Freedom ain’t free

For more than a year, Republicans have desperately hoped (and the mainstream media has suggested) that the “FBI primary” — the longstanding investigation in to her private email server, the information that went over it, and the Clinton Foundation and the tangled web of favor-trading that it weaves — would somehow damage Hillary Clinton so badly that she will lose in November notwithstanding the massive Democratic edge in the Electoral College. Whether that damage would flow from the Department of Justice convening a grand jury (which would probably cut off her misleading claim that she is not a “target”) or mere voter backlash against the steady drip-drip of one revealed lie after another is not clear. What is clear is that the Republican desperation for the indictment of Clinton is rising in proximity with the party’s anxiety over its own probable nominee.

The last day brings exciting news for such Republicans. First, it now appears that Clinton indeed sent at least one email marked “Classified.” While the marking does not in and of itself confer culpability — it is unlawful to misuse classified information whether or not it is marked — it does make it easier, perhaps decisively so, to argue that Clinton knew she was doing. And knowledge equals intent equals mens rea, the type of intent necessary to prove criminal culpability. Or so the argument goes. In any case, we know the email scandal is getting worse, because journals of the left are now on the case, even if from a confused point of view: “FBI criminal investigation emails: Clinton approved CIA drone assassinations with her cellphone, report says.” No doubt it took “CIA assassinations” to get Salon interested. Welcome aboard!

Then, ABC News reported that a patron of the Clinton Foundation — a stock operator, to use an old term — had been pushed on to a “sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field, a decision that appeared to baffle the department’s professional staff.” Worse, newly available emails reveal an internal attempt to “protect the Secretary” from ABC’s original investigation of the matter back in 2011.

Anyway, it is not our purpose here to persuade the unpersuaded that Hillary is indeed a crook — if you do not believe it now, it is likely you are not open-minded to the possibility that she is, or that you simply do not care. Rather, it is to say that her opponents are not irrational to hope or even expect that the probable nominee of the Democratic Party will find herself in a heap of legal trouble before the fall.

On the partisan left, of course, this is all laughed away, most fashionably with a nervous cackle. The partisan right, however, is divided between those who still hold out hope, as it were, and the cynics, who believe that there is no chance that the Obama Department of Justice will not stretch prosecutorial discretion to its theoretical limit in order to avoid hurting Clinton’s chances. (There is, of course, no meaningful constituency on the right for the position that Hillary Clinton is of high character, and that this is all of a piece with the “vast right wing conspiracy,” revivified, or at least warmed over, from the 1990s.)

The cynical camp, which will attribute any current expansive deployment of executive power to the aggrandizement of Barack Obama, believes that the DOJ will block the prosecution of Hillary Clinton to protect Obama’s legacy. Here is an exemplary post from that point of view. Money quote:

Since his recent endorsement of Hillary for president, Obama has staked his entire legacy on her candidacy, and it becomes less likely that Joe Biden can be tapped to replace her. Hillary has the momentum, money, and organization, whereas Biden has none of these. If Obama’s legacy is going to survive, he needs to keep Hillary’s campaign alive.

The linked post goes on to propose that if the DOJ did move to prosecute Clinton, Obama might preemptively pardon her.

We are not in this corner of the cynical camp. In our view, Obama’s “legacy” is a secondary consideration, even for Obama. The far greater danger, at least in the minds of the Washington elite, is that Donald Trump becomes president of the United States.

Imagine, if you will, the bureaucratic dynamic that unfolds if the FBI submits findings to the Attorney General which argue strongly for the prosecution of Hillary Clinton on any of the aforementioned grounds. The Attorney General, if a partisan, could simply stonewall, and refuse to move forward. What is the FBI, or perhaps dissenters inside the DOJ’s professional staff, to do?

In an ordinary year with a perfectly respectable Republican nominee — say a Mitt Romney or John Kasich — the FBI would leak like a salad spinner and its director might resign in protest. Career lawyers within the Justice Department would complain to reporters. Cue shit storm, and substantial damage to Barack Obama’s legacy. That exact scenario happened during Watergate, and it was quite effective in taking down an actual president, much less a mere candidate.

The problem is, we suspect that even the principled professionals in the DOJ and the FBI shudder to contemplate a Trump presidency, and far fewer reporters will want the country’s blood on their hands, as they will see it, even if they could source such a story, write it, and get it past their editors. The “leak” deterrent, which would be the main reason a partisan Attorney General might think twice about stonewalling an FBI recommendation, will be inoperative with scary Donald Trump at the top of the opposition ticket.

Hillary Clinton should be very grateful that the GOP will nominate Trump. And, ironically, those among Trump’s supporters who believe that he has the greatest chance to beat Hillary may have neutralized the one thing that would definitely take her down.

