By Mike Huckabee
September 4, 2022
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Here are the top stories from this week that I think you will want to read:
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Read this and know why they targeted Trump
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California digs a deep, dark hole for Democrats
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Sarah Palin loses
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Biden’s Speech
And after you read my Sunday Standard, please leave me a comment.
Read this and know why they targeted Trump
When California Rep. Darrell Issa appeared with Judge Jeanine Pirro Wednesday to discuss the FBI and DOJ, he brought up an interesting point about FBI agent Timothy Thibault leaving the agency. Since Inspector General Michael Horowitz can speak only with current employees of the DOJ/FBI, Thibault is effectively out of his reach for any internal investigation.
We couldn’t report with certainty yesterday whether Thibault had resigned from the agency after being reassigned or had been fired. But in an update from CBS NEWS’ Catherine Herridge, his attorneys at the firm Morrison and Foerster LLP have announced that he has retired. Thibault “was not fired, not forced to retire, and not asked to retire,” they said in a statement.
They said the “headquarters-like” agents who escorted him out were simply two long-time agent friends, with him as he finished processing his paperwork. “Claims to the contrary are false,” according to the statement. And though whistleblowers have reportedly complained of Thibault’s partisanship, his attorneys insisted he’s done nothing wrong. They essentially denied everything.
In particular, their statement addressed allegations of certain politically motivated actions in investigations, including the treatment of Hunter’s laptop, saying he “welcomes any investigation of these allegations, regardless of his retirement. He firmly believes that any investigation will conclude that his supervision, leadership and decision making were not impacted by political bias or partisanship of any kind. He is confident that all of his decisions were consistent with the FBI’s highest standards for ethics and integrity.”
My concern is that the FBI has lowered the bar so much that this isn’t anything to brag about.
His attorneys denied his involvement in the raid on Mar-A-Lago and said he was not involved in the investigation of Hunter Biden and made no decision about the laptop. (The latter denial directly contradicts whistleblowers if news reports are correct, and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley also seems to be under a very different impression, based on his own statement.) At the same time, Thibault’s lawyers ignored the allegations that he pressured agents to reclassify cases to pad the numbers and make “domestic violent extremism” look like more of an issue than it is. If they could have denied these, they probably would have.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/fbi-agent-hunter-biden-whistleblower-resigned
The point remains, if Inspector General Horowitz wants to look into any of this, he won’t be able to interview Thibault, as Thibault...has...left the building! So, in that sense, it seems like a great time to retire.
Horowitz said this summer that Thibault might have violated the Hatch Act over his social media posts, which attacked President Trump and former Attorney General William Barr. Thibault’s attorneys say these allegations are being investigated through the Office of Special Counsel John Durham and that he’s cooperating.
A few days ago, I linked to an article by Jeff Carlson about retrieval of RussiaGate documents from the Crossfire Hurricane investigation likely being the real reason for the raid on Mar-A-Lago. Now, Lee Smith, author of THE PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT, is providing support for the same hypothesis. He said that according to people he thoroughly trusts, the FBI raid was a search for RussiaGate documents that they don’t want in Trump’s hands.
In an interview with Joel Pollak on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Sunday,” Smith said the people whose insight he was relying on “have much more insight” and “much more knowledge” than he does. He pointed out what we’ve been saying: that the same cast of characters has been involved in so-called investigations of Trump for years. In fact, Smith recalled a report we recently featured: “FBI Unit Leading Mar-A-Lago Probe Earlier Ran Discredited Trump-Russia Investigation.”
The orchestrated get-Trump effort got started in 2016, or likely even in 2015. Surveillance of Trump started during the Obama administration, and Smith maintains that Obama must have known about it. But now, with the emergence of these whistleblowers, Smith postulates that the anti-Trump operatives might be getting wary, even of each other. “We want them fearful of each other,” he said.
This will help us deter them “while we’re working to restore our constitutional order.”
“In a constitutional order,” he continued, “corrupt federal law enforcement officers would be charged, tried and, if found guilty, convicted. But we don’t live under those circumstances right now...” For the moment, he said, we’re living in more of a “regime order.”
Stephen Kruiser at PJ MEDIA would agree, and he notes in this must-read column that to maintain their hold, the left are having to lie more and more outrageously. For them, it’s full-out ideological war, with the endgame of one-party rule in America. “What has changed now,” he says, “is the level of hyperbole and the complete absence of truthfulness in their rhetoric.”
