Tuesday, December 05, 2017



   
Disgraced Spook Michael Hayden Only Cares About One Tenth Of The Bill Of Rights

He spied on Americans when he was supposed to be spying on foreigners

Time and again, President Donald Trump has triggered people across America with his habitual tweeting. Twitter has continued to offer a direct gateway to the thought process of a President, something Americans have never known before. His tweets are not watered down by his staff, they’re directly from him. Where President Trump encounters trouble is when he fires shots against his political enemies.

The hyperbole in response is incredible. Critics label his tweeting habits as dangerous to liberty and the free press. Using his own right to free speech to criticize those who criticize him is apparently contrary to the First Amendment.

Count disgraced spook Michael Hayden as one of those people jumping on the hyperbole bandwagon.

Over the weekend, President Trump incited a whole new uproar by stating Fox News is more important to America than CNN. He then went on to tweet that CNN represents the United States poorly worldwide. Fox News has long held a Republican bias, whereas CNN is frequently criticized for leaning too far to the left. CNN and the President have exchanged insults and criticism for several years now.

Is this an attack on the First Amendment right to free press? Former Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden believes so. In a tweet, Hayden slammed the President for his “outrageous assault” on the truth, free press and the First Amendment.

The problem here is that Hayden, who also once ran the National Security Agency, is no constitutional scholar. This is evidenced by the intelligence community routinely violating the founding documents under his watch. But here he is attacking other people for apparently violating the Constitution, as if he cares about it one bit.

The problem with the oft-stated claim that the President is attacking the free press is that it’s just wrong. When he criticizes CNN, he isn’t declaring that we should close down the press or shut down free speech. He’s calling a specific entity into question and using his own right to free speech.

Isn’t the right to speak freely and disagree one of the many great things about America?

Hayden also claims that if this is what the country is turning into, then his forty year career is a lie. Given that he directed two intelligence agencies to routinely violate the Bill of Rights against American citizens, it’s difficult to say that his career consisted of serving the cause of good.

In the last year, the President has given America some legitimate issues to complain about. He, like anyone else, is not perfect and, being a human being, will certainly make mistakes. But is free speech something people should be complaining about? This is the ultimate irony here.

Michael Hayden isn’t a constitutional scholar. In fact, he’s shown clear disdain for the Constitution. But he clearly doesn’t have a clue, as evidenced by his most recent bandwagon tweet joining the left-wing echo chamber.

SOURCE

****************************

Disloyal State Dept. officials being given marching orders

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is finally taking control of his State Department. Besieged with leaks as Obama-era holdovers have been retained, 100 senior Foreign Service Officers have already been forced out, with more anticipated to come. Disposed bureaucrats have taken their sob stories to the mainstream media about how Tillerson’s swamp draining has wronged them.

The New York Times released an article last week regarding the plight of career bureaucrats who are on their way out of the Trump administration. The bureaucrats do have their supporters – long-time Washington D.C. lawmakers who desperately want to maintain the status quo.

“The amount of talent leaving the State Department endangers the institution and undermines American leadership, security and interests around the world,” the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs said in a letter addressed to Sec. Tillerson.

“Even more troubling, the Department is reportedly planning to offer buyouts to reduce State’s numbers even further, seemingly for no other goal than to decrease the size of the Department’s personnel,” the committee said. “With the range of crises, war, and humanitarian disaster around the world, slashing our diplomatic corps is downright dangerous.”

U.S. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) released a bipartisan letter addressed to Sec. Tillerson deriding the decision to purge the State Department as well.

“The State Department’s non-partisan Foreign Service and Civil Service career professionals represent a unique national asset that belongs to all Americans. They are America’s front line, promoting our safety, security and prosperity, often in difficult and dangerous places. While we support reasonable steps to improve the efficiency of the State Department, such efforts must be fully transparent, with the objective of enhancing, not diminishing, American diplomacy,” the Senators said.

The bureaucrats are sounding the alarm about the changes as well, as many of them complained to the Times themselves.

“The United States is at the center of every crisis around the world, and you simply cannot be effective if you don’t have assistant secretaries and ambassadors in place,” R. Nicholas Burns, former under secretary of state for President George W. Bush, said. “It shows a disdain for diplomacy.”

