Posts Tagged → FBI
Dear GOP, it’s not about the economy, stupid
If you want to determine a person’s mindset, ask them tough questions. If they dodge those questions, or avoid them altogether, it is a clear signal where their mind is, and is not.
And thus we find the GOPe (Republican Party establishment) folks talking very loudly about the economy. As if that matters when a free America is being burnt to the ground, economy and all, by the Biden Administration and the Democrat Party’s anarchic friends like BLM, the anti-Republican so-called Lincoln Project, RINOs, and Antifa.
America’s most defining characteristic, the rule of law/ equal protection under the law/ equal accountability under the law regardless of station in life, has been utterly blown to smithereens in the past three months by the Biden Administration in coordination with the Washington, DC, administrative state like the FBI, DOJ, BATFE, etc.
Totally innocent Americans across the nation are having their front doors kicked in at 4:00am by heavily armed SWAT teams of FBI agents on made-up charges, brandishing search and seizure warrants out of a Cracker Jack box. These so-called “law enforcement agents” then steal everything of value or of necessity to the family in their home, lock down their bank accounts, and whisk these innocent people away to solitary confinement in jails without access to attorneys or prompt judicial hearings. These people are law-abiding patriots who had the temerity to lawfully assemble and petition their government for one main grievance: The Democrat Party’s theft of the 2020 election, and well, then about the two stolen senate seats in Georgia.
In doing these ultra-violent, over-gunned, unnecessary arrests, the corrupt, un-American, totalitarian message the corrupt Biden Administration and their corrupt administrative state allies at the FBI are sending is Don’t mess with us. We will destroy you. And they mean it, because while none of these innocent political prisoners the FBI is taking away and locking up in darkness have been accused of financial crimes, their bank accounts are being frozen. Which renders the family unable to pay bills, pay their mortgage, pay an attorney to defend them.
And while rifling through these people’s personal things inside their homes, the FBI agents are also taking family computers and tablets used for their small businesses and managing health medications that have zero to do with someone protesting at the US Capitol (The People’s House) on January 6th. The FBI is simply acting in a punitive way, using its huge law enforcement powers to abuse and hurt people because of basic political differences.
I don’t know why it is so hard for the GOP/GOPe to say this, but this FBI & DOJ detonation of the rule of law is the issue in America today. Everything else pales in comparison. Nothing else matters if your own government is using its huge police powers (given to it by We, The People to protect We, The People) to round up innocent citizen We, The People political prisoners, deprive them of their liberties, deprive them of due process, steal their personal property and never return it, and destroy their lives out of a vindictive political difference. Which should never matter to an impartial law enforcement agency, which of course the FBI and DOJ have shown themselves to no longer be; these two rogue agencies are strictly a domestic terror arm of the Democratic Party, used to punish its political enemies.
So hello, earth calling to GOPe, please stop sending out emails about how Joe Biden’s crappy economy is going to cause inflation. Of course Biden’s economy is going to be a disaster. How else do you think the Democrat Party will put as many Americans on the government dole as possible, if not by depriving us of an honest day’s living? Dependency on government handouts is a cornerstone of all tyrannies, as is the dependence on government leniency in law enforcement areas. The Democrat Party and its Washington, DC, minions want us all groveling on our knees, begging for bread and to not be beaten again.
America as we knew it since 1787 ended on January 20th 2021, and now it is up to Americans to re-assert their ownership of the government apparatus that is quickly making a mockery of the most basic tenets of democratic self-rule. We would like some help from the Republican Party in this undertaking. The people who work at the FBI and DOJ are paid by us, the US taxpayers, and they are supposed to work for us, not against us; not as some hired gun meant to terrorize the countryside and bring the population to heel, to get into line and do as we are told by our masters in DC. The FBI’s blatantly unconstitutional behavior does require some political pushback, by someone.
