The two-bullet theory

Scott Adams presents his two-bullet theory to explain why Comey first covered for Hillary, then exposed her:

My movie says Comey had good evidence against Clinton during the initial investigation but made a judgement call to leave the decision to the American public. For reasons of conscience, and acting as a patriot, Comey explained in clear language to the public exactly what evidence the FBI found against Clinton. The evidence looked daming because it was. Under this interpretation, Comey took a bullet to his reputation for the sake of the Republic. He didn’t want the FBI to steal this important decision away from the people, but at the same time he couldn’t let the people decide blind. So he divulged the evidence and stepped away, like the action hero who doesn’t look back at the explosion.

In the second act of this movie, Comey learns that the Weiner laptop had emails that were so damning it would be a crime against the public to allow them to vote without first seeing a big red flag. And a flag was the best he could do because it was too early in the investigation to leak out bits and pieces of the evidence. That would violate Clinton’s rights.

But Comey couldn’t easily raise a red flag to warn the public because it was against FBI policy to announce a criminal investigation about a candidate so close to election day. So Comey had a choice of either taking another bullet for the Republic or screwing the very country that he has spent his career protecting.

In this movie, Comey did the hero thing. He alerted the public to the fact that the FBI found DISQUALIFYING information on the Weiner laptop. And he took a second bullet to his reputation.

How do I know the new emails are that bad?

I start by assuming Comey is the same man now as the one who was carefully vetted before being hired to protect the integrity of one of our most important institutions. And even Comey’s critics concede he’s smart.

So…

The way you know the new emails are disqualifying for Clinton is because otherwise our hero would have privately informed Congress and honored the tradition of not influencing elections. Comey is smart enough to know his options. And unless he suddenly turned rotten at his current age, he’s got the character to jump in front of a second bullet for the Republic.

According to this movie, no matter who gets elected, we’ll eventually learn of something disqualifying in the Weiner emails.

And we can’t say we weren’t warned. Comey took two bullets to do it.

While I agree with Scott’s conclusion that the emails have to be THAT bad in order to justify Comey’s change of heart, I don’t agree with his twice-heroic interpretation of Comey’s actions. Comey strikes me more as someone who did the dirty the first time around, felt guilty about having failed in his duty, and when given the opportunity to do the right thing and redeem himself, leaped at the chance.

The fact that we have word of an internal rebellion at the FBI and his wife’s initial disappointment in him tends to support this theory. The good news about the redemption theory is that having failed once, and having personally experienced the negative consequences of that failure, I expect Comey is much more likely to hold firm under fire this time around, especially given that he knows he will have the support of those around him. He’s going to need it, too, because he is already coming under tremendous fire from some very powerful people.

Besides, if we’re talking about movies, the Redemption motif is stronger than the Machiavellian Hero story.

Behind the revived FBI investigation

Andrew Napolitano provides some useful background for the recent revival of the investigation that has now unearthed some 650,000 emails, some of which appear to be related to Hillary’s apparent malfeasance as Secretary of State.

When Clinton herself was interviewed on July 2 — for only four hours, during which the interviewers seemed to some in the bureau to lack aggression, passion and determination — some FBI agents privately came to the same conclusion as their former boss: The case was going sideways.

A few determined agents were frustrated by Clinton’s professed lack of memory during her interview and her oblique reference to a recent head injury she had suffered as the probable cause of that. They sought to obtain her medical records to verify the gravity of her injury and to determine whether she had been truthful with them. They prepared the paperwork to obtain the records, only to have their request denied by Director Comey himself on July 4.

Then some agents did the unthinkable; they reached out to colleagues in the intelligence community and asked them to obtain Clinton’s medical records so they could show them to Comey. We know that the National Security Agency can access anything that is stored digitally, including medical records. These communications took place late on July 4.

When Comey learned of these efforts, he headed them off the next morning with his now infamous news conference, in which he announced that Clinton would not be indicted because the FBI had determined that her behavior, though extremely careless, was not reckless, which is the legal standard in espionage cases. He then proceeded to recount the evidence against her. He did this, no doubt, to head off the agents who had sought the Clinton medical records, whom he suspected would leak evidence against her.

Three months later — and just weeks before Clinton will probably be elected president — we have learned that President Barack Obama regularly communicated with Clinton via her personal email servers about matters that the White House considered classified. That means that he lied when he told CBS News that he learned of the Clinton servers when the rest of us did.

