October 13, 2019
Hits the nail on the head on the whole Climate Change issue.
Just a taste:
Cook et al. (2013) ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature‘ searched some 11,944 abstracts of scientific papers published between 1991-2011 in an online database called The Web of Science for the phrases "global warming†and "global climate changeâ€
Without reading the papers, nor even the sentences in which the key words appeared, Cooke the activist found 97% of the abstract of the papers examined contained the key words sought.
From this, and nothing more, Cooke et al., and concluded and reported that some 11500 of the papers, or 97%, must be endorsing the idea of human activity as primarily responsible (that is more than half of the contributory cause) for global warming, and that the levels of global warming are dangerous.Note that this is paper, not authors. There were 29,083 authors listed on the 11,944 papers.
In reality, a more honest review of the same database by real scientists found that only 65 papers (0.5%) explicitly said humans contributed some effect to global warming. Almost none said the human contribution was the primary cause, or that it was dangerous.
To add insult to injury, Cooke’s emails were leaked to the press, and before he ever began the so called research, he explicit says what result he seeks to find, and says it will be used as a public relations gimmick.
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My cousin Ellen sent me this. I think it is a very valuable essay on the benefits to society of decent wealthy people.
Whatever Happened to Noblesse Oblige?
From the article:
Progressive egalitarians may sneer at the principle of noblesse oblige, but the way Hampy lived and ministered in an English village in the middle of the last century exhibited the basic principles of a just and workable economic and social system. The principle of solidarity existed because the members of the village community lived, worked, prayed and played together. The village was a network of extended families who fought and forgave one another and who lived out the drama of quotidian life together.
Hampy was one of them, as were the members of the other wealthy families who lived in the two country mansions outside the village. These aristocrats not only provided the employment, they funded the local old folks home, ran the village school, nurtured the social life of the village, motivated the charitable works of the church and made sure no one was excluded. As they lived together they not only lived out the principle of solidarity, but also the principle of subsidiarity — the idea that problems should be solved and initiatives taken at the lowest, most local level possible.
It's a fine article - do read the whole thing.
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Look - if you are an adult and want to do your thing...I may advise against it...but ultimately I have better things to do. Seek your own path.
But for the love of God, a child cannot even take out a credit card,
but we are indulging them in their *gender* identification.
It's horrifying. Some parents - egged on by the woke among us - are not just dressing up their kids in different clothing, but giving hormones and considering surgery.
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I'm sick of the "Kurds are our allies" line. Alliances are not permanent mergers. We did not marry them. They did not become Americans.
Alliances are temporary agreements that offer mutual benefit to both sides. When the benefit ends, the alliance ends.
The benefit has ended. The alliance has ended. There is zero reason for America's sons and daughters to go and die in Kurdistan. Let the Kurdish refugees that came here go fight for their country.
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October 12, 2019
The rest of the article is here, and I urge you to read it before you condemn the President out of hand: http://carolineglick.com/trump-did-not-betray-the-kurds/The near consensus view of President Donald Trump’s decision to remove US special forces from the Syrian border with Turkey is that Trump is enabling a Turkish invasion and double crossing the Syrian Kurds who have fought with the Americans for five years against ISIS. Trump’s move, the thinking goes, harms US credibility and undermines US power in the region and throughout the world.
There are several problems with this narrative. The first is that it assumes that until this week, the US had power and influence in Syria when in fact, by design, the US went to great lengths to limit its ability to influence events in Syria.
The war in Syria broke out in 2011 as a popular insurrection by Syrian Sunnis against the Iranian-sponsored regime of President Bashar al Assad. The Obama administration responded by declaring US support for Assad’s overthrow. But the declaration was empty. The administration sat on its thumbs as the regime’s atrocities mounted. They supported a feckless Turkish effort to raise a resistance army dominated by jihadist elements aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Obama infamously issued his "redline†regarding the use of chemical weapons against civilians by Assad, which he repudiated the moment it was crossed.
