Dec 20, 2019

On a road to Nowhere

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How The Deep State Sunked The Democratic Party

The Moon of Alabama

The House Democrats continue to party on their Titanic voyage even as there are clear signs that the impeachment iceberg will sink them:
President Trump’s job approval rating has ticked up 6 percentage points since the Democrats' impeachment inquiry began, according to a new survey.The Gallup poll released early Wednesday found Trump’s approval rating at 45 percent, up from 39 percent when the inquiry was launched in the fall. The new findings mark the third-consecutive increase in Trump's approval rating, Gallup noted.
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Gallup’s new poll found that 51 percent of respondents say they oppose impeachment and removing Trump from office, an increase of 5 percentage points since the Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced the impeachment inquiry into the president's dealings with Ukraine. By contrast, 46 percent of respondents now support impeachment and removal, down 6 points.
Not even the Democrats core supporters are enthusiastic about the step the House Democrats will take later today when they will vote to impeach Donald Trump:
Liberal groups organized more than 600 events from Alaska to Florida, following a familiar model of mass protest that has come to define the left during the Trump administration.
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For all the passion among activists, the gatherings were notably smaller than many of the other recent mass protests ..
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Some activists acknowledge that impeachment doesn't fire up people like life-and-death issues such as health care, guns or climate change.
The Democrats hope that by November 2020 the voters will have forgotten about impeachment and vote for Democratic candidates. But Donald Trump and other Republican candidates will take care that everyone will keep the issue in mind.

It is the reason why Trump's letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reads like an overlong campaign ad. Its content will be at the core of each of his campaign speeches. It is no holds barred but surprisingly factual.

Trump partisans are not the only to think that the impeachment articles the Democrats brought forward are astonishingly weak and not supported by the facts. The Senate will need little time to exculpate Trump.

So how did the Democrats get here? Trump's letter notes that talk about impeachment started as soon as he stepped into office:
Speaker Pelosi, you admitted just last week at a public forum that your party’s impeachment effort has been going on for “two and a half years,” long before you ever heard about a phone call with Ukraine. Nineteen minutes after I took the oath of office, the Washington Post published a story headlined, “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun.” Less than three months after my inauguration, Representative Maxine Waters stated, “I’m going to fight every day until he’s impeached.” House Democrats introduced the first impeachment resolution against me within months of my inauguration ...
Since Trump stepped into office the Democrats were looking for something that would make him impeachable. The deep state delivered them Russiagate, the claim that Trump 'colluded' with the Russian government, by taking seriously an obvious fake dossier the Clinton campaign had ordered and paid for. FBI agents who hated Trump even faked FISA court certification submissions to be able to spy on the Trump campaign. They found nothing that supported the 'collusion' claims.

The FISA court is not amused about that:
"The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable," Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote in an order published Tuesday.
For nearly two years the Democrats had hoped that the Mueller investigation would come to their help and deliver them the evidence they needed to impeach Trump. But Mueller did not deliver what the Democrats had hoped for. It turned out that the CIA and FBI driven Russiagate was a nothing-burger.

In 2018 eleven former intelligence and military operatives joined the House as representatives for the Democrats. This was presumably a planned invasion by the security state.

After the Mueller bubble had burst something else was needed to impeach Trump. The deep state delivered again.

A day after the Mueller act had played out Trump had a phone call with the new president of the Ukraine Zelensky.

A lunatic Lieutenant-colonel Vintman in the National Security Administration found that during the phone call Trump was not following the Colonel's preferred foreign policy. He informed a former colleague, .... who then contacted two former colleagues who worked for the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff. They cooked up a scheme in which the CIA analyst would play a 'whistleblower' and accuse Trump of wrongdoing. When the legal review of the complaint within the CIA found that the 'whistleblower' had no case, the Schiff folks leaked the issue to the press to put pressure on the Trump administration to publish the complaint.