We also learned this week that Andrew McCabe, Giacalone’s successor as head of the FBI Washington field office and presently the No. 3 person in the FBI, is married to a woman to whom the Clinton money machine in Virginia funneled about $675,000 in lawful campaign funds for a failed 2015 run for the Virginia Senate. Comey apparently saw no conflict or appearance of impropriety in having the person in charge of the Clinton investigation in such an ethically challenged space.

It seems that Comey now understands that the corrupted officials at the FBI and the Justice Department can’t keep the lid on their rebellious underlings any longer. Everyone at the FBI knows Hillary Clinton is corrupt, they’ve known it for years. But the hard evidence and the permission required to gather it has, historically, been lacking.

Perhaps it will finally see the light of day, as the FBI has now obtained a warrant to go through the emails not directly related to the Weiner case.

Things are getting crazy.

UPDATE: Kee-rikey… if this is true and the details are leaked to the Democratic Party elders, she will be forced to stand down whether she is willing to do so or not.

Gab, the ADL, and the Alt-Right Gecko

A single phrase suffices to demonstrate why #Gab will outcompete #Twitter. And why I am on the former rather than the latter.

“The ADL can shove it.”

Imagine a world without fear. Imaging speaking without self-censorship and cowering before the thought police. #SpeakFreely

For thus spake Andrew Torba:

Our logo is a frog. Gabby is not Pepe and never will be. This is why we chose a frog:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh and say to him, ‘This is what the Lord says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me.  If you refuse to let them go, I will send a plague of frogs on your whole country.  The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs.  The frogs will come up on you and your people and all your officials.’”

But it’s clearly not Pepe lol. Also Pepe is not a symbol of “hate speech.” The ADL can shove it. He’s a cartoon frog. If I slap a Nazi symbol on the McDonald’s logo, is it now a hate symbol? (No) So how does this logic work for Pepe? Because the media told you so?

He’s right. Gabby is not Pepe and is not Alt-Right. The ADL would do much better to turn their attention to Gramsky, the GEICO gecko, who is not only green, but is clearly an Alt-Right revolutionary.

Not only that, but Gramsky is also an avid supporter of Donald Trump. VFM on Twitter, you know what to do.

NFL Week 8

This is the weekly open NFL thread. Meanwhile, NFL ratings continue to decline, but everyone even remotely associated with the NFL claims it has nothing – NOTHING – to do with the political antics of the players.

After seven weeks, the NFL has a problem. Whether the league wants it acknowledge it publicly or privately or will try to minimize it with damage-control doublespeak (“we don’t have fewer viewers, the same viewers are viewing less“), the NFL has a problem.


Ratings are down, every week in nearly every broadcasting window.


Speaking only for myself, I think my declining interest in the game is primarily due to instant replay. Between all the ticky-tack penalties and how long it takes to review every score and every turnover, I find that these days, I just don’t have much interest in watching if the Vikings aren’t playing.

If I ran the league, I’d keep instant replay and allow it to be used on one challenge per game by each coach. Any call or non-call by the officials would be reviewable. That way, only the most absolutely vital plays would ever be reviewed.

There are also too many games being televised. 12 PM, 3 PM, and Monday Night Football, plus two games on Thanksgiving, are sufficient. And a 14-game season would be to the benefit of the players’ bodies, and likely, to the quality of the play as well. The NFL needs to understand that sometimes, less is more.

Dems to Hillary: “Step down, immediately”

The Chicago Tribune demands Hillary Clinton step down and relinquish the Democratic nomination:

If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process:

They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately, and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place.

Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is just not a good idea.

Since Oct. 7, WikiLeaks has released 35,000 emails hacked from Clinton campaign boss John Podesta. Now WikiLeaks, no longer a neutral player but an active anti-Clinton agency, plans to release another 15,000 emails.

What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands.

The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton’s political action committee — should begin demanding it.

They don’t believe she’ll do it. But she should step down. It will be less humiliating. Because whether she steps down or not, a Trumpslide looms. The New York Times’s own poll of Florida, taken before Comey’s unexpected announcement, has Trump +4; a five-point gain in just a month.

