FBI, Circling the Drain?

I have had the honor and the privilege of working closely with the FBI many times during my nearly 34 years at State. We worked against Soviets, Cubans, East Germans, Bulgarians, drug dealers, pedophiles, criminal fugitives, money launderers, terrorists, fraudsters, and on suspected security breaches. I had tremendous respect for the professionalism and dedication of these FBI agents. They were world class in every way. My respect for the FBI was shared by many in foreign intelligence and security services with whom we worked. I remember, in particular, the British, who were markedly ambiguous in their attitude towards the CIA, had great respect for the FBI's investigative prowess and, as one Brit friend in the intel service said to me, "their humourless thoroughness." I had a lot of friends in the Bureau; they were terrific patriots with a morale and esprit d'corps rare among civilians and more akin to what I found with SEALs, Rangers, SAS, US and Royal Marines, and French Legionnaires. They were incredibly proud of their agency's history and accomplishments, and took it hard and personally when that agency or agents screwed up, e.g., Robert Hansen.

Given what we have seen of late, however, I, reluctantly, have to give vent to growing skepticism about the FBI and to the damage wrought on that jewel of an agency by political interference and correctness.

The investigation of the Clinton Crime Family and, in particular, that of SecState Clinton's use of  a private email server for classified information, and her use of the State Department as her and Bill's ATM leaves much to be desired. I, for example, cannot understand how an apparently morally upright and professionally competent Director, such as James Comey, did not go public with a resignation slammed down on the President's desk when Attorney General Lynch met "secretly" with Bill Clinton on that Arizona tarmac days before the FBI was to wrap-up its initial investigation into the Hillary Clinton email scandal. I do not understand how Comey could have made the public statement that he made on July 5 when he gave Hillary Clinton a pass on her scandalous, unethical, dangerous, and illegal use of a private server for official work. I do not for a second believe, despite what Comey said at the time, that nobody, including presumably Lynch, Obama, and the Clintons, knew Comey would recommend no indictment. I knew it the minute Lynch announced beforehand that she would accept whatever recommendation the FBI made. Right. Sure thing. Did Donna Brazile send you an email?

The FBI leadership made a hash of the investigation into Clinton. It was such a hash, that, reportedly, Comey's desk received a large number of outraged letters of resignation from agents justifiably angry over what Comey had done. He needed an excuse to try to save his reputation, when along comes Huma Abedin's husband El Perverso Anthony Carlos Danger Weiner.  Apparently, an investigation into his "sexting" with a minor girl revealed tens-of-thousands of emails on his computer which MIGHT have relevance to the original investigation into Hillary's emails. So, reboot: A public reboot via a vague letter to the Congress that requires a lot of reading between the lines.

The Dems, once full of praise for Comey, have exploded in anger calling Comey the most foul of names imaginable, including the foulest of all, "Republican." The Dems are desperately trying to put the focus on Comey and take it from the core issue: Hillary Clinton's despicable behavior.

But do they have a point? Yes, somewhat. I understand Comey's predicament. I understand that he called Lynch's bluff when she said she would not interfere and would accept whatever the FBI concluded.

That said, however, this would not have been necessary had the FBI done the right thing to begin with; I am just an amateur but it sure seems to me that the investigation did not press key individuals, including Hillary, very hard. Why wasn't this computer found initially? Was Huma Abedin's house searched? The letter sent to Congress by Comey, I have to say, was unfair to Hillary Clinton and to the electoral process. It is a massive innuendo which raises all sorts of questions that nobody can answer and leaves the field open to all sorts of speculation.

Now, that said, of course, we have the relentless deluge of Wikileaks data which has provided a context for concluding that Hillary and her Gang are crooks of the grossest kind. So maybe Comey was trying to get ahead of the Wikileaks? I don't know. Maybe he hates Clinton as much as Obama does--note Obama's defense of Comey. I don't know. All that and more is possible.

What I do know is that one of the last institutions held in high regard, the FBI, has been dragged into the political swamp created by the progressives. Another victory for the Alinsky brigades.

No Reason to Vote for Hillary

Trump was not my first choice for Presidential candidate. I liked Gov. Walker of Wisconsin: he had a long record of accomplishments; a track record of taking on the progs and beating them; a good sense of humor, and--like me--a face made for radio. He did not do well in the primaries and faded out. After that, I remind aloof, and briefly flirted with voting for Rubio . . . but in the end Trump's brash, non-PC style won me over. He was saying the things that the elite establishment does not want said. He was a full-throated practitioner of the first amendment. Sure, his conservative credentials were far from perfect (here)--and who has such?--and, in the end, I decided I would take a chance on a nationalist populist.  We got Trump warts and all, and some of the NeverTrump crowd will still not vote for him, unable to see past the warts to his message and the movement he heads. OK, fair enough.