As ISIS forces gathered in Iraq and Syria, Obama shrugged them off as a "jayvee squad.†When the jayvees in ISIS took over a third of Iraqi and Syrian territory, Obama did nothing.
As Lee Smith recalled in January in the New York Post, Obama only decided to do something about ISIS in late 2014 after the group beheaded a number of American journalists and posted their decapitations on social media.
The timing was problematic for Obama.
In 2014 Obama was negotiating his nuclear deal with Iran. The deal, falsely presented as a non-proliferation pact, actually enabled Iran — the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism — to develop both nuclear weapons and the missile systems required to deliver them. The true purpose of the deal was not to block Iran’s nuclear aspirations but to realign US Middle East policy away from the Sunnis and Israel and towards Iran.
Given its goal of embracing Iran, the Obama administration had no interest in harming Assad, Iran’s Syrian factotum. It had no interest in blocking Iran’s ally Russia from using the war in Syria as a means to reassert Moscow’s power in the Middle East.
As both Michael Doran, a former national security advisor in the George W. Bush administration and Smith argue, when Obama was finally compelled to act against ISIS, he structured the US campaign in a manner than would align it with Iran’s interests.
Obama’s decided to work with the Kurdish-YPG militia in northern Syria because it was the only significant armed force outside the Iranian axis that enjoyed congenial relations with both Assad and Iran.
[...]
During his tenure as Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton hoped to revise the US mandate to enable US forces to be used against Iran in Syria. Bolton’s plan was strategically sound. Trump rejected it largely because it was a recipe for widening US involvement in Syria far beyond what the American public – and Trump himself — are willing to countenance.
In other words, the claim that the US has major influence in Syria is wrong. It does not have such influence and is unwilling to pay the price of developing such influence.
This brings us to the second flaw in the narrative about Trump’s removal of US forces from the Syrian border with Turkey.
The underlying assumption of the criticism is that America has an interest in confronting Turkey to protect the Kurds.
This misconception like the misconception regarding US power and influence in Syria is borne of a misunderstanding of Obama’s Middle East policies. Aside from ISIS’s direct victims, the major casualty of Obama’s deliberately feckless anti-ISIS campaign was the US alliance with Turkey. Whereas the US chose to work with the Kurds because they were supportive of Assad and Iran, the Turks view the Syrian Kurdish YPG as a sister militia to the Turkish PKK. The Marxist PKK has been fighting a guerilla war against Turkey for decades. The State Department designates the PKK as a terrorist organization responsible for the death of thousands of Turkish nationals. Not surprisingly then, the Turks viewed the US-Kurdish collaboration against ISIS as an anti-Turkish campaign.
Throughout the years of US-Kurdish cooperation, many have made the case that the Kurds are a better ally to the US that Turkey. The case is compelling not merely because the Kurds have fought well.
[...]
The Kurds are a tragic people. The Kurds, who live as persecuted minorities in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran have been denied the right of self-determination for the past hundred years. But then, the Kurds have squandered every opportunity they have had to assert independence. The closest they came to achieving self-determination was in Iraq in 2017. In Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurds have governed themselves effectively since 1992. In 2017, they overwhelmingly passed a referendum calling for Iraqi Kurdistan to secede from Iraq and form an independent state. Instead of joining forces to achieve their long-held dream, the Kurdish leaders in Iraq worked against one another. One faction, in alliance with Iran, blocked implementation of the referendum and then did nothing as Kurdish-controlled Kirkuk was overrun by Iraqi government forces.
The Kurds in Iraq are far more capable of defending themselves than the Kurds of Syria. Taking on the defense of Syria’s Kurds would commit the US to an open-ended presence in Syria and justify Turkish antagonism. America’s interests would not be advanced. They would be harmed, particularly in light of the YPG’s selling trait for Obama – its warm ties to Assad and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
[...]