Finally, Sundance at THE CONSERVATIVE TREEHOUSE gets much more specific about this very situation, asking why Democrats are so intent on attacking Trump and labeling his supporters threats to democracy. He says what we have now can be traced to the passage of the Patriot Act in the aftermath of 9/11, and he nails it here: “What President Obama and AG Eric Holder did was take the pre-existing system and retool it, so the weapons of government conducting surveillance only targeted one side of the political continuum. Domestic terrorists were now defined through the prism of political opposition.”
What we have now is essentially a domestic surveillance state, “with a targeting mechanism based on political ideology,” he says. Really, if you read one article addressing the massive, attempted take-down of Trump that’s going on right now, in plain sight in front of the whole world, this has to be THE ONE. It’s a masterful explanation of how we got here and what the current dynamic is now that a fourth branch of government, the unelected “Intelligence Branch,” has been crafted and put to work with social media platforms and political operatives. It explains why simply defunding the Intelligence Community is not enough, and why DC is so set on federalizing elections and minimizing transparency. (“Our elections have been usurped by the Intelligence Branch,” he says. “Start with honest elections and we will see just how much Democrat AND Republican corruption is dependent on manipulated election results.”)
By the way, this piece supports our suspicion that Obama attorney Lisa Monaco is really running the show at the DOJ, to protect Obama and those responsible for the current “Intelligence Branch,” in what actually is the third term of Barack Obama. (We’d say to look for the next Democrat presidential nominee to be his machine’s choice for Obama Term 4.)
It might be said that the system really has, in a sense, been “fundamentally transformed,” as Obama once infamously said he’d do. “Preserving this system is also what removing Donald Trump is all about,” Sundance concludes. “The targeting of President Trump in order to preserve the system, the system that was created during the Bush administration, then weaponized during the Obama administration, is what the actions of the DOJ and FBI are all about.”
Is it all making sense now? This piece is quite long, but please hold onto it for when you have time to settle in for a fascinating, enlightening and at times shocking read.
California digs a deep, dark hole for Democrats
Here are two rules to keep in mind if you want to stay healthy: (1.) Never handcuff yourself to a homicidal psychopath; and (2.) Never commit your state to do whatever the government of California does.
Incredibly, Democrats who were in charge of several states, including Washington and Massachusetts, actually did #2, which now has many of their residents wanting to go #1 on them. These states are either planning, or are bound by insane laws of their own devising, to go along with California’s attempt to ban sales of all new gas-powered cars by 2035. Yes, California plans to force everyone into an electric vehicle in a state that can’t even generate enough electricity to keep the lights on. And all those other liberal-run states looked at that and said, “Brilliant! We have to do that, too!”
https://www.yahoo.com/
One state that has no interest in joining Californians as they sit in the dark is Virginia. Unfortunately, during that recent small window of Democrats being fully in charge (and Americans are learning how quickly they can destroy everything if given complete power), the Virginia legislature and Gov. Ralph “Blackface” Northam signed a bill requiring Virginia to impose whatever emissions laws California came up with. Now, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is trying to get lawmakers to repeal that idiotic law, arguing that Virginians should not be forced to live under laws dreamed up by unelected bureaucrats in California.
One other possibility for circumventing this is a lawsuit currently being pressed by 17 states against the EPA to rescind its exemption for California to set its own auto emissions standards. The plaintiffs make the entirely reasonable case that it’s a violation of the equal sovereignty of the states to let just one state change federal emissions standards and impose its own standards on manufacturers, causing vehicles to become more expensive for everyone.
No state leader anywhere should be looking to the example of Gavin Newsom and the California state government as anything other than a cautionary tale. You should not want your state to become another California. These days, even Californians don’t want to be Californians, which is why so many of them are becoming transplanted Texans.
PS - Another way in which you don’t want your state to be like California:
LEAVE ME A COMMENT, I READ THEM!
Sarah Palin loses
In a fairly shocking result, Sarah Palin lost the special election runoff to fill the House seat of the late Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young to Democrat Mary Peltola. It’s the first time a Democrat has won that seat in 49 years.
Naturally, the media are beside themselves with glee that Palin won’t be in the House and that they have a story to flog about the big Democrat comeback and the end of the “red wave” talk. I know the last thing America needs right now is another Democrat in Congress, but before you start to despair, please note that this is in no way reflective of the vast majority of races coming up in November. Indeed, there will be a rematch in November for this seat. This election was just to fill it for a few months, until the end of 2022.