Let's look at the other side of the battlefield: Hillary Clinton. For the life of me, I cannot think of a rational reason to vote for her UNLESS I was getting some sort of sinecure, or was able to get in on that Clinton Foundation scam to rip off poor Haitians to help a billionaire Irishman secure a mobile phone monopoly on that ravaged half island.

What has Hillary ever accomplished? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. At least nothing positive.

She has a record of corruption, lying, poor judgement, and ethical lapses that would have sent dozens of politicians to an early date on Political Boot Hill. Her vaunted feminism is a joke; why, for example, does she run as Hillary Clinton? Why not Rodham? She has latched onto her politically brilliant and morally compromised husband for a lifetime ride. Nothing is going to get her to loosen her grip on that trolley car. She and her husband have become fabulously wealthy playing the "We are here to help the poor" progressive game and have developed a loyal criminal entourage that puts those of drug cartel bosses and mafia dons to shame.

She is so corrupt that even, even Comey's FBI have decided to launch a whole new investigation of her and her friends.

Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt politician to emerge on the American political scene since, well, since Bill Clinton.

The whole thing makes no sense.

If you can't vote for Trump for whatever reason, then don't. But for crying out loud don't vote for Hillary Clinton . . .

OK, going to climb into my truck and head off to the airport. My son is flying to Chicago, and I am his personal Uber . . . in fact, I call myself Über alles . .  . catchy, that.

The Polls and My Shooting: Don't Count on a Bullseye

Finally made it to the range. Thought the Diplowife would join me, but she saw a Ross store and decided to go there while I went to do manly-man things.

Took my new .44 Mag plus my two .357 Mags. On this range run, I included my old reliable .357 from Guyana days, a wonderful piece of iron which I shamefully had neglected for some years. Cleaned it up. It shot wonderfully. That gun is over 55 years old and still works -- unlike its owner.

I did very well with the two .357s, and pretty well with the .44 when using .44 Special "Cowboy Action Rounds." Not so great when I went full .44 Magnum. OK, but nothing to brag about. Let's just say it's a good thing those splatter targets don't shoot back . . . I, however, did like the sound. Quite impressive even with a headset on.

My Washington-based son, a political junkie of the first degree, gave me a lesson yesterday and today on why the election polls are not to be believed. He says most polls have way over-sampled Democrats and make the invalid assumption that over 95% of Democrats will actually vote for The Hillary. He seems very confident of a Donald victory on November 8. I, however, am more cautious having gone through this in 2012, when I was pretty sure Romney would win. The electoral college remains a challenge for Trump, but . . . we'll see.

Now, of course, adding fuel to the fire of skepticism about the polls are some Wikileaks which apparently show senior Democratic activists discussing getting friendly pollsters to oversample Democrats in their polling data bases. I also find it suspicious how all the press are joining in a chorus of "It's All Over!" I can see this as a strategy trying to discourage Trump voters from going to the polls, but wonder if it might not have the opposite effect, and discourage Hillary voters who are markedly unenthusiastic about their candidate to begin with. I guess we will know the answers soon enough . . . assuming the illegal alien vote doesn't throw all calculations into the dust bin.

Best to disconnect from the media for a bit . . . allow sanity to return.

Love the smell of Hoppe's 9.

Reflections on my .44 Mag & the End of Our Civilization

Picked it up.

Oh, but first, our Spanish visitors left yesterday for Las Vegas in the company of my son, who knows his way around Vegas better than Elvis ever did--worrying, that. What euros our guests have left will soon clatter into the vault of some casino or another. Watch the euro-dollar exchange rate.

Yes, I picked it up.

California's absurd ten-day waiting period over, I drove my 'Stang this fine sunny Saturday morning to Turner's and picked up my new S&W 44 mag with a 6.5 inch barrel. A magnificent piece of work. Clint Eastwood has nothing on me now . . . well, except rugged good looks, international fame, and hundreds of millions of dollars . . . but besides that, nothing.

As I oiled and wiped my new S&W and put it to rest in the safe with the other 20 or so handguns (until range day, Monday), I couldn't help but think, "Does anybody really need a .44 Magnum?" I mean, "Aren't .357s and .45s enough for anybody?" Hmmm? The answer, of course, is, those are the wrong questions. The proper question is, "Why as a free citizen can I not have any gun I want?" In other words, where in the Constitution does it say the nanny state can determine what gun I can and can't own? I have no intention of holding up a liquor store, shooting up a church, or killing the neighbor's hideous cat. Why should the actions of criminals determine what I can or cannot do? Perhaps it's true that nobody needs a .44 Mag, a GT Mustang, a cigar, a fine whisky, a Harley, a speed boat, a large tattoo of an eagle, or an ill-fitting suit with a pink carnation in the lapel. But what if I want one, and can get one without taking anything from anybody or hurting anybody?