Dear GOPe, it is not about the economy, stupids. Rather, our present situation is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the very core of being an American, all of which constitutional rights are under direct violent assault by the Biden administration and its taxpayer-paid henchmen at the FBI/DOJ/ US Postal Service/ BATFE etc. Could you Republicans please lend a hand, and help us citizens out of this un-American situation? Or are you guys all in such serious avoidance about the giant alligator that is not yet eating you, but which Sir Winston Churchill once warned will eventually get to you, too?
Months later the actual facts with this FBI-inspired violence remain unknown. Given that the Biden Administration is aggressively facilitating border crossing by criminals and child traffickers, why would the Biden FBI suddenly go after them inside America? This victim was probably a pro America patriot, defending himself against a lawless, politicized FBI assault.
When law-abiding Americans fear their own government
Roughly half of Americans are living in deep fear of their own government right now. These are law-abiding, tax-paying, job-holding Americans, and there is no reason why they should fear their own government. The American government belongs to them, and its sole purpose is to protect them and serve them.
And yet, the new Biden regime is openly at war with its political opponents, to the point where the Dept. of Justice and the FBI are forming a sort of SWAT team to attack individuals these two deeply corrupted agencies believe must be locked up. One guy was just arrested by a rogue FBI agent, and he is facing ten years in prison for making anti-Clinton memes in the 2016 election. The same exact meme was used by a Democrat activist against Trump in the 2016 election, and yet she is not under arrest.
Plenty of other examples of a Washington DC elite gone hog wild against the People it is supposed to serve. Building a wall around the US Capitol, which is The People’s House, to keep the public out, while tearing down America’s southern border wall meant to keep disease-ridden illegal aliens from illegally invading our country to the detriment of the people who actually live here.
This situation is ludicrous, except that if you speak out about it, you can be “disappeared” by the FBI just like political opponents in South American dictatorships. Some radical, rogue FBI agent will invent false charges against you and that’s that, you are caught up in the Washington DC net of official rogues and villains, determined to punish anyone who dares stand in their way of taking full control of America.
Perhaps the best symbol of just how evil and illegitimate the Beijing Biden regime is, are the extra National Guard troops now pouring into Washington DC. Does America now have more troops guarding its fascist dictator in the White House than North Korea has protecting its Dictator Kim? What a great achievement, Biden gang!
If the Biden gang needs all these troops to protect them from the American people, then it’s probable that the American people did not vote for or select Biden to be their president. Only an illegitimate and unpopular pretender does what Biden is doing. But it is why the Biden regime needs all this official fear and oppression against their political opponents.
And to all the regular Democrat Party folks watching this un-American farce unfold, and just loving it, now you know what happened in 1930s Germany, and how the good German people turned into stark raving mad butchers. Germany’s Nazi Party spent ten years scapegoating and delegitimizing Germany’s Jews, and in 1933 the Nazis launched a very public shaming and humiliation attack on Jews across Germany, called “Kristallnacht.” After that night, it was easy for the Nazi government to persuade enough Germans that no matter how patriotic or morally good their tax-paying Jewish neighbors were, the fact that they were simply Jews was good enough to throw them into concentration camps and steal everything they owned.
This same exact dynamic is playing out now in America, against conservatives and American patriots, with the second totally sham illegal fake “impeachment” of President Donald Trump intended not for legal purposes, but to delegitimize Trump and his political supporters. So that they can be officially oppressed and disappeared. And so many “good Democrats” are happily, even giddily going along with this.
Should we make these Democrats wear black and red arm bands, so we know who they are? They want to pin a yellow star on all of Trump’s supporters, so let’s clearly demarcate both sides. Let’s make it absolutely clear where everyone stands as this official fear and oppression campaign keeps rolling along, steamrolling freedom in its path.
Pence-Biden first week looking so awesome
Without US VP Mike Pence, President Joe Biden would not have been possible. Recall that at the hour of our nation’s greatest need in modern times, Mike Pence refused to follow the Constitutional process and return the competing electors back to their states for re-certification. In an openly lawless election process flawed from Day Two and Three and Four and so on, that moment was the best opportunity for actually following the US Constitution and law in the 2020 election, and so VP Pence said
“I feel constrained by the Constitution” from returning the contested electors to their home states for another state-by-state electoral vote certification process. In which President Donald Trump would have won the Electoral College vote. And so Pence simply counted the electors the way he wanted to count them, and declared criminal fraud Joe Biden the President of the United States.
