It’s My Party and I’ll Lie if I Want to, Lie if I Want to, Lie if I Want to…You Would Lie Too if It Happened to You!

Happy Sunday my lovely half a century of readers! I hope I have this posted sometime by tomorrow, which will be Labor Day 2022. What better way to celebrate Labor Day than by sharing the lies of the Overlords that make us sweat in poverty while they lounge in state and dine on caviar?

I’ve been writing on the Mar-A-Lago FBI investigation. So far this will be the third post, I intend to do at least one more. Here are the links to my previous posts pertaining to the topic: https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/648

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/2861

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/2914

Before I go further, I want to say something. In my last post, I stated I had no desire to dive into the controversy about Hillary’s emails, or Hunter Biden’s laptop, but then in the next paragraph, I state that that will be in my next post. Before I had written the next paragraph I had talked to one of my best friends who is also one of my most loyal readers, and he advised that I talk about them, but do it in a separate post (as I am doing here). I understand that the paragraph is confusing. Also, on a more important topic…this likely deserves its own post, but I’ll try to keep it to a short paragraph. I think one large reason we have gotten where we are is that far too many of us have just done what was comfortable, what was expedient. I am just as guilty as anyone. If I’m going to sit here and complain about the complacency of our over-lords, the least I can do is be less complacent myself.

Let’s start with the scandal that won Trump his Presidency: Hillary Clinton and her controversial e-mails. Most of my readers will remember that almost every news agency in 2016 was predicting that Hillary Clinton would win the Presidency. Michael Moore spoke about it in one of his documentaries. There was a confident hopefulness in the crowd and throughout the land (well…where Democrats are prevalent anyway). We were almost certain to have four years of Hillary (and why not eight) and the progress made by Obama in certain quarters would be continued with the homespun, quasi-intellectual Southern charm that was the graceful New York Senator and Secretary of State (not to mention First Lady) Hillary Clinton. The first female President after the first Black President. Could life get any better?

This site shows us how the day progressed. How the entrenched Clintons were over-confident in their win, and how the grass roots sent their howls of rage for the last few decades of excrable leadership by voting for someone who promised to “drain the swamp.” I find the wikileaks comment pretty telling. Why would we vote for Hillary Clinton? Wasn’t she the epitome of what we no longer want? We sent Obama to the Whitehouse because we were tired of the Clinton/Bush family controling our lives. Now the Democratic Party has the gall to nominate a woman who represented everything we no longer have faith in, a rich Washington insider who had not had to even drive her own car in 30 years.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/08/politics/inside-election-day-2016-as-it-happened

Walking down memory lane should be sweet, but I’m afraid this one is more bitter than sweet. Remember all the celebrities that promised to leave the US if Trump won?

At first the race was pretty neck and neck. God forgive me, I voted for Trump. I felt likely Hillary would win, but I did expect a tighter race than the media talking heads predicted. For a change, I was right. County after county turned in. States largely went as predicted, but the margins were much tighter than predicted. Rural counties saw Hillary being slaughtered, while urban counties were often overwhelmingly going to Hillary. As a small town boy, I saw (and still see) a lot of significance in this. By 8:21 pm, EST (central standard doesn’t count…everyone knows if you carry the cities you carry the country) Trump was actually ahead in the area that counts: electoral votes. He was standing at 128 to her 97. Suddenly the odds looked a lot more even. The House that was supposed to go to the Democrats was now projected to go to the Republicans. Suddenly people were tweeting that Trump’s ridiculed statements that there were a lot of people out there who had not been polled who supported him started to have credence. Democrats were starting to feel real terror.

Real, actual, unadulterated terror.

Ohio went red. Florida went red. “Lock her up” chants started spreading across Republican rallies that till a few hours before had been quiet and subdued. Democrat rallies suddenly went silent. People who had been cheering started to burst into tears. “Big doners” started tweeting their dissapointment. News outlets cranked out charts about where they had gone wrong.

I stayed up till 3 am, and a weary Trump stumbled out, in a hushed voice he gave a gracious victory speach. Hillary had conceded. He congratulated her on a great campaign, complimented her years of service to the nation, and gave some words about how “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no more.”

I’ve spent quite a lot of time on something that is frankly off topic, but I do so to remind people that there were several things that upended all the predictions, but one thing that I feel really impacted the election was the whole e-mail scandal. Those who may remember the confusion, terror, or elation (depending on the side you were on at the time) often forget that Hillary was embroiled in scandal. The so-called “October Surprise.” And five years later, I feel this may have been one of the most important items that lost her the election.

