Reflections on the Impeachment and Leftism's Roots January 30

Amici,

Finally, it looks as though the Impeachment saga of President Trump is about to end. Late last night, January 29, after a day of the senators asking questions via written text read by the Chief Justice, it became apparent that Mitch McConnell, Senate leader, has whipped up the votes to squash any request for new witnesses. (The Democrats have had 17 witnesses so far, whose testimony came from their House hearings, and one witness whose testimony Adam Schiff has blocked: this 18^th witness was the “Intelligence Community’s Inspector General’s testimony given some months ago in a closed committee hearing. The Republicans have used only these 17 witnesses’ testimony, and called no new witnesses of their own.) I saw a New York Times article this morning lamenting this likely vote-down of new witnesses. Clearly, the Democrats will use this vote – if it occurs Friday evening, the most likely time for it – as a cudgel to try to maim Republican senators running for re-election. Of course, some new turn of events might occur today, the second and last day of senators asking questions. Tomorrow, Friday, they’ll debate what they’ve been presented with.

After yesterday’s one day of questions, however, it has become apparent that the Democrat managers from the House both don’t have a case, nor the ability to defend what they do have under such “cross-examination” the senators can give. This development was apparent to anyone listing to or reviewing some of the prosecution team’s opening arguments, and then the White House’s team’s response. Also, the Democrats, as Trey Goudy has said, had a stupid way of arguing their case, insulting many senators for hours, and they’re carrying that over in answering the senators’ questions: Ted Cruz last night said Adam Schiff twice refused to answer a question presented to him on Wednesday, and that’s just not going to work.

So, as this apparently winds down, at long last, at least for the time being, one naturally asks what was all this about. For what it is worth, I’ve written up a few things that I find worth considering.

Background

Donald Trump is what is known as a “Change Agent”. For better or worse, such people change the course of the way things had been going before. Abraham Lincoln was perceived to be a change agent by the Southern slave-owning class, and thus they started the Civil War to prevent him from making any changes to their part of the country as it had been. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was another such agent of change; so were, in different degrees, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Ronald Reagan tried to be, and to some degree was, but the statist, rule-by-bureaucracy that FDR started was not so easily derailed. Lyndon Johnson was a “change agent” in a terrible way, leaving the country nearly at war with itself with his Vietnam debacle and his “Great Society” that parked generations of Black Americans on the “asphalt plantations” in the huge urban areas the Democrats rule with an iron hand.

Mixed with all of that, there’s the marked, and growing, trend in academia and in certain political circles toward both Globalism and Socialism, the latter manifesting as a sort of hodge-podge of true Socialism, Mercantilism, and “crony Capitalism”. Socialism and “Leftism” in general need a few words.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the father of Leftism. A reprobate himself, fathering many bastards, he wrote, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” He meant moral chains, repressing us, keeping us from fathering bastards and being wastrels, as he was. Jean-Jacques was a sort of high IQ version of Hunter Biden, in fact. (The comparison is quite striking, except that J-J didn’t have a father who was Vice President.) “Freedom” for Rousseau meant fathering bastards and not working at a gainful trade, and you can see his intellectual progeny in the “Pro-Choice” movement and the hedonistic culture of today. Jean-Jacques was a non-religious antinomian down to his DNA. All Leftists, mild or strong, are in some degree antinomian, actually; they believe mankind is basically good, and held back by old demented types who impose an impossible morality on everyone: such “repressors” are what the very Progressive Pope Francis calls “Pharisees” and “Rigorists” in morality, and what Marx would have called Capitalists or the Owners of the Means of Production in economics. Either way, the common Joes and Janes of the world are held back, held down, and taken advantage of. Bernie Sanders says this every day. If only the Repressors could be overthrown, then everyone would flourish. Peace, joy, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” to quote Marx.

I, myself, am on the Right, not the Left, for religious and anthropological reasons. I don’t think people are basically good, and they need strict laws to keep them in line. One doesn’t need to be religious to appreciate this. James Madison apparently had no religion at all, but famously wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” God made Mankind good, and blessed it and all Creation on the first Sabbath Day (Genesis 2), but Original Sin prevents them from really being very good, certainly not for any length of time. We can neither achieve Heaven on our own, nor Utopia on Earth. That’s the Christian religion (can’t say “Judeo-Christian”, because Jews reject the idea of Original Sin) and that is common-sense everyday experience. G.K. Chesterton said that Original Sin was the easiest Church doctrine to prove; all one had to do was to open the daily newspaper. But the Left, you see, is on a morally iconoclastic crusade, an antinomian jihad. In a tired, materialistic, ever-pushing and endlessly competitive Consumer Capitalist world, the Left’s causes can seem like the “tune of a different drummer”, a panacea, an unholy Grail that one can dedicate one’s life to pursuing.