Here it is critical to note that Trump did not remove US forces from Syria. They are still deployed along the border crossing between Jordan, Iraq and Syria to block Iran from moving forces and materiel to Syria and Lebanon. They are still blocking Russian and Syrian forces from taking over the oil fields along the eastern bank of the Euphrates. Aside from defeating ISIS, these missions are the principle strategic achievements of the US forces in Syria. For now, they are being maintained. Will Turkey’s invasion enable ISIS to reassert itself in Syria and beyond? Perhaps. But here too, as Trump made clear this week, it is not America’s job to serve as the permanent jailor of ISIS. European forces are just as capable of serving as guards as Americans are. America’s role is not to stay in Syria forever. It is to beat down threats to US and world security as they emerge and then let others – Turks, Kurds, Europeans, Russians, UN peacekeepers – maintain the new, safer status quo.
The final assumption of the narrative regarding Trump’s moves in Syria is that by moving its forces away from the border ahead of the Turkish invasion, Trump harmed regional stability and America’s reputation as a trustworthy ally.
On the latter issue, Trump has spent the better part of his term in office rebuilding America’s credibility as an ally after Obama effectively abandoned the Sunnis and Israel in favor of Iran. To the extent that Trump has harmed US credibility, he didn’t do it in Syria this week by rejecting war with Turkey. He did it last month by failing to retaliate militarily against Iran’s brazen military attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil installations. Whereas the US has no commitment to protect the Kurds, the US’s central commitment in the Middle East for the past 70 years has been the protection of Saudi oil installations and maintaining the safety of maritime routes in and around the Persian Gulf. [emphasis added]
The best move Trump can make now in light of the fake narrative of his treachery towards the Kurds is to finally retaliate against Iran. A well-conceived, and limited US strike against Iranian missile and drone installations would restore America’s posture as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and prevent the further destabilization of the Saudi regime and the backsliding of the UAE towards Iran.
As for Syria, it is impossible to known what the future holds for the Kurds, the Turks, the Iranians, Assad or anyone else. But what is clear enough is that Trump avoided war with Turkey this week. And he began extracting America from an open-ended commitment to the Kurds it never made and never intended to fulfill.
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I thought I'd drag this one out of the archives. Sung to the tune of "My Darling Clementine":
He was a kleagle in a klavern
burnin` crosses for the Klan,
he`s a white trash 99er
glad his daughter isn`t tan!
He was born a West Virginin`
in a cardbord paper shack
as a boy he and his kin`un
made their clothes of burlap sack.
Robert Byrdie, Robert Byrdie
Robert Byrd, the Senate Dean
though he may be forced to say it
can`t believe Obama`s clean.
walked to school with snow a blowin`
in his bare or stockinged feet
through the coal piles that were growin`
as he stitched his first white sheet.
Robert Byrdie, Robert Byrdie
Robert Byrd, the Senate`s soul
found the Democrats appeal
beat the work of mining coal.
Went to Congress as a liberal
though he`d fought to segregate
now he guards the Senate`s conscience
while he sees that pork inflate.
Robert Byrdie, Robert Byrdie
Robert Byrd, we all agree
just ain`t nothin but a bumpkin
a West Virginia hillbilly!
He was a Kleagle in a Klavern
burning crosses for the Klan
sounds just like he left the tavern
and he needs to eat more bran.
Robert Byrdie, Robert Byrdie
Robert Byrd, Pro Tempore
thinks he`s bigger than ``white...peoples``
and that coloreds should obey.
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On Facebook a fellow I happened to know from grammar school picked a fight (with another old school chum) over the "Southern Flip" by racists in the Deep South to the GOP. That is an old canard but this fellow (no doubt a good union man, as were almost all of the blue collar kids I grew up with) has bought it as Gospel. Here are his comments, and my rebuttal:
I think you know history and realize that the Republican and Democratic party basically switched platforms in the 1960's If you didn't you should do a little reading so you understand history.
