It's not surprising that Obama doesn't want to talk about this subject, but I want to know about his role in getting the hoax rolling.
You can want whatever you want, but, trust me, you will never know.
Was he just a passive bystander?
Probably not, but again, we will never know. (Or at least extremely unlikely to know.)
His party has a lot to account for. Where was his leadership?
Occam’s razor tells me he never was much of a leader.
As to Obama gracious remarks after the election, by the summer of 2009 he had taught me to ignore what he said and pay attention to what his administration did.
Was that Rose Garden speech a con or did he believe what he was saying at the time?
Ask Bill Ayres. Remember how Karl Rove was called "Bush's Brain?"
What we have now is the far left, the academic progressives I like to call them, who are in control of the party for the first time in a long time.
Yup. First time since Wilson, maybe. Roosevelt was an improvisor and did not let the "Brain Trust" run everything.
Obama reminds of the scene in "Bull Durham" where the young pitcher is going to the big league and the older catcher tells him, "You gotta learn your cliches." "I'm just here to try to help the team."
but I want to know about his role in getting the hoax rolling. Was he just a passive bystander?
One of the early news hooks was Susan Rice's "unmasking" of Americans on wiretaps. She has never given an acceptable reason for doing so. This and other Dem leaks were necessary to give the media the fig leaf justification they needed before initiating their Team Blue rescue mission.
Are we to believe Obama didn't know what his National Security Adviser was doing?
Remember it was fitz Mueller's associate who chose not to flip rezko against obama.
I think Obama was happy and didn't GAF and still doesn't. He thought the Hillary people and other sore losers would make a lot of noise then peter out.
But I've been wrong before.
... the blue collar Dems who don't want to go full socialism and still go to church, but voted Dem because they were members of unions or were poor, have been forced aside by the academics.
@Mr. Whibble, Trump has made a home for them and small businessmen in his party. Trump has had to go tell a few country-club Republicans to go pound sand, but that’s a small price to pay. Whether Trump’s successors can keep the blue collar Dems is a good question. George H. W. Bush sent “Reagan Democrats” back to the Donkeys and it cost him. Maybe Trump’s successors will be smarter.
There were [baseless] questions, and an [baseless] investigation.
Fixed it for you Chuck.
President Obama figured that Donald Trump's Electoral College majority was too large to eliminate by convincing some Electoral College voters to switch their votes from Trump to Hillary Clinton. If Trump's EC majority had been smaller, then the Intelligence Community would have implemented its "insurance policy" by leaking information that Trump had won only because he had colluded with Russia to tip the election in Trump's favor.
Since Trump's EC majority was too large for the "insurance policy" to work, the still existing framework of the "insurance policy" was adapted to a new scheme. Trump would be allowed to become the US President -- Obama and Clinton even attended the inauguration -- but the Russian-meddling insinuations gradually would entangle him into a situation that would compel him to resign.
The FBI still had an active FISA warrant to collect and analyze all of the communications of Carter Page -- and perhaps also of Michael Flynn.
Previously, the FBI had been constrained by the date December 19, 2016, the date when the Electoral College voted to officially appoint Trump as President. Now that deadline was passed, and so the FBI had plenty of time to continue to collect and analyze all the communications of Page -- and perhaps also of Flynn.
Such communications surely would provide tidbits indicating continued Russian collusion, and these tidbits would be leaked constantly to Trump-hating journalists. The leak about Flynn's telephone conversation with the Russian ambassador was merely the first of what was supposed to be an endless series of leaks indicating collusion between Trump's associates and Russian Intelligence.
These endless leaks eventually would goad Trump into firing key officials of the US Justice Department. (The model was President Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre.) The situation would lead to impeachment proceedings, and a group of Republican leaders would visit Trump and urge him to resign.
"While the more liberal freshmen have garnered much of the attention..."
Here's a pet peeve: describing hard-left authoritarians and race-baiters as "liberal." There is nothing liberal about Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib. They should be described as what they are. I'm liberal. They are leftists, socialists, communists.
I can think of one reason that someone might want to brand all of this as a "hoax" right away. That is, if you were a fan of Trump and you were more or less actively campaigning for Trump, you might want to cement "hoax" as the go-to term of art for it. To pump up Trump, to diminish the media who may in the future be reporting on spun-off state and federal prosecutions of Trump, and indeed to diminish and undercut the credibility of those investigations substantively.
We know how the democrats and republicans got the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.
It was blatantly illegal.
This was not just a hoax. This was a criminal conspiracy to overturn an election.
I am eagerly awaiting the cries of agony when Perkins and Coie have their offices raided and claims that "Attorney client privilege" are sacrosanct.
Hypocrite does not even plum the depths of the depravity of these people. They know how terrible they are.
Either Obama is extremely corrupt, extremely incompetent, or both. I also wonder if the Clinton machine had something on him.
