The Usual Idiots that Gave Us the FISA Mess

Adan Avelar

Christopher Chantrill  "Okay, so now the Nunes FISA Memo is out and it shows that the Justice Department and the FBI were used to wiretap the Trump campaign on behalf of the Democratic Party.

"I doubt that this game of using the FBI and the DOJ and the FISA court to assist the Democratic Party in its vital national work of spying on the opposition started with the 2016 election and the Trump campaign. I’ll bet you a nickel that “they” have been doing this for a while. That’s because the facts as they have come out do not suggest at all that the opposition surveillance team was doing it for the first time, or worrying that “we could do this, but it would be wrong.' " . . .

. . . 

"We know this about the Obama political operation: that, going back to Obama’s senate campaigns, Obama’s operation has used illegal methods to dig up dirt on the opposing candidate and win elections. They made their bones getting information about the opposing candidates’ sealed divorce records. Somehow the campaign used its local “deep state” contacts to unseal sealed and confidential court records. Hey, why stop now?

"A campaign with people willing to break the letter and the spirit of the law will inevitably staff its administration with similar folk.

"And then Shakespeare kicks in with “oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” That’s what happens when you have an administration headed by an idiot who got there by cheating. Once you start cheating you find that you can’t stop.

"I am coming to believe that the best way to understand politics and war is to assume that the principals are idiots. Let’s apply the principle to U.S. presidents since World War II." . . .

Chantrill then gives his assessment of each president from Truman to Obama and why he grades them thus. It appears he consider the jury still out on President Trump, once referred to in 2012 by Britt Hume as "zany".

Truman and Eisenhower: not idiots. . . . Lyndon Johnson: idiot.  . . .Richard Nixon: half idiot. . . . Jimmy Carter: idiot.  . . .Ronald Reagan: not idiot. . . . George H.W. Bush: idiot. . . . Bill Clinton: half idiot. . . . George W. Bush: idiot. . . .*Barack Obama: idiot. . . . 

* Blames Bush for the housing bubble, but I contend it was Barney Frank and liberals who forced foolish home loans on people who could not measure up financially. President Bush warned Frank but the Democrats blew him off and continued the policy until the market blew up. TD