Co-conspirators to an Attempted Coup d’état

First, a definition:

coup d’état- n. (kuː deɪˈtɑ) Fr: [ku de ta’] ) also known simply as a coup, an overthrow, is a type of revolution, where the illegal and overt seizure of a state by the military or other elites within the state apparatus occurs.

Setting aside the all-too-soft interview of the disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe by Scott Pelley on CBS News’ 60 Minutes– an interview designed to make McCabe appear to be some kind of patriotic hero (and assist him in the sales of his new book), we now have an admission that an attempted coup d’état took place in May of 2017.

If what McCabe said in the interview is indeed true, then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who authored President Donald Trump’s justification for the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, took it upon himself to initiate proceedings in an attempt to remove the President from office by invoking the 25^th Amendment.

According to McCabe, it was Rosenstein who mused about the “number of additional cabinet-level officials” (neither Rosenstein nor McCabe were such) who would vote to remove Trump from office, via the 25^th Amendment. McCabe also claimed that Rosenstein offered to be “wired” in order to trap the new President, a claim which Rosenstein first denied, and then said was only offered in jest. McCabe even claimed that two of Trump’s cabinet officials were “a go” on the attempt, despite the fact that the 25^th Amendment, enacted in 1965, only applies to a president who is physically or mentally incapacitated from discharging his duties. Only twice in the last century, was a President so duly incapacitated.

The stroke which incapacitated President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 would have invoked the proper use of this amendment. More recently, when President Ronald Reagan was shot in March of 1981, the 25^th Amendment was temporarily invoked while Reagan was in surgery to remove the bullet from his chest cavity.

Nothing in the 25^th Amendment addresses the issue whereby a President isn’t preferred, or commits an act found to be personally objectionable, such as firing an FBI Director who has run afoul of the law by leaking confidential information, directly or indirectly, to the press- like James Comey did when he leaked details of a confidential conversation he had with President Trump in February of 2017, through a Columbia University professor to the New York Times the following May.

A president, any president, may fire an FBI Director at will and for any reason, or no reason at all. However, that wasn’t good enough for a Deputy Attorney General (Rosenstein) or a Deputy FBI Director (McCabe) who worked diligently to absolve Hillary Clinton of very real crimes like obstruction of justice when her operatives bleach-bit some 33,000 e-mails illegally stored on her private server and when they hammered to bits wireless phones and other “smart” devices, both of which had been subpoenaed by the Justice Department. No, instead, because these two “deep state” apparatchiks didn’t like the decision of American voters to elect Donald Trump as the nation’s forty-fifth president, they manufactured a reason of their own to oust a duly-elected president from office. By using false information from a Clinton-paid-for dossier, they had Robert Mueller named as special counsel to investigate a crime which they both knew, all along, bore no evidence and was completely without just cause.

Some $40 million and two years later, the ill-conceived and mis-begotten Robert Mueller investigation continues unabated. Yet, no evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, nor evidence of justice obstruction in the firing of James Comey, has been brought forth- and there is a reason for this…it simply does not exist.

So, what we are left with is simply this:

Donald Trump was elected the nation’s forty-fifth President of the United States, much to the chagrin of an elite group of Justice Department and FBI officials who wanted Hillary Clinton to be elected, instead. By white-washing her very real crimes, and then illegally surveilling the Trump campaign, they nevertheless failed in their effort to see her elected. Then, having failed this, they attempted to undo and overturn the results of a free and fair election, by attempting a silent coup d’état- the first time ever in the history of the United States…

…and while the mainstream media seeks to rationalize and minimize this very real conspiracy against a duly-elected President of the United States, in so doing they have missed the biggest story of our lifetimes- an attempted overthrow of our government by “deep state” insiders, who honestly believed that they knew better than the citizens they were sworn to serve.

God help us.

-Drew Nickell, 18 February 2019

© 2019 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

http://www.drewnickell.com

Follow my postings on the RSS feed: http://www.drewnickell.com/?feed=rss2

Under-reported: Trump Just Won Re-election in 2020

The headline yet to be seen: Trump Wins Re-election in 2020…

…yet to be seen, but nevertheless almost certainly true.

Taking stock of the 2020 election as of February 2019:

• With (count ‘em) 30 Democrats who have either announced or are seriously considering running for their party’s nomination in 2020, no real party standard-bearer has emerged that has a chance of uniting a fractured party to victory against Trump. The media doesn’t like to mention it, but the Democrat Party is fractured between its lunatic left (who favors infanticide, open borders, radical socialism and a fantasy called the “green new deal”), and a shrinking, aging and soon-to-become-extinct traditional left (wedded to big labor, protectionism and the working middle class).

• Virginia’s sad comedy of errors where Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, both of whom ran their elections on a 2017 platform of accusing their Republican counterparts of racism, must now rationalize and contextualize their having donned “blackface,” in an era where doing so had long since been deemed an anathema to racial equality and sensitivities. Meanwhile Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax, being pressured to resign in the face of two credible accusations of sexual assault within the last twenty years, leaves the swing-state party in Virginia without any shred of moral authority when it comes to the defense of women’s rights. Given the two controversies involving race and gender, the longer they remain in office, the more these three will place a drag on a national party which seeks to run on a platform accusing Trump and Republicans of being insensitive to the plight of women and people of color.

