Is it any wonder that President Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice was the one responsible for the underhanded, improper and possibly illegal surveillance of President Donald John Trump and his campaign team last year after Trump won the Republican presidential nomination?
Rice, when she was ambassador to the United Nations for Obama, was the one they picked to go out and tell bold-faced lies about the attack on two US compounds in Benghazi, Libya.
The lies were absurd. The American people were supposed to believe that the 13-hour attack on the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency compounds were not terrorist attacks but were the result of a spontaneous mob.
The White House knew this wasn’t true when the attacks were happening, but it has been impossible to explain why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama didn’t send any help to the men defending the compounds – four of whom, including the US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, were killed during the attacks.
According to Rice, there was no terrorist attack. A mob upset about a YouTube video spontaneously attacked first the State Department compound and then the CIA compound. This spontaneous mob had machine guns and mortars and well-organized attacks. It was an absurd lie and Obama had to find someone willing to go on the talk shows and tell it. Rice did.
The only people who bought the lies were in the mainstream media, who believed without question anything the Obama administration said. The New York Times went so far as to find someone in Benghazi who said they were upset about the video. In the twisted minds of the reporters and editors for what was once a great newspaper, this proved Rice was telling the truth, despite the fact that there was a huge pile of testimony proving that she was lying.
What the mainstream media should have been asking is why the ambassador to the UN was being interviewed about an attack in Benghazi. Who knows what the answer is, but it appears that Rice was so loyal to Obama that she was willing to go out and lie for him when others were not. It doesn’t seem likely that Rice is so dumb that she believed the lies she was telling, but it is possible.
Instead of being fired for telling such a whopper, Rice was moved over to national security advisor.
It appears Obama wanted to know more about what Trump was doing so he had Rice order that, when the conversations of Trump campaign members were intercepted talking to foreigners, the names of those people not simply be unmasked but that the identities be shared with 17 intelligence agencies, making it almost certain that the information would leak, which it did.
It is legal for the National Security Administration to intercept communications with foreigners, but when an American citizen is involved the identity of that citizen is supposed to be masked and their name either redacted, or they might be referred to as “American citizen #1,” and so forth.
But the Obama administration didn’t follow this protocol when dealing with members of the Trump campaign, and presumably Trump himself.
It’s why Trump said he was “wiretapped.” The mainstream media keep harping on the fact that Trump wasn’t wiretapped, but there is a reason Trump put the word in quotations. After all, it was in a tweet where there is a limited number of characters. In a tweet, Trump couldn’t go into detail about how the information about him and his campaign was improperly released. But it turns out Trump was right. The conversations of people in his campaign were listened to by the Obama administration.
The other part of this whole deal is that so far no one has found any evidence that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians during the campaign. But in the reporting by the mainstream media, you would think that Trump was not under improper and possibly illegal surveillance by the Obama administration and that Trump was involved with the Russians trying to affect the outcome of the election.
Maybe with this revelation about Rice the mainstream media will start to get it right, but so far CNN has refused to admit the Rice story is real, even though it has been confirmed by more than one person who has seen the classified documents.
Nobody should be surprised that Obama used his power as president to go after a political rival, and Trump was definitely a political rival. Obama was campaigning hard for Hillary Clinton and, probably more than most people, Obama realized what a short shelf life the Obama policies would have in a Trump administration.
Under Obama, the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative organizations for special treatment. Their applications for nonprofit status were delayed and their tax records were audited on a level that wasn’t replicated for liberal organizations. Then the IRS claimed it didn’t do it and had lost the records that proved it did. It sounds crazy, but the IRS claimed that it didn’t back up official documents and the mainstream media dutifully reported that the IRS didn’t have a backup system in place, which turned out to be simply another lie, used to buy time.
Perhaps it’s time for the Trump administration to reopen that investigation and bring criminal charges against some of the current and former high-ranking IRS officials who participated.
For the Obama administration, spying on Trump appeared to be the perfect crime because, unfortunately for them, they believed the mainstream media, which throughout the campaign reported that there was no way that Hillary Clinton could lose because there was no path to victory for Trump. Of course, Trump proved to be a far smarter political analyst than the mainstream media, or the Hillary Clinton campaign. Trump didn’t waste his time in states he had no chance of winning, like California, and concentrated on the Rust Belt and the Midwest, where he won states that the political pundits said he could never win. The path to victory was pretty simple – ignore the popular vote and win the most votes in the Electoral College.
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People who hated Trump the candidate, hate Trump the president even more because he is doing what he said he would do as a candidate – proving beyond any reasonable doubt that Trump really isn’t a politician.
This week it was announced that the US would stop funding the United Nations agency that provides abortions and sterilizations. The US doesn’t fund abortions at home; why should we fund them abroad?
Trump has said he is going to cut funding to the UN, and it appears he’s going to do it. Why the US provides more funding than any other country for an international organization that works against US interests and policies is beyond my understanding, but the US has been doing it since the beginning.
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I keep reading about Trump’s approval ratings being lower than any modern president at this point in his presidency. But it’s wise to remember that these pollsters are the same ones that in primary after primary predicted that Trump would receive far fewer votes than he did, and in the general election had the nation convinced that there was no way that Trump would win.
It would appear to an unbiased observer that the pollsters have a long history of being biased against Trump.
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The anti-Trump contingent appears to punch way above its weight, but that’s because the media is almost entirely anti-Trump.