Donald Trump, a man of many achievements and a complicated (and not always moral) past, is now on the receiving end of the Left’s jihad. Trump is a “change agent,” one wrenching the United States away from what’s called the “Uni-Party” politicians and their Globalist friends. The “Swamp” or “The Deep State” is their apparatus for control. Opposed to this is “flyover America”, and in that “great middle” Trump strikes a deep chord in the American soul; Reagan did that, too. But no American president since Reagan has really been a “nationalist” in the classic American sense. 

Certainly, the American Left wants Globalism, meaning not merely international trade but ultimately subjection of established nations to shady foreign bureaucracies. A central element of all this is relaxed sexual morals and abortion on demand (to clean up what the lax morals produce). Lax morals produce, you see, a dissolute, dissipated population naturally unable to manage itself. Thus, you need an all-powerful bureaucracy. (Rousseau foresaw this, actually, and argued for a strong central state to manage the hedonistic zombies his system would create.) Central Globalism is an international trade in which the U.S. becomes a Mercantilist colony of the Left’s ideal republic, the People’s Republic of China (even the pope sings China’s praises, something grotesque, abominable, and Hellish, all in one), and the American military to be the world’s policeman.

Trump is not threatening to upend all that, he’s actually changing it. His “America First” program is about putting the American people first, as in the slogan “Mainstreet, not Wallstreet” in economics, and also in resisting the use of the U.S. military to police the world (a world as hopelessly vicious, tribal, and self-defeating as it ever was). And quietly, steadily, his replacement of liberal or Leftist judges with conservatives is going to change profoundly the homeland’s moral situation, as well.

The Impeachment

So, with this background in mind, how is this Impeachment Trial playing out? What all is involved?

Here’s a parable. Fred and Barney are sitting in a bar, and Fred says he’s going duck hunting. Barney says, “Oh, yeah?” and Fred says, “Yep, I’m going duck hunting in our neighbor’s back yard duck pond! I’m going to shoot his pet duck!” Barney doesn’t say much of anything to that, though maybe he shrugs it off as a joke. A week later, the sound of a shotgun echoes through the neighborhood, and the neighbor runs out his back door and sees his pet duck has been shot up.

Not long after this, Fred is in court, being charged with shooting his neighbor’s duck. Barney jumps up in the back of the courtroom and yells, “Hey, I got some evidence! Fred told me last week he was going to shoot that duck!”

In such a context, maybe Barney’s unsolicited but timely testimony might be considered of some value, IF there were witnesses corroborating what he alleges he heard. However, here’s the kicker: the duck was never shot. There was no gunfire, and no dead duck. Nope; the duck is still swimming about in his duck pond. But Fred is in court for shooting that duck!

This is what President Donald Trump is in an impeachment trial in the Senate for: shooting a duck that was never shot. That’s the gist of what Alan Dershowitz was arguing for over an hour for. Impeachment MUST involve a crime. NO CRIME is alleged, except the very vague “Abuse of Power” and “Obstructing Congress” – which are not listed in the U.S. Constitution as constituting crimes a president can be impeached for. Dershowitz explained that “Abuse of Power” being essentially another version of the British-derived “Maladministration”, which the Constitutional framers excluded from the impeachment criteria precisely because they didn’t want the American president to be in essence a prime minister in a Parliamentary system, and “Obstruction of Congress” is a non-starter, because presidents are supposed to take Congressional demands to the courts, the co-equal Third Branch of government, to adjudicate.

Now, to be sure, the Democrats and the Mainstream Media (MSM) allege that Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress are indeed crimes. The New York Times had a piece yesterday making that claim. Either Alan Dershowitz is an idiot or someone (indeed, many someones) are simply insisting on something that isn’t so. (It reminds me or Reagan’s famous, “It’s not that the Democrats don’t know anything; it is just that they know things that aren’t so” line.)

