The Attempted Coup D’etat?

by

       George Sontag

      The most egregious anti- constitutional actions ever taken by members of what we now call the Deep State are confirmed with the publication of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s new book detailing how the FBI and Justice Department plotted what is basically a coup d’etat’ to remove President Trump from office for firing FBI Director James Comey.

      Instead of waiting for the proper appointment of a new FBI head and allowing him/her to set the tone of any investigation, they decided that they were the ones that should take action and discussed wiretapping and using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove President Trump. They acted to create an independent counsel over obstruction that never happened as a retaliatory move for Comey’s firing.

      The discussions about invoking the 25th Amendment was serious, it was also ridiculous because McCabe and Rosenstein had no authority to invoke the 25^th Amendment. The 25th Amendment does not permit the deputy attorney general to trigger the process for removing an incapacitated president. By its own terms, it can only be invoked by the president himself, or by the vice president in conjunction with a majority of the Cabinet (or a congressionally authorized committee).

      On the other hand, while talk about invoking the 25th Amendment was serious, it is also ridiculous. The 25th Amendment was adopted in the years shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination to address the potential problem of a president who is rendered physically or mentally unable to perform his duties – as, for example, President Woodrow Wilson was by a stroke. The amendment is not a substitute for the Constitution’s impeachment process: If you believe a president is guilty of criminal, abusive, or incompetent behavior – the remedy is for Congress to impeach him, not to declare him physically or psychologically unfit.

      The fact is that the amendment has nothing to do with the situation McCabe and Rosenstein believed they were confronting - a president who is either potentially obstructing an investigation or not up to the obligations of the office. In addition, neither McCabe nor Rosenstein was a Cabinet officer. All they could do was speculate about which Cabinet officials might be amenable to considering a 25th Amendment ploy; and they quickly dismissed the idea because they realized they were nowhere close to a Cabinet majority, let alone to a green light from the vice president.

      But these elitist Justice Department and FBI officials who believe that the end justifies using any means were joined by Lisa Page and Peter Strzok of the FBI – knew how to get around the intent of the law and the Constitution. They were on a mission to remove Trump from office for daring to fire Comey and other perceived atrocities to the status quo. They even thought they were part of the 25th Amendment, which empowers only the Cabinet and Congress to remove the president from office in extraordinary circumstances.

      There has been a good deal of commentary this week about whether McCabe and Rosenstein were seriously brainstorming about a coup attempt. McCabe, himself, and others say Rosenstein was deadly serious when he discussed invoking the 25th Amendment and wiretapping against President Trump in an effort to remove the president from office. Rosenstein says he was just joking around. No one was in a joking mood when these discussions took place. McCabe was in the midst of formally opening a criminal investigation of the president, and Rosenstein was handwringing over the possible appointment of a special counsel.

      No, they were not joking. They wanted more believable accusations so they decided that if you’re going to convince people that the president is unfit, you need evidence of his unfitness. McCabe and Rosenstein discussed considering whether they could secretly come into the White House, the Oval Office, wearing a wire to capture Trump saying things that were incriminating or crazy. They could then use such recordings to try to convince top administration officials that the president needed to go. 

 

      Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said any justice official who discussed the 25th Amendment in the context of ousting the president "has committed a grievous offense against the Constitution," adding that using the 25th Amendment to circumvent the impeachment process or an election, "is a despicable act of unconstitutional power grabbing."

       Evoking the 25th Amendment, Dershowitz added, would be a fundamental misuse of its original purpose. He said it was originally "about Woodrow Wilson having a stroke. It’s about a president being shot and not being able to perform his office." He emphatically stated that the Department of Justice’s discussions to employ the 25th Amendment to oust President Trump-- if true-- is ‘clearly an attempt at a coup d’etat’

      Every Democrat, Republican and Independent American should stop angling for partisan advantage and agree, regardless of who is helped or hurt, that these officials acted without proper authority in discussing the possibility of removing a duly elected President and are responsible for unprecedented damage to our democracy and our political system.

      As they dress up their resistance in high-minded rhetoric about protecting the Constitution. But in reality, it is the ruling elite that is undermining democratic norms, by subverting the core of our democratic process. The American idea is that “we the people” should be in charge, through the representatives we elect. The Deep State has a different idea: not “We the People” but “You the People, ruled by We the Elite.” We are still not out of the woods.

History Repeats Itself

By

        Zeno Potas

       Overall news coverage of the president in the news media has been negative since he took office in January 2017. The Media Research Center has reported that from last June 1 to Sept. 30 it monitored the TV network evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC and found that 92 percent of news coverage of President Trump during this period was negative. The center called this “the most hostile coverage of a President in TV history.” A former executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, says the paper’s news pages, the home of its straight-news coverage, have become “unmistakably anti-Trump.”