Freedom, baby, that's what it's all about, and freedom and its corollary fun are what progressives hate. If you are having fun, they are not in control.

This made me think about the current "uproar" over Trump's refusal to endorse the results of the November 8 election beforehand. That's the other thing progressives do. Not only do they tell you what you cannot have, they tell you what you must do and have: such as, give an ever increasing portion of your wealth to the progressives; wear a motorcycle helmet; wear seat belts; not eat your meat medium rare, and on and on.

In fact, I am going to go on about some of that "on and on."

Above all, the progressives want you not only to tolerate certain things they favor, they want and insist you endorse them. We, therefore, must not only go along with the progressive gag that there is no electoral fraud, we must endorse now the November 8 results of an electoral system we know is rife with progressive corruption of all sorts. We must not only tolerate gay marriage, we must endorse it; we must not only tolerate the sexual perversion known as transsexualism but must endorse it and allow these perverts to use bathrooms with our children. A baker, or a pizzeria owner must cater events his religion and conscience tell him not to. Speech codes determine the limits of discussion and even redefine the words we use.

We must all chant, "Diversity is our strength," when in many cities in our beleaguered Western Civilization, we cannot walk safely down the street, or take a bus thanks to the diversity that has been imposed upon us by progressive immigration laws and practices. Stockholm, once one of the world's safest cities, is now the rape capital of Europe thanks to progressive immigration policies; in fact, police there are instructed no longer to mention the "ethnicity" of the rapists. Here in the US, Trump states a truth that any Central American migrant headed north knows: women migrants in Mexico will be raped. He gets chastised for being a racist, for not refusing to see what is in front of his nose. We must not only tolerate the importation of thousands upon thousands of Muslim refugees who adhere to a creed that advocates our enslavement and death, we must embrace them; we must make up history showing that they have always been part of our culture; we must encourage MORE of them to come to the West. Any violence emanating from followers of Islam is to be attributed to lax gun laws,  and the failure to embrace the Muslims in our midsts even more lovingly.

They want us to be like Rohm's SA "Brownshirts" screaming, "Heil Hitler!" as they were executed by the firing squads sent by Hitler; like the victims of Stalin's purges forced to proclaim the greatness of the Comrade as they were lead off to receive a bullet in the back of the head.

Trump, win or lose, has managed to demonstrate how rotten our civilization has become under the tutelage of the progressives. We see in the volumes of Wikileaks documents how these progressives are so confident in their corruption and in their ability to manipulate us that they lay out their comments and plans in insecure emails and other texts. They can't imagine a world in which the stuff they say and plan might just be "triggering."

Triggering? Back to my .44 mag.

Molon Labe . . . and I just mailed in my ballot for Trump . . .

The Final Debate

The debate. I didn't watch it. I listened to it on Sirius radio as I drove back from San Diego. I, therefore, did not see the faces, the gestures or any of the other body language. Just listening to it, however, I thought Trump won most of it. He certainly gave the best summation either of the two has given at the end of any of the debates. He rocked her on the Clinton Foundation and on Wikileaks. I thought her answers were weak and tired.

Got to give credit to Chris Wallace who I thought was BY FAR the best moderator of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. He brought up topics previously ignored and pressed both candidates, and did a credible job of controlling both candidates without being obnoxious.

As usual, however, Trump gave the media something to yammer on about. He, again, stepped on his own performance. He, frankly, gave a bad answer on the question of whether he would accept the results of the election if he lost. I cringed while driving upon hearing his "I'll keep you in suspense." That gave Clinton the opening to launch one of her faux patriotic speeches about how that was unprecedented in 240 years of American elections, blah, blah, blah. She, of course, ignored, among others, the election of 1860, when a good chunk of American states seceded from the Union because they would not accept the election of Abraham Lincoln, and, more recently and less dramatic, Al Gore's lengthy refusal to admit he had been beaten in Florida by George W. Bush--both of those refusals, by the way, were by the Democratic Party. Trump needs a better answer, especially since his running mate and his own daughter have stated that, of course, Trump would accept the results. Bad coordination that.

I think Trump should have turned the question around and said something along the lines of, "Hillary, will you, right now, disavow the actions of your party--which we learned about through Wikileaks--to disrupt my rallies with violence and intimidate my followers? Will you join me in insisting that voters must be US citizens and that poll workers must insist that those who vote are indeed Americans and eligible to vote? Will you ask your party machine to help scrub from the rolls dead voters, illegal aliens, felons, etc.? Will you promise not to do what you did to Bernie Sanders? Will you abandon the Democratic Party's long, long history of electoral violence and fraud?"

