Memorial Day 2023

In pondering a holiday message each year, I go back and look at what I’ve posted for it in the past.  This year, on rereading the “Priorities, USA” article for 2022, I concluded that it’s still a timely message, and should be the bulk of what I advocate taking in this year.

As time passes, we are flicked more and more on the raw by the things we are having to face up to right now – epochal things, things of an entire age of the human journey.  We find we can’t flee them.  They come to find us.  They won’t rest unresolved.

The purchases of the blood shed for America, by the ones we remember on Memorial Day, still hang in the balance.

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Durham’s Nugget: An intelligence tale

In a quick-look treatment on 16 May, Lee Smith unerringly identified a central data point from John Durham’s special counsel report on the FBI’s conduct of Crossfire Hurricane.

That point is John Brennan’s handwritten record of having briefed President Obama and a group of administration seniors, on 3 August 2016, about “Russian intelligence” on Hillary Clinton’s operation to generate a fake narrative in which Russia colluded with Donald Trump.

Smith points out that James Comey was reportedly in attendance at that meeting.  That would mean Comey knew throughout the execution of Crossfire Hurricane that it was entirely possible much if not all of the supposed “evidence” of Russia-Trump collusion was coming from a campaign “oppo” effort mounted by Clinton.

Yet with this implication in throbbing neon in the special counsel investigation, Durham ultimately let Comey off the hook

A brief meditation on media manipulation: Israel, Republicans, ordinary politics

Haaretz has perpetrated a headline.

“Biden Administration Braces for Potential ‘Sh**show’ in Appointing New U.S. Ambassador to Israel – U.S. News”

It’s a good mental exercise to recall that whenever such scare language (here, “sh**show”) is deployed in headlines, you’re being manipulated to feel bad.

Just as whenever euphemism and omission are deployed to avoid characterizing a topic more accurately, you’re being manipulated to feel normal and reassured.

Here is the unattributed passage of the Haaretz article giving us our scare word:

The bait and switch of election “security”: Timeline nuggets from a colluding cabal

A great deal has come out from the “Twitter files” about the collusion of federal government agencies, Big Tech and social media, legacy/left-wing media, and “civil society” organizations (think-tanks, self-appointed “watchdog” groups) to silence legitimate speech, and to do so on a thoroughly biased basis.

Although the pattern demonstrated in Twitter correspondence has related to several topics, one of the most important is suppression of reporting on Hunter Biden, his laptop, and the Biden family ties to foreign governments and companies.  The files, and testimony prompted by their revelations, have clarified that systematic collusion was behind suppression of information about the Hunter Biden laptop in the weeks just before the November 2020 election.

In fact, there’s good reason to posit a connection between suppression of the laptop story on social media,

TOC Ready Room 2 May 2023: YU-UGE SCOTUS case; Another balloon (yes, we reacted); Tucker Carlson and Fox

Some brief drive-bys as we advance into May – if not slouching toward Jerusalem, at least schlumping toward East Bugsplat.

The first set of reflections is on a case that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear, involving the power of regulatory agencies to basically – in a vernacular rendering – interpret federal regulatory statutes any old way they want to.

The federal courts’ friendliness to this principle is called “Chevron deference.”  It’s named for a 1980s case in which Chevron was a party, but Chevron has nothing to do with the contemporary case the court has agreed to hear.  Chevron is also not the party being deferred to in the “Chevron deference” shorthand; that role belongs to whatever federal agency is imposing mandates in the case, based on its interpretation of law.