Better in their words…

Bonus roundup! Judge Joe agrees with my Fani take; Ukrainians agree with C&C Proxy War take; Dems cling tightly to the pandemic; study undermines long covid; Menendez troubles; Trump’s Mandate; more.

Source: THE MANDATE ☙ Sunday, March 17, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🔥 To be honest, this weekend I was starting to feel like I was stranded on a social media desert island, because of my heterodox positive take on Judge McAfee’s ruling in the Fani Willis saga. But then an alert commenter linked an interview with Judge Joe Brown, which was one of the best analyses yet of McAfee’s order.

YOUTUBE: The Real Dana interviews Judge Joe Brown about Fani Willis Decision (1:45:00).

In short, Judge Brown completely agreed with me. Thanks to Judge McAfee’s order, Fani Willis is doomed.

In a thoughtful, nearly two-hour interview, Judge Brown, 74, enthusiastically explained why he thinks Judge McAfee did not hurt but helped the Trump defense. Instead, Judge Brown thinks McAfee’s order cut Fani and company to the quick. Although he never used the phrase “4-D chess,” that’s exactly what Judge Brown described:

“I think Judge McAfee artfully put this democrat lady in a position where her life is not going to be too interesting. She’s got three complaints by semi-official public agencies that are complaining about unethical conduct. Each one of them has to be answered within a 30-day period of when she gets notice. And somebody’s likely to file a number four.”

Judge Brown also agrees with my ultimate prediction, which is that Judge McAfee is bound for appointment to a higher court (I predicted court of appeals). Judge Brown went much further than I did. Drawling “this is a smart judge,” he opined McAfee was so intelligent he should be on Georgia’s Supreme Court or even the United States Supreme Court.

The Judge noted another critical facet of Judge McAfee’s order that I am chagrined to admit I missed. As a judge of 30 years, Judge Brown immediately noticed that Judge McAfee’s careful recitation of all the problems with Fani’s testimony, his descriptions of her unprofessional conduct, pointing out that “reasonable questions remain” about Fani’s honesty, and his reference to an “odor of mendacity,” were unnecessary to the verdict. Instead Judge Brown observed they seemed deliberately written as a gift for the Trump defendants to later use in an appeal if things go sideways and the case ever goes to trial.

In other words, if a future jury ever rules against Trump and his co-defendants, this order could potentially help overturn the verdict on appeal. That’s how far ahead Judge McAfee was planning. 4-D chess.

Tip: Judge Brown is a bit of a slow talker. At 1.25 or 1.5 speed the judge sounds perfectly normal.

🚀 More agreement with C&C sprang from another surprising source this week: Ukrainians. The Financial Times ran a goofy, paywalled, pro-war article last Monday headlined, “Ukraine needs 500,000 military recruits. Can it raise them?”  Well, no, but that’s beside the point.

The article discussed a new draft stuck in Ukraine’s congress (FT politely and euphemistically called it a “mobilization bill”). But apparently, Ukrainians aren’t enthusiastic about being drafted, with only 31% of surveyed young men responding they were prepared to fight.

“The mobilisation law,” the Times circumspectly noted, “is proving controversial, with more than 4,000 amendments submitted by Ukrainian lawmakers on the first draft.”

4,000 amendments! In other words, they don’t like the proposed draft and they are trying to bleed it to death.

FT offered a few “reasons” for Ukrainians feeling low about their war prospects, all of them easily fixable in the Times’ view. Number one, of course, was stingy Westerners, who aren’t moving fast enough to fork over hundreds more billions to Ukraine. Beyond that, FT blamed insufficient leave, not enough rotation off the frontlines, and not enough training.

As if training to be blown up by the Russians is what Ukrainians are really worried about.

Here at C&C we’ve been speculating that cooler heads are beginning to prevail in the deep state skunkworks and negotiations with the Russians have already begun. The Financial Times’ article mentioned a final reason surveyed Ukrainians said they don’t want to fight, and guess what? Lots of them agree with us:

Half of the 90 per cent of respondents who said they believed Ukraine could succeed with the support of western allies now think the west is tired and will push Kyiv into a compromise with Russia.

Imagine that. The Ukrainians themselves are possibly best positioned to predict what happens next in the Proxy War. If, despite being the most heavily propagandized people in history, half the Ukrainians think the West is ready to settle, that’s saying something.

💉 On Friday, Gallup released a new poll and a matching article on its website headlined, “After Four Years, 59% in U.S. Say COVID-19 Pandemic Is Over.” That left an astounding 41% who still think the pandemic isn’t over.But it’s actually much worse. The sub-headline ominously reported, “More than four in 10 do not expect their lives to return to pre-pandemic normalcy.” Forty-six percent, to be exact:

Guess which demographic group thinks we’ll never get back to normal, not ever?

