Thinking more about the Durham report last night, there is so much here that is common to the use of firearms.
As with a gun, the use of the weapons of government - the FBI, CIA, DOJ, or any other government-controlled entity - can be used by the people in control of them in many ways. Some uses are within the bounds of safe use, some are not - but the use depends upon the people behind the optics with their finger on the trigger.
There is not a single organization in the world that can be constrained by any written rule if there are members of that organization who are corrupt. The current narratives are "there are safeguards in place now" and "the people who did this are gone" are insufficient.
There are no "safeguards" to prevent true believers and they are never really gone. Organizations have a historical penchant to learn from their targets and in the case of the FBI, CIA, and DOJ, in their mission of capturing white collar criminals, violent criminals, terrorists and spies, they have learned much.
And all their "talents" are on display in their vendetta against Trump.
Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, Fusion GPS, the national media, James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Susan Rice, Barack Obama and yes, the Crypt Keeper himself, Joe Biden, all decided to use their offices to "get Trump" and get Hillary elected - and when Hillary stumbled into a career of election denial and taking walks with Sasquatch in the forests of Chappaqua, they turned those talents and that power into a quest for destruction.
But that says more about the character of those people than it does the organizations they controlled.
"But Trump" doesn't come close to explaining the reasons for the damage they have done.
Since Trump and Melania came down that escalator in 2015, the massive power of government has been focused on them the way a kid focuses sunlight through a magnifying glass on an ant. Millions, if not billions, of taxpayer and Democrat donor dollars have gone into operations designed to destroy a man and anyone who supports him.
That money and those efforts have gone into the construction of an alternate reality where a presidential candidate colluded with a foreign government to create a discriminatory, authoritarian government that persecutes their enemies with prosecution...and they gave themselves awards for doing it.
The "alternate" aspect of it is that what the Trump campaign and administration was alleged, the Clinton campaign and the Biden administration have done.
As John Adams wrote to his wife, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Adams’ view was hardly solitary.
James Madison wrote that our Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another” and as it turns out, the rest of us as well.
The Democrats are, as they have been for decades, hiding behind legalism.
“Well, he wasn’t charged with a crime, was he?” is a common defense when all the shady dealings of the past several years have been uncovered. “What they did wasn’t illegal.”
They say this while always finding a way to charge and prosecute their enemies. One of the Democrat plants on Twitter posted yesterday the names of all the people on the Trump side, from Mike Flynn to President Trump himself who have pled out or have been convicted versus the two failed prosecutions conducted by Durham as evidence of the overwhelming guilt of the Trump team vs. the innocence of the White Knights on the Democrat side.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I saw that list a little differently.
What it told me was that a Republican brought before a judge or jury in Washington or Manhattan has damn little chance of being treated fairly while Democrats will walk.
Add that as just another corruption of equal justice.
Unfortunately, this goes beyond just our government because there are people who see nothing wrong with what happened because they hate (or fear) Trump so much. They are so blinded by their hatred that they can literally excuse anything and everything that was done to “get” him.
Something that is true is that every tree that rots from the inside eventually falls, and once the heart rot begins, it is virtually impossible to stop it. A tree can look perfectly normal from the outside, but when the heart of the tree dies, its strength is gone.
The same is true for a nation.
If Americans can’t agree that using government to “get” people they don’t like is wrong, the rot has already gone too far.
There's an Ash tree on the septic mound behind our home. When we moved to this place 15 years ago, it was a healthy, vibrant, shade tree that screened the back of the house from heat and storms in the summer and caught lots of snow that would otherwise pile up by the back door in winter. About six years ago, I noticed a few dead branches, devoid of leaves, inside the tree when the rest of it was greeting the spring with green.
There's a parasite on the loose in the upper Midwest called the Emerald Ash Borer, a small green beetle few have ever seen until the damage they've done causes the tree to fall or be removed. then they fly away in search of a new victim. This year, the lower half of the tree has no leaves. Even several of the larger branches in the upper reaches are barren. come mid summer, you'd be hard pressed to see the full damage, but that doesn't make it's impending doom any less inevitable. Next spring I'll likely have plenty of firewood. I may plant a couple apple trees further up the mound and farther from the house, but if I ignore that Ash, I'll end up having crash into the house.
Sometimes drastic action must be taken to protect yourself from further injury. As much as we like that old tree, it would be foolhardy to let it rot completely and crash into the house.
Too true. My only edit is that a democrat is not even likely to be charged, but protected.