"I think it absolutely necessary that the president should have the power to remove his subordinates from office; it will make him, in a peculiar manner, responsible for their conduct, and subject him to impeachment, himself, if he suffers them, to perpetrate with impunity high crimes or misdemeanors against the United States, or neglects to superintend their conduct, so as to check their excesses." -- James Madison
If this is the case, then James Comey and Andrew McCabe got EXACTLY what they deserved.
To go back a bit concerning the topic of impeachment.
I told you a very long time ago that something like this was going to happen if Donald Trump was elected. It was as predictable as 100 following 99.
The reason?
You can't run the government like a business. Ross Perot made this mistake in his thinking, as well (although I do hate to use "thinking" and "Ross Perot" in the same sentence). The government doesn't operate on the same rules as a business does, being, as it is, a means of making and acquiring money.
Government, on the other hand, is a means of acquiring power.
In business, failure is rewarded with bankruptcy, unemployment, and a poor reputation that might make others hesitate to hire you for any future position of responsibility, and hence, higher income. Profit becomes the sole means of judgment as to fitness -- those who make money (or help to make it), get to stay and get rewarded. Often handsomely.
Accountability is the Sword of Damocles hanging over everyone's head. Equally.
In government, one is, if gifted with the proper connections (and often dubious) qualifications, immediately given responsibility. Even if they have no record of actually displaying that trait, and the rewards are treated as perks of the job -- the office, the aura of authority, the fawning appreciation of lackeys and hanger's-on, the dependency upon which those who have appointed you come to display. These give you some sort of leverage which can be used in subtle ways to increase one's social status and income.
To give an example, there is an old saying about the pack of wealthy, ultra-libtard, near- (and real) commies that surrounded Franklin Roosevelt. It was said that "they went to Washington to do good and stayed to do well."
To "work" in government turns the rules of management and propriety on their heads. "Profit" is not a priority, since in theory government can operate at continuous loss (now totaling in excess of $20 trillion, if we're to believe the numbers...produced by government), so that there is no need to do things efficiently, inexpensively and dynamically.
One also does not suffer the consequences of failure: the civil servant is protected by law, his union, and the campaign contributions his union makes to politicians who will be sitting across the negotiating table. The Congresscritter is bought-and-paid for by the union, and feels no need to pull back the curtain on such trifling matters as whether or not federal employees are actually doing, or even are any good at, their jobs.
When it comes to political appointees -- Cabinet Secretaries, the "advisers", the "deputy-assistant-to-the-assistant-deputy" types buried deep within the (constipated) bowels of a profligate and prolific alphabet soup of largely-anonymous agencies, bureaus, boards, panels, commissions, etc. -- the first loyalty is often not to country and duty, but rather to patron and party, and this loyalty is often rewarded by what is called "The Revolving Door" in which these parasites serve in government, hop to the public sector where their government contacts and knowledge will garner them large paychecks, and then take another position in government with the change of administrations.
Their rice bowl is guaranteed. So long as they remain anonymous and no one looks too carefully at what they're doing, who they're doing it to, and whom they are doing it for.
No, the democrat (small 'd' intentional) party was never -- I mean literally NEVER -- the force against which Trump was going to have to struggle. After all, his election was a signal that the country was, for the most part, sick of the democrat (small 'd' intentional) party and the apparatchik republicans who kissed their feet (hint: Paul Ryan).
Trump's blindside didn't have Nancy Pelosi rushing towards him like a 300-pound defensive end; it was always going to be the professional bureaucracy looking to slam him to the turf.
Because they always had the most to lose.
Because even the threat of accountability and standards would show them up for the incompetent bastards they truly are, no matter how much time they spent in the Kennedy School, or how many Georgetown law degrees they had piled up. The vast majority of these people are no different than the hordes of sycophants that haunted the old European monarchies -- entitled to eat at the King's expense, living in Royal Apartments in close proximity to the throne, figuratively partying like it was 1999 every day on the Q.T., cloistered in the splendor of the palace -- but otherwise not of much use, except to move a lever of government this way or that in concert with the whims of the Monarch, or the needs of their social class.
And make no mistake: this brand of parasite constitutes a unique social class. They occupy a unique position in our society. The professional political appointee/bureaucrat literally has a job for life so long as no one discovers his ineptitude or malfeasance, and even then his inadequacy is protected by law (which they wrote, in all likelihood). They became something on the order of an endangered species in terms of the lengths to which government would defend them even when they were nuisances.
Lois Lerner, Comey, McCabe, Ohr, Brennan, Strzok, Page, Ron Klain, Eric Holder, Lt. Col. Vindman, Loretta Lynch, after all, are not isolated individuals, operating alone and without support: each is a single cell within a larger, collective organism, which I'll describe a bit before going on.
In any complex system -- like a business, but especially in a government -- there exists a hierarchical structure. Those at the top of the hierarchy give directions; those at the bottom of the hierarchy are the rank-and-file who have to carry those directives out, often without thinking about them. It's just their job, and the nature of government -- one regime moves out, another comes in -- inoculates them with an attitude of "who gives a shit"; they get paid no matter who is (nominally) in power, and changes in policy that cause them to operate in direct opposition today to that which they did yesterday is a common occurrence.
