Random Politics & Religion #23 (Fake News)

In the future a library will just be a building were books used to be !

So when do we know when the future is? Will there big and ad campaign with Steve Jobs telling me the future is now ?

You'll know it's the future when we're in a space ship, eating space pizza, drinking space smoothies, and arguing about space politics on the space internet.

But do you play video games about sewing?

Oh no. Although I do craft in video games.

Wall Street Journal

He didn't ask for funds. He asked for resourses.

Of course it depends on what your definition of is is.

Once again, Donald Trump has done something that no president before him dared to do. This time, he has fired an F.B.I. director engaged in an active and continuing investigation of his own campaign. The decision reflects President Trump’s most autocratic instincts, showcasing his contempt for the independence of federal investigators as well as for the basic search for truth.

Given his frequent calls to prosecute Hillary Clinton for using a private email server, the anger he directed at the F.B.I. director, James Comey, for giving her a “free pass,” and reports that he directed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to find a reason to fire Mr. Comey, it’s hard to believe the president’s claim that he made his decision out of concern for Mr. Comey’s harsh treatment of Mrs. Clinton during the campaign.

But if Mr. Trump actually hopes to shut down or limit the F.B.I. investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia, he may well be disappointed. History suggests that his decision is likely to backfire, producing new leaks and heightened inquiries that will be more difficult to control than he imagines.

President Trump may think he has sent a stern warning to leakers and independent bureaucrats unwilling to toe the White House line. Instead, he may well have incited an internal rebellion.
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Recent Comments
Jim Steinberg 5 minutes ago

I realize that Trump is far too arrogant to realize it. The fact remains that he is our new Nixon. One was bad enough. See accompanying...
Nan Socolow 9 minutes ago

Yes, yes, President Trump has unleashed the hounds of hell this week with his crackpot decision to fire FBI Director James Comey. Rebellion...
Chris 9 minutes ago

OK, fine - but this time around, let's come up with a classier name than Deep Throat. I mean, really, a porn film?

That’s what happened in 1972, when President Richard Nixon suddenly found himself in a position to replace J. Edgar Hoover, the long-serving and infamous F.B.I. director. Suspicious of the F.B.I.’s independence, Nixon tried to appoint a successor who would bring the bureau under White House influence. To his surprise, he set in motion the events that led to the Watergate scandal — and ultimately to his own resignation.

Nixon did not fire Hoover. Indeed, no president had the chutzpah to fire Hoover, who took office in 1924 under Calvin Coolidge and went on to serve seven other presidents — four Democrats and three more Republicans. According to popular myth, Hoover achieved this astonishingly long tenure by blackmailing politicians with tidbits from his secret files. In truth, though he was hardly above arm-twisting and gossip-mongering, much of his power came from more mundane sources, including his skill at promoting the F.B.I.’s nonpartisan image.

Nixon knew Hoover’s political talents well. He had been working with Hoover since 1948, when the two men collaborated to expose the alleged Communist spy Alger Hiss. Over the years, they had become fast friends and allies, swapping secrets, spending time outside Washington together and exchanging holiday presents. Hoover quietly supported Nixon during the 1968 campaign; one of Hoover’s former deputies, Louis Nichols, served as chief of Nixon campaign security. When Nixon won the election, he vowed to keep Hoover on, despite the fact that the F.B.I. director was well over the mandatory retirement age of 70.

Once in office, however, Nixon discovered that Hoover was not nearly as pliable as he might have hoped. In 1970, when Nixon sought a more aggressive surveillance campaign against antiwar protesters, Hoover put up resistance, arguing that the program was illegal and likely to result in public backlash.

The following year, Hoover and Nixon came into conflict over the investigation of the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Nixon discussed the possibility of firing Hoover, convinced that the director was too old and cautious — and too independent of White House influence. But Nixon worried that Hoover knew too much, and he recognized the political dangers inherent in firing an F.B.I. director.

