Reality Leaker

In mid-1950s America, Sen. Joseph McCarthy's efforts to root out Communist infiltrators from the ranks of our government and military collapsed amidst general ridicule.  As Sen. Flanders of Vermont, himself a Republican, described McCarthy's bombastic efforts:

He dons war paint; he goes into his war dance; he emits his war whoops; he goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink army dentist.

Yes, Irving Peress was a devout Communist and an American military officer; but he was merely a dentist fixing soldiers' teeth, his officer rank being a standard courtesy applied to Army medical personnel.  He himself was no serious threat to our Constitution, and everyone could see that.  Sen. McCarthy became a joke, then a has-been, and for decades a curse word.

To this day, the leftist media uses "McCarthyism" as an epithet whenever conservatives try to point out that certain beliefs and actions are inherently unAmerican even if they are legal.  Yet when the fall of Communism released millions of secret Soviet archival documents, it became clear to anyone who cared to look that McCarthy was right: our institutions were in fact riddled with Soviet agents, fellow-travelers, and sympathizers, just as Sen. McCarthy had said.  He simply wasn't competent enough to find the evidence needed to expose them publicly.  This suggests that our government institutions which were tasked with ferreting them out didn't really want to.

Trump and the Traitors

Unfortunately, conservatism never found a solution to the problem Joe McCarthy encountered, which was bureaucratic resistance to exposing truths that made the agencies look bad.  Ronald Reagan won the presidency by a landslide, but the parts of his agenda that went against the desires of the permanent bureaucracy such as securing our borders and cutting spending never took place.  In contrast, those agenda items which government employees liked - amnesty for illegals and massive military spending - happened like clockwork.

For the handful of months of his presidency, Donald Trump has woken up each day to the increasingly clear reality that just about every single person for twenty miles around is his enemy to a greater or lesser degree.  While only the frothing loons of the entertainment-media complex feel free to fully express their hatred for Mr. Trump, it's transparently obvious that elected Democrats hold the same hatred; they just hide it a bit better.

From the avalanche of negative leaks, there can be no doubt that vast hordes of government bureaucrats are laboring mightily to undo the election.  Donald Trump cannot even enjoy an extra scoop of ice cream without a media troll leaking it and CNN spinning it to cast him as Satan with jimmies.

Is it any wonder that he can't help but scream at the TV blaring lies about him?  If anything, that makes him seem normal - half of America feels exactly the same way about the media.

Which is why we are so disturbed by the news that, finally, amongst the dozens of felonious leakers high and low throughout the entire government, one has been caught.  Step forward, Reality Winner!

Ms Winner, an Air Force veteran with a top-level security clearance, has been arrested on espionage charges, accused of mailing a classified document to a news website.

The website did in fact receive the highly-classified document, as anyone can find out with a quick Google.  It has to have come from somewhere, and whoever contributed it has committed a major felony.  We don't know for sure whether Ms Winner did it, but it shouldn't be too hard to prove, and that's what we have courts for.

But if anyone thinks this proves that our government security investigators are doing their job, they're nuts.  In theory, anyone granted access to high-level classified information is supposed to be thoroughly investigated for signs that they'll turn traitor.  This is what Mr. Trump meant when he said that he wanted to delay letting people into the country until we figured out how to "vet" them.

Our vetting agencies should be looking for signs like writing in a letter, "I want to burn the White House down and go live in Kurdistan," which, according to news reports, she did.

Or how about this tweet she sent:

There are many Americans protesting US govt aggression towards Iran. If our Tangerine in Chief declares war, we stand with you!

If that isn't a sign of the possibility that the writer might be open to committing treason, we don't know what is.  Yet she waltzed freely in and out of a highly classified workplace for months, our intelligence agencies none the wiser.