In the middle is a class of specialists (what? You don't think "Chief-Assistant-To-The-Assistant-Chief-Assistant for Sub-Saharan Educational Affairs" is a technical job requiring a great deal of sophisticated knowledge and acumen?) who by virtue of their positions are the ones who get to decide HOW the directives are carried out, WHO carries them out, and how it gets paid for. It requires a vast co-ordination of resources and efforts. And when the tablets are handed down from Mt. White House that "something must be done about _____", rest assured, this middle layer will ensure that THEY will be the ones who decide what to do, ensure they will be the ones to do it, and how much graft they're willing to engage in.
Those at the top don't care "how the sausage is made", as the saying goes; they only care that it is made and that the resulting product makes them look good (or can be made to make them look good) so that they can go about their real business of enjoying the fruits of (pretend) power -- the television appearances, the paid speaking engagements and book deals, enjoying the fawning adoration of the crumb-gatherers at their feet, reveling in their own venality.
If you needed proof of this, I will remind you of a (in-)famous quote from a woman who has been in government since Christ worked in the mail room, and who has been, twice, Speaker of the House of Representatives (and future spokeswoman for both Alcoholics Anonymous and any Alzheimer's charity of her choice), who in regards to Obamacare said:
"We have to pass it to find out what's in it."
Think about that statement for a second. It indicated that the most-powerful woman in America did not know what was in the bill her own party had cobbled together. It was a frank admission that she hadn't even read it, It was a blatant confession of the reckless nature of the modern legislator that she rammed through a bill on a strictly-partisan vote, in the dead of night, that she could not even explain.
And she wasn't alone. For neither could Harry Reid (then Senate Majority leader), and perhaps most chillingly frightening of all, neither could Barack Obama, whose name was attached to the policy.
You might think it was because each was a different kind of fucktarded incompetent and might even have been stunned when you heard those words, but it was a national epiphany of sorts.
Nancy, Harry and Barry did not know what was in the bill because the middle layer never told them what it was doing or how it intended to do it. It simply provided a range of options it had created and then expected the elected officials to simply pick and choose the parts they liked and then pass it.
And if you have ever wondered why a relatively simple (for Big Business) website cost $600 million, if you ever had any curiosity why a new public healthcare offering had to be paid for by plundering an already-existing public healthcare offering (Medicare), if you were even the slightest bit puzzled as to why, six years later, the regulations still had not been written for a policy the government went ahead and instituted anyway, if you were really perplexed as to why "health care exchanges" suddenly turned up in 26 states before the ink was dry on anything, here's your answer:
The Middle Layer ensured that whatever was going to be done, it was going to be done in a way that benefited the Middle Layer.
So, $600 million website design that doesn't work goes to a politically-connected IT firm...in India. Moving money around federal accounts from Medicare to Obamacare kept thousands of government bean-counters generating paper. Ever-shifting and changing regulations, enforcement policies, funding mandates, compliance arrangements, legal requirements, kept thousands of government lawyers occupied and in courts. The collusion (and in this case, it's REAL collusion) between insurance companies (who thought they were getting access to 30 million assholes armed with a government check, i.e. "free money"), the federal regulators, the Congressional aides, the media, all went to serve the purposes of The Middle Layer -- they got to keep and get paid for do-nothing jobs; they feathered their own nests by directing money from one place to another so that they could move about government from one job to the next; they showed favoritism to certain providers in exchange for the high-paid sinecures they'd need when they left "government service". They ensured that the "winners" knew to whom to write the checks to come next election, currying favor with the presumed ruling class.
They ARE a ruling class, all unto themselves, and it's because of the position they occupy. They effectively control -- in a literal, Marxist sense -- the means of distribution, since every aspect of business and private life in this country comes into contact with some form of government.
Remember: they can't be fired; they are rewarded with better jobs with the change of administrations; most will advance despite being complete fuck-ups and by nature of the work they do -- boring, complicated, often-stupid projects that the average American wouldn't devote three braincells to, if you asked them about it -- they remain anonymous.
Now, extend that system between governments in myriad ways -- NAFTA, WTO, NATO, the U.N., The E.U., international law enforcement and courts, defense co-ordinators and contractors (want to know why you can't win a war? Because they people charged with enacting the policies that war follows aren't interested in doing so -- it's too lucrative -- which is a funny thing, because it's usually the defense industry that gets accused of profiting from war), international trade, environmental regimes, international banking and economic systems , you name it -- and you can see why "Globalism" exists, and why it has a bad name, for the opposite numbers to our own parasites in Brussels, Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and so forth, operate in the same terrain and by the same methods. They see themselves as members of worldwide social class that transcends international borders.
I will explain how this all came to pass in another post, post-Christmas, because I find it interesting, and it involves a history lesson, which I love giving.