Mind you, Mike Pence is a verrrry high minded, religious man. Very serious. Oh yes sir, he is quite pure and even keeled. He was so concerned about the US Constitution that he stamped as kosher a clearly fraudulent and unlawful election process that resulted in the most anti-Constitution people possible running America.
That’s right; Martyr Mike Pence turned the safekeeping of America’s Constitution over to a bunch of lawless savages who have been doing everything they could for decades to eradicate the Constitution. That showed everyone just how genuinely serious and somber he was on January 6th.
And so this is why we get to acknowledge this incoming criminal administration as the Pence/Biden Administration. And so Pence now gets all the credit for forced transgender bathrooms in taxpayer-funded government schools, where little girls and little boys get to watch one another go potty. Just so some strange adults get their odd sexual gratification in public. And this is just the beginning of the fun! By next week the FBI/KGB witch hunt will begin in earnest and lots of innocent taxpaying citizens will be attacked, assaulted, jailed, and falsely accused, while hundreds of thousands of people who have never set foot in America are bused in and given taxpayer money to get their new lives started here.
Yep, Mike Pence is a real serious American. Congrats on your first week in office, Pence. Looks like it’s gonna be a real doozy. Guess you are making up for having been a big quiet zero the past four years. You are sure showing us. You sure are getting your revenge on America.
Official lawlessness about to become unimaginable
Once a political party is willing to risk everything by stealing a national presidential election, they are willing to do everything else necessary to cement that conquest into stone, so that they are never held accountable in the future.
And as we have seen in just one week, the now official merger between the national mainstream Big Media, Big Tech (facebook, twitter, youtube, etc), and the lawless Democrat Party is about one thing: Absolute control over every single American.
Worse yet, every institution is now assisting the official lawlessness: The various state bar associations are trying to eject and dis-bar attorneys who have stood up to the official lawlessness, state licensing organizations are trying to de-certify professionals who have had their own opinions that are different than the Democrat Party narrative. And so on. There is an all-out war being made on free speech, free thought, freedom of association by the Democrat Party and their allies.
And this assault on America is about to become unimaginable in the weeks after criminal Joe Biden is sworn into office on an oath he will immediately break.
One of the things that has really bothered me over the past five years is that I did not get to write more about the events, trips, sights and natural features I have experienced. Summer time is usually devoted to family trips to pretty places, national and state parks, etc., and there is so much cool stuff to write about. Some of the most-read posts on this blog have been about exactly those family trips and adventures. Our readers were probably other mothers and fathers looking into potential travel plans for their own families.
But instead of getting to write about the fun stuff, with pictures of our kids holding up their biggest bass or standing at the edge of some scenic vista, the whirlwind of forced culture war and endless Democrat Party lawlessness has demanded that anyone who gives a whit about democracy and Constitutional government stay on top of the sustained assault on our rights and way of life by responding to it.
In the coming week I will do my best to lay out a list of steps the average American can take to repulse the assault on a free America. It is nothing you will hear on talk radio, because all the radio hosts seem to have been immediately cowed since last week into recommending extra prayer, longer showers, brighter clothing, and more better coffee as the antidotes to the constitutional crisis America now faces. The best radio host, Rush Limbaugh, seems resigned to playing Josephus and simply documenting the downfall of American civilization.
We can each do better than that.
Remember, America belongs to us, We, The People. America is not about government, it is about free individual people, making their own choices, free of Big Government, and a government that is heavily restrained by the Constitution. What we had six months ago is worth fighting for, because the looming alternative is a nightmare no free American wants to live under. In the meantime, I will do my best to post essays about the fun stuff, the neat stuff, the natural history stuff that makes living so much fun and interesting.