If you take a step back from tribal politics, you’ll see that Mrs. Clinton has clearly disqualified herself from ever coming near classified information again. If she were a young person straight out of grad school hoping to land a government job, Hillary Clinton would be laughed out of Washington with her record. She’d never be hired.

As secretary of state she kept classified documents on the home-brew server in her basement, which is against the law. She lied about it to the American people. She couldn’t remember details dozens of times when questioned by the FBI. Her aides destroyed evidence by BleachBit and hammers. Her husband, Bill, met secretly on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch for about a half-hour, and all they said they talked about was golf and the grandkids.

Hillary is done. She is pining for the fjords. It looks like Google may have just ditched Hillary as well, as they’re finally allowing negative autocompletes concerning her. This is what the beginning of a preference cascade looks like.

How fortunate that she has a credible health issue to blame.

Those independents sure decide fast!

Amazing how these “undecideds” suddenly make up their minds with such rapidity and decisiveness after such a long period of indecision:

Donald Trump has wiped out Hillary Clinton’s comfortable lead, with the Democratic candidate dropping in the polls just 11 days before the election. Clinton now leads by just two points with 47 per cent to Trump’s 45 according to the poll put together by ABC and The Washington Post. At the start of the week, she held a comfortable advantage over her opponent with 50 to his 38.

These were polls carried out BEFORE the FBI announced it was reopening emails investigation. The truth is that Hillary never had a 12-point lead over Trump or anyone else. It was nothing more than the usual attempt to manage public opinion by the mainstream media.

Of course, they have to dial back their attempts right before the election in order to retain their credibility for the next time. Hence the “late-breaking independents” and “undecideds making up their minds”. As Scott Adams said over a month ago, no one is undecided about Hillary Clinton; she’s been a public figure for nearly 30 years.

Zerohedge notes a key admission in the way the latest poll was conducted. “Changes in the poll’s latest four nights compared with the previous four are not mainly about people shifting in their candidate preference, but about changes in who’s intending to vote.”


Translation: the oft-heard narrative about late-deciding independents tightening the polls is a false one.

Zerohedge also observes two more relevant facts: “Ironically, these new results do not reflect the latest FBI bombshell as polling was concluded on October 27th and it still includes an 8-point sampling advantage for democrats.”


It is still true that the state polls in the battleground states are the important ones. But the known unknown there is the extent to which they have been manipulated in the same way.

Gosh, a lot of people would like to kick him

Captain Underoos is delusional enough to think that he had a chance to win the Republican nomination in 2016:

The 2012 Republican presidential nominee said he often asks himself why he did not run again and expressed regret for not doing a “better job” communicating his conservative economic message to the public.

“I get asked on a regular basis, ‘Boy, why aren’t you running this year?’ I ask myself that now and then too. But I did that once,” Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, said at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Legal Reform Summit this week in D.C.

Romney said the general public might have gotten the wrong impression about his economic plans.

“People on the other side of the aisle have made that a centerpiece of their campaigns, which is the idea of income inequality and the lack of progress for middle-income families, and it’s something which, gosh, I kick myself as a Republican nominee for president for having not done a better job communicating this,” he said.

“When you speak, as you do in a primary, to people who are strong Republicans and conservatives, you begin to speak in shorthand because they’ve heard the kind of remarks that I’d make, they’ve heard it time and again, and they sort of understand what you mean. So when I’m talking about making America the most attractive place in the world for entrepreneurs, and when I want to make America a terrific place for small business and big business, when I want to see corporations thrive and grow in America, what my primary audience hears is something which they can connect with,” he added.

The reason Romney didn’t run again is because a) no one except Wall Street and the Fortune 1000 supported his globalist economic plans and they are supporting Hillary anyhow, b) he’s a terrible and incompetent candidate, and, c) he would have gotten fewer votes than Jeb Bush.

No Americans trust the globalist Republicans anymore or are buying their immigrant-in-a-poker program. Trickle-down economics trickled down only to the H1Bs and immigrants. The ironic thing is that Mormons may be the only portion of the electorate dumb enough to collectively a) reject racial identity politics while simultaneously b) practicing aggressive religious identity politics.

You can get offended by my observation if you like, but you can hardly deny it. Taken as a political demographic, Mormons won’t vote for white American interests, but they’ll vote for a Mormon every single time.