Anyhow, yes, I think Trump "won" the debate, but will it make a difference? How many genuinely undecided were watching? Plus, of course, millions of people, living and dead, American and foreign, already have cast ballots in the idiotic process known as "early voting."

The Integrity of the Electoral Process

This will have to be short.

I am playing gracious host to some very nice Diplowife relatives from Spain. We spent yesterday in Hollywood (lotta freaks) and today at the Mission in San Juan Capistrano. Tomorrow is a visit to the USS Midway Museum in San Diego and then a Lakers-Warriors game at Valley View Casino; the day after, we are off to Universal Studios. Lot of highway, lot of miles.

While driving, I was listening on the radio to all sorts of progressives whining about "how dare" Trump question the "integrity" of our electoral process. You can link to all sorts of stories reporting the same. We have progressives telling us that it's essentially unpatriotic, even treasonous, to put in doubt the integrity of the electoral system. They cite all sorts of spurious data "proving" that voter fraud is almost unheard of, and very minor.

I have written before (here and here, for example) how vulnerable our electoral system is to voter fraud. As a person who has done a lot of formal election observing all over the world, I can assure you that I would never certify US elections as above board. We are the only country I have seen where voter identification is not required, where voters do not have to prove they are citizens. Of course there is fraud. The way the laws are written, however, makes it almost impossible to prove. God help the brave poll worker who challenges somebody to prove his or her citizenship. Let me be blunt: huge numbers of illegal and legal aliens will vote.

I heard Obama give an absurd defense of the system saying that its decentralized nature makes it almost impossible for fraud. Nonsense. Voting in more than one district is very possible and done. The Diplowife and I, for example, have in the past received mail-in ballots from Virginia, Florida, and California for the same election. We are honest folks so we threw away the extra ballots. And, of course, for decades Democrats have used their urban machines to register dead voters, and to provide multiple ballots to living ones. Our electoral college system makes voter fraud even more important as a small win in a big state, throws a huge chunk of electoral votes to the "winner." Go no further than the JFK campaign of 1960 and the state of Illinois.

I love the business that we are not allowed to "question" the voting process and its institutions. Might I suggest that we also make it not-allowed, for example, for progressives to question the integrity of urban police forces and that they must automatically accept the police version of any shooting? Wonder if the progs would agree to that?

Questioning is the essence of democracy.

Back to hosting . . .

Appalling Days

Haven't been writing as the Diplowife has returned from Spain. As I feared, my housekeeping did not meet her standards; your humble Diplomad, therefore, has been busy vacuuming, cleaning mirrors, wiping dust, mopping floors, and throwing out garbage. I don't know how she does it. She walks into a perfectly clean room and immediately spots the two beer cans on the foosball table, the old sneaker on the ottoman, and the half-eaten submarine on the sofa. How does she do it? Anyhow, the two dogs did not escape her wrath either, and have been sentenced to bath row, with execution scheduled for tomorrow. She shows no appreciation for how I recharged the battery in the '66 Olds, had the oil changed in the Expedition and the 2015 Mustang, fixed a tail-light problem in HER Jeep, started the paperwork for the ten-day waiting period on a new S&W .44 Mag, cleaned my guns, ordered hundreds of rounds of ammo from Cheaper-than-Dirt, or even how I had a gun safe installed in my walk-in closet. All that passes unawares in Diplowife world!

All of the aforementioned drama has kept me from watching, listening or reading too much election coverage. That's fine. I, frankly, am sick of it all; it's all been said. There's nothing more to say. I have never seen such a concentrated and coordinated effort by the media, working as the armed wing of the DNC, to destroy politically and personally a candidate. The polls? Who knows? They're all over the place, and many of them are extensions of that effort to destroy Trump. So, who knows where the voters actually stand? Are there enough ignorant, anti-American, progressive sheep along with some electoral corruption out there to put the Hillary criminal in the White House? Perhaps so. I give up reading the political scene.

The stuff coming out almost daily from Wikileaks re Clinton should be enough to derail any campaign and launch a thousand criminal investigations. Nothing. The MSM is trying to ignore the incredible evidence of illegality and immorality by the Clintons and to fill the air with 30-year-old allegations of sexual advances by Trump. Contrary to some, I do not believe allegations of sexual misconduct should be automatically believed any more than allegations of any other misconduct unless backed up by evidence: Duke Lacrosse? UVA? Ring a bell? I have a hard time taking too seriously some of the women who have come forward four weeks before the election with tales of alleged "inappropriate" conduct by Trump decades ago. I must call BS. At the same time, of course, there is a near total blackout on reporting of actual misconduct, up to and including rape by Bill Clinton and the enabling actions by Hillary.

The whole thing stinks and I fear for our Republic as I never have before.