I do not know your level of education or if either of you have taken any political science classes. Heather you are almost correct to say "the Democrat party is the one of the KKK, Jim Crow" that was their platform till around 1960 when both parties began to switch their agenda. Southern democrats left that party and became republicans, northern republicans left that party and became democrats. This did not happen overnight it took about a decade. The welfare plantation comment is completely unsubstantiated
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Here is an article about Venus, how it was once more Earthlike but is now a horrible hellhole (sort of like Chicago). Venus got hot ultimately because the Sun got hot.
I love this quote from the article; it illustrates something that we global warming skeptics have always argued and that the True Believers aka the Gang Green refuse to admit:
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Timothy Birdnow
Warner Todd Houston made the following observation:
The radical gay movement is a perfect example of how liberals lie.
-In the 60s gays said they only wanted to be left alone to do whatever they wanted in their own bedrooms. But they said they didn't care about the right to get married, they didn't think it was OK for grown men to have sex with little boys, and they didn't want to impose themselves on everyone else.
-Then they wanted the right to marry, but they said it was just for their own community and they would never impose their ideas on others.
-Then they got marriage and wanted to force everyone else to observe and celebrate their choices by forcing religious people to cater to their desires.
-Then they wanted mentally disturbed people who are one sex, but claim to be a different sex to be given set asides and deference.
-Then they began demanding that their lifestyle be taught to school kids and held up as normal.
-Then they wanted laws made to punish anyone that disagrees with them. And they wanted sex with children to be OKayed.
The fact is, where we are today is where they wanted to be in the 1960s. They just lied to get there.
This is how liberals work. They always say in the beginning that "all they want" is one, simple thing. But they then keep adding, pushing, ad moving the goal posts. THIS is why liberals should NEVER be compromised with. They are liars.
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October 11, 2019
Planned Parenthood is on the ropes, particularly in Missouri, where they have largely been run out of the state. In order to capitalize on that fact, the baby butchers have been secretely building a mega abortion mill in Fairview Heights, a suburb of St. Louis.
From the Belleville News Democrat:
The narrow stretch of public right of away next to a drainage ditch did not deter the crowd of hundreds of people who rallied Wednesday outside the new Planned Parenthood clinic in Fairview Heights that will open later this month
The clinic will offer surgical and medication abortions, as well as family planning services, annual exams, sexually transmitted infection testing and HIV prevention.
It was built in secret in order to keep protesters away and to keep the project on schedule.
Interesting; they tried to build this in secret. And it is a sign of desperation. The article continues:Construction of the clinic took place as abortion access is being restricted in Missouri, but expanded in Illinois. Missouri’s only licensed abortion provider, the Planned Parenthood location on Forest Park Avenue in St. Louis, will continue providing surgical abortions. That facility is involved in a battle over whether it can keep its license.
Planned Parenthood is also fighting Missouri in court over its new law to criminalize abortions after eight weeks of pregnancy. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction pausing the abortion ban while it is litigated.
"This facility behind us is not a victory for Planned Parenthood, it is a sign of desperation,†said Mary Kate Knorr, the executive director of Illinois Right to Life.
Indeed it is.But it will not be if the Democrats manage to successfully impeach President Trump, or if they succeed at so damaging him the Republicans stop moving forward any of his appointees to the courts. The Big Kahuna will be Broomhilda Ruth Bader Ginsberg's seat. If Trump can appoint a pro-life Justice to that seat, we will have the first opportunity in almost fifty years to restrict or elminate this vile practice. Planned Parenthood (a monstrous misnomer) knows that. So do most Democrats, which is why they are so adamant about destroying Trump rather than riding him out.
In the meantime the fight is still on.
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Warner Todd Houston goes into detail on how the so-called "whistleblower" has ties to Joe Biden and the Democrats.
How much you want to bet the media reports none of this?
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Beto O'Rourke wants to pull the Catholic Church's tax exemption.
From P.J. Media:
Barack Obama's IRS may have targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny, but Obama never pledged to strip tax-exempt status from organizations that disagreed with his position on an issue.