She’s in trouble

And the Democrats know it. This isn’t something that the media can simply paper over:

Hillary Clinton’s allies were cast into a state of anger and disbelief over the FBI’s stunning announcement that it is reviewing new emails “pertinent” to Clinton’s use of a private email server. That shocking development — revealed in a letter to Congress by FBI Director James Comey — pushed some of Clinton’s allies past the boiling point.

They said they were “dumbfounded” by the revelation that the new FBI review may have been spurred by a separate investigation into Anthony Weiner sending lewd texts to a minor. Weiner is separated from wife Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s closest aides.

And they worried that Clinton’s unconventional email arrangement had finally caught up to her and might imperil her presidential bid less than two weeks before Election Day.

“I’m livid, actually,” one Clinton surrogate told The Hill. “This has turned into malpractice. It’s an unforced error at this point. I have no idea what Comey is up to but the idea this email issue is popping back up again is outrageous. It never should have occurred in the first place. Someone somewhere should have told her no. And they didn’t and now we’re all paying the price.”

And October isn’t over yet….

The loosening grip of empire

Fred Reed explains why the Empire needs a war:

The United States is not in danger. The Empire is. This is not good. Empires, the Soviet Union notwithstanding, seldom go quietly. Either Washington gambles on war of some sort against Russia, or Russia and China, in the desperate hope of reversing things, or the Empire gets slowly eaten. Or not so slowly. Once one country pries itself loose, many may rush for the door.

New York may go for calculated war against Russia–say, cyberwar expected not to turn into shooting war, shooting war in Syria not expected to turn into global shooting war, global shooting war not expected to turn into nuclear war. This will be a crapshoot. Note that America has badly misguessed the outcomes of every war since Korea.

This is why the American election actually matters, unusual in Presidential contests. It is Blowhard against Corruption, a swell choice, but Trump is firmly against war with Russia, and Hillary for. Her military understanding is that of a fried egg.

The woman is both a fool and a knave but, it seems, Trump has talked trash, and therefore she will likely be President. Weirdly, the future of the world depends on how an excited electorate of political middle-schoolers responds to one candidate’s dirty talk. From a curmudgeon’s point of view, it is pretty funny. It is funnier if one lives outside of the radiation footprint.

But back to business. The seaboard Axis of Evil needs a war because almost every tide runs against it. Proximately, the Axis has pushed China, Russia, and Iran together against the Empire. (First rule of empire: Do not let the dissidents unite.) Many signs suggest that the world, or much of it, is beginning to see China as its future. The BRICS, the SCO, the NDB, the AAIB–all exclude the US. China becomes the major trading partner of country after country. The twilight deepens.

I find it very difficult to believe that the Imperial USA is dumb enough to directly start a war with either Russia or China. But I don’t find it at all difficult to believe that they are foolish enough to expand the current wars-by-proxy and risk a disproportionate response by one or more of the enemies they have unnecessarily provoked.

A Hillary presidency doesn’t expressly guarantee war, but it does make it the obvious probability. This is something the NeverTrumpers clearly never considered before they struck their epically stupid poses. Hillary is a servant of Empire. Trump is an opponent, which, of course, is why he is so often lumped in with Vladimir Putin.

“The woman is a disaster!”

Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton:

Talking to Camille Paglia is like approaching a machine gun: madness to stick your head up and ask a question, unless you want your brain blown apart by the answer, but a visceral delight to watch as she obliterates every subject in sight. Most of the time she does this for kicks. It’s only on turning to Hillary Clinton that she perpetrates an actual murder: of Clinton II’s most cherished claim, that her becoming 45th president of the United States would represent a feminist triumph.

‘In order to run for president of the United States, you have to spend two or three years of your life out on the road constantly asking for money and most women find that life too harsh, too draining,’ Paglia argues. ‘That is why we haven’t had a woman president in the United States — not because we haven’t been ready for one, for heaven’s sakes, for a very long time…’

Hillary hasn’t suffered — Paglia continues — because she is a woman. She has shamelessly exploited the fact: ‘It’s an outrage how she’s played the gender card. She is a woman without accomplishment. “I sponsored or co-sponsored 400 bills.” Oh really? These were bills to rename bridges and so forth. And the things she has accomplished have been like the destabilisation of North Africa, causing refugees to flood into Italy… The woman is a disaster!’

La Paglia may occasionally take a while to come around, but she always provides an interesting take on things. And, as usual, she does not disappoint.