It will have juicy tidbits in it, like Communists, and Progressives, and Nazis, and Mass Genocide in it, I promise!
But there, in a nutshell, is the origin of the whole "Impeach Trump" thing.
He (potentially) would make the Swamp-dwellers eat a huge shit sandwich of accountability and put legions of them out on the street with no recourse to anything productive, and hence, remunerative enough to keep them in the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed. The Man had to be stopped.
The democratic party (small 'd' intentional) was proving to be a decrepit old mechanism that couldn't stop a drain. The WikiLeaks fiasco, the Debbie Wasserman-Schultz IT scandal, the discovery of what the Federal Election Commission and IRS were doing to the Tea Party, the contrived and transparent maneuvering to pave Hillary's road by fixing primaries, the gross and arrogant incompetence of the Obamatards, the utter disaster of Obamacare, the Benghazi debacle, Hillary's servers and the classified e-mails on Anthony Weiner's laptop, were all conspiring to bring the entire rotten edifice down. Someone had to save The Middle Layer's phony-baloney jobs and gilded Way of Life.
The only way to do this was to either drag Hillary across the finish line, or to destroy her opponent.
If you want to do either, you need to break the law. Many laws. And no one is better, historically-speaking, at doing this than the FBI and the CIA. They opted for both methods.
And they did it badly, because, as we've established, an Ivy League education followed by a lifetime in government employ where the laws of good management do not apply only makes for a better-credentialed and wealthier idiot. To judge by the character and shoot-first-aim-second nature of the bungling conspirators, they had reason to try. This bunch would choke to death if held to any standard, whatsoever.
Fake "Russian" dossiers incestuously circulated; lies on search warrant applications; the deliberate ignoring of obvious criminal prosecutions; the emotional high-school-Twilight-quality of the Strzok-Page love-letter/journal of illegality; the jump from one investigation to many investigations; the poor quality and near-senility of the Mueller charade; the rush to pressure plea-bargains on "process crimes"; the daydreaming of the 25th Amendment; the sudden importance of Ukrainian foreign aid, and the transformation of Ukraine from annoying supplicant to embattled and stalwart ally.
The illegitimacy and sheer comedic nature of the Schiff-Nadler Dog-and-Pony show (bereft of either dogs or ponies, which would have made it more entertaining). In the annals of comedy, Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Rowan and Martin, Martin and Lewis, are all pikers by comparison.
These two should hit the road as the Should-be-Smothered-Brothers.
All of it results in...a sham, partisan impeachment vote and the withholding of the articles of impeachment from the Senate in return for "a better deal" (you mean a Quid Pro Quo, right?).
There is never going to be a true impeachment process. This has all been theater. Nancy may have her articles, but she'll never send them to Mitch McConnell. For her, the real tragedy of this whole thing is that the game could not be extended for another few months -- her base was so hyped for red meat they forced the more-radical elements of her party to rush to summary judgment based on the flimsiest "evidence" they could find. They suffered a case of "Premature Execution".
The process, as Mark Steyn says, was supposed to be the punishment. The Black Spot was to be plastered on Trump, forever de-legitimizing him in the eyes of history. They stepped on their own rake.
But, there is one silver lining for the Middle Layer in all of this: a few heads have been lopped off, but there are still thousands more to this hydra. They may no longer be anonymous, but their exposure presents The Swamp Drainer with another problem that buys them just a bit more time -- their sheer numbers and the scope of their infiltration assures that most, the bulk, will never have to deal with such disgusting notions of "accountability", "efficiency" and "effectiveness" at the hands of an...ewww...businessman.
After all, their own businessmen -- Yang and Steyer, Zuckerberg and Bezos; all are only the visible pustules that signify the presence of the underlying disease -- have already shown their willingness to cut deals with The Middle Layer, have profited from them and will continue to do so.
No, it's only the businessmen who are determined to TAME government instead of CO-OPERATE with it that get accused of Golden Showers in Moscow hotel suites, have their offices bugged, are the subject of fraudulently-obtained FISA warrants, and who get accused of being agents of a foreign government, all because an elderly woman in a crusty, old pantsuit, with a big sense of entitlement and a very small list of accomplishments couldn't find Wisconsin on a map and who didn't understand the Electoral College, despite a (nominal) husband who won office that way...twice.
These fleas expected to be rewarded with more sinecures and more opportunity for graft from Her Heinous.
Therein lies the origin of your Magical Impeachment Tour.
And as stupid as they've all turned out to be they all sound shocked -- appalled -- that after all this slipshod work, all this lying, all this fresh, fruity ineptitude, the man they sought to destroy is more-popular than ever and seems destined to win the next election, with a bigger majority behind him. Carefully-constructed careers built upon gathering favors, moving up by fucking up, by being "good party men", creating a system of suckers and suck-ups covered in shadows and night, has gone for nothing.
I do hope these people enjoy the well-deserved rewards of orange jumpsuits, courtesy of the Bad Orange Man.
Update: Angelo Codevilla pronounces of this very phenomenon.
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