Embrace the power of "and". During my time in academia, I knew a lot of people who could believe contradictory things. If they were really smart, they could convince themselves there was no contradiction.
Not a smidgen of corruption. Not a bit.
"Was that Rose Garden speech a con or did he believe what he was saying at the time?"
Obama had already set the coup in motion.
"Was that Rose Garden speech a con or did he believe what he was saying at the time?"
Bless your heart.
Ann Althouse said...Was he just a passive bystander? His party has a lot to account for. Where was his leadership?
It was his DOJ and his officials who made bad-faith FISA applications and pressed for investigation and prosecution (FBI, CIA, etc). It was his administration that decided to be as weak as possible in the face of Russian aggression--not just in Georgia/Crimea/Ukraine but also for known intelligence work/hacking, etc--because it was important to keep Russia on our side for the shitty "Iran deal." It was his administration officials who preemptively decided that his SecState, Hillary Clinton, should not face actual justice for a number of crimes and misdeeds.
So, yeah, he has a lot to account for. But, you know, nice centrist people will absolutely not call for that and will not, in fact, stand for anyone else saying anything bad about a nice man like Barack. It'd be an ugly thing to do, you see!
I wonder how much money that ol' Clinton Foundation is pulling in these days.
Unrelated, of course.
My money's on 'con".
Obama is a prideful master of nuanced sincerity. His alleged nickname from the Secret Service was Renegade.
Chuck said...I'm not getting the "hoax" part. Not any "hoax" as I understand the term. I don't want to get too clever with Althouse.
Brennan and Schiff claimed several times that there existed evidence proving Trump and/or his team colluded with the Russians. Mueller's investigation proves that was false. (Those two are just a couple of examples--any number of Media outlets and Democrat officials made basically the same claim--but those two made the allegations implying that they had some secret info that couldn't be shared at the time.) Claiming something false is true, and pushing for action based on that false claim, is a hoax. A hoax is a "malicious deception." It's, you know, the fucking definition of the word.
I'm responding here because I believe you're capable of arguing in good faith. The post I'm responding to does not appear to have been made in good faith, but as of right now I believe you are capable of better. Please prove me right!
I want to know about his role in getting the hoax rolling. Was he just a passive bystander?
I'm pretty confident that Barry O'Bama would have made a pretty good anchorman. He's VERY Good at reading off of a Teleprompter. I haven't Ever seen him to have Any other skills.
I totally believe him when he reads off of the teleprompter that the first time he'd heard of a particular issue, was when he heard it on CNN. In fact, i wouldn't be surprised if the first time he heard of an issue, was when he was Reading the teleprompter that told him to say that the first time he'd heard about that issue was on CNN
Since, for Life Long Liberals; Time started at 00:01 am this morning, i wonder how long it will be before we will hear them saying things like: "What was the "Russia hoax" exactly? "
He probably learned about Crossfire Hurricane the same time as everyone else, on the evening news.
Everyone remembers that, right? Obama was both a brilliant, near-omniscient genius who knew the details better than the specialists...but also couldn't be held responsible for anything because he was just unaware of things that were going wrong until some news organization published articles about it.
That's why the Media lets him get away with the "not one hint of scandal" bullshit--if he wasn't aware of bad/improper/illegal things going on then it can't have been a scandal, ya'll!
Man, the nice centrist people just ate that shit up. Still do, I guess.
A business partner's spouse was best friends with a Senator from the midwest- for the sake of argument just say it was Ohio. A place where many Democrats are also christian. This Senator and his friend the business partner's spouse loved pretending they were religious in public then sniggering their contempt in private. It was disgusting how they relished it. I see that in Obama for a lot of things.
One of the early news hooks was Susan Rice's "unmasking" of Americans on wiretaps. She has never given an acceptable reason for doing so.
She told Congress that she doesn’t know who did it in her name, but Chuck doesn’t think that should be investigated, because her heart was in the right place and the most important thing is to get Trump.
At the time, I chalked up things like the Rose Garden comments to political boilerplate. But with what we seem to now know about the Obama administration's politically motivated campaign spying, I'm firmly in the "it was a con job" camp.
He got his start in Chicago. Of course it was a con.
If I make up some evidence of wrongdoing on your part and a crooked DOJ opens an investigation on you based on that unsupported/bogus evidence then it doesn't make sense for me to say "hey, the investigation itself cleared you, the investigation was valid, you don't have any reason to say the whole thing was a hoax and improper!" That's idiotic.
The investigation itself is punishing and having people hype the existence of the investigation is politically damaging--that's why your political opponents want to use the power of the government to investigate you! Everyone knows that and that's why there are supposed to exist safeguards to prevent investigations based on nothing more than political animus. When those safeguards fail or are not adhered to it's perfectly correct to say the people who pushed the investigation perpetrated a hoax.
