The People’s Banana-State Demokratik Republik Of America

     Does anyone here remember Scooter Libby? If not, read the first four paragraphs of the WikiPedia entry about him. Yes, WikiPedia is edited by a bunch of left-liberal shits who’d swear that the Sun rises in the West if they thought it would get their favored candidates elected, but one must start somewhere.

     Scooter Libby did nothing criminal. He certainly had nothing to do with the “outing” of Valerie Plame. Baldly put, he was railroaded – and President George W. Bush displayed a noticeable lack of political courage in not shutting down the witch-hunt that targeted him. Yes, Dubya commuted the sentence Libby was given, but even there he showed less spine than I’d have expected from a man who’d been willing to lead America to war.

     However, what was done to Scooter Libby should have told us something. It was a harbinger of things to come: an early flexing of institutional and political muscle by the Deep State. It displayed its political preferences, which are totally aligned with the Left. It wanted to bring down Dubya or one of his Cabinet secretaries, but couldn’t quite manage it it. So it settled for one of his closer support figures. The indictments, which were garishly publicized, jarred public opinion sufficiently to cement the Democrat Party into control of Congress in the 2006 midterms.

     It’s possible that the witch-hunt aimed at Libby was an attempt to create a lever. Perhaps the “investigators” and “prosecutors” whispered something to him along these lines: “We know these charges are BS, but we can put you in the poor house defending yourself. However, if you’ll give us some dirt on the vice-president or president that we could use to build a case against one of them, we might let this indictment slide.”

     Sound plausible to you, Gentle Reader?

     Fast forward to 2017. The man under the crosshairs is no longer Scooter Libby but another second-echelon political effective: Paul Manafort. The FBI have been “investigating” Manafort since early 2014. They wiretapped his conversations, including those with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. They staged a dawn raid on his home. They picked the lock on his door and rousted him and his wife out of their bed. They seized virtually everything he owned that might have carried a scrap of information. Yet after three and a half – nearly four – years of “investigation,” they can’t make a case against him for anything of substance. Yet they persist. Why?

     I know most of my Gentle Readers are averse to watching videos. Even so, I urge you to watch the Mark Steyn video I’ve embedded below. It’s devastating.

     As Steyn says, in most banana republics, the secret police work for the regime. Here, they’re actively working against the regime: a clear case of the Deep State striving to eject an Administration whose policies it dislikes. As for the minor matter of the “choice of the people,” the Deep State’s attitude seems to be “The ‘people’ be damned. We are the ultimate power in this nation.”

     For my part, it’s getting harder and harder not to lock and load. What about you, Gentle Reader? I await your thoughts.