So Trump is on trial for shooting a duck that wasn’t shot. Honestly, for a quid pro quo, we need actual evidence. Witnesses, recordings, something. And now Barney, in the lumpy form of John Bolton, a man who never met a war he didn’t like, is saying he heard Trump discussing the idea of shooting the duck. Can he prove that? How? Or is he just selling a book? And even if Trump “kicked the idea around” with Bolton, it isn’t a crime, even had he actually done it. It certainly isn’t a crime if he didn’t do it at all! It is absurd, therefore, a farce, a sort of Masque of the Swamp Creatures; the House should have never set this precedent, and for its part, the Senate was derelict in its Constitutional duty by accepting these illegal “articles of impeachment.” (In hindsight, it was a mistake to impeach Bill Clinton, purely in terms of long-term political calculation. And the Andrew Johnson Impeachment was a joke, too, on a grand scale.)

There’s another large maggot in this decomposing carcass, a wriggling worm that promises to turn into a monstrously omnivorous, insatiable insectoid monster: the Senate is about to (apparently) vote to call witnesses, witnesses the House didn’t call in its initial hearings (i.e. Barney, and others). Now, the way it is supposed to work, how the Constitution has previously been interpreted, is that the House acts as a District Attorney: it builds a case, does the investigating, and then presents the result to the Senate to judge the merits of the evidence. But in this Donald Trump Impeachment Trial, it looks like 51 Senators are about to vote to call witnesses. This would make the Senate part of the House investigation. In fact, it would make the Senate the House’s “gopher/go-for” lackey and errand boy. That’s not what the Senate is for. If the House didn’t call enough witnesses, or the right witnesses, or whatever they complain about not having, that’s supposed to be their problem. But if the Senate votes to call witnesses, all Constitutional precedents – and all previous interpretations of what the Constitution is saying needs to be done in an impeachment – are overturned. We’re in new territory.

More than “new territory”, we’re in a revolution.

But then again, that has already happened by the Senate voting to hear an impeachment in which no crime is alleged in the first place! Put simply: American Constitutional governance is being wrecked right before our eyes, as we look at it. It’s a true coup d’état. The U.S. Constitution is being bastardized, trashed out. And the Republican leadership in the Senate (Mitch McConnell & Co.) are complicit in that. But then, so are Republicans not in the leadership (Romney, etc.) and all the Democrats.

Clearly, this all sets very bad precedent. A Republican-controlled House could impeach any Democrat president – or a Republican they didn’t like – thus turning impeachment into a “no confidence” vote such as Parliament has. It destroys the American presidency as a co-equal branch of government. This is in fact what happened in the 17^th and 18^th century Britain. Parliament gained ever more and more governmental control from the king, the chief executive, until the king became a mee figurehead, a tourist attraction. (Parliament is also the “highest court in the land” as well.) More directly, it stuffs into the septic tank the will of the American people. The U.S. President (and his Vice-President) are the only two people in the entire Federal system who are directly elected by the nation; this is done via the Electoral College, a system allowing even small states an important say in who is elected, and thus creating a truly national presidency, an unique institution in the world. Removing a president for a non-crime/maladministration is nothing less than a political defecation on the collective American voter. (For three years, the Democrats have alleged the Russian meddled in our election, but if what the Democrats are doing is not meddling, then nothing is.)

In the months leading up to this moment, I’ve been watching as the House of Representatives under Nancy Pelosi and the radical wing of the Democrat Party cleverly laid the groundwork for this fiasco. They would not call a formal House Impeachment Inquiry vote. Such a vote was done in the past, and would have empowered the Republican minority to subpoena witnesses as well as the majority Democrats. By NOT doing it that way, the Republicans could call no witnesses at all, and even the Democrat majority could not legally subpoena witnesses in the sense of issuing subpoenas that would hold up in the Courts. The House Intelligence Committee under the execrable Adam Schift (N.B. his committee should not have been involved in an impeachment in any case!) had issued one of their faux-subpoenas to one of Trump’s National Security Agency’s top people, and he took it to court. At that point, Schift withdrew the subpoena. It would have been thrown out. Many in the press and online Commentary see this as a flaw in the House’s Impeachment, but actually it was done intentionally so, for it allows the Democrats to say, “Boo-hoo, we couldn’t call important witnesses; now the Senate must.”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of commentary from all angles, and two basic schools of thought seemed to dominate in pro-Trump commentary: one school said the Senate should immediately dismiss the illegal Impeachment Articles (impeaching where no crime is committed, as discussed above), and the other asserting that a full Senate trial, one in which witnesses were called by all sides, was what was needed. The supporters of this second position thought that the infamous “Deep State” could thus be put on trial, and all the maggots exposed. However, as Senator Rand Paul made plain just before the Senate Impeachment trial began, “the fix was in” to remove Trump, and that were the Senate to vote for witnesses, the Republicans would get none. Paul alleged that some of his fellow Republicans were lying in wait to ambush Trump’s defense, and it seems he was quite right.