What was the "Russia hoax" exactly? There were questions, and an investigation.
Look at how much work the phrase "there were questions" is doing here!
Hey I heard from a guy who heard from a guy that one of the Democratic candidates for President had repeated carnal relations with a farm animal. Nonconsensual relations, at that! This raises a lot of questions about that candidate--a full investigation is appropriate. The FBI should interview as many people related to that candidate and their campaign as possible just to get to the bottom of things (so to speak). If in the course of that wide investigation any other crimes or potential crimes are uncovered, or if anyone is less than 100% truthful with the federal investigators then those infractions must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
And hey, if it turns out later that those initial accusations were baseless then that's no big deal--there were questions and there was an investigation, right?
That's laughable, man.
Why didn't Obama talk about it? Why won't Obama talk about it? Why hasn't he been talking about it? He can read the polls as well as anybody else. He wants it out of the news because debate about Russia hurts Democrats in 2020. Every bit of space taken up about this, rather then health care, hurts Democrats in 2020. The Russian investigation is not good for the Democratic party in the voting booth or in the polls. Obama is one of the few Democrats who "gets" political strategy. Most of them are a mess. Harry Enten's data shows the Russian investigation has not moved polls from the start. The people interested in the Russian investigation are elites and the media and a slice of the Democratic base. But a larger slice of regular D voters and leaning independents do not care. Normies are interested in health care. Democrats who ran in the 2018 midterms who won, ran on health care. Synema over and over and over again talked about health care.
Impeachment talk is horrible for Democrats. Normies don't care. Part of the base cares, but only a slice of it. The great bulk who vote D are not going to "health care, bread & butter" voters. That's why Pelosi has been trying to get activists to slow their roll on this stuff, while talking about it enough to appease the people who care.
Bottom line: impeachment hearings would have been bad news for Ds. Now Ds have an excuse to give their base: they can concentrate on policy rather then investigate Trump. Pelosi knows impeachment hearing would have been a catastrophe for 2020. Public doesn't like these investigations & they don't help at the ballot box in swing states in the midwest. See: B. Clinton & Iran-Contra.
tl; dr: Obama and other Democratic strategists know the Russian investigation has not been profitable at the polls. Political strategic thinkers have understood this for a long time.
Did he speak before or after Hillary, or did she speak at all? His speechwriter might have remembered the accolades Gore's final concession and O's 2004 convention speech got.
At least domestically, we're really lucky that both Bill and Barry were so feckless. That's why I'm willing to believe O didn't know what his henches were doing.
Obama always lied a lot, but his conciliatory comments after Trump won may have been the biggest lies of all
Look at what his team did--before, during, and after. He could have stopped it at any time just by raising a finger, which he never did. I don't care if he actually said anything to start it, his not ending it is all I need to know.
Can a former president be indicted for ordering spying on a presidential candidate and not to indict a clearly guilty former Cabinet member?
Will Lynch and Brennan rat Obama out?
“I would have to conclude, given what happened in the weeks after that Rose Garden speech, that Obama was lying through his teeth that morning. It is difficult to believe otherwise. And, seriously, does anyone actually believe no one informed Obama of Crossfire Hurricane, at the very least?”
The White House knew, but Obama himself? Not so sure. There was apparently at least one briefing to the WH, with McCabe at the FBI hosting the meeting in, I think, early October, 2016. Seem to remember an earlier one.
That said, someone at the WH had their fingers in all the scandals and corruption going on at the top of his Administration. I just don’t think that it was Barack Hussein Obama II. Valarie Jarrett maybe. Whoever masterminded the weaponization of FISA had to be brighter and a lot more subtle than most of us believe Barack Obama to be (I am using his first name, since the mastermind could be his wife, though I doubt it). Neither the NSA (Rice) or UN Ambassador (Powers), as intelligence consumers, not producers, should have had the power to unmask, but did. And Need To Know was blown up by routinely putting FISA sourced information in Obama’s PDBs. Which means that someone controlling his daily intelligence feed had to be heavily involved. But we also have DAG Sally Yates over at the DoJ tweaking the unmasking requirements and other tweaks that helped blow up FISA protections. My guess is that it was Rice and Yates working together, maybe under the direction of a third party, such as Jarrett.
Democrats lost more than 1,000 state and federal seats during Obama's eight years in office. I hope they continue to take his advice.
My question about a definition for "the Russia Hoax" was really intended for Althouse. I didn't much care what the Trump cultists thought, and I still don't.
But the cultists answer(s) pointing out some sort of conspiracy among senior Obama intelligence and law enforcement personnel is/are interesting. The interesting question that arises is whether those definitions of "the Russia hoax" are what Althouse would adopt as her definition "the Russia hoax," with its own tag. Is Althouse signing onto the Deep State theory of how the Mueller investigation was initiated?