Then Hoover died, of a heart attack, on May 2, 1972. The event made front-page news, and all three television networks carried Hoover’s funeral live. For Nixon, it appeared to be a moment of serendipity — a chance to do what he had long wanted to do. Instead, it turned out to be the beginning of a long national nightmare.

Nixon made his first mistake almost immediately. Faced with the solemn duty of replacing Hoover, he chose L. Patrick Gray, an assistant attorney general and former Navy man with no F.B.I. experience, to serve as acting director. The Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman articulated the reasons behind the decision in a “talking points” memo for the president soon after Hoover’s death. “Gray’s primary assignment is to consolidate control of the F.B.I.,” Ehrlichman wrote, “making such changes as are necessary to assure its complete loyalty to the administration.” Critics did not need access to such documents to label Gray a White House stooge, put in place to undermine the F.B.I.’s vaunted independence.

The F.B.I.’s Watergate investigation was not yet underway. But Nixon already believed that control of the F.B.I. would be critical for his political future. He hoped especially that a newly cooperative bureau would help to dam the fast-flowing stream of leaks from the executive branch. Instead, he inspired one of the great leakers of all time: the F.B.I. associate director W. Mark Felt.

As the historian Max Holland has shown, Felt hoped to become director himself and took Nixon’s decision as a personal affront. Like many career F.B.I. men, Felt also believed in the value of bureau autonomy and resented the president’s attempt to manipulate an independent bureaucracy. In June 1972, when Washington police arrested five men connected to the Nixon campaign during a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex, Felt recognized an opportunity. As the journalist Bob Woodward admitted more than a decade ago, Felt turned on Nixon in the summer of 1972, feeding information to The Washington Post as the legendary informer Deep Throat.

Felt’s leaks served in part to counter intense pressure from the White House, which sought to end the F.B.I. investigation. As early as June 23, 1972, Nixon conspired with Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman to close the F.B.I.’s inquiry — a recorded conversation later known as the “smoking gun tape,” which forced Nixon’s resignation. The F.B.I. proceeded nonetheless, painstakingly digging into Nixon’s campaign and its ties to the Watergate burglars. Felt leaked some of those discoveries to the press, keeping the story alive at a moment when Republicans hoped it would simply disappear.

Nixon won re-election in a landslide later that year. Still, the F.B.I. problem refused to go away. In 1973, Nixon nominated Gray to be permanent F.B.I. director, but the confirmation hearings turned into a debacle, fueling rather than calming suspicions of a Watergate cover-up. Gray resigned in disgrace that April, after it was revealed that he’d destroyed Watergate-related files, and was temporarily replaced by yet another acting director. Over the next several months, things got steadily worse for Nixon, as congressional investigations gained momentum and a newly appointed independent prosecutor, Archibald Cox, demanded the release of White House tapes. In October 1973, Nixon fired Cox in an attempt to shut down that investigation — but this, too, failed to stop the rolling disaster of Watergate.

Many commentators have pointed to Cox’s dismissal as the closest precedent for Mr. Comey’s firing: the last time a president tried to use his executive power to stop an investigation — and failed to get what he wanted. The story of the F.B.I.’s succession crisis raises still more troubling prospects for Mr. Trump in the months ahead. Despite having political skills far superior to President Trump’s, Nixon never managed to “consolidate control of the F.B.I.” in 1972, at the peak of his popularity. To the contrary, his attempts to do so fatally undermined his presidency, setting in motion a political and bureaucratic backlash from which Nixon — indeed, the presidency itself — never fully recovered.

FBI agents crying sounds like the FBI has a clear liberal bias !

Sounds like writers at the New York Times are crying too. It's so sad when someone you wanted to resign is fired by someone you like even less.

If Trump was going to fire Comey he should have done it in January, not May, not when the FBI probe into Russia was heating up, subpoenas were being issued, etc. Instead Trump is lying.

Common Sense.

I think Trump should fire Stephen Colbert too.

I wonder how angry Trump is to see his own party subpoena Mike Flynn today? Why oh why can't he make the Russian scandal go away?