So, right now, we teeter on the bring of apocalypse. Precedent has been well and truly broken, and laws – including the basic law of the country, the U.S. Constitution – are wrecked. Anything can happen now. If the Democrats call the war-monger (but never-having-served-in-the-military) maggot John Bolton, President Trump must assert Executive Privilege, because no President can have his closest advisors on national security being dragged before Parliament – er, excuse me, Congress – and made to testify about any private advice given. One would think – though in these crazy times, one cannot know – that in this case the Courts would uphold Executive Privilege. Presidents since Washington have asserted it, after all. Everything else considered, there’s no alleged crime here to begin with: as Professor Dershowitz argued before the Senate, presidents have used “quid pro quo” with foreign governments since the beginning. And need I write here that there’s actually no evidence that President Trump did any “quid pro quo” in the first place! That’s the duck that wasn’t shot! Maybe he kicked around the idea with that fool Bolton, and maybe he didn’t (how can Bolton prove it?); but one must be tried for what one did, not what one talked about considering doing.

In any case, voting to call witnesses would mean the Impeachment Trial of Donald John Trump would last in to April or May. That’s because it would take months to wrangle it all out in the Courts. Would the Senators tie up the Senate for that long? Would the American people stand for it? President Trump’s popularity is higher than ever. How high would it be by then?

Perhaps I’m just the pessimist, or maybe I’m an outright, unmitigated fool, but I am definitely NOT sanguine about what’s happening. I trust Senator Rand Paul to raise all Hell in the coming days, but we know that Mitch McConnell has the power to squash Republican Senators from voting for Bolton to testify. Word is that the Chamber of Commerce is offering big money and lucrative contracts to any Senators who vote for Bolton’s testimony. The Chamber of Commerce is a Globalist lobby, soaked in cash and throwing it around to try to destroy Trump, whose “Main Street, not Wall Street” economic nationalism is turning out great dividends for actual Americans. Also, regarding the Globalists, most of whom have sold their soul to China, in effect, they are in for rough times should somehow this new Coronavirus wreak even a fragment of the havoc it is suspected of being able to inflict on the world. The Chinese economy might well collapse; even the evil Barad-dur of the Chinese Communist Party might lose control. It is all so frustrating. So-called “conservatives” have gotten themselves so stuck onto the teat of China, that they’ll catch whatever disease infects that miserable slave state, directly from their false “mother’s milk.”

Short-sighted bastards, them. Trump, with his new United States, Mexico, and Canada trade agreement (USMCA), along with his unsung but massive cutting of the insane “red tape” previous U.S. governments have hampered the U.S. economy with, has made North America an infinitely better place for business to invest in than odious Communist China.

And Trump has so far avoided the purely stark-raving mad “Endless Wars” scenario that we’ve been trapped in for decades. So far, he’s not gotten American military personnel removed from Afghanistan and so on, not yet, but he is, as the old saying goes, a damned sight better than what we’ve had before.

Partly because the Democrats simply have no one remotely suitable for the office of the president running for that position (although Hilary Clinton looks like she wants to jump in, which would probably blow up the Democrats entirely – that’s also certain to happen if the Democrat Party bigshots squash Bernie Sanders a second time), and partly because Donald Trump is able to command huge crowds wherever he goes (see the amazing photos of the hordes who came out for him in New Jersey, of all places!), but mainly because of the excellent economy, Donald Trump will easily be re-elected president – that is, unless the Democrats can remove him via the fraudulent impeachment.

That’s the situation we’re in. The ghost of a true Civil War 2.0 seems to haunt us. Perhaps it is inevitable.