“The FBI still had an active FISA warrant to collect and analyze all of the communications of Carter Page -- and perhaps also of Michael Flynn. ”
I don’t think that they were crazy enough to try to get a FISA warrant on recently retired Lt Gen. Flynn. I think that too many powerful people in the govt knew exactly who he is. And, in particular, military intelligence. He was one of theirs. And during that time, another one of theirs, Adm Rogers was running the NSA. Carter Page was a young guy, academy grad, but far too junior to ever use first names with the generals and admirals running military intelligence. Flynn, on the other hand, was that senior, and after his successes, highly regarded by that fraternity. They would notice a FISA warrant for their buddy Mike Flynn. Probably not for a young guy like Carter Page.
That all said, a lot of people believe that military intelligence is behind Trump, and they are the ones funneling intel to Q.
I have thought all along that the transcript of Flynn’s call to the Russian ambassador was the result of illegal unmasking of the routine interception of the ambassador’s communications pursuant to a standing FISA warrant. Probably standing from the day that FISA was enacted back in the mid 1970s. My guess is that the Soviet ambassador’s outside phone lines were included in the first batch of warrant applications provided the newly constituted FISC. The problem is that the FBI had no legitimate use for the unmasked interception. What should have probably happened is that some lowly analyst saw something interesting in the interception. Someone was talking foreign policy with the Russian ambassador. Was there a quid pro quo going on? But keep in mind that counterintelligence (or counter terrorism must be involved for unmasking), and not mere criminality. So, maybe the original unmasking was legitimate. It is going to be interesting to see who requested it - there is inevitably a good paper trail there (they are bureaucrats). But the second that it was determined that the other party to the conversation was Gen Flynn, the designated NSA in Trump’s incoming Administration, their legal duty was to delete the unmasked intercept as part of FISA required minimization. They didn’t. Instead they used it in a perjury trap with Flynn. And, no wonder he was sucked in - he had no reason to believe that they had a copy of that conversation - because that would be illegal. But of course, they did, and were never called for it. Indeed, part of what has bothered me about this from the start was that they were so blatant, parading around that they had a copy of his unmasked conversation with the Russian Ambassador that they had used to catch Flynn in the perjury trap. No one seems to have ever asked them how and why they had it. Their violation of FISA minimization was in plain sight around the world, and studiously ignored by everyone.
I have long thought that Obama could afford to appear as gracious as can be precisely because he had already set in motion the coup. It protected his talk-show-host brand as hell was being unleashed behind the scenes.
LOL
It is VERY helpful indeed to see all the lefty and LLR masks dropping.
And it will be impossible for those masks to go back on...........
It cannot be fully expressed how useful that exposure is this early before the 2020 campaign.
Just think, a few dozen LLR hacks, fully exposed, attempting to recreate their "lifelong republican" act that they pulled in 2016 for 2020......to less than zero effect!!
Go ahead lefty billionaires! Reid Hoffman, George Soros, Tom Steyer, Pierre Omidyar and others: keep tossing your cash at your LLR assets on blogsites and creating your Russian bot-ops during campaigns. What a waste of cash that will be!
Even the sad sack lying legal hacks at Lawfareblog, a blog often referenced on Althouseblog by the usual LLR suspects, know they are in trouble.
I suspect that one fallback ploy by the LLR/lefty hacks online will be to pretend that there isn't any clarity about how we define particular activities and that in that confusion perhaps some mud can be tossed onto the screen to obscure what the democrats/lefties/LLR's pulled.
Basically, these hacks are going to run with an updated version of "it depends on what the meaning of "is", is"
This is going to be so much fun to watch.
But the cultists answer(s) pointing out some sort of conspiracy among senior Obama intelligence and law enforcement personnel is/are interesting.
So how do you think that the investigation got started Chuck, accepting of course that there was no collusion, and that the dossier was funded by Hillary Clinton, funding reported as “legal fees” rather than campaign expenses, and spent on foreign spies.
None of that stuff is in doubt anymore. Mueller found that there was nothing to the “dossier.” The “Trump cultists” were right on that stuff.
Or do you just tune out factual evidence and reasonable deductions if you don’t like where they lead? If that’s so, it may explain why you are always mystified.
'That's not where Democrats chose to "go at it" and "try even harder."'
You're talking about the special counsel investigation that Republican Trump appointee Rod Rosenstein ordered. Now sure, some Democrats talked about it ad nauseam, but in the public arena. Is President Obama somehow responsible for that? The implicit premise of the collusion charge was that Obama knew or should have known about it during the election and didn't do enough to stop it. It was always a slap at Obama, as well as a punch at Trump.
There is a parallel to the Barack Obama not having a U.S. birth certificate hoax that Trump fed. Trump got a very hard smackdown in 2011, but was back to win in 2016. So, those Democrats getting a very had smackdown this week may very well be back to win in 2024.