The term “October Surprise” comes from the history that a last minute news story can profoundly effect a Presidential election. People won’t remember you had sex with Russian spies three months ago, but if it gets reported suddenly in October (the election being on the first Tuesday of November) everyone will remember come election day. And what happened ten days before the Clinton/Trump election? FBI director James Comey announced that the FBI was reopening the investigation of Hillary’s email accounts, an investigation everyone believed had been put to bed that Summer. Trump went on TV, announcing that a “scandal even greater than Watergate” was being perpetrated at our expense. And we believed him, because we were now used to being betrayed. Some of us voted for him. And while I would not, many would vote for him again.

A lot of words to get here, but I want to stress the importance. We didn’t elect her, in part, because of the e-mail investigation. So how did that scandal compare to Trump’s current difficulties with Mar-A-Lago?

I’m going to be citing these links for my information:

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/09/why-the-trump-search-warrant-is-nothing-like-hillarys-emails-00050691

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/on-hillary-trump-and-whataboutism-a-response-to-my-critics/

https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/aug/25/all-they-had-do-was-ask-said-trump-timeline-nation/

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/politics/hillary-clinton-james-comey.html

The similarities between the Hillary and the Trump scandals are as follows:

• Both scandals are FBI investigations.
• Both candidates claim the FBI was “out to get them,” and that the investigations were simply political efforts to destroy them.
• Both scandals were reported to Americans as breaches of “Top Secret” security. Both sides claimed the other was either grossly negligent with sensitive material, or possibly even colluding with our enemies (Russia, China, Outer Buttfukia).
• Both are famous wealthy people who belong to the upper .09 percent of wealth compared to the American population at large.
• Both sides vociferously insisted that the accused be arrested as criminals.
• As of this writing, neither side has been charged.
• Last of all, while there is great polarization, it is an inarguable fact that a substantial percentage of Americans feel betrayed by one or both of these erstwhile political opponents.

The contrasts are as follows:

• Polar opposites of course. Woman vs man. Democrat vs Republican.
• One investigation involved electronic communication and the other involved actual physical record.
• One involved a Cabinet member running for President, and the other involves an ex-President who is not currently officially running.

Some quotes from my sources before I tell you my two cents.

From Politico:

“A day before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump named seven administration officials as his representatives to the National Archives. Among them were his chief of staff, Mark Meadows; White House counsel Pat Cipollone; his deputies Patrick Philbin, Scott Gast and Michael Purpura; national security attorney John Eisenberg; and Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel chief Steven Engel.

“Engel has testified to the Jan. 6 select committee about his resistance to Trump’s plan to remove Justice Department leaders and replace them with compliant officials who would support his effort to remain in power. Cipollone also testified about his concerns with the legality of some of Trump allies’ attempts to overturn the results of the election.

“It’s unclear whether all seven of the officials remain authorized representatives for Trump, but the former president has also recently added at least two additional representatives: reporter John Solomon and former Pentagon official Kash Patel.

“Patel told Breitbart in May that Trump had declassified the materials he removed to Mar-a-Lago, even though the documents still had classified markings on them. As president, Trump had total power to declassify any classified material in the government’s possession.”

From nationalreview:

“I’d like to respond to three critiques of my Corner post from yesterday, titled “Yes, Her Emails.” In it, I argue that “anyone — either on the anti-Trump left or the Trump-skeptical right,”

who thinks that the FBI and Department of Justice’s credibility can survive in the eyes of the average, normie American if it prosecutes Donald J. Trump on very, very similar mishandling-of-classified-documents charges that Hillary [Clinton] avoided with nary a slap on the wrist is naïve to the point of lunacy.”

Also:

“If Trump is shown to have broken the law, he deserves to face the consequences of his actions.

“But it is not excusing or defending Trump to point out that every decision has a cost as well as a benefit.

“I am much less concerned about Trump facing the music in this matter than I am about holding the Republic together. You’re free to disagree — after all, it’s a free country — but I believe that the best way to move past Trump is through politics, not lawfare. A shortsighted focus on putting Trump in the dock may be satisfying to his enemies, but they’re not the ones who need convincing that this process is fair. Like it or not — and entirely to Trump’s demagogic discredit — millions upon millions of Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that the institutions and powers of government have been unfairly used against him in a years-long “witch hunt.” You may not believe that. Hell, I don’t believe that. But something like a full third of the country does.”