An Préachán

Trump the Conqueror, or Donaldus Victor Superbus

What a first week in the New Year! The "Number 2" man in the Iranian regime whacked, and a MASSIVE rally in Toledo. Wow. Trump just glides along, victory to victory, such as this great job news. 

See also this: 145,000 more jobs in December. 

The passing of the USMCA Trade Agreement is a huge success for Trump now, before it is actually passed, and for "Mainstreet America". Think how good the economy will be by November!

So what is it about "The Donald" that works so well? We were told by mavens such a Paul Krugman that if elected, Trump would trash the stock market. Instead, it has reached record highs and kiddie porn is found on Krugman's computer. (An example of the famous "Trump Curse"?)

Ronald Reagan was "The Teflon President" as nothing "stuck" to him, and of course the Dems threw mud at him for his two terms, the second term bogged down in "Iran-Contra". But nothing stuck to Reagan himself. Trump seems to be a repeat of Reagan, except far greater, because more has been thrown at him than was at Reagan, and Trump has achieved far more of his agenda than Reagan did his, and that despite the most incredible – and ceaseless – Democrat attempts to sink him.

Yet, of course, Democrats and "Never-Trumpers" keep howling how "stupid" Trump is. Are they going to keep that up for four more years of Trump success?

One interesting article here attempts to offer something of an explanation. It excoriates American elites (in government, academia, entertainment, etc.), and makes the case that anything his enemies accuse Trump of, the public knows the accusers are just as guilty of, if not more so. Quite an interesting take on it. The idea is that they see the immoral elites' hypocrisy of "the pot calling the kettle black", ("in spades" to keep the ebony metaphor).

Below is a long piece I quote in full. It's Well worth the read. Trump's handling of the Iran crisis was superb – we got the terrorist general Suleimani killed and the Mullahs had an impotent, flaccid response to the death of their main terrorist Mujahideen killer-of-infidels bad guy, despite all their tough talk. Their missile attack reminded me nothing so much as an American Indian hitting you with his coup stick; they even got word to us the attack was coming!) As the Mid-East is a "shame-honor response culture", this is huge. Trump shamed 'em and they're stuck with that.

In fact, there's some suggestion that Suleimani was plotting against the Mullahs themselves -- what with his private army and world-wide terror connections, he'd be a formidable enemy to his erstwhile "masters" -- and they got his location info to the Iraqis/U.S. to wack the guy. You can imagine Stalin making use of such a chance to remove Trotsky, or vice versa, depending. It's how these regimes operate.

But Trump. He's humiliating the Democrats, too. Yesterday, the first Democrat committee chair in the House to call for Pelosi to release the Impeachment articles, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, asked her to release them. A number of Dem Senators are saying the same thing, including Pelosi's fellow Californian, Diane Feinstein. (Has that state's name changed to The Poop Republic? The flag with that bottom red stripe now turned brown and the bear image pooping away?) If, indeed, Pelosi was waiting for the courts to approve Democrats' request for the Mueller grand jury testimony, pressure is building fast for her to cave. J.R. Dunn writes about that below, along with a host of other things. (If she caves, no matter: she'll just leak the grand jury info to the Dems' PR arm, the WaPo and the NYTimes.)

Anyway. Trump. Sui Generis. Here's J.R. Dunn's American Thinker article. 

Nota Bene: Note: the author, J.R. Dunn is a novelist, editor, and political commentator online and in print. His three novels include This Side of Judgment (1994), Days of Cain (1997) widely hailed as one of the most powerful novels to deal with the Holocaust, and Full Tide of Night (1998). Dunn’s the author of an interesting book review I've read about a very interesting book, indeed; i.e.: https://thefederalist.com/2018/09/28/uncovering-the-secret-world-of-intelligence-services/  

 An Préachán

Comments on Two Major Secular News Events

A New Year, some shocking news: Two Items of note.

Iranian leader killed in Baghdad

Big news today, the U.S. killing of top Iranian special forces leader in Baghdad, and his Iraqi associates. Wait, what? Wow, bolt out of the blue, right?

Maybe, maybe not.

I'm providing no links; this is all over the Internet.

Many expect full-scale war, while others don't think the Iranian regime leadership has the ability to do that, esp now that Kassem Suleimani, the Iranian al-Quds leader, is dead. Suleimani was a major player in the Iranian regime, you see, and in its military actions outside of Iran, a man who was responsible for a whole host of nasty things in various countries, as in even ballistic missile deployment. Another man killed was one Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, Suleimani's top Iraqi associate. Al-Muhandis was founder and leader of Kata’ib Hizballah, an Iraqi Shia paramilitary group, and was directly involved in the attack on the U.S. embassy. Of course, De Gaulle once said (I think it was him) that cemeteries are full of "indispensable men". Maybe so.