FBI now officially a Democrat Party political weapon
Over the past twelve years, the Federal Bureau of Investigations could not prosecute open sedition or treason against the United States of America. “Sanctuary cities” in clear violation of federal and state laws were allowed to flourish and corrode our body politic from within, producing violent South American drug cartels operating freely in American towns that included unsolved beheadings of American citizens and murders of entire families.
FBI leaders and agents have blatantly used their official positions to protect political allies like Hillary Clinton, while using their official positions to attack, threaten, punish, jail and fine innocent people who just happen to be not their political allies. Peter Stzrok, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and many others have used their official taxpayer-funded jobs to politicize law enforcement, thereby destroying the foundations of the rule of law, the equal protection of the law, and official accountability for official malfeasance. In America, all citizens are supposed to be equal, but at the FBI some citizens are “more equal” than others.
The FBI couldn’t find the time to investigate blatant voter fraud in the November 2020 election, in order to promote the fraudulent candidacy of China Joe Biden, nor could it self-police its own rogue agents, nor could it investigate the criminal contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In contrast, now the FBI has agents immediately scouring America for their so-called “MAGA Most Wanted” list of people who briefly occupied the US Capitol building last Wednesday, and the FBI is even now rounding up Republican law makers in Tennessee on obviously fake charges stemming from political differences.
Can you imagine if the FBI had lifted a finger to confront the year-long violent rioting, looting, arson, murder, and vandalism conducted by Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA members? How many lives and businesses might have been saved! And can you imagine if the FBI had compiled a “Black Lives Matter Most Wanted” list of suspects from the various riots around America in 2020?
No, you cannot imagine that? Right, because had the FBI engaged in that kind of overt political statement, all hell would have broken loose. People would have rightly asked “What kind of a federal agency is targeting an activist group by name?” And yet, here we have the very purposeful political statement by the FBI that it is specifically going after “MAGA” people (Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again supporters).
This is not only not right, it is a crystal clear declaration by the FBI that it is an illegal political tool firmly behind one political party, the Democrat Party. The agency does not represent ‘the law,” it represents the un-law, the authoritarian coercive and selective use of illegal and immoral laws for political and personal gain. The agency is now an aggressive political tool for the Democrat Party, much like the East German STASI and the Russian KGB secret police were for their respective authoritarian regimes, acting illegally to advance a partisan political agenda. The FBI is abusing and misusing the law in order to achieve political goals.
This is nuts; it is totally un-American, because it destroys the foundations of any democracy. And yet we have a lot of Americans openly cheering for it. If the shoe were on the other foot, they would be openly rioting over it. So these presently cheering Americans will have to move aside or forgive the others if they riot; this would be consistent behavior, and not the double standard Democrat Party people have become addicted to.
I do not know how much more stomach at least half of American citizens have for this disgusting behavior by our nation’s pre-eminent law enforcement agency, and the political party it has been protecting and promoting for the past twelve years. We have already endured four years of brutal partisan FBI political machinations, including no-knock 4AM raids on innocent people like Roger Stone and General Michael Flynn, and other overtly political statements with guns drawn under color of law by those taxpayer-funded law enforcement professionals. Now we are watching the agency move lightning-fast to round up political opponents and turn them into political prisoners.
If last Wednesday’s peaceful protest in Washington, DC, was any indication of what can happen in America these days, it is plausible to believe that all civilian taxpayer Second Amendment hell can break loose right back over the zero-credibility FBI and its political party. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants,” because he probably envisioned a time like right now when one group of people would seek official tyrannical domination over everyone else. Jefferson knew human nature back in 1776, and now the FBI is showing us the worst of it all over again.
Enter the Spirit of 1776, you motherfuckers. But the difference between 2021 and 1776 is that in 2021 American citizens will not be staging a revolution against established authority, they are beginning to resist an illegal Marxist revolution implemented through grievously corrupt and audacious political over-reach by the Democrat Party, due to the complete failure of the other supposedly counter-balancing political party to perform its basic functions.
I put all my money on the American civilian resistance, despite the FBI being supported by Big Tech (FaceBook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Apple etc) and Big Media (NPR, NYT, CBS, NBC etc.). At the end of the day, we have free minds and able bodies. Welcome to your own resistance, FBI-ocrats.