It was so absurd I had to screen-grab it for you. Otherwise you might not believe me. That’s how unbelievable this is:

Democrats. Democrats were propagandized about covid more than any other group in history besides the Ukrainians (about the war). Take a look at this remarkable graph:

In other words, sixty percent of democrats think the pandemic rages on. What is it going to take? It’s been four years now. When will democrats finally concede the “emergency” is over? Are they a permanently broken people? Is this “following the science?”

Fearful people are easy to manipulate. Many democrats are fearful people. So.

💉 Speaking of the pandemic not being over, the Guardian UK ran a widely-shared story this week headlined, “Time to stop using term ‘long Covid’ as symptoms no worse than those after flu, Queensland’s chief health officer says. The sub-headline explained, “Researchers compared the symptoms and impairment of Covid and influenza patients a year after they tested positive.”

The article was prompted by a new Australian study. The study’s lead researcher, Dr. John Gerrard, gave a press conference last week (is that common?), and lit the zero-covid subreddit on fire by saying:

“I want to make it clear that the symptoms that some patients described after having Covid-19 are real, and we believe they are real. What we are saying is that the incidence of these symptoms is no greater in Covid-19 than it is with other respiratory viruses, and that to use this term ‘long Covid’ is misleading and I believe harmful.”

The researchers surveyed people who had covid and people who had the flu (based on PCR test results). A year later, 3% of covid getters reported still suffering from symptoms. But after the same period, slightly more flu getters — 3.4% — reported still suffering from their symptoms. And they all reported similar symptoms: fatigue, post-exertion symptom worsening, brain fog, and changes to taste and smell.

Dr. Gerrard explained long Covid may have looked like a distinct and severe illness because of the high number of people infected with Covid-19 within a short period of time, rather than because of the severity of long Covid symptoms.

This is bad news for the forever-pandemic people. But it’s great news for the rest of us.

🔥 Politico ran a quiet story Thursday headlined, “Judge rejects Bob Menendez’s legislative immunity claims.” In a remarkable case involving a sitting U.S. Senator, gold bars, luxury cars, and a freezer full of cash, Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) got some more bad news this week when his grand jury added sixteen more corruption counts and a judge breezily knocked down his Congressional immunity defense.

Like presidential immunity, legislative immunity shelters public officials from personal liability for things that they do in their public capacities as part of their official duties. It often produces disgusting results, but it’s a necessary evil, or else it would be impossible to function as a public official being constantly sued by partisans of one stripe or another.

But Menendez and his wife are charged with accepting bribes from a foreign government, acting as a foreign agent, and conspiracy to obstruct justice, among other counts. Bob’s federal judge correctly ruled that none of those things were a part of his official duties. Hopefully.

His trial begins May 6th.

Tellingly, Menendez beat a previous corruption prosecution in 2017 by hanging the jury, a cherished New Jersey maneuver. In other words, he got to a juror. Bob’s 2024 story is an embarrassing joke, but not atypical for democrats, and one wonders why Bob doesn’t enjoy Nancy Pelosi’s political armor. But the important thing is last time, the Democrat Party stuck with Bob. Last time.

A raft of headlines last week proved that, this time, Bob Menendez has become a persona non grata with the Donkey Party, which is ejecting him faster than someone coughing on an airplane. NBC ran a story on the same day as the Politico article headlined, “Indicted Sen. Bob Menendez is considering running for re-election as an independent, sources say.”

What changed? And … why is the media downplaying this story, which is fraught with political possibilities — like, could Republicans capture a safe democrat seat, especially if Menendez splits the democrat vote by running as an independent? Not to mention all the other salacious parts of the story. I mean, gold bars? It’s made for TV.

And how about the similarity to Trump? Why aren’t the media and the democrats jumping up and down pointing at Bob’s prosecution, to prove that the DOJ is even-handed, that no politician is above the law, and thus the Trump prosecutions are fair?

None of the many stories about Bob’s prosecution or his campaign choices make the obvious comparisons to Trump’s prosecutions. Weird.

It’s not that weird. The reason they aren’t talking about Menendez more than this is because it compares badly to the Trump prosecutions. Menendez took bribes and did things that are clearly illegal. But Trump is being prosecuted under novel legal theories for ill-defined process crimes. In other words, Menendez’s case shows what political prosecution looks like.

Which brings us to The Mandate.

🔥 Starting in November and trundling through the beginning of the year, corporate media tried and failed to manufacture an anti-Trump narrative of revenge. The gist is that, since Trump is being sued and prosecuted so much, if Trump gets elected President he will turn around and sue and prosecute his political enemies. They claimed the difference is it is fair for them to sue and prosecute Trump, but everybody knows it will be unfair whenever Trump does it to them.

