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| Home Front: Politix |
| SPENGLER: The Lawyers' Civil War |
| 2017-06-16 |
| The distinguished political scientist Angelo Codevilla coined the ominous term "cold civil war" to describe America’s precarious condition, adding: "Statesmanship’s first task is to prevent it from turning hot." The attempted massacre on June 14 of Republican congressmen and their staff by a deranged partisan of Sen. Bernie Sanders turned up the heat a notch, but it would be mistaken to attribute much importance to this dreadful outburst of left-wing rage. The augury of American fracture will not be street violence, but a constitutional crisis implicating virtually the whole of America’s governing caste. The shock troops in the cold civil war are not gunmen but lawyers. A considerable portion of America’s permanent bureaucracy, including elements of its intelligence community, is engaged in an illegal and unconstitutional mutiny against the elected commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump. Most of the Democratic Party and a fair sampling of the Republican establishment wants to force Trump out of office, and to this end undertook an entrapment scheme to entice the president and his staff into actions which might be construed after the fact as obstruction of justice. By means yet undisclosed, the mutineers forced Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn from office and now seek to bring down the president for allegedly obstructing an investigation of Gen. Flynn that arose in the first place from the entrapment scheme. ...The Trump-Russia collusion story is nonsense, as its disseminators know better than anyone else. The object of the exercise is not to support the innuendo, but to launch an investigation which can provoke the White House into responses that might be construed as illegal. The intelligence leaks involved in framing the story alone are probably sufficient grounds to put several dozen senior officials in federal prison for double-digit terms. That consideration gauges the scale of the problem: the mutineers have committed multiple felonies, and their downside should the mutiny go wrong is not ignominious retirement but hard time at Leavenworth. Trump’s one great advantage in all of this is that he has done nothing wrong. He did not obstruct justice because there is no crime. The mutineers’ only hope is to provoke him to take actions which might be construed as obstruction of justice in an investigation with no crime and no victim. Still, it is a moment of great danger for the American Republic. The mutiny has burned its bridges on the beach, and its perpetrators will risk everything to make it succeed. Whatever the outcome, the legitimacy of a political system designed to be litigious and oppositional will be called into question, and the polarization of American opinion will become more rather than less extreme. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #3 Whatever the outcome, the legitimacy of a political system designed to be litigious and oppositional will be called into question US Chief Justice Roger Taney, 1857, on the human rights of black slaves in the USA: "they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect" I wonder if/when a US high court decision will some day soon result in the US electorate coming to believe that the US justice/political system has no jurisdiction that they are bound to respect. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2017-06-16 23:03 |
| #2 I think ol' Speng was deliberately stirring his metaphors. I laffed. No word from Cortez on the subject. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2017-06-16 19:28 |
| #1 The mutiny has burned its bridges on the beach, and its perpetrators will risk everything to make it succeed. The correct term is "burned its boats on the beach". |
| Posted by: Pappy 2017-06-16 18:46 |