Chuck, it’s a matter of record that Susan Rice claimed before Congress that she doesn’t know who used her name for hundreds of unmaskings of NSA intercepts.
But as a lawyer who cares about America, and a life long Republican, you don’t give a flying fuck about the Democrats using the NSA against Republicans. It’s pretty likely that Trump wasn’t the only target.
It's all Obama like with the secret personal email communications, he put in brennan who selectively droned small grids leaving tracks in Syria libya Tunisia et al
It was a con. Obama is a con-man. He knew we wouldn't keep our doctors, he knew there was no riot caused by a video. He had to pretend to unite, because he knew if his spying on Trump came out he was toast.
Chuck at 10:33 AM
What was the "Russia hoax" exactly?
I will point out one hoax element of the overall hoax.
During a debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, she made a big deal out of his supposed failure to believe a consensus of all 17 Intelligence agencies. There was no such consensus, and she and many other people knew so.
In particular, the Director of National Intelligence and the directors of all the other 16 Intelligence agencies knew that there was no such consensus. Even so, none of those knowledgeable officials took any action to correct Clinton's false claim until well after Election Day.
Clinton's false claim and the silent acquiescence of the Intelligence Community's leadership constituted a hoax on the USA's electorate.
If you don't like the word hoax for that particular element of the situation, then suggest a better word.
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The FBI's application for a FISA warrant against Carter Page was a hoax on the FISA court.
The FBI knew that Page was not an agent of Russian Intelligence, but Page was the Russia expert on Trump's campaign staff, and the FBI wanted to collect and study communications about Russia that took place within that campaign staff and further within Trump's sphere.
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The motive for the hoax perpetrated by the Intelligence Community was to arrange an "insurance policy" for the possibility that Trump would win a majority in the Electoral College -- but only by a small margin.
If that happened, then the Intelligence Community's leadership would perpetrate a further hoax to deceive the public -- in particular, to deceive the Electoral College voters who might switch their votes from Trump to Clinton on December 19, 2016. The hoax would be a series of leaks from the US Intelligence Community insinuating that Trump had won his Electoral College majority only because he had colluded with the Russian Intelligence service.
The FBI's collection and analysis of communications enabled by the FISA warrant would provide substance for such leaks.
That "insurance policy" hoax intended to convince a sufficient number of Electoral College voters to switch their votes from Trump to Clinton on December 19, 2016.
Yes the surveillance based on the fisa, the unmasking by rice and power, the leaking by Sally Yates,
Can you indict a bull-shitting ex-President?
which is a separate issue - distinct from indicting a sitting/shitting President?
The initial FISA abuse, and I think we can call it that, began under Obama. The spying on Trump began under Obama. Was it only directed at Trump? Or also at Bernie? Other Republicans? Jill Stein? I don’t know, but I would be surprised if there was nothing done about any other candidate.
I didn't much care what the Trump cultists thought, and I still don't.
But which are the true cultists? Those of us who have supported President Trump have been pleased with the results of his policies. If there’s a cult around, it seems to be the hard core anti-Trumpers, in both parties, who will believe anything negative about Donald Trump, regardless of the evidence of their own eyes. Memo to Never-Trumpers: Fire burns, water is wet, the middle class is better off financially under Trump than under Obama.
Garner ye rosebuds while ye may
“I can think of one reason that someone might want to brand all of this as a "hoax" right away. That is, if you were a fan of Trump and you were more or less actively campaigning for Trump, you might want to cement "hoax" as the go-to term of art for it. To pump up Trump, to diminish the media who may in the future be reporting on spun-off state and federal prosecutions of Trump, and indeed to diminish and undercut the credibility of those investigations substantively.”
There will be no federal prosecutions of Trump or his family. Maybe NY and NJ. But we all know that those are going to be highly partisan hit jobs, and have nothing to do with Russian collusion. AG Sessions got rolled, pushed into recusal, when he shouldn’t have been, and out of the way, so that the Deep State Rosenstein could be put in charge of the Russian collusion hoax at the DoJ, ultimately resulting in the Mueller investigation. AG Barr seems very much to have his eyes open, and any federal prosecution of Trump or his family is going to have to ultimately be authorized by him. No lone wolf AUSA in podunk Iowa is going to get away with that sort of thing. And while USAs are principal officers, confirmed by the Senate, they still have to answer to the AG.
But, yes, it is being branded a “hoax” because it was a hoax. Peter Strzok admitted early on that there was no there there. The Dossier behind it was a political hit job paid for by Trump’s political opponent, and pushed into the FBI from all directions by former British spy, Christopher Steele, initially funded by Clinton and the DNC, and later by a Ukrainian oligarch, and apparently later by Soros. The FBI desperately wanted to believe the Dossier for their own reasons, and did. The Mueller investigation, staffed almost exclusively by heavily partisan Democratic prosecutors, desperately wanted to find collusion. They didn’t, despite tens of millions of dollars invested, hundreds of witnesses interviewed, search warrants and subpoenas obtained, etc. You are just trying to delay the inevitable with your push to wait to see the full report. AG Barr was unequivocal - there was no collusion. None. Zip. Nada.