Yet another (indispensable?) associate, one Hadi al-Ameri, whom Obama had once invited to the White House, was arrested yesterday (I guess it was) by US forces in Iraq. Al-Ameri had led (or was one of the leaders of) the recent attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Al-Ameri was also head of the Badr Organization, a Shia political party and Iranian-officer d militia.

Sure looks like a liquidation of high-level anti-U.S. people, doesn't it? No need to have a full-scale war like George W. Bush was talked into when you can just "headshot" a few leaders and end all the trouble.

Everyone in the loathsome Islamic Republic regime leadership must be aware of what this signifies. Certainly, at the very least, they know none of them are safe, and Donald Trump isn't Jimmy Carter or Barrack Obama. They're breathing fire an brimstone, the regime leaders are, as one would expect, but they know they could be taken out at any time. What good does it profit them to have militias and suicide brigades -- even vast if poorly trained conscription armies -- when they themselves can be killed instantly, anywhere?

Of course, the de-masculinized Western leaders will be in shock. Nothing new about that. (Did everyone see this? Pope Francis tells teens they’re not a ‘disciple of Jesus’ if they try to convert non-believers."

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/does-pope-francis-repudiate-the-great-commission ) Ben Rhodes, a close Obama associate and involved in Obama's Iranian -- uh -- love fest, is outraged. Rhodes is famous (infamous) for commenting on how easily it is to manipulate MSM reporters. (He was right about that!) And Democrat Senator Chris Murphy has written, "Soleimani [sic] was an enemy of the United States. That’s not a question. The question is this – as reports suggest, did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?”

1. If Suleimani was the second most powerful guy, the new second most powerful guy, not to mention the first, must be underground, in hiding. 
2. As for massive regional war, well, they've been having that off and on for millennial The Iraqis and Iranians killed over a half-million of their young men (wasn't it?) during their 1980-1988 war. (That was an interesting war in that it showed how stupid the high-level military leaders in both countries were, and how little they valued the human lives of their miserable subjects.)

3. Congress? Who would trust them for anything?

Also, the Washington Post called Suleimani "most revered". That's actually vomit inducing. It was Suleimani who led the IED program to kill U.S. and Coalition military people. He's responsible for the death and maiming of thousands of such, and Allah only knows how many of his own people he's brutally murdered. No doubt he never heard of Matthew 26:52.

Logically, this was also a serious retaliation against Shia forces in Iraq who staged the attempted U.S. embassy takeover. Now, it is said that when one of these staged protests occur, as happened in November 1979 in Tehran when "students" seized the U.S. embassy there during the feckless Jimmy Carter presidency, and then recently in Baghdad, the way to deal with it is not hand wringing and surrender, but "headshots" of the guys running the show. Drop them, and the curtain falls. (It's not necessary, in other words, to solve the problem the way Napoleon solved the problem of Parisian Revolutionary mobs: he turned the cannons on them.) But if such precision is not possible, give headshots to the first "protesters" over the wall. That ends such "events" promptly; indeed, with celerity. (As in Kent State, "back in the day.") This killing of Suleimani & Co. (and also arrest of others) is the equivalent of that, on a different, much higher, level. 

So, what is all this really about? We have only speculation at the moment, but FWIW, the initial word is that Kassem Suleimani and friends were in Baghdad to run a coup d'état against the current Iraqi regime. This might be true, it might not. Whether there's any validity to that report, certainly it is obvious, though, that this "culling of the bulls" while there's been an ongoing, nation-wide protest in Iran against the hated and loathed regime, is an extremely significant event. It has got the attention of every leader in the violent Mid-East, that's for sure. News has spread through Iran itself, and Iranians online are cheering the event (while Iranian leaders fiercely vow vengeance, of course). Are we witnessing the beginning of the fall of the Islamic Republic? Was this Trump's plan when in strengthened sanctions against Iran, thus causing the domestic shortages that sparked the newest uprising?