Did Justice Kavanaugh Just Torpedo America?
Probably a majority of Americans believe America is too big to fail, too financially successful, too militarily powerful, too much of an economic powerhouse. Our lives are just too comfortable and everything is just so orderly. How could it ever fail?!
Surely the last survivors of every failed civilization before us asked the same things, probably right before their lives and cities burned to the ground. Civilizational failure is systemic to humans. The question for America is not if we will fail, but when.
American citizens can prolong failure, perhaps indefinitely, by participating in their own governance and electing wise leaders who represent the USA’s founding principles. Because tyranny is only one generation away at any given moment, and America has had one and maybe two heavily propagandized generations, it sure looks like failure and tyranny are about to descend upon us momentarily.
The 2020 election is being stolen from the voters right in front of our faces. The evidence of vote fraud and unconstitutional laws and policies designed to enable fraud is overwhelming. And every taxpayer-funded public institution designed to protect the citizen taxpayer from injustice is now sitting on its hands, doing absolutely nothing to stop this theft and the tyranny that will follow. In particular, the FBI and DOJ staffs and leaders are actually looking the other way while mounds of new evidence are disclosed daily. These agencies have the legal purpose to intervene, but they do not act. This is because they are run by people whose political views no longer mirror the nation’s principles nor the citizenry’s interests.
Earlier this year commentator Mark Levin called this “the elites rebelling against the masses.” And how else could it be described? The masses voted overwhelmingly to send President Donald Trump back to the White House, and the entire federal government did everything it could to prevent that, or to allow vote fraud to succeed.
The US Supreme Court is America’s backstop, the last bulwark of democracy. Of all the government institutions designed to look out for and protect the individual rights of the citizenry, the US Supreme Court is and always has been the last line of defense. And yet it, too, is now staffed by people who do not share the vision or purpose of our founding documents, nor the interests of us, We, The People. At least half of the Supreme Court justices are Big Government liberals, whose answer for every public policy question is to say “We know better than you how to live your life, and so we are going to put the federal government in charge of your life.”
This has become glaringly evident as ObamaCare was deemed a tax, when it was legislatively not passed as a tax, and when over the past few years failing to intervene when lower courts aggressively ignored the high court’s Heller and MacDonald precedents in protecting individual Second Amendment rights, and recently when a narrow 5-4 majority ruled that California’s subjective and unscientific fatwa against church attendance violated We, The People’s First Amendment religious rights. And now yesterday, the US Supreme Court was unable to muster five justices to fix the most obviously faulty Pennsylvania election procedures and results.
Until yesterday afternoon, most political observers believed that Justice Alito had sufficient support from four other justices to back up his prior demand that Pennsylvania segregate the roughly 650,000 ballots counted AFTER Election Day. But late yesterday we learned that the Court had declined to change the faulty outcome, with no decision issued and no dissents. What this means is that the justices were deadlocked 4-4 and one hold-out justice refused to join either side.
Chief Justice John Roberts has increasingly sided with the Big Government leftists Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer, to the point where the Court now has a solid four-vote leftist bloc. That has become quite obvious.
On the other hand, the Court has two reliable originalists, Thomas and Alito, who have been or are reasonably expected to be backed by Gorsuch and Barrett. Justice Kavanaugh will probably join this group of four about 60-70% of the time, because Kavanaugh is not an originalist. Justice Kavanaugh is, more than anything, a Washington, DC, Beltway guy. When nominated, people were amazed that he was spending something like $80,000 annually on major league baseball tickets. He gave them away as gifts to “special people.” In other words, Kavanaugh is very much a DC elitist, and very much tied into the DC political web. His allegiance is to intellectual pyrotechnics and gymnastics, nuanced opinions written for law school students and professors to marvel at for generations to come. Unlike Scalia, Thomas or Alito, Kavanaugh is not a fighter. He is an effete functionary with a strong sense of duty to The DC Machine. He has no loyalty to the president who stood by him and who put him on the Court. Rather, Kavanaugh wants to ingratiate himself with DC elites and special people, at whatever cost.
