Thursday, May 30, 2019

Very Interesting Excerpt From Real Clear Politics


The skies are growing dark and increasingly ominous for dirty officials at the top of Obama-era law enforcement and intelligence agencies.  Leading the “I’m really worried” list are James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch, and their senior aides, all political appointees.  They expected Hillary Clinton to win in 2016 and bury any traces of malfeasance, just as they had buried hers.  It didn’t work out that way.

This assault on democracy has not been proven, but the evidence emerging in dribs and drabs strongly suggests the possibility. If it is proven, and if the Obama White House was directly involved, as some FBI texts plainly say, the scandal would be one of the biggest in American history.

How big? Big enough that major news organizations, which always favor transparency (“Democracy Dies in Darkness”), are now deeply troubled by the release of any secret documents. They know the stakes are too high and transparency too dangerous for their side, politically.

Right now, we don’t know how big the scandal is, how extensive the coordination was, and how far up it went. But we certainly need to know, just as we needed to know if Donald Trump won the presidency by cooperating with a hostile foreign power. He did not, according to the Mueller report. Now, we need to know if the U.S. government itself worked secretly and illegally to prevent his election and, when that failed, to damage his new presidency. That conspiracy would be equally serious, and for the same reasons. It needs to be rooted out, exposed, and punished.

The fundamental problem was identified by James Madison, who led the drafting of our constitution. “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” he wrote in Federalist Paper 51, “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." Under Comey, Lynch, Brennan, and Clapper, under Obama and Biden, it failed to control itself.

Over the next few months, we will learn the extent of that failure. We will see if top officials misused their agencies to investigate and crush their political opponents. Constitutional democracies cannot permit that. They cannot wave it off as yesterday’s news and expect to survive unscathed. If undetected and unpunished, it will happen again to another party, another candidate.

This assault on democracy has not been proven, but the evidence emerging in dribs and drabs strongly suggests the possibility. If it is proven, and if the Obama White House was directly involved, as some FBI texts plainly say, the scandal would be one of the biggest in American history.

How big? Big enough that major news organizations, which always favor transparency (“Democracy Dies in Darkness”), are now deeply troubled by the release of any secret documents. They know the stakes are too high and transparency too dangerous for their side, politically.

Right now, we don’t know how big the scandal is, how extensive the coordination was, and how far up it went. But we certainly need to know, just as we needed to know if Donald Trump won the presidency by cooperating with a hostile foreign power. He did not, according to the Mueller report. Now, we need to know if the U.S. government itself worked secretly and illegally to prevent his election and, when that failed, to damage his new presidency. That conspiracy would be equally serious, and for the same reasons. It needs to be rooted out, exposed, and punished.
The fundamental problem was identified by James Madison, who led the drafting of our constitution. “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” he wrote in Federalist Paper 51, “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." Under Comey, Lynch, Brennan, and Clapper, under Obama and Biden, it failed to control itself.

Over the next few months, we will learn the extent of that failure. We will see if top officials misused their agencies to investigate and crush their political opponents. Constitutional democracies cannot permit that. They cannot wave it off as yesterday’s news and expect to survive unscathed. If undetected and unpunished, it will happen again to another party, another candidate.



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