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Strategies & Market Trends : World Outlook -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Saulamanca who wrote (22402)	1/23/2020 2:43:05 PM
From: Saulamanca	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 48976

Government in the Shadows By Victor Davis Hanson January 21, 2020 Goodbye to the peaceful transfer of power. The frenetic opposition to Donald Trump by the Washington establishment, the new progressive, hard-left Democratic party, and in particular the veterans of the Obama administration has led to the ruination of a number of hallowed protocols and customs. Impeachment has been redefined as a mere vote of no confidence and will become a rank political ploy for years to come once an opposition party gains a majority in the House. It is taking on the flavor of a preemptory device, a vaccination, rather than a medicine, as if to prevent future hypothetical crimes in the absence of current impeachable offenses. Whistleblowers are now mere political operatives, who work with the opposition party to disseminate second- and third-hand rumor to prompt impeachment frenzies. The FISA court has been disgraced. It was revealed to be either incompetent or actively partisan in its failure to question the Steele dossier’s legitimacy, in ignoring the warnings of Devin Nunes’s memo, and in the court’s selection of hard-core anti-Trump partisan David Kris to monitor FBI compliance with the recommendations of the Horowitz report. At this point, the existing FISA courts should probably be dismissed and the laws authorizing their creation rewritten. In addition, the anti-Trump mob has now ended any idea that prior administrations should step aside, mostly stay quiet, and allow successors to fail or succeed on their merits. During the Reagan years, a frustrated emeritus president Jimmy Carter more or less kept still. True, a sometimes-exasperating Carter chose to travel abroad and dabble publicly in foreign policy. But for the most part, he did not offer play-by-play, negative criticism of Ronald Reagan or his successors. Reagan’s team kept a low profile during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, as is usually the case when a president is succeeded by his own vice president or a member of his own party. In turn, a reticent elder Bush was especially magnanimous during the Clinton years — despite occasional nastiness directed at him from Clintonites. Clinton himself was not vocal during George W. Bush’s first term, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. When Bush’s polls tanked and the Iraq War was at its most unpopular moment in 2006 and 2007, Clinton opportunistically began to attack Bush. Nonetheless, he was not an active Bush hater. Bush himself was idealistically silent during the Obama years, despite the Obama administration’s turns to the hard left on immigration, health care, the Iran Deal, and foreign policy — and Obama’s constant negative references to Bush himself. All those Marquess of Queensberry Rules of post-presidential decorum abruptly ended in 2017. What superseded them was, at best, a kind of British-style, European shadow government, in which mostly ex-Obama officials became nonstop activist critics of almost everything Trump has done. At worst, the endless opposition turned into a slow-motion sort of coup in which progressive, life-tenured bureaucrats leaked, obstructed, and connived to stop the daily operations of the administration — as they often proudly admitted to the media. The subtext was that the Obama-progressive-media complex would create enough momentum to abort Trump’s first term. Or was it that Trump represented such an existential danger to the administrative-state way of doing business that any means necessary were justified to end his presidency? The locus classicus was Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national-security adviser, and Jack Sullivan, who had been Obama’s White House deputy assistant. Together, they formed the National Security Action organization in early 2018. The two promised that they would offer an “effective, strategic, relentless, and national response to this administration’s dangerous approach to national security.” Translated, that meant that Rhodes and Sullivan would aggregate former Obama officials and progressive analysts to launch nonstop attacks on all of Trump’s foreign-policy efforts. And they have. Continued