But it is also being branded a hoax because we are in the midst of a political spin war. Hundreds of hours of TV and thousands of articles by the MSM have been utilized to delegitimize President Trump on the grounds that he had conspired with the Russians to be elected. Never was any corroborated evidence to support that claim. Yet we heard that drumbeat 24/7 for better than two years.
The other thing to keep in mind here is that much of Trump’s base believes that the elites in this country routinely foist hoaxes on them to maintain, and increase, their power over them. None is probably more blatant than the AGW hoax that is being used to justify destroying our economy by going full socialist, all in the name of saving the planet from too much CO2 (and other greenhouse gasses, such as the methane in cow farts). The Dems are pushing AOC’s Green New Deal, estimated to cost almost $100 trillion over 10 years, based on non science hype sold as science. But we also see vaccinations, 9/11, etc questioned as hoaxes pushed on us by our self perceived betters. So, yes, calling Russian Collusion a hoax plays very well with Trump’s base.
Professional lady said...
Either Obama is extremely corrupt, extremely incompetent, or both. I also wonder if the Clinton machine had something on him.
They both have secret communications on Hillary's private server.
By nature any official communication with the president is classified.
They both broke the espionage act when the President of the United States and his Secretary of State made classified information public.
They both belong in jail just for that.
To paraphrase: Everyone I disagree with is a cultist. When I comment in a public forum I'm only talking to one person and no one else should reply.
Yeah, that's not the kind of thing an asshole would say, no sir. Remember how I said I believed you were capable of arguing in good faith? Time to reassess that belief, I guess.
If someone purposefully chooses to act like an asshole, even when capable of not acting that way, why should we treat them any differently, or think of them any differently, than a person who is simply an asshole (and has no choice but to act like one)?
It's your life, buddy, but if you want people to treat you as anything other than an asshole the first step is to stop acting like one.
My question about a definition for "the Russia Hoax" was really intended for Althouse. I didn't much care what the Trump cultists thought, and I still don't.
He is talking about republican voters.
We have known the GOPe doesn't care about the voters.
The best part is republican voters no longer care about you. We will never vote for an LLR democrat again.
There is nothing more pathetic than the never-Trump "conservative."
Trump's greatest accomplishment has been removing the uniparty masks.
Bruce: "Hundreds of hours of TV and thousands of articles by the MSM have been utilized to delegitimize President Trump on the grounds that he had conspired with the Russians to be elected. Never was any corroborated evidence to support that claim. Yet we heard that drumbeat 24/7 for better than two years. "
Indeed.
You could say that the lefty/LLR media seemed quite pleased and happy to openly and proudly smear Trump with falsehoods.....
......say, that does sound awfully familiar, doesn't it?
I come down on the side of Obama knowing about it but not really directing it. His 2 main personality traits are laziness and no desire to be responsible. Everything his administration did was “done for the boss”. IRS, ObamaCare, Syria, Afghanistan over Iraq, cheating Romney during the debates, EPA rules, the governance letter to universities and on and on all have one trait: no real Obama fingerprints. He really could say, with a straight face, “not a smidgen of scandal” because HE was never really involved.
BTW, did you hear the one where CNN complained about Tucker Carlson sending a dozen jelly donuts to resident CNN eunuch Li'l Brian Stelter?
Yep.
Seems CNN is claiming this is fat shaming!!
LOL
LLR's on particular blogsites hit way way way hardest.
Embrace the power of "and". During my time in academia, I knew a lot of people who could believe contradictory things. If they were really smart, they could convince themselves there was no contradiction.
One of the things you learn in law school is to "distinguish" two cases that seem to be the same, and to "harmonize" two cases that seem to be contradictory. Obama was a damn good law student.
If you don't like the word hoax for that particular element of the situation, then suggest a better word.
I'm pretty sure that the word that Life Long Liberals would suggest is: SMEAR
smear
[smir]
VERB
damage the reputation of (someone) by false accusations; slander.
“I come down on the side of Obama knowing about it but not really directing it. His 2 main personality traits are laziness and no desire to be responsible. Everything his administration did was “done for the boss”. IRS, ObamaCare, Syria, Afghanistan over Iraq, cheating Romney during the debates, EPA rules, the governance letter to universities and on and on all have one trait: no real Obama fingerprints. He really could say, with a straight face, “not a smidgen of scandal” because HE was never really involved”
The other thing to keep in mind is that he had essentially zero management training or experience when he was elected President. He wouldn’t have known how to manage even his White House staff if he had wanted to. And that was minuscule compared to the millions of federal employees and contractors he was putatively in charge of. Pretty much every resident of the White House, after Ford, and most of the recent Republican Presidential nominees have been far better qualified. He didn’t have a clue what he didn’t know.