“These people either do not believe the U.S. should be a world leader, or they’re utterly incompetent,” former Qatar ambassador Dana Shell Smith told the Times. “Either way, having so many vacancies in essential places is a disaster waiting to happen.”

While the bureaucrats and their enablers believe that the sky is going to fall without a massive concentration of unaccountable officials in the State Department, Tillerson has remembered his administration’s mandate: Drain the Swamp. The only recourse of the swamp rats will be to cry to a dwindling audience.

SOURCE

*****************************

The Irrational, Unshakable Faith of the Collusion Conspiracists

It is amazing the degree to which seemingly intelligent people hold an unshakable belief the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the election. Blind to the trumped up narrative unraveling all around them, oblivious to the absence of any evidence or even a substantive allegation of a deal between Trump and Russians, unmoved by every error and scandal the media stumbles into trying to push the story, they simply know it’s true. They smugly sneer and disdain anyone who points out the holes in collusion conspiracy.

Last week’s guilty plea by Trump’s short lived national security advisor Michael Flynn is a prime exhibit of the critics’ unshakable faith in The Narrative. Michael Flynn pled guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI. Instantly the Trump impeachment mob was high fiving and laying bets how soon the trail would lead to Trump and force his exit.

 ABC’s Brian Ross added to the frenzy when he breathlessly blurted that Flynn was cooperating with Muller, and would testify that, during the campaign, Candidate Trump had directed him to contact the Russians. The mob went wild. Smoking gun! Collusion! Treason!

 By the next day, Ross and ABC had to backpedal in disgrace: The direction to Flynn came after the election, not before. That is, it was about transitional diplomacy on behalf of an incoming administration, not about hacking emails or rigging the vote for a candidate in an upcoming election. The supposed bombshell turns out to be little more than a distracting sparkler. ABC suspended Ross without pay for four weeks.

 The information released by Muller the next day was clear: Flynn was directed to engage the Russians about improved relations, about considering opposing a UN resolution against Israel, and about cooperating to fight ISIS in the Middle East. There was simply nothing untoward about those contacts. Why Flynn would have lied to FBI investigators about having them is something of a mystery. But he pled to lying about things that were right and proper, not wrong and collusive. They were completely unrelated to the campaign and voting.

In a sane world, the details of the Flynn plea would have been seen as strong indication there is nothing to the collusion conspiracy. We don’t live in that world.

SOURCE

**************************

Psychotherapist: "No, Trump is not Crazy..."

Psychotherapist Andrew Snyder emailed to share an op-ed he wrote for Fox News that discusses the political bias of those in the mental health field toward President Trump:

    "Some psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have effectively joined “the resistance” to President Trump, publicly stating that he is seriously mentally ill. I’m a psychotherapist and I disagree.

    One of the books these anti-Trumpers have churned out, which made it to the New York Times Bestseller List, is “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” The authors “offer their consensus view that Trump’s mental state presents a clear and present danger to our nation and individual well-being,” according to the Amazon page promoting the book.

    This is not a professional diagnosis. It is a political statement, being used by Trump’s opponents in the mental health field to attack him because they oppose what he is trying to accomplish in Washington.

    And predictably, politicians, media commentators and celebrities have used the “Trump is crazy” claim to call for his impeachment, arguing that he is unfit for office. This is absurd."

As Mr. Snyder so aptly states, "It’s official. The shrinks have taken a dive into the swamp."  Too bad we can't drain the swamp of mental health  "experts" who purposely conflate political bias with concern about the president's fitness.

Psychologists are one of the most biased professions, with the majority of them being liberal. Because of their political bias,   many mental health types are untrustworthy and a clear and present danger to half the population in this country and maybe more,  they should focus on this failure instead of falsely accusing their political enemies of being crazy.

SOURCE

*************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCHPOLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

***************************

1 comment:

C. S. P. Schofield said...

Re; "Disloyal State Dept. officials being given marching orders"

I don't believe there has been a time in my adult life that disbanding the State Department and turning its duties over to the Marine Corps would not have constituted an improvement. Indeed, that may well be said of the entire 20th Century.

I don't say the Marine Corps would do a GOOD job; the tasks of the State Department are pretty far removed from the Marine Corps' core competencies (killing people and breaking things). But it would still be an improvement, if only because the Marine Corps is generally pretty good at following orders.