Ms Winner did everything short of walking into work wearing a suicide vest and waving an ISIS flag - and thus far, she is the only leaker who's seen the inside of a courtroom.  Lest you suspect that we're raising expectations that can't be met, the Harvard University Admissions Department recently rescinded their admissions letters to a group of incoming freshmen who'd made politically-incorrect remarks on a supposedly-private Facebook page.  Why did the admissions office do that?  Because Harvard cares about the thoughts and motivations of anyone who inhabits their sacred halls - or at least, they care enough to examine their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

Harvard isn't alone.  Apple has a formidable security apparatus charged with finding and stopping leaks about upcoming Apple products.  It's staffed with alumni of NSA, FBI, the Secret Service, and Military Inteligence.  These people are able to stop leaks from Apple, but evidently their former colleagues can't do it in the government.

If Harvard and Apple can do that on their own dime, why can't our vaunted security services do it at our expense?  Perhaps they don't care who they let into our intelligence services any more than our elites care about who comes into our country?  Or, worse, could this likely leaker be precisely the kind of person they want handling our sensitive intelligence?

We are constantly told that most members of our intelligence and security services are dedicated, patriotic employees, and from the random sampling of those we've met, we're inclined to believe that's true.  Why, then, are none of these dedicated, patriotic employees turning in the seditious traitors and leakers?

Or, are they trying to, but the politicised higher-ups quash the investigations, secure in the knowledge that the dedicated patriots would never break the law by leaking the (doubtless classified) documentation of this malfeasance?

Meanwhile, ex-FBI Director Comey confesses in front of the Senate and national news media on live TV that he himself leaked a privileged memo concerning his meetings with President Trump for the political purpose of causing a special counsel to be appointed to investigate the President's imagined crimes.  Wisely, he made sure his memo wasn't classified, but it's still government property since it was prepared on the government's dime, and leaking it is was still against the law.  Yet there have been no charges filed and nobody believes there ever will be.

Maybe It Can't Be Saved?

The people of the United States, in increasing desperation to "drain the swamp," elected a brash, pugnacious outsider to take the helm of the ship of state.

Well, Donald J. Trump is now at the helm.  The problem appears to be that the entire rest of the crew, instead of obeying orders, is busily drilling holes below the waterline.

President Trump cannot personally punish all his enemies throughout the government, or even find them.  He has to find some allies, or at the very least some obedient and reliable minions, or both he and the concept of government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" are doomed.

As Americans, we tend to believe that our government is supposed to operate in a certain way, responsive to the people.  The great genius of Barack Obama was in realizing that nothing actually forced that to be the case except that everyone believed it to be true.  As his terms went on, he became more and more aggressive at doing whatever he pleased via autocratic executive orders no matter what the law said, from amnesty for illegals to billions spent on Obamacare in ways which were not authorized by Congress.

Aside from the occasional squawk from an obstreperous court, he mostly got away with it.  The media adored him, Democrats accused anyone who criticized his many blunders of racism, and he had no trouble getting re-elected.

This lesson was not been lost on his comrades who still inhabit the federal government swamp.  Eric Holder intentionally ordered American firearms dealers to make illegal salesto known Mexican drug smugglers in the "Fast and Furious" scandal.  The supposed reason was to trace these weapons back to the druglords, but nobody bothered to put tracking devices in the weapons, disable them, or even watch the purchasers.  The weapons were used to murder countless Mexican as well as American law enforcement officers - for which America's Second Amendment was blamed.  The Obama administration wasn't quite able to use this manufactured crisis to strip us of our Constitutional rights, but neither did anyone pay any price for the attempt.

Similarly, Lois Lerner weaponized the IRS as a political enforcer to kneecap conservative groups while fast-tracking liberal groups, just in time for Mr. Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.  While Ms. Lerner was forced into retirement, she'll be collecting a lavish pension at taxpayer expense for many decades, instead of inhabiting a small cell in Club Fed where she belongs.

The bottom line?  Mr. Obama showed that the fabled "checks and balances" of our system of government are just that - fabled.  They only have power if bureaucrats believe that they do.  Now that they've realized that the checks are meaningless, they have the power, because nobody can stop them, not even the voters.

The presidency of Donald Trump represents the final attempt of the American people to force our public "servants" back into their constitutional cage.  Thus far, it doesn't look very promising.

Yes, from the evidence presented, Ms Winner belongs behind bars.  But unless the hundreds of similarly-disloyal traitors and criminal leakers join her, both high and low, and pronto, it won't make any difference.