From politifact: In responce to Trump’s statement, “All they had to do is ask” we have a long and detailed timeline of requests and actions, including the following:

“June 3: Justice Department officials travel to Mar-a-Lago, where they briefly meet with Trump, and retrieve more documents marked classified, according to The New York Times. A Trump lawyer signs a declaration indicating that all the materials marked classified were turned over, the Times and others reported. Trump’s attorneys later confirmed the June 3 visit and document retrieval.

“At some point after the June 3 visit, investigators had learned that there could still be more classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, according to reporting in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal that cited unnamed sources.

“June 22: Trump is served with another subpoena, this time for surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s attorneys would later acknowledge receipt of the June 22 subpoena, writing in a court filing: “At President Trump’s direction, service of that subpoena was voluntarily accepted, and responsive video footage was provided to the government.”

“Aug. 8: The FBI, with a search warrant in hand, searches Mar-a-Lago, removing another 25 boxes of documents. According to a receipt released by the Justice Department, the documents include “various classified/TS/SCI documents.” TS/SCI stands for top-secret/sensitive compartmented information. There are also four sets of documents described as “Miscellaneous Top Secret” and three others listed as “Miscellaneous Secret.”

“Aug. 11: Attorney General Merrick Garland says in a public address that the Justice Department had exhausted efforts to retrieve the material in other ways. “The department does not take such a decision lightly,” Garland said. “Where possible, it is standard practice to seek less intrusive means as an alternative to a search, and to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken.”

Last of all, from The New York Times just in case anyone thinks I’m being too easy on Hillary Clinton:

“Mrs. Clinton’s instinct to shun any personal responsibility angered some Democrats. Several donors on the call, while deeply bitter about Mr. Comey’s actions, said they believed that Mrs. Clinton and her campaign had suffered avoidable missteps that handed the election to an unacceptable opponent. They pointed to the campaign’s lack of a compelling message for white working-class voters and to decisions years ago by Mrs. Clinton to use a private email address at the State Department and to accept millions of dollars for speeches to Wall Street.

“There is a special place in hell for Clinton staff, allegedly including Cheryl Mills, that okayed the email server setup,” Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and former senior aide to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, wrote on Sidewire, a social media site, referring to a longtime aide and lawyer to Mrs. Clinton.”

Now for a Tired Bloggers two cents. After reading all of these sites (and a few more that either said the exact same things or were wastes of time) I conclude that, I can’t know.

Neither can you. We want to trust the media to do their jobs, but most of us don’t anymore. Why the hell do you think Trump won in the first place? And don’t kid yourselves. Trump didn’t lose the last election because it was stolen, nor because of Media collusion with the left. Trump lost because he is just too much of an ass. A friend of mine said “Yeah, I know he is a jerk, but sometimes it takes a jerk to get the job done.” Nothing wrong with that thinking…except at some point people get fed up with the jerks. Sometimes you are so much of a jerk you get your ass handed to you in a back ally. I’m sorry Donald Trump, that is what happened.

As for the investigation, I’m not done with the series so I won’t declare I’ve made up my mind yet, but in my mind (I’ll offend a LOT of my liberal friends here) Hillary Clinton may not deserve to go to jail, but she mishandled top secret information. Don’t get me wrong, I doubt I would have done much better. But…that’s why I don’t go into politics. Both Hillary and Trump felt they were above the law. They both feel like they are better than the rest of us, and the rules don’t apply to them. Both have spent the last 30 years with silver spoons in their mouths, and the FBI comes along (don’t get me wrong, I see the FBI as a bunch of bullies too), and dares to suggest they take the damned spoon out of their mouths long enough to answer the American people.

Hillary lost the election due to her hubris. Honestly, I don’t hold any ill feelings towards these folks. I hope she has learned her lesson, lives happily ever after as an also ran, and the FBI leaves her alone. But make no mistake, the general Republican voter, right or wrong, sees no difference between what Hillary did, and what Trump did. She was let go, and we are going to charge Trump. Well…again, I’m not going to draw a conclusion yet. I have two (or three or four) more posts to write on this subject. But if the Democrats think the this will do anything for their cause other than to bring hell down around all of our ears, then they are as foolish as Trump.

I’m not saying don’t go after Trump. But if you do, 1) it has to be something worth breaking up the Republic. What could that possibly be? 2) If you do go after him, understand that you will have to make it perfectly crystal clear that this is not about politics, it is about justice. And understand, there is a dangerous percentage of people that are past caring, and just wanna see it burn.

In the end though, neither side listens to the other. Mr. Worf, I see no intelligent life her. Ahead Warp Factor Two. Engage!

Next post, the Tired Blogger compares Donald Trump’s dellima to Hunter Biden’s bind. Stay tuned next Wedsnesday for more tired blogging!