First of all, Alaska is still a very red state. I won’t get into the issues with mail-in voting, because I don’t want to go down the conspiracy rabbit hole. It was enough that Alaska recently adopted a complicated and confusing ranked choice voting system, which Palin already called for repealing because she claims it gives an unfair advantage to Democrats, and it appears she was right. This is why it took over two weeks just to figure out who won a House seat. Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com has a good explanation of this weird, baffling and ultimately wildly unfair system.
The system asks voters to pick more than one candidate, ranking them in order of preference, so that determining who wins the seat is like predicting the winner of the Final Four. Instead of having two party primaries to pick two clear contenders, the special election primary ballot had voters pick the top four out of 22 candidates: 16 Republicans, six Democrats, two Libertarians and two Independents. In that race, Peltola won only 10% of the vote, with Republicans Palin and Nick Begich winning 27% and 19% respectively.
In the primary election, Peltola received 36.8% of the vote, Palin received 30.2% of the vote, and Begich received 26.2% of the vote. So the Republican vote was 56.4%.
Finally, in the run-off, Begich came in third, so his votes were divided up by how many voters listed either Peltola or Palin as their second choice. Palin got 50.3% of those, Peltola 28.8% and 11,000 failed to fill in a second choice. That means 11,000 voters whose first choice was a Republican saw their votes discarded while Democrat Peltola’s margin of victory was only 5,000 votes. Nearly 60% of voters chose a Republican, but the District ended up with a Democrat whose share of votes specifically for her was only 40.2%. Imagine the howls from Stacey Abrams about “voter suppression” and “assaults on our democracy” if the parties had been reversed.
Don’t take it too hard, or pay too much attention to the media trying to place a lot of importance on it. Alaska is still a red state, and far more voters wanted a Republican than a Democrat. This race was only a placeholder until the November do-over, when the choice will be clearer and turnout even larger, although the same thing could happen again if Republicans don’t start uniting and stop the intraparty squabbling. But if you have to take something away from it, try this:
NEVER let your state adopt this kind of complicated ballot system (another awful idea pioneered by California) that confuses voters, splits votes and puts the wrong candidate into office. And don’t get complacent about a “red wave.” The Democrats have put in a lot of “insurance” policies in place in the election system to make sure that their protection of “our democracy” isn’t derailed by actual democracy. So work, volunteer, donate, campaign, vote and make sure all your Republican friends and relatives VOTE. Do it as if the survival of America depended on it, because it does.
Biden's Speech
There have been a lot of mean “old man” jokes about President Biden soiling himself. Last night, Americans got the chance to watch that process play out over half an hour on live TV. Biden managed not only to soil himself in front of the world, but also to soil Independence Hall, the American flag, the US Marines, the Democratic Party and the Presidency of the United States.
I called it the speech that will go down in history as the “GET OFF MY LAWN!” speech when I appeared on Hannity with guest host Tammy Bruce. For someone who hates fossil fuels such as our plenteous supply of natural gas, Joe Biden used up about 10 years’ worth of our supply by “gaslighting” the 74 million people who voted for Trump. I had NO idea voting for someone other than Joe Biden made me an “extremist, un-American, hate-filled, and an enemy of democracy.” It was truly a disgraceful abuse of the Presidential Seal. But the reason most people won’t hold him and his hate-filled Democrat party accountable is because ol’ Joe has a willing partner in the media. They will mostly cover for him, defend his bile-filled screed, and justify it.
This may be the first time in history that a presidential speech could be considered an impeachable offense all by itself. Some of the more charitable terms used to describe it, across the political spectrum, included “dark,” “divisive,” “demonic,” “menacing,” “appalling,” “bitter,” “un-American,” “hate-filled” and “Mussolini-like.” At no time in American history, even during the lead up to the Civil War, has any President stood before the nation in his official capacity and slandered tens of millions of his fellow Americans as evil for disagreeing with his political views. Biden said, “I believe America is at an inflection point” as to whether it will be “a nation of hope and unity and optimism, or a nation of fear, division, and darkness.” At least he was right about that. He then went on to prove it by making the sales pitch for fear, division and darkness.
To their credit, the major TV networks that normally have no problem with ceding prime time to Democrat campaign commercials masquerading as “official government business” just said no to Biden's State of the Abomination Address. I don’t know whether that was because they realized that his scurrilous demonization of half the US population was clearly unfit to air, or they realized what damage it would do to the Democrats’ electoral prospects and were trying to save Grandpa from himself.
Of course, MSNBC aired it, and some of their Democrat Renfields actually praised Biden’s horrifying rhetoric. But while CNN aired it, even they were critical of some aspects of it, like the two Marines forced to flank Biden, an obvious attempt to co-opt and politicize the military.