The Times and the media has long faced accusations of liberal bias, even before Trump got into politics and became its harshest critic. But Abramson’s words carry special weight because she is also a former Times Washington bureau chief and Wall Street Journal correspondent specializing in investigative reporting. No president since Abraham Lincoln has faced the kind of unending bias and hostility from the media that he is living through.

Here are some comments about our president printed in the news media;

• “Within 90 days from inauguration, the Republican Party will be utterly ruined and destroyed. His path is environed with so many difficulties, that even if he had the ability of Jefferson and the energy of Jackson, he would fail, but he is a weak and inexperienced man, and his administration will be doomed from the commencement.”

• “If he takes that radical section of the Republican Party, the conservative wing of it will cut loose and repudiate him. If, on the other hand, he courts the conservatives and pursues a moderate conciliatory policy, the radicals will make open war upon his administration.”

• “….is universally an admitted failure, has no will, no courage, no executive capacity… and his spirit necessarily infuses itself downwards through all departments.”

• ….“his election was a rash experiment, his administration is a deplorable failure.”

• “As President of the United States he must have enough sense to see and acknowledge he has been an egregious failure. One thing must be self-evident to him, and that is that under no circumstances can he hope to be the next President of the United States … (he should) retire from the position to which, in an evil hour, he was exalted.”

• The President was “evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis."

• Even one general dismissed the President as a... “hack and an idiot...”

       Does any of this sound familiar? Then you a quite the historian as these comments were made over 150 years ago about President Abraham Lincoln. Many news organizations opposed Lincoln from the beginning – much as they have President Trump in our time and the hostility toward Lincoln within the Washington establishment and the political elite was just as ferocious.

       This relentless hostility parallels what President Lincoln had to endure in the media of his day – newspapers and magazines. Just as President Trump rails against “fake news,” President Lincoln felt that a significant front in his war to preserve the Union was against the news media. This made Lincoln highly critical and skeptical of the media.

       According to Noah Brooks, a reporter who had regular access to the president, Lincoln often said "the worst feature about newspapers was that they were so sure to be 'ahead of the hounds,' outrunning events, and exciting expectations which were sure to be disappointed." Sound familiar?

       Today’s never-ending Russia investigation is a perfect example that things have not changed, in fact, when in comes to mainstream media distorting information and telling lies. They have gotten much worse in recent years, It is highly encouraging that more people are starting to see through these lies. It’s time to turn off your television, “Big Brother’s fantasy box,” and do your own research. Read news accounts from all sources especially outside the US propaganda sphere. Use the tools of critical analytical logical reasoning to come to your own conclusions, not the opinions of the talking heads that represent the elite who want nothing more than profit and power. If you are curious about what is happening on our planet. It’s time to wake up

Society of Fear

By

       Zeno Potas

       We are becoming a “society of fear”. Individual citizens live under the constant threat of government surveillance. It is an society where individuals reasonably believe their actions are being tracked, recorded and monitored by government agents at all times. They fear having their computers hacked by government bureaucrats. Privacy International spokesman Mike Rispoli said: What is frightening about the NSA's capabilities are that they collect massive amounts of information on everyone, including your political beliefs, contacts, relationships, and internet histories.
 

      We are becoming a “society of fear.” Individual citizens live under the constant threat of social scrutiny. American Patriots are becoming afraid to speak, act and think freely. George Orwell’s 1984 is a classic book depicting a populace ruled by a political regime that persecutes individualism and independent critical thinking as “thoughtcrimes” that must be enforced by the “thought police.” This party seeks power above all, and, through the propagandist Ministry of Truth, presents the people with their version of truth. Sound familiar?

      In 1949, when he wrote “1984,” Orwell predicted all this, including the secret torture, the perpetual warfare, the continuous spying and the fear of the government. His predictions were right on the mark -- he was only mistaken by 30 years.

      Today, it is still held that Communist Socialism and Fascism are considered opposite extremes of the political spectrum. This has not been true for almost 100 years. The Left/Right convention used to describe the two is an archaic and meaningless originally referenced to French parliamentary practice. It has zero application in American politics, where extreme far-right views would be Anarcho-Capitalist or Libertarian, and extreme far Left views would be both Communist Socialism AND Fascism.

      A truly free society exists only when citizens have a reasonable expectation they are free to live their lives without the fear of unwarranted interference from the authorities. Unfortunately, in today’s society, there is a growing expectation that is quite the opposite -- that we are, or soon will be, the victims of government targeting, for either personal or political motives.