Yet on Thursday, former Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas) said he would strip tax-exempt status from any religious organization that supports traditional marriage, defined as one man and one woman. In fact, his position essentially amounts to a government preference for pro-gay marriage religious bodies that likely violates the Establishment Clause.
CNN's Don Lemon quoted O'Rourke's policy on LGBT issues, which states:"Freedom of religion is a fundamental right but it should not be used to discriminate."
"Do you think religious institutions — like colleges, churches, charities — should they lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage?" Lemon asked.
"Yes," O'Rourke replied — to loud applause from the audience.
I rather think this might be a good thing, insofar as it would perhaps finally wake the Catholic Church from her accomodationistBTW, government control of the content of Sunday sermons began during the LBJ Administration;
They've been bought and paid for ever since, and the Catholic Church is one of the worst. They NEVER preach about Catholic doctrine on Sundays. They won't come out against abortion in any but the mildest ways, will not call out gay marriage or any other such thing. Politicians who promote abortion, for instance, are still welcome in the pews - a tacit acceptance of their anti-Christian beliefs.
Maybe losing the exemption would wake the slumbering heirarchy.
Of course, those tax exemptions are there because the Church is not a for-profit organization and it gives a lot away in charity. Of course, it also does not take money through any sort of normal income stream, but rather from donations. It's hard to see how Beto will be able to justify taxing the Church. But if they do the Church should tax HIM with ex-communication. O'Rourke claims to be a practicing Catholic.
If the RCC were even remotely true to her faith she would have kicked an apostate like this out long ago.
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In a recent post by Dana Mathewson about the decline of America, an interesting discussion broke out in the message section. It is reproduced here.
Bill H. says:
"...by giving governments too much power over our lives."
I think that oversimplifies and, in fact, is only a small part of the problem. Today's generations suffer from moral, mental, and physical laziness. They believe in the proposition of the "participation trophy." They favor socialism because they think it means that no one has to work for a living. They think that they should not have to learn how to make change because the cash register will do that for them. That think that information comes from Twitter. A pox on them. more...
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October 10, 2019
Reminds me of a gal I dated when I was single...
‘Kill it immediately’: 3-foot-long fish that can live on land found in Georgia water
Well, she WAS a Democrat, after all!
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The Red Mitred Ones (the Cardinals) scalped the Braves in a 13 to 1 bloodletting. They advance to the championship series in the National League.
I'm gratified. Not so much because I live in St. Louis, but because it will make coastal teeth grind down like Indians grinding corn to meal, and because sportswriters will cry into their latte's over flyover country besting the coastal elites. St. Louis won the Stanley Cup earlier this year, which I am sure made them most unhappy (the announcers kept referring to the Bruins as if they were the home team, even when in St. Louis) but, hey, that's hockey! Nobody expects civil behavior from hockey people, right? Baseball is different. If the flyover country Cardinals win it all this year, St. Louis, the midwesternest of midwestern places, will show up the Supermen of the coasts. It will be like Jesse Owens embarassing the Nazis, or Joe Lewis knocking out Max Schmelling. Intolerable! THEY are the superior ones, not those hayseed, hillbilly, God and Country types in Middle America! (Well, out side of St. Louis proper, that is; STL is as much an east-coast liberal enclave as Philadelphia or Trenton N.J.
So I'll choke down a Budweiser in honor of the Cardinals (we have much better beer here than THAT, but the Bush family connection to the Redbirds requires a bad bud brew and later the bud flu.)
Go Cards! I only wish we still had football in this town.
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I haven't really been able to form an opinion about Trump's removal of troops from Syria, and especially about his retreat in the face of a Turkish invasion. It strikes me as craven, but I doubt this was simply created from nothing.
I have always been of the opinion we should not have gone into Syria at all, that it was something guaranteed to turn the Russians into our enemies (which it has) and to strengthen their ties to China (which it did). Be that as it may, I also know you have to play the cards in your hand, not the ones you wish you had, not the discards. So, given the current circumstances, what are we to make of Trump's new, apparently craven policy?
