US Enters Banana Republic Territory

 

Mark Wauck at Meaning in History has as succinct a take on the Trump indictment as any of the commentary I’ve read:

. . . For now I’ll simply state that Trump is correct. He IS an innocent man, innocent of any charges stemming from his possession of documents relating to his presidency. Make no mistake about this. It’s a joint, bipartisan, project of the Uniparty. The Republican participants—key among them Bluto Barr—retain the right to criticize Zhou, whom they helped put in the White House, but they will support the attempted lynching of Trump. The DC political establishment has closed ranks with the Deep State to assert its right—as against We The People—to select the POTUS and to punish anyone who transgresses against their Will to Power. This is a day that will live in infamy.

Mr. Wauck’s posting is here.

Moving to Substack: this blog now also appears here.

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Banana Republic: defined

Bob Gorrell cartoon seen at Townhall:

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End of the Republic?

 

  

Robert Spencer at FrontPageMag offers today’s doomsday read:

End of the Republic:
Donald Trump has been indicted

Is the title of this piece apocalyptic hyperbole? I wish it were. But everyone in the country and most of the people in the wide world know that Donald Trump has not actually been indicted for the crime of giving hush money to a prostitute. He has been indicted for the crime of opposing the Leftist elites and challenging their control over the political system. For the first time in American history, a politician – indeed, a front-running presidential candidate – has been indicted in order to destroy his political chances. Americans used to take pride in the fact that such things didn’t happen in the United States of America. But that United States of America is over.

Donald Trump has been indicted on the thinnest of charges. . . .

More at the link here.  Mr. Spencer concludes:

This is a dark day for the United States. If there are any Democrats with integrity left, they would join the House Republicans who have already gone on record decrying this, and stop it before it’s too late. But if Trump is arrested, handcuffed, and perp-walked, it will be much more than just a photo-op for the salivating Leftist mob. It will be the end of the republic. Somehow, possibly, the republic may end up being reborn, and the rule of law saved. Maybe this will disgust enough Leftists to make that possible. The Hail-Mary football is in mid-flight now.

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An Elegy for the FBI

 

George Parry is a former "federal Organized Crime Strike Force lawyer, a unit chief in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, and a special organized crime prosecutor in central Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s." His blog "An Elegy for the FBI" at Knowledge is Good was cross-posted at the American Spectator.  Here's some of it:

. . . It’s quite remarkable to watch a once revered and legendary organization metaphorically slit its own throat in public. But that’s exactly what happened when the FBI raided President Donald Trump’s Florida home purportedly to retrieve official Trump administration documents.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the search warrant cited the Presidential Records Act and possible illegal handling of classified information and that the raid came two months after Justice Department lawyers visited Mar-a-Lago “seeking more information about potentially sensitive material that had been taken there from the White House.” 

But if document retrieval was truly the goal, why didn’t the FBI obtain and serve a subpoena duces tecum instead of resorting to a gangbusters-style ransacking of Trump’s home? After months of discussions with the president’s lawyers, during which they voluntarily handed over 15 boxes of presidential documents to the National Archives, was there some reason to believe that a raid was necessary to prevent the destruction of what remained at Mar-a-Lago?

. . .

There are many more such examples that amply demonstrate that the FBI has been reduced to being the armed muscle and praetorian guard of the Democrat Party. But, while all of that is bad enough, the FBI’s ill-conceived raid on the home of a former president who also happens to be the leading political opponent of the bureau’s masters in the Biden regime, is a historic, hideous, and radical abuse of its law enforcement authority that has obliterated the bureau’s relationship with a vast swath of the American public. To those citizens, the bureau’s agents are no longer regarded as the respected and stalwart G-Men of legend. They are now widely and justifiably mocked and dismissed as the Stasi, Gestapo, KGB, secret police, and banana republic thugs for hire. 

Thanks to the raid of Trump’s home, the FBI is not only faced with having lost the confidence and cooperation of almost half of America. It has also transformed itself into a despised moral leper colony — a painted, hagged out, repellent, and whorish mockery of what it used to be. . . .

Much more at the link here.  Irreversible damage.

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Steyn: More on Our Banana Republic

 

Ben Garrison cartoon via NewsAmmo

The inimitable Mark Steyn published his “Criminalizing Opposition in a Pseudo-Republic” column yesterday about the FBI raid on Mar-A-Lago.  And as always, Mark has some historical perspective on this latest action by a corrupt DOJ & FBI:

For almost a decade and a half now, the American "republic" has been decaying to the defining condition of a one-party state - that is, the total merger of the ruling party and the state. Last night, the dirty stinking rotten corrupt US Department of Justice signed off on a raid on Mar-a-Lago, so we've now moved into hardcore banana-republic territory: the regime's cops are busting into the home of the opposition leader. We're told this is because Trump took some "classified" documents with him when he left Washington. Yeah, that's always a pretext for an armed raid: You could ask Hillary Clinton or Sandy Berger.

. . .

I see Kevin McCarthy is now threatening Merrick Garland with an "investigation" and ordering him to preserve all documents. Ooooooh! Maybe, after the coming Republican landslide, they can appoint an independent counsel; maybe John Durham or Robert Mueller is available. Why would anyone take McCarthy's threat seriously? If you don't grasp that in today's America there is no equality before the law, there is no point even discussing public affairs.

. . ..

If that's the best McCarthy can do, it's hopelessly insufficient to the moment: There ought to be total non-cooperation with the regime by the GOP with the intent of bringing it to a standstill - because this "administration has gone way beyond politics and is corrupting institutions to a degree that will make violence inevitable.

Oh, but don't worry, says McCarthy, there's that Big Red Wave coming in November.

Yeah, right. A throwaway line from The Mark Steyn Show of December 15th 2020:

By the way, when they mention Covid and 2022, that's code for: 'Yeah the US midterms are gonna get stolen too.'

Read Mark’s full column here.  Recommended.

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Our Banana Republic

 

image credit: politicaltilt.com

The blogosphere is full of reports and commentary on the FBI’s raid on President Trump’s residence Mar-A-Lago, but Robert Spencer’s column atFrontPageMag is the one I am linking to today.  Mr. Spencer begins:  

When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home on Monday, a key aspect of what made the United States of America great and free has been lost, and likely cannot be recovered. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson detested one another for years before their eventual reconciliation, but neither one used the agencies of the U.S. government to hound, persecute or discredit the other. Other bitter political opponents throughout the history of the republic have never before used the government’s own mechanisms of justice to do injustice to their foes. Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and their henchmen have brought America to a new phase of its history, and it is not likely to be one that is marked by respect for the rule of law or defense of the rights of individual citizens. Instead, we are entering an ugly age of authoritarianism, in which the brute force of the state is used to bend the people to the will of the tyrant.

Trump announced on Monday, “These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.”

The 45th president is not given to understatement, but the FBI raid on his home is much more than just unnecessary and inappropriate. It is criminal.

. . .

This is no longer a republic, except of the banana variety. It may be a republic again someday, but for now, the great American experiment is over. Born July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia, died August 8, 2022, in Mar-A-Lago, at the hands of Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and Christopher Wray.

Read the rest here.  President Trump’s announcement is on most websites, including here.  

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