Politics as Lawfare

There is a wonderful quote from noted scary fascist (back when fascism was still a vogue and “the coming thing”) Oscar Benavides who was president of Peru from 1933-39. it’s as aposite as ever today:

To my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law.

It really says it all, doesn’t it?

This is the power that accrues to those who control the justice system. It turns out that it, quite literally, does not matter what the law is. What matters is what those who uphold the law do.

Who will be charged and for what?

Who will be ignored?

The US DoD can “misplace” trillions of dollars.

The US Congress can spend $1.7 trillion in appropriations without having had a legal quorum to vote.

Nothing whatsoever will happen to these people.

But if you inappropriately deduct a cheeseburger from your taxes,

This rapidly becomes a substantial power base.

This was one of the grand discoveries of the Soros gang who realized that elections for city DA’s could be swayed with very small amounts of money or by running third candidates to split opposing votes. It’s just value investing ideas applied to Moneyball politics. And it works. You get massive, unaccountable control.

The astonishing power one can wield if breaking the law carries no consequence for your team, but even made up infractions can be used to destroy those who dare speak against you beggars belief.

It’s subject to nothing.

Not legislation.

Not Constitution, nothing.

It’s absolute, unaccountable fiat and the more you abuse it and get away with it, the more it demoralizes your opponents, terrifying and cowing them into acquiescent silence and the more abject and hopeless the populace becomes as there seems to be no justice nor any path to any.

You put a foot wrong and they take all your bitcoin or mire you in million dollar defenses of “process as punishment” scenarios, meanwhile the Congress grows insanely rich trading short-dated options on companies they regulate right before they change the laws or shower subsidies.

It rapidly becomes a grotesquerie of those who own the organs of justice passing you at 140 mph on the highway just as you get pulled over for going 67.

Whatever one feels about Trump, the truly relentless and unprecedented attacks on him by the CIA, NSA, FBI, Justice, and Congress and Biden/Obama/Clinton cronies alike is so far beyond the pale as to beggar belief. It’s past banana republic and well into farce as issue after issue turns out to be illusory, invented, or irrelevant.

Meanwhile inconvenient laptops, facts, and follies are swept from the internet and the docket alike. US justice and intelligence agencies circled the wagons right before an election and lied their faces off to the American people. “The laptop is a fake” made claims about “not having had sex with that woman” look like sandbox hijinks. That was real, no fooling around, bare-knuckle election interference. And no one has paid any price for it.

No one ever does.

You get “the law.”

Their friends get “everything.”

This may be the most lawless administration since FDR. At least the Obamas had the decency to try to hide it.

No mas.

In any other time in America, this would be an astonishing story. Today, it’s just “Yeah, we know. Whatever.”

That’s what demoralization feels like.

This is what absolute fiat looks like. It’s pure, unadulterated influence-peddling.

The evidence shows that Hunter Biden and his company Rosemont Seneca Partners were on the verge of a significant expansion in Russia in 2014 after years of courtship. The foray into the Russian market overlapped with the younger Biden’s stint as a Naval Reserve officer from May 2013 to October 2014, when he was discharged for testing positive for cocaine. It also came as the Obama-Biden administration was actively pursuing a “reset” in its relationship with the Russian Federation.

One of the first instances of Russian business recorded on Hunter Biden’s laptop is a late 2010 email thread between (Devon) Archer, Biden, and other partners about a “Moscow agreement” that appears to have resulted in a wire transfer to the Rosemont firm.

Burisma was hopelessly corrupt and under investigation. Biden the elder “the big guy” got some prosecutors off their neck and, “whadda ya know?” A multi-million sinecure for his drug-addled progeny.

The whole affair is so tawdry that even a whiff of the scent should draw every law dog in the Western world.

Instead: nothing

For my friends, everything.

But if an enemy so much as misprices collateral on a loan agreement, friendly judges in friendly courts will burn them to the waterline.

This cements power.

Your “allies” are all kept in line because any of them could be the next show trial if they buck.

Your enemies live in constant terror.

Why is so much of the GOP comprised of weak, tepid chambercrats playing at gormless opposition party? Perhaps because they are terrified of what will land on them should the Justice Department decide to single them out for an object lesson.

A few smallfolk can play dissident and raise issues, but not anyone who will hold actual power. Not the leadership. They remain senile, rudderless, and acquiescent. “Screensaver Mode Mitch” can leave, but watch who takes his place. Do not expect anyone potent.

Imagine if you took the Burisma story and swapped a Trump name into it where the Biden patronymic currently resides.

Can any reasonable person even try to claim it would not be being handled differently?

This is not politics, this is dictatorship by unaccountable apparatchiks and it has festered into something truly ugly.

This is how you undermine the faith in a system entirely.

You make it lawless and capricious, blatantly unfair, rigged, and slanted.

You do not even try to hide this fact, you flaunt it.

It’s dug in deep all over the US at local, state, and federal levels.

Pushing it back and tearing it out will be the work of a massive grassroots, no stone unturned effort persisting over years.

At issue is the foundational idea of a nation of laws.

Without that, you inhabit a dictatorship absent any visible dictator to depose.

And that will just keep getting uglier.

(Addendum: where this gets really interesting is when factions start fighting for control over who gets to hold the reins of the capricious application of law. you saw this all over the Soviet, Maoist, and fascist systems. One day, you are untouchable. The next, gulag. If Hunter is suddenly up on charges, you’ll know that Newsom and Pelosi have won.)

Republished from the author’s Substack