John Tobin is a retired Army Colonel and Special Forces guy who heads up the Special Forces Association. Tobin had this to say on Facebook:
OK Folks, "Plickee†everybody is going nuts over the removal of about 100 US Troops from Prison Camp Guard duty in northeast Syria and to bring them and their support units home. Folks before you touch the Zippo to the gas soaked scalp, let us cut the BS from the Congressional Employees of the Military Industrial complex.
You can’t tell the players
without a scorecard, the map below shows the area occupied by the Kurds
over the centuries. Now if you look at the Syrian/Turkey/
Now there are four different Kurdish groups, we will work on two, the Peshmerga, our allies, over 60,000 strong well equipped, extremely well led, and superbly trained by the "Quiet Professionals†of the US Army Special Forces, and who President Trump will continue to supply and support, even with air cover, if necessary. They are allied with the Syrian Defense Force, and they will probably work together, surrendering Syrian land, if necessary, and moving East back to their homeland.
The other group, mostly concentrated in eastern and southeastern Turkey are the PKK, a Marxist/ Maoist group who have been on the US and world Terrorist list since at least the mid 1980s, they have been the PROVOS, Bader-Meinhof, Japanese Red Army, Black September like group of Turkey blowing up civilians, murdering etc. They are not our friends and allies. They are the Turkish target, oh and the Syrians are also in that area, so if Turks and Syrians murder each other off, don’t cry for me Argentina.
Now if the Congress want to do the right thing and establish a formidable ally, who would gladly work with our Israeli, Jordanian, Azerbijanis and other allies in the area, they will petition the UN, ok, you have to check the box, and help the Kurds establish, Kurdistan, and announce to all comers that they are our friends and allies, Iran would go berserk, but then again how many more times can they scream "Death to America.â€
Ike warned of the
"Military Industrial Complex†(MIC), he led millions of troops and
freed millions of people. Lindsay Graham, a USAFR JAG officer, and the
other Congresscitters
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You can see what he's getting at. As with every VDH article, you'll want to read the entire thing, and it's found here: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/victor-davis-hanson-generations-giantsMany of the stories about the gods and heroes of Greek mythology were compiled during Greek Dark Ages. Impoverished tribes passed down oral traditions that originated after the fall of the lost palatial civilizations of the Mycenaean Greeks.
Dark Age Greeks tried to make sense of the massive ruins of their forgotten forbearers’ monumental palaces that were still standing around. As illiterates, they were curious about occasional clay tablets they plowed up in their fields with incomprehensible ancient Linear B inscriptions.
We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.
Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?
Californians tried to build a high-speed rail line. But after more than a decade of government incompetence, lawsuits, cost overruns and constant bureaucratic squabbling, they have all but given up. The result is a half-built overpass over the skyline of Fresno — and not yet a foot of track laid.
Who were those giants of the 1960s responsible for building our interstate highway system?
California’s roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them, although the state population has tripled. We have added little to our freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements.
When California had to replace a quarter section of the earthquake-damaged San Francisco Bay Bridge, it turned into a near-disaster, with 11 years of acrimony, fighting, cost overruns — and a commentary on our decline into Dark Ages primitivism. Yet 82 years ago, our ancestors built four times the length of our singe replacement span in less than four years. It took them just two years to design the entire Bay Bridge and award the contracts.
Our generation required five years just to plan to replace a single section. In inflation-adjusted dollars, we spent six times the money on one-quarter of the length of the bridge and required 13 agencies to grant approval. In 1936, just one agency oversaw the entire bridge project.
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Mark Musser has a ministry which is heavily involved in the Ukraine, and he visits the country on a regular basis.
Mark recently commented on the Ukrainian connection in most of our current day politics, and he did so from a position of knowledge. Well, there's more.
He states:
Of interest to me, Penny Pritzker, Obama's financial campaign adviser, but better known as the subprime queen whose bank in Chicago was ground zero for the subprime mortgage meltdown (where bank laws were deregulated because of alleged discrimination/
Well, well, well!
