Sir Walter Scott made a sound observation in his poem, “Marmion,” when he said, “Oh what a tangled web we weave / when first we practice to deceive.”
The clever writer J.R. Pope was attributed as adding another couplet to Scott’s original:
“But when we’ve practiced for a while, How vastly we improve our style!”
The huge cast of the Obama Theatrical Company, out on their world tour of the Russian Collusion Delusion, embraced Pope’s sly emendation. They should have heeded Scott’s original.
But all good things—and all bad ones, too—eventually come to an end, and finally the expensive, multi-year effort by the deep state to overturn the results of the 2016 election ground to a sclerotic halt.
Changing the Narrative
The whole thing was as pathetic as it was repellent, amply earning its title as the greatest political scandal in our nation’s history. But just when we thought the sordid story was yesterday’s news, a series of revelations about retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was Trump’s national security adviser for a few minutes in 2017, catapulted the story back into the center of everyone’s consciousness.The was no reason for the FBI to interview Flynn. He was a designated fall guy, set up by James Comey, Peter Strzok, and other high-ranking members of the establishment, because he would have been in a position to expose the larger “umbrella” operation of “Crossfire Hurricane,” which began in July 2016, and whose aim was to delegitimize Trump and then, when that didn’t work, to overturn the results of a free, open, and democratic presidential election.
Nervousness
If you sense a sudden chill in the air, an uncomfortable silence, it’s because the usually insouciant deep-state actors from Obama and Comey on down have clearly got the message. Their lot are never called to account for their wrongdoing by the establishment for the very good reason that they are the establishment. They make the rules that we have to obey but that they may ignore with impunity.“Honest, competent leadership,” forsooth!
Also nervous was the queen bee, the spider at the center of this web of extralegal intrigue, Obama. In a gesture that was almost comical in its clumsiness, a “private conversation” with aides was leaked.
“The news over the last 24 hours I think has been somewhat downplayed — about the Justice Department dropping charges against Michael Flynn. And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”
Second, we now know that Obama discussed charging Flynn under the Logan Act, an act that dates from 1799 that “has never been used successfully to convict anyone and is flagrantly unconstitutional.”
The Art of the Possible
As I say, it never seems to happen that the important people who develop and nourish the narrative are called to account for the sort of misconduct that is being exposed in the case of Obama versus Trump.Will it be any different this time around? What if it were proved that Obama knowingly had a hand in illegally framing Flynn and the attempt to frame Trump? What then? Do you expect he would be indicted?
Would Hillary Clinton, no matter what evidence was brought forward of felonious mishandling of classified material, to say nothing of her fabricating a case against Trump by feeding Russian-sourced disinformation to an eager press?
Would Comey ever be held to account?
To ask these questions is to answer them. You would have to go far down the Democratic food chain—to a Peter Strzok or a Lisa Page—before you get to someone dispensable enough to be thrown under the bus.
Which is why retribution is a fond hope. The best we can hope for is a general disillusionment and erosion of authority in the public’s acquiescence to rule by the deep state. That would undoubtedly be a victory, the more thoroughgoing the disillusionment, the better. Doubtless, retribution, in the form of indictments, would be more satisfying.
But politics, as Bismarck observed, is the art of the possible.