So given yesterday’s deadlocked Court and the resulting rubber stamp given to PA’s fake election results, it is likely that Kavanaugh removed himself from the entire discussion. He punted. Like with his recent decision on the North Carolina voting law case, he probably erupted once again with intellectually flowery language designed to mask his unwillingness to commit to anything.
The end result of this is that every single similar or related case now brought to the Supreme Court is going to meet the same logjam. The American people will find no justice being served there. Which means the stolen 2020 election is likely going to be affirmed and Joe Biden sworn in as the next president.
Which means that America will overnight become a vassal to China. The long lawless Democrat Party will move swiftly to cement its power and control of all federal agencies, including law enforcement, and in short order dissent will be illegal, domestic political spying will be routine, the FBI will become the STASI, and America will never again have a fair or free election.
So, spineless Justice Kavanaugh just torpedoed America. The nation you grew up in, identified with, perhaps fought for, will be completely gone in another month’s time. It will resemble California shortly after.
What this all means for patriots is a big question. Will enough people be willing to use political violence to restore the Republic? Short of sufficient political violence to overturn this coup d’état against We, The People, America is officially a failed state, a tyranny, and God only knows who will fill the political power vacuum.
China?
Jeff Epstein probably murdered, how did THAT happen?!
Now new information (but not all of the information that would normally be obtained and available in a murder investigation) is released that child trafficking pedophile and ultra-Democrat Party insider Jeffery Epstein was probably murdered. No surprise.
- his neck and throat bones were broken through tremendous violent force. On the other hand, self-hanging is a slow suffocation process, especially with a soft bed sheet, which at its tightest twist is still wide, relatively gentle, and would take a long time to shut off air to the body and kill a person. A self-applied bed sheet cannot break those neck and throat bones.
- the security camera trained on his cell was mysteriously turned off
- his cell mate was relocated, against prison protocol, so that Epstein was alone and vulnerable, and no witness was present to say what happened to Epstein
- his prison guards are said to have fallen asleep
- one of the sleepy prison guards is not even a prison guard and was not qualified to be there, and no one knows how he got there
You do not have to be already pre-inclined to be easily persuaded to believe in various conspiracies to see that this way-too-many-coincidences situation is beyond a conspiracy; it is a murder. All of the circumstantial and much of the physical evidence here points to a hit, a purposeful and targeted murder of a person who knew too much about too many wealthy and powerful people, who could not afford to have him talk about what he knew. The beneficiaries of Epstein’s death are Bill Clinton and a whole bunch of other politically powerful and wealthy people. Bill Clinton is known to have flown some twenty-four times on Epstein’s private jet to his “orgy island,” where little girls were raped and sexually abused.
The big question is how on earth this brazen murder was carried off under the nose of so many watchful eyes. Yes, it happened in New York City, where criminal mayor Bill de Blasio runs things like a mafia boss. That is a first step in understanding the Epstein murder. But so much more had to happen so quickly for the hit to work the way it did.
Another consideration is that Epstein’s prosecutor is James Comey’s daughter, Maurene. Yes, that James Comey, the disgraced former FBI director who has engaged in openly partisan political advocacy from the time he was in the FBI until just days ago. His daughter Maurene is the same radical leftist activist as her father. So did Maurene Comey play a role in having Epstein killed before he could talk?
UPDATE: JANUARY 6, 2020: Newly released photos from Epstein’s autopsy clearly show strangulation marks from a wire garrote, which professional assassins use, not a bed sheet. Epstein’s hyoid bone was shattered, and his body showed marks from being held down. A two-man hit-job in a modern prison…unbelievable, but really powerful people absolutely had to have Epstein dead. Read this article to see more photos and analysis.
This is Epstein’s neck on the autopsy table. The ligature marks are from thin wire, like a professional hitman uses. The angular marks are from Epstein’s fingernails clawing at the wire around his neck. Epstein was murdered in plain view. Who did this, why did they do it, and will there be accountability?
