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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32158 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Mike Pence joins the File Why? Club

The former VP has turned in "a small number of documents bearing classified markings" after his lawyer found them in a sealed moving box. He's taking the Biden approach of denying all knowledge while cooperating with NARA, which I would describe as "begging forgiveness." The coverage looks relatively soft; CNN offers an innocuous explanation for how they'd have gotten from his former SCIF at the Naval Observatory. It is definitely being used for comparison with the similar Biden situation and contrast with Trump's approach of screaming bloody murder.

Points to anyone who claimed classified document messes were common among officials. I do wonder if this triggers a mass search among Congressmen's residences. Or if it already has. I don't think other findings would have been kept quiet, but I guess it could be possible.

I suspect the practices of handling some documents marked classified by top politicians has been very lax forever (maybe not raiding SCIF but not turning in some stuff that should be turned it, for sure). Outgoing Senators and Presidents probably kept some documents they technically shouldn't be keeping, and nobody made a fuss about it. Just as with many other things (e.g. FARA or Logan Act, etc.), everybody knew and nobody cared. Until it became necessary to use it to get Trump - because everything must be used to get Trump. Now there's a silly dance of trying to explain why our guy doing the same as their guy is totally different. I wonder if they dare to inspect the Lightbringer's archives - I bet there are classified docs there too, though nobody would dare to have FBI raid his residence, of course.

Trump was given every opportunity to return the materials he "accidentally archived" in his personal residence without a public to-do and he choose not to. That is not the same as a handful of overlooked folders no one noticed or ask for being returned the moment they are noticed.

Trump did this to himself. It's not a conspiracy or a double standard.

Trump was given every opportunity to return the materials he "accidentally archived"

It doesn't look like this is what happened. See here: https://www.factcheck.org/2022/08/timeline-of-fbi-investigation-of-trumps-handling-of-highly-classified-documents/

Trump's team repeatedly complied with the requests, and provided documents and access to the property, but every time DOJ came back and asked for more, and for some of the documents, Trump team alleged it's either not classified or privileged, while DOJ disagreed. Despite all the times they were given access, they got a warrant and conducted the search, grabbing everything and the kitchen sink (including Trump's passports, for example).

With Biden, we have DOJ warn them upfront before issuing a warrant:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/25/politics/justice-department-biden-home-search

And I don't see any Biden passports being taken, either. I think the process here was conducted in a much more amicable manner. And I don't see Biden team disagreeing that the documents found were actually classified documents.

As a side note, CNN absolutely does not know what the word "unprecedented" means.

I would bet against this.

Not the general mishandling, but specifically the “nobody cares.” I’m not exactly clear on how the Pence story was broken, but for Trump it was quiet until the FBI got publicly involved. If NARA went after Cheney or Quayle back in the day, the process was resolved before it could become news.

I am convinced that Trump made his bed via his response rather than any scope and scale differences. We saw the end step of months of escalation without having heard a whisper of earlier proceedings.

but for Trump it was quiet until the FBI got publicly involved

And the FBI has lied to courts to get warrants against Trump's people. And the FBI has lied to Twitter to get them to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

So I'm not just going to believe that the FBI acted impartially and professionally here.

Well I think that's the difference. When the outgoing President or Senator takes a bit more that he should have (which seems to be routine occurrence) usually what happens is lawyers write other lawyers and there's a bureaucratic tug of war until one of the sides gives up or somebody higher up yells at them and appoints one side as the winner. No press involved. Nobody outside deep bureaucracy knows it is happening.

With Trump, it was a huge FBI raid taking everything and the kitchen sink, and the press clowning around for weeks telling us Trump was about to sell nuclear codes to Russians. It definitely looks like a drastic change of pace. And how everybody is discussing old secret documents as the most important thing (while multi-trillion-dollar bills pass with little notice, as it seems).

I wonder if they dare to inspect the Lightbringer's archives

While it's not necessarily a surprise Lucifer himself is a part of the American government, I must admit I did a double take. What is this referring to? A nickname for one of the politicians?

https://obamamessiah.blogspot.com/

https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/morford/article/Is-Obama-an-enlightened-being-Spiritual-wise-2544395.php

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/kyle-drennen/2009/06/05/newsweeks-evan-thomas-obama-sort-god

And so on, I could give you a hundred, but I think you get the idea.

You weren't aware of the kookier stuff around Obama's arrival in 2008? Azure children? Light worker? Tingles down the leg? This is the day the seas stopped rising?

Gotta love the "spiritual not religious" spin in this one:

Here's where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

I was mistaken, the tingle was up the leg, not down:

Last night during MSNBC's Potomac Primary coverage, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann were discussing Barack Obama's speech. Matthews — who, in the past, has both cried over an Obama speech and compared him to Jesus — described exactly what happens to him when Obama speaks:

I have to tell you, you know, it's part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often.

Turns out that unlike Jesus, Obama was not able to calm the angry seas:

In June 2008, when Obama knew that he had clinched the Democratic nomination, he claimed that it "was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Not only is Obama not a deity who controls the earthly waters, he's not a good forecaster, either.

I can't find a source for the azure children one, so maybe I only imagined that, but there was so much hoo-ha going on around the man that yeah, he pretty much was being hailed as a deity or at least demi-god by the more excitable portion of the populace.

I believe the proper reference is to the Lightworker, also known as former President Obama, thanks to an exceedingly effusive article written by Mark Morford in SFGate several years back.

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

(Emphasis in the original text.)

Probably not a Lucifer comparison.

The Biden-Senate-documents case might be unique. Every congressman I've seen comment on the issue has stated that they aren't allowed to take files out of the SCIF and there is a check-in-check-out process for each one for each viewing. Executive branch officials seem to have much more ability to craft their own systems, which seem to be less secure.

Executive branch officials seem to have much more ability to craft their own systems, which seem to be less secure.

Not only is the regulation for classified documents defined (almost) exclusively by Executive Order [1], but I suspect high-level executive branch officials are, by nature of their jobs, unable to fully "leave work at the office." Some bedtime background reading on foreign leaders to meet tomorrow or late-night national emergencies could easily see documents outside of normal locations. And that's not even considering the acknowledged epidemic of over-classification: it's possible to have a file marked "secret" that has nothing you couldn't learn from a cursory read of the New York Times -- though there are reasons this can legitimately be the case as well.

This isn't to say that I don't want them to do better, but I can at least see how it'd be difficult for the White House to keep all the files locked up every night.

[1] This is one of the defenses Trump has attempted to raise -- although I'm not completely certain I think it should prevail, it is an interesting argument and complicates the whole matter.

[1] This is one of the defenses Trump has attempted to raise -- although I'm not completely certain I think it should prevail, it is an interesting argument and complicates the whole matter.

Indeed. I've opined from time to time that imposing criminal penalties based on the classification system might not even be legal for this reason. I think it probably needs to be revamped into an actual statutory framework.

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