Here is an example headline from NBC, on February 22nd:

NBC’s article was a rogues’ gallery of Never-Trumpers and treasonous cowards like Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the democrats’ lying key witness in Trump’s first impeachment, and John Kerry, who despite much worse conduct was never charged with the same crime with which they persecuted Mike Flynn.

Here’s another example from the Atlantic, published January 16th:

The Atlantic went further; quoting David French, it argued it’s not just Trump that wants revenge. It’s the entire Republican base.  But wait — The Washington Post ran a story around the same time arguing that even Republicans should fear an out-of-control Trump:

But apparently the narrative failed to grip and, while not completelyabandoning it, they’ve moved on to the greener pastures of more promising psyops. They ditched it not because nobody cared. They set aside the new narrative because something resonated, just resonated the wrong way, and maybe it even kind of backfired.

It resonated because they’d accidentally hit on a fundamental truth.

That truth is simultaneously the reason they are crushing on the narrative as well as the same reason the public rejected how they framed it.  I call that essential truth, “Trump’s Mandate.”

It’s not the usual type of ‘mandate’ that we’re used to discussing on Coffee & Covid. It’s not a legal requirement, like a mask mandate. The Mandate is a higher ethical justification, an earned permission, a latitude voters grant a popular politician. It’s not a new concept; they used to talk about the “mandate” a winning President earns when elected by a wide margin.

Trump’s lawsuits, judgments, and criminal prosecutions have permanently changed the country in fundamental ways, unpredictable ways that nobody, especially the deep state, can foresee. When Trump took office, the major political parties enjoyed a kind of detente, a framework of unwritten agreements, an uneasy truce amounting to a kind of unspoken immunity surpassing the legal immunity.

You just didn’t go after Presidential candidates personally; it wasn’t done. And there hasn’t been a real treason conviction since the Cold War. This fussy restraint has led to lots of obvious injustice, like when Hillary Clinton got away with hosting an illegal email server in a broom closet including thousands of state secrets being monitored by all our enemies. (Not to mention all the extremely troubling, pizza-related emails.)

Despite a popular cry to “lock her up,” Hillary still enjoys her freedom.

Democrats started chipping away at the unspoken agreement when they knocked out President Nixon over a “coverup.” As Coverer-Upper-In-Chief, Nixon was an amateur compared to the Democrats, whose militarized Operation Hurricane makes the impeached former President look like a kid with a wrist rocket.

Democrats nuked all the remaining rules for Trump.

Now they’ve opened Pandora’s Box. Dirty politicians used to be fully protected by claiming political prosecution. Corporate media made sure of it. But — assuming Trump survives and gets elected — he will enjoy a new freedom to prosecute people currently holding political office. I don’t need to tell you that Republicans are, in fact, eager to see Trump to prosecute top politicians and officials. And even non-partisan Democrats could see such prosecutions as fair, since after all, it happened to Trump.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and so forth.

The inconvenient difference the narrative-crafters hoped to avoid was the distinction between prosecuting people for no reason versus prosecuting actual criminals and traitors. Nobody seriously thinks anyone should be investigated because of their political beliefs or just because they criticized President Trump. History proves that kind of thinking has always backfired badly.

We want Constitutional investigations, fair trials, and we want the two-tiered justice system collapsed into one, uniform justice for all.

Trump has been unfairly investigated and tried not just once, not just twice, not just three times — but half a dozen times, all at once. He’s been sued civilly and prosecuted criminally, just about every conceivable way. He’s been arrested and mugshotted. His allies and supporters have been arrested and prosecuted. And while everyone sane can see it is rank political persecution, Trump continues to fight his own battles in court, the long, hard way.

Fair is fair. Now Trump enjoys a mandate. The media was right in one way: Trump can now appoint a DOJ that could rightfully investigate and arrest even well-entrenched politicians. It’s only fair.

I would never, ever, advocate for even investigating someone over their political views. That’s patently unconstitutional. But I do believe that, if there’s good cause, there should be investigations in spite of people’s political views.

A final point. I’m convinced another democrat psyop is don’t donate to Trump because “Trump is using donor money to pay his legal bills!” I know a lot of good, smart people who’ve bought into that narrative. But there’s a point they may have overlooked. That point is, Trump wouldn’t be facing any of these lawsuits or criminal cases had he not run for President.

If we want Trump, if we want to see how Trump’s new mandate plays out, we should be willing to pay the freight.

Have a blessed Sunday! Thank you immensely for your loyal support — it’s more critical this year than ever. I will meet you back here tomorrow with another terrific roundup as C&C gets back to its normal schedule.

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