The Washington Post‘s Wonkblog argues that “Justin Trudeau may have made the best case for legal pot ever.” Trudeau argues that young people are going to smoke it anyway, it is in fact more available because it is illegal and unregulated, and billions of dollars end up in the hands of organized crime which then does lots of other bad things.

Read it if you dare, but that is actually the most banal argument for legal pot ever. It
amounts exactly to this: “Prohibition was a great idea, but it made alcohol more fashionable among people who had not been drinking before and the mob and official corruption screwed it all up.”

How about, “it shouldn’t be illegal to smoke a plant, ever.” Or to distill one.

That liberals decided to rebrand themselves as “progressives,” the name of the movement that gave us Prohibition, perhaps the most socially pestilential idea ever, is the most compelling evidence that Americans don’t do history.

We are not ready to endorse a presidential candidate — the year is yet young! — but we have no regard for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and expect to spend the better part of the next five months hammering on both of them. Since we vote in Texas, our influence on the Electoral College is non-existent, so we will in all likelihood take the opportunity to cop out and #FeelTheJohnson at the end of it all.

This will not be easy for us, because we cannot abide Hillary Clinton, of whom we expect to write much more in the coming months (we commend you to Christopher Hitchens’ 1999 classic “No One Left To Lie To” if you would prefer your indictment of the Clintons from the left). But voting for Donald Trump is more than we can bear, and not for all the usual sanctimonious virtue-signalling reasons. Trump is a bad guy, but Hillary is a bad gal, and weighing the moral deficiencies in their respective characters requires precision instruments not yet invented. For us it comes down to this: All evidence and our own instincts suggest that Trump is impulsive to an almost incalculable extent, and we cannot have an impulsive person at the top during a national security crisis. Or catalyzing one with a midnight tweet.

Hillary Clinton’s recent and otherwise silly speech on foreign policy actually framed the issue well:

Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different — they are dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas — just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.

He is not just unprepared — he is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility.

This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes — because it’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin.

We can agree with that notwithstanding our view that Hillary Clinton will probably extend the endless war of the Bush/Obama years, further weaken the geopolitical advantage of the United States, and remorselessly lie about anything that either does not go well or that does not perfectly reflect the transnational progressive party line. We do believe, however, that Clinton will be deliberative and calculating in a crisis, and is highly unlikely to bring us into armed conflict with a great power. We have no such confidence in Donald Trump, and since impulsiveness is a trait that we believe is disqualifying in a president of the United States, we cannot hope that Trump wins.

This is also true for the vast majority of Republican leaders who actually understand the demands of the presidency, or at least have an inkling. But they are in a difficult spot, because they are partisans in the literal meaning of the word. If they do not support the party’s nominee, however dangerous that nominee may be, their careers are over. And since politicians are not fit to do much else — well, other than lobbying other politicians on behalf of rent-seeking clients — most of the GOP brass are cracking under the pressure and issuing tepid endorsements of Trump. This article neatly captures the “hostage video” endorsements from the Republican elite and is worth reading in its entirety, but here are a few choice nuggets:

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry

July 22, 2015: “Let no one be mistaken – Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.”

May 5, 2016: “He’s not a perfect man, but what I do believe is that he loves this country and that he will surround himself with capable, experienced people and that he will listen to them.” …

Florida Senator Marco Rubio

March 4, 2016: “Donald Trump has been perhaps the most vulgar — no I don’t think perhaps — the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency in terms of how he’s carried out his candidacy.”

May 10, 2016: “”I signed a pledge, put my name on it, and said I would support the Republican nominee and that’s what I intend to do.”

Paul Ryan’s precisely tuned announcement that he would “vote for” Trump was the most painful to watch. He might have preferred a long night in the prison showers.

This much is clear. We are watching the destruction of the Republican Party. Whether it survives in name remains to be seen — the legal entrenchment of the party duopoly will be very tough to dislodge — but a realignment is unfolding that will completely remake not only the GOP, but ineluctably also the Democrats. Because one cannot change the yin without also changing the yang.

Payday loans are in the news. The editors of the New York Times and Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff are occasionally regularly in lockstep, and yesterday was no different:

Abusive payday lenders have preyed on Americans for too long. @CFPB's new rule will protect families; the next president should do the same.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 3, 2016

Yesterday, Elizabeth Warren’s pet agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, proposed new regulations that would essentially put out of business most storefront “payday” lenders. So naturally the editors of the Times and Hillary Clinton would be all excited and stuff (although the former does not believe that the proposed regs go far enough).

Now, we can hear you saying, “Blueberry Town isn’t going to defend payday lenders, is he?” Well, no, but we are going to attack the people attacking them!

Our first questions for the anti-payday loan crowd are these: Do they believe that the borrowers they seek to protect are too stupid to understand the very high interest rates that they pay? Or, alternatively, do they believe that these borrowers have no other lawful alternative? What would be a third possibility?