Epstein’s painting of past president Bill Clinton, wearing a Monica Lewinsky dress and saying “I did not have sex with that woman.” Clinton and Epstein were partners in sexual crime
Maurene Comey at the sore losers against democracy pink hat parade, with her hippie mom. Notice Maurene’s shirt: Hillary Clinton, Ruth Ginsburg, and Elizabeth Warren are visible; Nancy Pelosi appears to be the fourth face. Maurene Comey is no professional prosecutor. She is a dedicated leftist activist who apparently used her central role in the Epstein case to have him murdered, so that he could not damage a bunch of Democrat Party biggies.
The McCain in my soup
What seems like a hundred years ago, in the summer of 2000 I served as a volunteer at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
Staying with my old Philly friends Mark and Bill in their back bedroom, I was able to easily access the convention center by foot.
Being a burly lad, I was put on “security,” which involved wearing a special yellow or red shirt, standing at certain choke points and doorways in the convention center, checking credentials before allowing people to pass to some next destination, and answering questions about the location of bathrooms.
Most of my security role was done at the entrance to the main stage, where speakers and media activists (“reporters”) entered and exited. From this doorway, the speakers walked out onto the stage to speak from the main podium, and the media things sauntered, pranced, sashayed their ways to nearby desks set up to look at the podium and speaker.
Cameras were set up to capture both the speaker and the media commenters looking at the speaker. Sitting en banc like a panel of judges, the media personalities were represented as a real-time source of expert analysis and useful commentary. Of course, that is exactly the role the mainstream media plays at a Republican convention: Judge, jury, and executioner, heavy-duty criticism. At Democrat conventions the same media people are giddy cheerleaders.
Why anyone thinks that these celebrity personalities add anything useful or valuable to the experience is beyond reckoning, except that the mainstream media have done a very good job of arranging their own roles at these conventions. The political parties do not necessarily need them there. The Republicans would do well to not have them at their conventions.
Anyhow, three distinct memories of that 2000 Philadelphia convention stand out in my head, all of them from my unique VIP security role at the entrance on to the main stage.
The first memory was NPR activist Cokie Roberts. Like all the other VIPs at that stage entrance, my job was to walk from the stage entrance and get her at the far end of the tunnel where a temporary FBI office was located in a small room. Police officers and FBI agents populated this end of the tunnel, providing heavy protection for the VIPs. From there I would then accompany her back down the tunnel to the stage entrance. Once there, the protocol was to look around and make sure everything was clear, no unpermitted people around, and then point the VIP toward their destination: the main podium, or, with Cokie Roberts, the press desk ahead and slightly off to the left.
Sharing the same physical space as Cokie Roberts is unpleasant. Her smug self-importance sucks up all the energy in the immediate vicinity. Cokie was like a saucy queen, and the air was full of expectation. I felt diminished in her presence. Yet I stayed close to her, walked her to the doorway, pointed her to the media desk, and there she sat, lips pursed, looking feline, watching her prey through slitted eyes.
OK, that is one memory.
The second memory is of that same exact location and security role. I walked Bob Dole down the tunnel to the stage entrance, looked around, and sent him out to the podium. I had never been in Dole’s immediate space before, but true to form he was clutching a pen in his damaged hand. Dole took a bit extra direction, and I had to step out onto the stage apron and take him by the elbow so that he was fully oriented toward the podium.
Dole spoke, and began walking back toward the doorway. I took a step forward and extended my hand to help him feel comfortable, and out of the corner of my right eye I saw a strange looking man slowly and very carefully edging his way toward us. I have no idea how this guy previously evaded my view, or how he even got there, given how well secured the back stage was. I am a keen hunter and my eyes miss almost nothing around me.
And yet here was this white haired but not terribly older man suddenly materializing out of nowhere and now bearing down on a frail Bob Dole. Dole was now a couple steps into the tunnel and heading back up toward the FBI office, where he would get an armed police escort to his next stop.