How could any President be so utterly clueless as to not only think that this kind of slanderous demonization of his fellow Americans would appeal to anyone but the most unhinged leftwing extremists, but not even to consider how he was encouraging those deranged nutjobs to commit violence against Republicans? Because despite the blizzard of lies he was spewing, he can’t be dumb enough not to know that the main source of dangerous, violent extremism in America today is not patriotic, pro-life, churchgoing, working class moms and dads in red MAGA caps.
In Biden’s fevered brain, what makes you a dangerous extremist and threat to democracy is believing that we shouldn’t have millions of illegal immigrants pouring across the border, along with the human trafficking, violence and deadly drugs that entails; that we shouldn’t be kowtowing to China and Iran, or begging Saudi Arabia for oil; that criminals should be behind bars and not law-abiding citizens who are cowering in their barricaded homes; that schools shouldn’t brainwash small children with indoctrination in socialism, transgenderism and graphic sexual practices; and that babies in the womb shouldn’t be brutally dismembered right up to – and perhaps beyond – the moment of birth. Funny, I seem to recall a time when believing that any of that stuff was good made you a dangerous extremist. Now, those are his official policies and you’re a dangerous, “semi-fascist” extremist if you oppose them.
A handful of angry Trump supporters rioted for a couple of hours on one day in 2021. Despite Biden’s claims, I don’t know of a single Republican, myself included, who didn’t condemn the January 6th violence and call for the perpetrators to face the full legal consequences (the ACTUAL perpetrators; not grannies who wandered through an open door of a public building and took a few selfies.) The true danger from radical violent extremists is 99.99% from the left, as witness the 570+ BLM/Antifa riots that ravaged America’s cities in 2020, injuring over 1,000 police officers and doing more than a billion dollars in damage. The reaction of Biden’s VP to that was to contribute to their bail fund so they could get out and do it again.
Or witness the illegal protests at SCOTUS Justices’ homes that Biden’s DOJ refused to stop. One of his unhinged followers even tried to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh. Biden’s reaction to that was no reaction. He couldn’t even bring himself to condemn an attempted assassination of someone he disagrees with politically. Did he even think about how this speech was going to be interpreted as a call to arms by genuine violent leftist extremists like that, or like the masked goons of Antifa, who have recently started toting AR-15s? And he calls Republicans “dangerous extremists” and a “threat to democracy!”
Normally, I reject out of hand any attempts to tar political opponents with comparisons to the Nazis or Hitler. It’s usually a disgusting and cynical belittling of the true horrors of the Holocaust (and sadly, one that the Democrats have embraced wholeheartedly.) But many commentators couldn’t help pointing out how frighteningly Hitlerian this speech was, with Biden angrily denouncing half the citizens of America in terms that sounded eerily like Hitler’s demonization of the Jews (“they live in the shadow of lies!”) while shaking his raised fists in front of a flag bathed in blood-red light and flanked by two soldiers at attention. It might as well have come with a credit reading “Cinematography by Leni Riefenstahl.”
All meme makers had to do was add a couple of swastikas and a toothbrush mustache and their job was done.
For those who did want to avoid invoking Nazi references, I saw comparisons of it to Vladimir Putin’s demonization of his political opponents, and to Darth Vader, the dictator imagery in the movie of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” and the infamous “Two-Minute Hate” speeches in George Orwell’s “1984.”
As much as I disapprove of foul language, especially on TV, I have to admit that the only moment of true American spirit during that entire speech was when an unseen heckler yelled, "F--- Joe Biden!" It was a well-timed reminder to Biden that the First Amendment does still exist.
Astoundingly, Biden also called for “unity” in this speech. Well, he accomplished that. All but a tiny handful of radical left wackos are today united in universal condemnation of what could easily be the single most cringe-inducing public appearance by an American President since this nation was born. And yes, I'm including the time President Bush threw up on the Prime Minister of Japan.
Further reading: Some more commentaries on last night’s low point in Presidential history, from Prof. William Jacobson at the Legal Insurrection blog…
…Paula Bolyard and Stephen Kruiser of PJ Media…
…Spencer Brown at Townhall.com…
Here are a couple of round-ups of comments from various sources about this “rancid” “disgrace to the office of the Presidency.”
Finally, although this was written before the speech about similar comments Biden already made this week, I know you’ll want to read what Kurt Schichter has to say about Biden and the Democrats’ desperate attempt to distract you from their catastrophic policy failures with their fantasies of dictatorial power and a one-party state.
I Just Wanted to Say:
Thank you for reading the Sunday Standard.
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