If Hillary Clinton believes that these borrowers are too stupid to be given the choice of borrowing money at these rates, can she suggest a public agency charged with educating people that might provide a solution? You know, public schools, maybe. Or do we have to impose these regulations because the government has utterly failed at teaching the most basic requirements of modern life?

If Hillary Clinton believes that there are alternative lenders for these loans who are not the Mafia, who are these generous lenders and can she please connect them with the people who she thinks are too stupid to make their own decisions?

Anyway, icky as the payday loan business is — and it is icky — what will happen to the customers if we regulate it out of business? One doubts they will be getting loans from JP Morgan — even if Jamie Dimon were so inclined to do, federal bank examiners would lose their minds. My guess is that a lot more poor people will get evicted or have their cars repossessed (and lose the jobs they can not longer commute to) because they cannot get a bridge loan to their next pay check.

Unless, of course, they go to their local loan shark.

If Elizabeth Warren’s favorite agency had a sense of humor — that alone is a hilarious idea, come to think of it — it would call its proposed regs the “Tony Soprano Full Employment Act.” Of course, that would not be truthful, because no legislator will ever have a chance to vote on the proposal so it can’t be an Act, but you get our point. The CFPB will act, as it were, entirely on its own, and when violent loansharking makes a big comeback the “progressives” will claim that this obvious consequence is “unintended.”

Travis County Republicans are, in the words of your Editor’s beloved father, “a couple of nice cats.” The actual voters, however, have elected one Robert Morrow to the chairmanship of the Travis County GOP. This is not helping the party’s cause locally — or wouldn’t if it had one — as this rather hilarious and decidedly NSFW round up of “the 18 craziest tweets of Robert Morrow” will confirm for all but the most decompensated of the anti-PC crowd.

All of this is apropos of nothing important, other than it led to this little gem of an opening paragraph on the front page of the morning’s Statesman:

With the exquisite care of a bomb squad, the Travis County Republican Party is seeking to defuse its Robert Morrow problem by crafting rules that will enable the party to function as normally as possible under a duly elected chairman who has described himself, with considerable understatement, as “Donald Trump on steroids.”

Bomb squad indeed. And, it must be said, a micro version of the drama slow-motion train wreck unfolding in front of the national Republican Party.

Back in 1994, Hillary Clinton attributed her success in trading cattle futures — she turned $1000 in to $100,000 in less than 10 months during the late 1970s — to “reading the Wall Street Journal.” Her supporters believed her, even though (1) Clinton unaccountably stopped trading even though she was apparently brilliant at it because she couldn’t handle the stress, (2) it was the single most profitable investment the Clintons had ever made up to that point, and (3) the WSJ had not actually published any articles on cattle futures during the relevant period. Her story was both mathematically and actually unbelievable (one in 31 trillion according to one academic paper).

Nevertheless, Clinton’s claim that her cattle profits were the result of her own brilliance pales in comparison to this morning’s claim:

The sexism is less virulent now than it was in 2008, she said, but still she encounters people on rope lines who tell her, “ ‘I really admire you, I really like you, I just don’t know if I can vote for a woman to be president.’ I mean, they come to my events and then they say that to me.”

Sorry, with the greatest imagination we still cannot believe that in 2016 anybody has the balls — and the implication is that balls are involved here — to go to a Clinton campaign event, get close enough to make a comment, and use that moment to say that their big hangup is that Hillary is a woman. A fortiori we do not believe that this has happened more than once. And if you do not share our hard-won skepticism, consider that nobody has ever captured one of these outrages on video, which fact we know because if somebody had done, it would have been social media gold for the Clinton campaign and its social justice warrior camp followers. Liar, liar, pants on fire, not that you will ever hear that from the putative “editors” of New York Magazine.

Can you believe that this is the person we have to vote for to avoid president Trump?

There is a new Quinnipiac Swing State poll out, and Hillary and The Donald are in an apparent dead heat where it matters. The people in the important swing states of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania have tasted and measured their bile in the contemplation of their vote in November, and responded accordingly.

The talking head buffoonerators on the TV above the bar in the United Club in Austin, whence your Editor scribbles, are going on about Hillary’s huge advantage among women as supposedly revealed in that poll, side by side with this graphic:

Anybody see anything wrong with MSNBC’s logic?* “Gender gap” may not mean what they think it means.

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*Because the milk of intellectual honesty flows through your Editor’s veins, we might not have given MSNBC the full benefit of actually listening. Our impressions are based on a few seconds looking at the subtitles scrolling across the screen, so our assessment of MSNBC might be unfair. Then again, MSNBC is not known for putting things in context, so there is a limit to our reticence about leaping to a conclusion.