Penny Pritzker was the thirty eighth Secretary of Commerce under Barack Hussein Obama, and heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune. Harvard educated, Pritzker is brother to the current governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker and is worth two and a half BILLION dollars!
She headed the Superior Bank of Chicago which pioneered the subprime mortgage. They also cheated depositors when the bank failed.The Chicago Sun Times said of the Pritzker Family:
And she was sent to the Ukraine by Obama to "straighten them out".
Notable in all this is that the Pritzkers are related to the nihilistic Ukrainian philosopher Lev Shestov, a radical existentialist who wrote frequently on the rejection of limits and Reason. In Athens and Jerusalem he wrote:
Doesn't that seem exactly like the Chicago style of Leftism? It's about fighting even when there is no fight to be had.
This was the cousin of the Pritzker patriarch Nicholas Pritzker, who immigrated from Kiev.
Penny supposedly met Barack Obama at a YMCA basketball game, where the BHO's brother in law Craig Robinson coached. (How often do you meet billionaires at the Y?) She largely bankrolled his political career in the early days.
The nexus of so many of these political interests in the Democratic Party seems to be Kiev.
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October 09, 2019
It has always been suspicious that Robert Mueller met with President Trump in the Oval Office the day before he was officially appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to investigate Trump.
Newly uncovered documents show that Mueller and Rosenstein had been privately communicating in the days before that meeting. They worked sedulously to keep it a secret. Trump had no idea that Mueller was already on board to serve as special counsel.
So, why was Mueller there in the Oval? Was it part of a scheme to furtively gather evidence that, as special counsel, he could then use against Trump? Did he lure the president into a conversation under false pretenses? The answer appears to be yes.
When I interviewed president Trump for my new book, "Witch Hunt: The Story Of The Greatest Mass Delusion In American Political History,†I asked him why Mueller was there:
President Trump: "Mueller wanted very badly to have the job as FBI director and to return to the FBI. I didn’t want him. I rejected him. By the way, how much of a conflict is it when a guy comes in wanting a job, I say no, and the next day he’s your special prosecutor? It’s outrageous.â€
It was outrageous. It seems increasingly clear that Trump was being set-up, and that Mueller was neither forthcoming nor honest during the meeting.
He deliberately concealed from the president that he was about to launch a damaging investigation that threatened Trump’s presidency. The duplicity was more than a sufficient basis to require that he disqualify himself from the special counsel position.
The president’s account of his meeting with Mueller was corroborated by his then-assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, who arranged it and was privy to its purpose and content. I questioned her about this. She confirmed to me that, without a doubt, Mueller had been there interviewing for the job of FBI director. Recently, multiple administration officials backed up this account to Fox News. Newly released records also substantiate it.
There has been widespread speculation about Mueller's intentions. Tuesday, Fox News' Bret Baier and Jake Gibson reported that Mueller was indeed "pursuing the open post as the director of the FBI – something the former Russia probe special counsel denied under oath during congressional testimony this summer."
So, has Mueller been lying about this all along? Consider his July 24, 2019 testimony before congress:
Mueller: "My understanding was I was not applying for the job. I was asked to give my input on what it would take to do the job.
Question: So it is your statement that you didn’t interview to apply for the FBI director job?
Mueller: That’s correct.â€
Mueller also denied telling Vice President Pence that he wanted to return to the top FBI post.
The last time I checked, failing to tell the truth under oath before Congress constitutes perjury.
Yep. It sure does. You'll find the rest of this absorbing article here: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/gregg-jarrett-mueller-congress-trump-special-counsel And you may very well want to read Jarrett's book from which this account was taken.
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I'm like the magician in the old kids special "Frosty the Snowman" who is told by Santa to write "I'm sorry for what I did to Frosty" ten zillion times: 'Busy, busy, Bussssssyyyyyy". Sorry if the blog is a big weak for the next day or so.
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