• Legislative initiatives in half a dozen states which would legalize abortion up to and including full-term delivery of a child, amount to nothing less than infanticide, not to mention the fact that third trimester abortion is only legal in seven of the world’s countries and is opposed by the vast majority of the U. S. electorate. Finding any Democrat who publicly denounces these ghoulish and dastardly procedures, codified into law by states all headed by Democrat administrations, is like finding a Democrat who publicly supports full funding for a border wall- yet another issue where the public supports the President’s position.

• Speaking of walls, the only real wall that is being constructed is the one being built by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), which is slowly but surely isolating the Democrat leadership away from the electorate who is coming to realize the need for actual, and not virtual, border security. As the number of innocents whose lives are being lost- from homicide (both civilian and law enforcement), drug overdose and sex trafficking- all at the hands of illegal aliens- continues to grow, political opposition to actual border security imperils the electability of Democrat politicians, especially those who had supported wall funding in the past.

So why are so many would-be candidates declaring, or on the verge of declaring, their intention to seek the nation’s highest office? Moreover, why are Democrats increasingly supporting issues and initiatives that will either never work, or never find favor with the vast majority of Americans?

The explanation is rather simple- assuming people are willing to extricate themselves from the box in which the media has placed us- a box that encourages division, exaggerates the President’s unpopularity and diminishes the specious positions taken by his adversaries.

In both instances, announcing a presidential candidacy (or publicly contemplating the same) and advocating an agenda steeped in fantasy and illogic brings to bear free national media attention to politicians who would otherwise be ignored in the wake of their own irrelevance.

Better to be noticed, even dubiously so, than to be ignored, all of which impacts an election twenty-one months away and which therefore suggests…

…advantage Trump.

-Drew Nickell, 11 February 2019

© 2019 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

http://www.drewnickell.com

Follow my postings on the RSS feed: http://www.drewnickell.com/?feed=rss2

A Call to Greatness: Trump Delivers State of the Union to Joint Session of Congress

On Tuesday evening, February 5^th, 2019, President Donald Trump delivered his second State of the Union Address before a joint session of Congress. During the hour and twenty-one-minute address, the President called on Democrats in both houses of Congress to set aside “gridlock, resistance, vengeance and destruction” for the greater good of the American people and instead pursue “greatness, results, vision and progress.” Imploring both parties to work together to serve the American people, first and foremost, he challenged the gathered Representatives and Senators, alike to “… choose whether we are defined by our differences- or whether we dare to transcend them.”

Touting the economic gains in both employment and wages, as the direct result of the tax cut legislation of 2017 and the elimination of tens of thousands of burdensome regulations, and then citing the economic miracle taking place as a result of these policies, he warned Americans that there are three things that could thwart this strong performance- “foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations,” adding, “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation… It just doesn’t work that way… We must be united at home to defeat our adversaries abroad.”

The President then laid out his legislative agenda for the coming year- border security including funding for wall construction where needed, creating an “immigration system that is safe, lawful, modern and secure,” further reductions in healthcare costs including prescription drugs, pursuing trade deals and foreign policies that put America’s interests first, and revitalizing our nation’s infrastructure.

President trump also cited that the year 2019 will mark three important anniversaries:

• The 50^th anniversary of man landing on the moon, recognizing one of the Apollo 11 astronauts who raised the American Flag on the lunar surface, “Buzz” Aldrin;

• The 75^th anniversary of the D-Day landing, recognizing three surviving members of the more than 75,000 Americans who took part in what Commanding General (and future president) Dwight Eisenhower called the “great crusade” against tyranny: PFC Joseph Reilly, SSG Irving Locker and Sgt, Herman Zeitchik;

• The 100^th anniversary of the 19^th Amendment, which granted voting rights to women, by recognizing that there are more women serving in Congress than ever before and that there are more women in the workforce than at any time in history.

In an address which introduced several ordinary Americans who have achieved extraordinary greatness, he offered a vision of what America can be, what America should be, and called for Congress to set aside petty partisanship to create safer communities, stronger families, richer culture, deeper faith and a middle class bigger and more prosperous than ever before.

He announced a month-end, follow-up summit meeting with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un to take place in Vietnam.

Then, the President implored Congress to pass legislation that would end the practice of late-term abortions, in response to several states which have recently sought to enact laws essentially amounting to legalized infanticide.

“Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life. And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: all children — born and unborn — are made in the holy image of God.”

In summation, the President closed his address, adding:

“We must choose whether we will squander our inheritance — or whether we will proudly declare that we are Americans. We do the incredible. We defy the impossible. We conquer the unknown.

This is the time to re-ignite the American imagination. This is the time to search for the tallest summit and set our sights on the brightest star. This is the time to rekindle the bonds of love and loyalty and memory that link us together as citizens, as neighbors, as patriots.

This is our future — our fate — and our choice to make. I am asking you to choose greatness.

No matter the trials we face, no matter the challenges to come, we must go forward together.

We must keep America first in our hearts. We must keep freedom alive in our souls. And we must always keep faith in America’s destiny — that one Nation, under God, must be the hope and the promise and the light and the glory among all the nations of the world!”

Despite media coverage to the contrary, history will show that President Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address was one of the finest, most visionary speeches ever given before a joint session of Congress. Whether his challenge to lawmakers to rise to the level of greatness as vouchsafed by the individual heroes he introduced remains to be seen.

Stay tuned.

-Drew Nickell, 7 February 2019

© 2019 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

http://www.drewnickell.com Follow my postings on the RSS feed: http://www.drewnickell.com/?feed=rss2