Here is my list:
Carter: Anapolis grad, former GA governor
Reagan: former two term governor of the largest state (CA)
G HW Bush: CIA director, VP for 8 years
Clinton: Arkansas AG and governor
GW Bush: Harvard MBA, governor of one of the biggest states
McCain: Anapolis grad, management up to O6 level over several decades in the Navy, War College
Romney: Harvard MBA, governor, ran multiple businesses
Trump: Wharton business degrees, ran, mostly successfully, numerous businesses around the world for several decades
And then there was Obama, who had no formal management training, had never managed anything larger than a Senate office before becoming President. He was a failed community organizer who had his career corruptly greased into the IL statehouse and then US Senate.
What it has always looked like to me was that Obama ran the US govt like he saw Chicago being run. He allocated different agencies and departments to different constituency groups as a reward for supporting them, and then stepped aside and let them run their agencies and departments as private fiefdoms. The Clintons got the State Dept as a reward for ultimately backing his Presidential bid, allowing them to monitize our US foreign policy for four years.
Chuck is Althouse’s ‘Lawyer Infatuate.'
Nobody at 1:55 PM
it’s a matter of record that Susan Rice claimed before Congress that she doesn’t know who used her name for hundreds of unmaskings of NSA intercepts
I think this was Samantha Power, not Susan Rice.
Obama was always a passive bystander when anything went wrong. He probably heard about this all on the TV like us
Has this joke already been used?
Bruce Hayden at 1:34 PM
I don’t think that they were crazy enough to try to get a FISA warrant on recently retired Lt Gen. Flynn.
YouTube used to have a video, done by so-called SonofNewo, that analyzed a meeting in Trump Tower that took place in December 2017 (I can't find the exact date quickly). The meeting was attended by Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon and UAE crown prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. The US Intelligence Community acquired details about the meeting, and some of those details were leaked by President Obama's National Security Advisor Susan Rice.
Anyway, the SonofNewo analyzed the available information cleverly and concluded convincingly (for me) that the US Intelligence Community obtained the information about the meeting because Michael Flynn was being wire-tapped. SonofNewo's reasoning was based on the names that Rice unmasked or did not unmask.
Unfortunately, that video is gone from YouTube. Otherwise I would provide the link.
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I speculate that a FISA warrant was obtained against Flynn in late 2015. He was receiving money from Russia's RT broadcasting money. Flynn was also accused secretly of having an affair with a Russian woman in Britain. Also, Flynn was lobbying for Turkey. And Flynn had become an advisor on Donald Trump's election-campaign staff.
As events developed, Flynn was one of four members of the campaign staff who were suspected by the FBI for participating in an "enterprise". The four members were
1) Paul Manafort
2) Michael Flynn
3) George Papadopoulos
4) Carter Page
The FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation was an enterprise counter-intelligence investigation targeting those four members of Trump's campaign staff.
The fact that Flynn had been a general did not prevent him from being targeted by this FBI investigation.
"While the more liberal freshmen have garnered much of the attention in Washington"
At least in this case, I think that the writer may have had it in mind to say *cornered*, as in "cornering the market."
Barack either shows to be an idiot if he did not know,( heread it in the paper, of course), or the biggest crook to one down the pipe since Themistocles, ( without the accomplishments).
Blogger Jim at said...
Democrats lost more than 1,000 state and federal seats during Obama's eight years in office. I hope they continue to take his advice.
I think that you are right about that. What is the Trump-tally so far on lost seats?
We lost 42 seats in the US House in 2018. And 309 seats in state legislatures. So Trump is off to an Obama-like start in that regard.
Actually, the Obama admin did quite a good job of "fighting the next election". That being the 2018 midterm. The Trump as Russian agent meme de-motivated Republican voters, motivated Dem voters (fed by the media), and led to more than a dozen incumbent Repub Congresspeople stepping aside. Of course, I think they were also hoping that some old corruption was dug up incidentally (see also: Manafort) on Trump as part of getting access to all of his emails, texts and violating his attorney/client privilege. We know that Hillary and her allies would not have done so well under that kind of intense scrutiny, and I doubt even Obama would.
Let's remember that the rules on unmasking were loosened in 2012. My guess is that Romney campaign was also spied on "incidentally" by the Obama admin, as we know that members of Congress were during the fight over the passage of Obama's Iran deal.
Conveniently, the NSA, finding that all of this spying on and unmasking of Americans over the years was inappropriate, conveniently has destroyed all of the evidence (to protect the innocent Americans, you see, not at all to protect the politicians whom unmasked them).
Treeamigo
Re: Jack Wayne's comments about Obama not being involved.