We'll learn more as things develop, obviously. Otherwise, we've just got speculation. But a major player in the Iranian regime's military is now dead. Major Iraqi associates of Iran are dead or arrested. That has to weaken the regime significantly. How far would Lenin have gotten without Trotsky? This is especially true in the Mid-East where you have a few leaders and a lot of ignorant, low-level cannon fodder following them.

One final possibility: this is an attempt by the U.S. government "Deep State" to take out Trump because one of his main campaign promises was to keep us out of such foreign war imbroglios. Many pro-Trump people want us totally out of the Mid-East (and the UN, too). This is quite possible, but we'll have to see.

Impeachment Development

The other big news, however, is an item you need not speculate about at all. I haven't written much of anything on Trump's impeachment because I've been waiting for "the other shoe to drop;" i.e., this isn't about impeachment, but rather accessing the Mueller Team's opposition research on Trump. Huh? Yeah, the whole odd-ball impeachment thing is a joke-show, but actually it is cover for something else.

While it was up and running, the Mueller Team (Mueller not having too much to do about any of it except serve as a quasi-respected figurehead, and who lost all respect after his embarrassing Congressional testimony) was using grand jury testimony to dig up all sorts of non-Russia hoax personal dirt of Donald Trump and his family as "oppo research" to run against him in 2020. Yes, tons and tons of info was garnered by Democrat lawyers and activists against Trump over the two-year period the Mueller investigation went on. That info is of course extremely valuable to the Democrats. Now that Trump has been impeached, the Democrats have filed for the courts to release it, "because we need this information now that Trump is impeached."

Actually, right after the impeachment vote, a week or so ago, the House Dems went to the courts (DC Court of Appeals) with this, and now, today, they'll make oral arguments before the court why this info needs released to them. THIS IS WHY THEY DIDN'T SENT THE ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT IMMEDIATELY TO THE SENATE. Clearly, all this was "in the works" for some time before now.

If the court rules in their favor, the Dept of Justice will appeal it to the full DC appeals court, and if that full court approves the Democrats' request, it'll go to the Supreme Court. But none of that really matters. The Democrats have the info now, and have had it through the impeachment sham. If they don't get official permission to mine it, they'll leak it to their allies in the press.

It's what they do.

For the full story of all this, check out:

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/01/02/2020-resistance-dem-operatives-open-new-leak-clearing-house/#more-179950

And that's about all there is to say to that.

I will note that this whole Russia Collusion hoax was similar: it wasn't about Trump being in cahoots with Putin. Everyone involved knew that wasn't true. As Doug Wead, presidential historian, said the other day, every intelligence service in the world knew that Russia story was untrue within 24 hours of it becoming public. https://theunionjournal.com/every-foreign-intelligence-service-knew-within-24-hours-trump-russia-collusion-was-bogus-story-video/

And as 22-year FBI veteran Frank Watt wrote here: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/12/two_possibilities_in_trump_wiretapping_and_neither_is_good.html

there's no way on Earth that such a series of investigations and wiretaps and so on that led up to "Crossfire Hurricane" (the investigation of the president) and "CH" itself, could have happened without multi-level knowledge and approval in the FBI and DOJ, and in the Obama White House. (Read Watt's article; it is excellent.)

Now, if a 22-year FBI veteran can write so plainly about what happened, you know full well that Attorney General William Barr knows it too, as does John Durham, U.S. attorney for Connecticut, whom Barr charged with investigating it. If serious indictments of many high-level people don't happen in a few months, wow, NO ONE is going to believe anything out of the U.S. government again (as in why we kill certain terrorists, as happened in Baghdad).

But my point is that just as Trump's impeachment is about getting "oppo research" on Trump as opposed to the officially stated reasons for it, so the Russia Collusion hoax was to cover up the Obama Administration's long term, multi-year plundering of the NSA archives and data for political opposition research. That was what the then NSA Director, Admiral Mike Rogers discovered during 2016 and why he went and reported it to Donald Trump when Trump was president elect.

If you don't know this story about Admiral Rogers -- who relinquished the NSA command in May 2018 and retired a month later, wow, you really don't know what's been going on. He's the real hero in all this mess, the true "whistle blower", and the word is -- "scuttlebutt" to use an old Navy term -- that Rogers has been working with John Durham.

So, two big news items today. "Never a dull moment, really." One we can only speculate about, and the other we should all know about in cold, clear detail.

Happy New Year,

An Préachán