On September 23 2019 seven freshman Democrats published an op-ed in the Washington Post that called for impeachment.

CNN noted approvingly that all seven op-ed writers were (former) members of the security state:
The reason they made their announcement and explained their reasoning as a group, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, is because they had already formed a bond over their national security background -- especially the five women: Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, both ex-CIA officers; Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania who was in the Air Force; Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia were Naval officers.
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The op-ed the women penned, along with Gil Cisneros and Jason Crow, two freshmen male veterans, opened the floodgates for others who had been resistant, and gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi critical political cover as she announced a formal impeachment inquiry on Tuesday.
Seven of the 11 security state representatives who had joined the Democrats in 2018 gave the impulse for impeachment. A day after the op-ed was published House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the opening of her 'impeachment inquiry'.

The 'whistleblower' claimed, solely based on hearsay and public sources, that Trump had pressured the President of the Ukraine during the phone call to deliver dirt on Joe Biden. His complaint was published and the deep state then used it to again push for impeachment.

Trump then ambushed Pelosi and the whole impeachment effort by declassifying and publishing the memorandum of the phone call in question.

Reading the memorandum it was immediately clear to us that the impeachment attempt was dead in the water:
The immediate impulse to start an impeachment investigation came from some whistle blower in the intelligence community who claimed that Trump did something nefarious during a phone call with the newly elected President of Ukraine Zelensky.The White House published a memorandum of the phone call. The call was made on July 25 2019, a day after the final Robert Mueller testimony in Congress. There are two passages which the Democrats will claim are damaging:
...[analysis of the transcript]...
Trump asks for investigations and Zelensky assures him that those will happen. Trump applied no open pressure.
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How the Democrats want to construct an impeachment out of this is beyond me.
It was therefore easy to predict this outcome that we are now seeing:
Pelosi has nothing. Six committees have investigated Trump issues but so far found nothing to charge him with. Nor did the Mueller investigation find anything damaging. How will combining all those nothing-burgers make an impeachment meal?
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There is no case for impeachment. Even if the House voted for one the Senate would never act on it. No one wants to see a President Pence.
The Democrats are giving Trump the best campaign aid he could have wished for. Trump will again present himself as the victim of a witch hunt. He will again argue that he is the only one on the side of the people. That he alone stands with them against the bad politicians in Washington DC. Millions will believe him and support him on this. It will motivate them to vote for him.
The current polls, quoted above, seem to support that conclusion. A majority of U.S. citizens reject the Democrats' impeachment act while Trump's approval rating is back at its previous top.

The actions of the deep state, and the Democrats falling for them, will cost them the 2020 election.

Russigate was a false story, invented by the CIA with support from British Intelligence. The Steele dossier was recognizable as an obvious fake as soon as it was published. But the FBI still used it. To find evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russiagate the crooks at the top of the FBI went as far as to make false sworn statements to the FISA court. It did not help.

As soon as Mueller busted the Russiagate bubble the deep state cooked up a new issue. 

Seven representatives of the security state then pushed Pelosi into launching the impeachment proceedings. Schiff again sprang into action by holding abstruse hearings in which some deep state minions were allowed to vent their antipathy to Trump and to Russia. The hearings exposed the sham for what it was.

It is unlikely that any Republican will vote today in favor of impeachment. No Republican senator will dare to vote against Trump.

Russiagate, Ukrainegate and the impeachment nonsense were all driven by members of the deep or security state. The Democrats have been riding on these issues while neglecting the real life-and-death issue of their voters - health care, guns or climate change. They will be punished for it. 

The Democrats would be well advised to distance themselves from those services that invited them to travel on the Titanic. They should remember that historically they have been far more often the victims of CIA, FBI or military overreach than the Republicans.

As the failure of this impeachment affair is imminent the deep state will likely try to cook up a new issue that it can use against Trump.


If the Democrats want to prevent the further sinking of their ship they must avoid becoming associated with it.