Remember the Robert Creamer fellow- the Democrat dirty tricks specialist? He visited the WH over 300 times and met with Obama 42 times. It seems Obama really loves the dirty tricks stuff and gets personally involved. Then again, think of the political environment he grew up with (Alinsky/Daley). And logically, Obama certainly approved the false portrayal of the Benghazi attack. The man is a true political animal- no matter if people have died, if they are getting unfairly audited by the IRS or they are having their civil rights violated by the intelligence agencies- it is all worth it for short-term political advantage. This is a different kind of evil from Trump, but still evil.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-democrats-undercover-video-trump-rally-violence-20161025-story.html
Treeamigo (sorry, having Google Acct problems)
Never thought Obama was really all that smart. A bit of a wordsmith, yes - could put together a pretty good speech if he had time. But management? The guy that took months to figure out if he wanted to do a surge to Afghanistan in spite of having the advice of experts? Was never really sure if it was good PR to have his name on the ACA? That guy? Not so much.
When Trump was elected, I started reading stories about Obama setting up a shadow government in his home. Also, remember in one of Lisa Page's texts she said that POTUS wants to be kept informed.
kinda like chicago did to Smolett, trumps gotta let Obama off -- grant him immunity NOw.
it would release the overblown Panic of our leftie elite-suprmacists, our would-be Overseers -- they most of all want their Prince to be the hero of history, no taint whatsoever -- OK, right? and perhaps a better nation can be had.
immune from any punishment or verdict, But everyone else is fair game.
As an “African American” female who is a Christian I have marveled at your failure to comprehend what has been clearly underfoot. Especially given Obama’s acceleration of what is obvious program “fundamentally transform “ the United States and make it compliant to a global authority.
With respect to Obama... someone you appear to have great admiration for... please read this warning from 2008 from a African American
https://www.google.com/amp/s/rosettasister.wordpress.com/2008/10/11/%25E2%2580%259Cbarack-obama-revealed-a-dire-warning-from-an-african-american%25E2%2580%259D-jazzman/amp/
"We brush ourselves off. We get back in the arena. We go at it. We try even harder the next time."
There's no mystery or inconsistency here if your arena already includes everything from mob action to a weaponized security apparatus.
Hoax=Steele Dossier
LLR Chuck: "We lost 42 seats in the US House in 2018."
Nope.
Your side won 42 seats in the US House in 2018.
Remember, you stated flatly that Republican electoral victories were "disasters".
Literally.
With no caveats.
"Was he just a passive bystander? Where was his leadership?"
I will comment with two quotations, Professor.
When Obama gave his speech the day after Trump's victory, his magnanimous approach likely followed the advice of George Burns: "The key to success in life is sincerity: once you can fake that, you've got it made."
But in his defense, maybe Obama just miscalculated when trying to run a con on the American people. As Hanlon reputedly said, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by simple stupidity."
Dumb or insincere. Or perhaps a combination plate?
Obama's role in starting it may be of interest for purposes of the historical record, but as far as I am concerned the bigger issue is that he could have stopped it at any time by cocking an eyebrow or lifting a finger, figuratively speaking--and chose not to. That's all the proof of his role that I need.
Almost all of the great words of Obama were a con, are a con, will be a con.
He's a con man. Very good at it. Very very good.
Probably guilty of obstruction of justice in getting DOJ to stop the prosecution of Hillary for her illegal server and illegal Top Secret documents.
So far, above it all. Can an ex-Pres be prosecuted for crimes committed while Pres? I think so. We might even find out.
Yes! Comey, McCabe, Lynch, Brennan, and others all took a huge, stupid risk and put their careers and reputations on the line because ... why? National security? No. A crime? No. They were told to do it, or at least tacitly encouraged. By someone VERY senior in the Obama Administration. Someone everyone would listen to and respect and follow. Someone who might have had access to classified materials and told them he knows things they don't and therefore they should cooperate. Someone who might have promised them goodies if they did. Someone who might have sent word that if you don't cooperate, you'll be punished by Hillary.
Why did Obama do it? He called Republicans "our enemies" and tried to shut down Limbaugh and Fox and others. He wanted to destroy the R party as best he could. Trump's impending "defeat" was the perfect opportunity tie all Republicans to Trump and thereby declare victory over racism, etc. IF Trump could be defeated in a landslide. A humiliating landslide was what he needed to set the R party back by 30 years, he thought. How? He had to give HRC an extra special edge that would help destroy Trump and give HRC the win. The ultimate edge? Charges of treason against Trump! If Obama could produce evidence of treason, the R's would lose not only the presidential but perhaps also downballot races. So led by Brennan, who coordinated among the intel community on behalf of Obama, the work began. They didn't find what they were looking for, but since HRC knew about the effort and, post-election, needed something to blame for HER humiliating defeat, had one of her henchmen conveniently take the "Russia" concept public and blamed Russia, even though it was all just a fishing expedition that went nowhere.
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