According to the Center for Public Integrity, 96 percent of journalists who donated to a presidential campaign in 2016 donated to Hillary Clinton. That would seem to imply that 4 percent donated to Trump, but I would bet that more journalists donated to the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, than to Trump.
The media are rabidly anti-Trump. I’ve watched a lot of White House press briefings and I’ve never seen anything like the press briefings that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is having every day. The reporters argue with him and press briefings have become like those panels on news shows where everybody talks over everyone else. Reporters ask Spicer a question and then won’t let him answer because they want to argue with the first words out of his mouth.
Go back and watch a press briefing when Obama was president. They’re pretty boring because the last thing the White House reporters wanted to do was find out something that might have a negative connotation. The White House press corps practically cheered when an announcement was made of some new initiative. Now they snarl and gnash their teeth.
But it doesn’t matter. The people who agree with the White House press corps lost the election. The vast majority of the people who voted for Trump don’t agree with the White House press corps on most issues and don’t believe what they read or hear in the mainstream media. If they believed the mainstream media, they never would have voted for Trump.
So you have two camps that are polar opposites in what they believe. One believes the narrative being promoted by the mainstream media, that Trump is a dangerous lunatic who failed at business and through some not-yet-identified illegal means was elected president.
The other believes that Trump, a multi-billionaire, was tremendously successful in business and then ran over all his competition in the presidential election by going out and telling the truth about the shape the country was in and what he would do to fix it.
I do find it incredible that the mainstream media continue to insist that Trump was not a successful businessman.
The goal in business is to make money. Trump has made billions of dollars and owns some of the highest profile real estate in the world. But according to the mainstream media – which traditionally knows nothing about business – because he took a couple of companies into bankruptcy he was a failure at business.
It’s like arguing that Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams is not a successful coach because his teams have lost games and last year lost the NCAA championship game.
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The people who keep writing about how horrible it will be for the federal government to stop funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and other such organizations are asking the wrong question, which is why they keep getting the wrong answer.
The question is not whether these organizations are spending the federal money they get well or whether they are doing good work. And it’s not whether cutting the funding is going to balance the budget, because it won’t. The question is whether or not this money is being spent to accomplish a task that is the responsibility of the federal government.
Should the federal government be funding a television and radio broadcasting network? The answer is no. Funding television and radio is not a function of the federal government. Nor is funding the arts.
It doesn’t mean that someone who is in favor of eliminating the funding for the NEA is against the arts.
One reason the federal government currently funds so much that it shouldn’t be funding is that every other organization in the country has to balance its budget at some point. Whether it is a government, a nonprofit or a for-profit business, no other organization in the country can constantly run a deficit. The federal government has been running a deficit of between $500 billion to over $1.4 trillion year after year and it’s time to stop.
Under Obama the national debt went from about $9 trillion to nearly $20 trillion.
So while Greensboro would either have to cut funding for something else or raise taxes to spend $10 million on the arts, the federal government simply borrows the money and passes that expense on down the line.
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We wrote a lot about Obama’s golf habits and now Trump is playing a lot of golf. But there is a difference that we noted when Obama was president.
The golf course traditionally has been a place where business deals happen. Trump is from the business world, so it makes sense for him to play golf with people he needs to talk to in a less formal atmosphere than a conference room
Playing golf with Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, is not the same as playing a round of golf with a bunch of mid-level White House men, particularly if you play with the same ones week after week.
Trump played golf with Sen. Rand Paul recently and after the round Paul’s opinion of the whole Obamacare repeal had changed.
Golf, like a lot of things, can be relaxation or work. You can sit in front of your computer and play video games or sit in front of your computer and work. Obama didn’t play golf with people he needed to meet with but usually with the same group of midlevel White House employees. However, it is certainly true that Trump has been playing a lot of golf.
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There are so many subtle ways the mainstream media, and in particular National Public Radio, denigrate Trump. One is that they refer to him as Mr. Trump, not President Trump and not the president.
After the first reference, we refer to the president as Trump, but we did the same for Obama, George W. Bush, William J.B. Clinton and George H.W. Bush.
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The reporting by the mainstream media and the honest media is so different it’s hard to believe they are writing about the same events.
According to the mainstream media, the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to steal the presidential election from Hillary Clinton. This is based on some anonymous sources but every agency and committee that has investigated it has found no evidence that its true.
One of the shocking pieces of evidence is that someone related to someone on the Trump campaign met with some Russian in the Seychelles. Just the fact that someone who knew people on the Trump campaign met with a Russian is considered evidence. And this is still the story that the mainstream media is promoting.
The evidence that Susan Rice unmasked members of the Trump campaign intercepted in legal surveillance of Russian nationals is not from anonymous sources, but there is no hard evidence that it was Rice who ordered the identities be unmasked. However, there is a lot of evidence that it happened. How else did the information about former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn talking to the Russians leak out? Someone had to have the information to leak it.
But the fact that the Obama administration was spying on the Trump campaign is considered fake news by the mainstream media and a big story by Trump and his advisors.
One problem the mainstream media are going to have is that Trump, despite what they seem to believe, is the president of the United States and he has access to all the information that exists about who did what. If Rice did order the unmasking and was really smart about it, meaning that she didn’t write anything down, then they will have to find someone to testify that Rice was the one that ordered the names be released. If it wasn’t Rice then it was someone high up in the Obama White House.
I can’t see how the story of Trump’s collusion with the Russians, which has been investigated and no evidence has been found, is the big story and Rice, who hasn’t been investigated, is not.
