Tea at Trianon: The Results Are What Matter

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, July 21, 2018

The Results Are What Matter

A must-read. From The Spectator:

Every American President has complained about the cheating and imbalance — the NATO penny-pinching-cheapness, the tariff and trade imbalances. In more recent years, the various Bushes complained about it. Even Obama complained about it. But they all did it so gently, so diplomatically. They would deliver the sermon, just as the pastor predictably tells the church-goers on Sunday morning that he is against sin, and the Europeans would sit quietly and nod their heads — nodding from sleeping, not from agreeing — and then they would go back out and sin some more. Another four years of America being suckered and snookered. All they had to do was give Obama a Nobel Peace Prize his ninth month in office and let Kerry ride his bike around Paris.

So Trump did what any effective negotiator would do: he took note of past approaches to NATO and their failures, and correctly determined that the only way to get these penny-pinching-cheap baseborn prigs to pay their freight would be to bulldoze right into their faces, stare them right in their glazed eyes with cameras rolling, and tell them point-blank the equivalent of: “You are the cheapest penny-pinching, miserly, stingy, tightwadded skinflints ever. And it is going to stop on my watch. Whatever it takes from my end, you selfish, curmudgeonly cheap prigs, you are going to pay your fair share. I am not being diplomatic. I am being All-Business: either you start to pay or, wow, are you in for some surprises! And you know what you read in the Fake News: I am crazy! I am out of control! So, lemme see. I know: We will go to trade war! How do you like that? Maybe we even will pull all our troops out of Europe. Hmmm. Yeah, maybe. Why not? Sounds good. Well, let’s see.”

So Trump stuffed it into their quiche-and-schnitzel ingesting faces. And he convinced them — thanks to America’s Seedier Media who are the real secret to the “Legend That is Trump” — that he just might be crazy enough to go to trade war and to pull American boys home. They knew that Clinton and Bush x 2 and Kerry and Hillary and Nobel Laureate Obama never would do it. But they also know that Trump just might. And if they think they are going to find comfort and moderating in his new advisers, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, alongside him….(Read more.)

Meanwhile, every American should be alarmed by certain text messages in the Russian probe. From The Hill:

Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the reported FBI lovebirds, are the poster children for the next “Don’t Text and Investigate” public service ads airing soon at an FBI office near you. Their extraordinary texting affair on their government phones has given the FBI a black eye, laying bare a raw political bias brought into the workplace that agents are supposed to check at the door when they strap on their guns and badges.

It is no longer in dispute that they held animus for Donald Trump, who was a subject of their Russia probe, or that they openly discussed using the powers of their office to “stop” Trump from becoming president. The only question is whether any official acts they took in the Russia collusion probe were driven by those sentiments. The Justice Department’s inspector general is endeavoring to answer that question. For any American who wants an answer sooner, there are just five words, among the thousands of suggestive texts Page and Strzok exchanged, that you should read. That passage was transmitted on May 19, 2017. “There’s no big there there,” Strzok texted.

The date of the text long has intrigued investigators: It is two days after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee an investigation into alleged collusion between Trump and the Russia campaign. Since the text was turned over to Congress, investigators wondered whether it referred to the evidence against the Trump campaign. This month, they finally got the chance to ask. Strzok declined to say — but Page, during a closed-door interview with lawmakers, confirmed in the most pained and contorted way that the message in fact referred to the quality of the Russia case, according to multiple eyewitnesses. (Read more.)

From The Daily Caller:

The frenzied furor and fomented outrage over President Donald Trump’s reluctance to express blind trust for our “intelligence community” defy reason and reality. In their choreographed cries of contempt for Mr. Trump, the “left’s” increasingly shrill proclamations of political apocalypse make “Chicken Little” look rational. At least we’ve moved on from the impending annihilation from the nuclear war with North Korea.

Power is the only thing leftists worship, and they are unraveling in front of our eyes without it. They can’t control Mr. Trump. That alone drives them insane. They have no policies that work. Cities and states they control are criminal sanctuaries and bankrupt cesspools. Check out San Francisco, Portland and Chicago.

Each of the president’s remarkable accomplishments — from unprecedented high employment, our booming economy and the tax cuts to his historic summit with Kim Jong-un — highlights their abject failures and serves to prick their narcissistic egos. The country is doing better without them every day. Even worse, they are desperate to keep their countless crimes and abuses covered up. We know that there are many honorable, dedicated and legitimate members of our multiple intelligence and law enforcement agencies who strive to protect us the right way every day. So, why might any of us not just declare blind trust for our “intelligence community” writ large? Let me count the ways. (Read more.)

A eulogy of a scandal. From Zero Hedge:

From the latest joke-indictment by Robert Mueller to the hysterical press-coverage of the Trump-Putin summit, the way establishment media has been acting over the past week has been apoplectic. One might imagine, given their response, that the end was nigh and Putin personally commandeered the four horsemen of the apocalypse or something equally Biblical.

However, the certifiable insanity characterizing the media’s reaction to these events is not the focus of this article. Instead, we ask, how is it that the Russiagate issue is still being discussed in the first place? How did we get here, to the verge of a neo-McCarthyist second-coming, despite all aspects of this issue being repeatedly dismissed in the light of evidence? When we part the curtain of staged madness, designed to provoke fear in the gullible and outrage in the skeptical, what do we actually glimpse?

The reality is that Russiagate, the neoliberal war-cry, is only spurred on by a constant shift in narrative focus. Yesterday we saw farcical indictments; today we are consumed by a summit. If the pattern holds, then tomorrow we will be delivered a new take on Mifsud, tailored to deceive and mislead once again.

In a recent Memorandum to the President penned by Bill Binney and Ray McGovern, they noted: “We now have forensic evidence that shows the data provided by Guccifer 2.0 had been manipulated and is a fabrication.” The memo, published with Consortium News, continued: “If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand close scrutiny. It could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.”

First, as mentioned by McGovern and Binney, we have the thoroughly debunked Guccifer 2.0 hacking narrative. But wait, we also have the collusion narrative spawned by the dossier produced by Christopher Steele, likewise discredited. Time to focus on a mutated and contradictory version of the Guccifer 2.0 narrative! Before anyone can notice the holes, we are spun back to a new incarnation of the Trump-Russian collusion scandal, Mifsud the most mysterious and magical scholar of them all! Do we sound like a street hawker yet?

In Mifsud, we saw a narrative built to replace the collusion allegations first based on the debunked, laughable Steele dossier. The corruption involved in framing Mifsud as a Russian intelligence asset also became painfully evident, in light of his close ties with UK and Western intelligence figures, and his long-standing history at campuses where these same intelligence agencies – including the CIA and FBI, conducted training programs. This statement brings us to the crux of this piece: what do the unfolding chapters of the Russiagate fairytale have in common?

Each of them has a critical lack of evidence supporting their thesis and has been countered by credible evidence that would require a book to recount in full. Each of these branches has been shoved into the fore of press attention when convenient, for a brief moment becoming the singular focus of the establishment media’s echo-chamber. When their credibility quickly fails in the light of credible countering evidence, they are whipped from view, to be replaced by a freshly fabricated aspect of a different arm of the scandal. Focus shifts like eyes at a tennis match, between the Russian hacking narrative and the Trump-Russia collusion fantasy. (Read more.)