Like out of a movie, the white haired guy’s arm shot out toward Dole and the guy was suddenly hurtling through the air in a complete and very athletic dive towards Dole that did not match his somewhat older appearance.
Well, the old wrestler automatically took over in me, and just as the guy’s hand was about to grab Dole’s arm, literally just a few inches away, I was all over the guy. He was strong, but I was stronger, and within a couple seconds I body slammed him flat onto the concrete floor, his outstretched arm locked painfully sideways by my left arm, my legs intertwined with his and his struggling body splayed out and largely immobilized in a classic wrestling move.
The FBI guys came flying down the hallway and covered me in what is now called a dog pile. I was immediately suffocated beneath a steaming pile of heavy bodies smelling of dry cleaned suits and shoe polish. Whatever people may think about FBI agents today as a result of the corruption by Comey, McCabe, and Stzrok, those agents were super physical and aggressive. I loved it and hated it all at the same time. Loved it because the bad guy was stopped dead, hated it because I could not breathe, and then again happy to know the weird son-of-a-bitch underneath me was being turned into a pretzel by all the hands reaching around me. Within about twenty seconds I was pulled off by three FBI guys, while a uniformed cop and two other agents were cuffing the weirdo hand and foot.
The white-haired weirdo guy was trussed like a hog and quickly carried up to the FBI office. I, too, was hustled up there, pushed from behind as a wall of guys swarmed the tunnel and then pushed the weirdo and I into the little FBI room.
Once in the room, the guy was cuffed to a chair and the questions started flying. Within a minute or so he was identified as a Polish national who had a long history of stalking Bob Dole and trying to assault him, all around the world. The guy was an obsessive kook and already known to law enforcement.
I was asked my version of events, congratulated on stopping the weird guy, with one of the big Irish cops giving me a big smile and saying how much he enjoyed watching me slam the guy down so hard. A couple of the FBI agents said they didn’t know anything was amiss until they heard the guy’s body smack the concrete so hard.
During the melee just a couple feet away, Dole had shrunk back against the tunnel wall, still clutching his pen, looking scared (why not) and two agents took him by the arms and hustled him back up the tunnel. That was the last I saw of Bob Dole.
From the little FBI room, I was accompanied back down to my spot at the stage entrance, patted on the back, and instructed to stay vigilant. Hey, I was never so important before or again!
The third and last distinct memory I have of that convention also involved the VIP entrance, because it was from there that I got to watch Senator John McCain deliver an emotional speech about wanting the presidential nomination so badly, and yet being denied it.
McCain delivered an interesting and very personal speech. He had just been through hell, with the Bush team pulling a lot of dirty tricks to eventually stop McCain’s momentum late in that hard-fought primary race.
From my view at the edge of the stage, I could see in McCain’s adam’s apple a huge lump had appeared while he spoke. I actually watched it grow. I had never before seen such an enormous lump in someone’s adam’s apple. This moment was obviously much more emotional for McCain than I would have expected from such a battle-hardened candidate, and I doubt that the many TV cameras there captured it.
What that huge lump in his throat brought home to me was how heavily and personally invested McCain was in his pursuit of the presidency. As opposed to Senator Bob Dole, who had torpedoed the 1996 Republican challenge to Bill Clinton by insisting that it was “his turn” to run, despite his lack of emotion, lack of energy, lack of passion.
John McCain is now dead, and with him goes a large part of strange era in Republican politics.
Like a lot of American conservatives, I retain mixed feelings about McCain. He was good and bad. He was both patriot and sell-out, warrior against and enabler of our domestic enemies, and so on. I had supported him in 2000 and 2008, but in recent times I had really disliked the guy for his policy sell-outs. He was the fly in my policy soup.
But when I think back to that huge emotional lump in his throat at the 2000 Republican Convention, I think of a man passionate about America and his cause to protect and improve it. Whatever his reasons for taking such strangely contrarian, incongruent positions in the past couple years, McCain remains in my mind as a once-principled all-American who at one time had my strong support.
Rest in piece, Warrior McCain.