Author Richard Dolan puts it quite well:

      "If you are concerned about Fascism coming to America, don’t look for a single fist pounding demagogue. Look instead at a government that can read every email you have ever written, GPS you at any time, know your internet habits better than you do, surveil you literally wherever you go in any major city, and use your information against you if they decide, however loosely, that you are an enemy of the state. That is Fascism, and the U.S. has been living that bipartisan nightmare for years."

How Quickly They Forget

by

       George Sontag

       Those Americans with a memory of more than 30 seconds remember that a little more than two years ago our Republic emerged from one of the worst periods in our history. The un-constitutional and probable illegitimate presidency* of Barrack Obama. For eight long years our Leftist controlled media colluded with Progressive(Communist) elements in the push for one-world, no-borders government. By deliberately ignoring constitutional law while claiming they weren't, this administration did more damage to America and it's values than anyone or anything in our history.

      The media did its best to conceal the dirty details of Obama’s fatally unethical and ruthlessly unconstitutional administration. The rule of law and our constitutional principals were so ignored that our highest lawman's department was referred to as “the Department of IN-Justice.” His deliberate destruction of the economy was to “bring America DOWN to the rest of the world.”

      Obama presided over the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression, plagued by stagnant wages and low labor force participation. Not only did job growth not keep up with population growth, but 95 percent of the jobs created on his watch were part-time or contract jobs. He is the only president in history to have never had a single year with at least 3% GDP growth. Even when adjusted for inflation Obama has 8 of the top 10 deficits in history, and racked up more debt than all past presidents combined and America’s credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history.
 
      How soon they seem to have forgotten that he was an unquestioned enemy of the press yet they fawned over him as to be politically correct to the first “black president.” This,even though his administration was spying on reporters and prosecuting journalists and whistleblowers from the AP to Fox News to CBS. According to journalist and former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, the ability of the press to report freely on the government was "under siege," by the Obama administration. How quickly they forget.

      Perhaps they have forgotten his other “accomplishments” 
 

• He destroyed civility. Race relations declined significantly on his watch.
  
• He regularly alienated America’s allies and kowtowed to our enemies.
  
• He is responsible for destabilizing Libya, and the rise of ISIS.
  
• His inability to work with Congress meant he signed fewer bills than even some one-term presidents and fostered a dangerous precedent of executive overreach with his “pen.”
• Despite being a former “constitutional law professor” he has the worst record before the Supreme Court of any modern presidency.
• Despite promises of making healthcare affordable, Obamacare raised premiums and deductibles, making health care costs the top financial concern of Americans, according to Gallup.
  

       Americans were too privileged. They needed to feel guilty about their prosperity, that was his message.

• He won reelection with 7.6 million fewer votes than he did in 2008, and was the first president to lose electoral and popular support in his second election.
  
• His job approval ratings were the most politically polarized in history.
  
• Not once during his presidency did a majority of Americans believe the country was headed in the right direction.
  

      The Obama administration was also plagued by more than two dozen scandals including: Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the VA scandal, Solyndra, the OPM hacking scandal, the GSA scandal, the Iran Ransom scandal, Uranium One, Project Cassandra, the FISA abuse scandal currently being unraveled… just to name a few.

      The dozens of scandals in the Obama administration never resulted in any of the key players being prosecuted. No special counsels were ever appointed. By the end of the Obama administration, they’d been able to get away with so much because the media refused to give anything damaging to Obama the coverage it deserved for eight years. Solid proof of our media can't be trusted with truth.

*Former Hawaii elections clerk Tim Adams has now signed an affidavit swearing he was told by his supervisors in Hawaii that no long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate existed for Barack Obama Jr. in Hawaii and that neither Queens Medical Center nor Kapi’olani Medical Center in Honolulu had any record of Obama having been born in their medical facilities.

Ninety Percent of the Media Admits to Leftist Views

by

 M. Richard Maxson

      Over the past decades billionaires with Leftist or Socialist agendas have taken control of the western media and pump out their version of reality. This is what we, at The American Constituionalist, have called “propaganda.” and it is what the President calls “fake news.” Patriots have been refusing to accept the elite's version of the reality. Many journalists continue to argue that there is no such thing as liberal media bias. The facts show a much different picture.

      An analysis by MSNBC.com found that 87 percent of the media donors gave to Democrats or liberal causes. The Media Research Center found that 94 percent of donors affiliated with five news outlets contributed to Democrats between 2008 and 2016. This is among all reporters not just political reporters. The result is a national press that attacks those on the right for anything and downplays and ignores everything awful done by the left.

      Real news is broadcast in seconds and events that further the agenda are blow-up way out of proportion and slanted to keep the citizenry's attention transfixed

with false narratives. They want us to be fearful, dependent, and divided. Their modus operandi involves persistently presenting our world to us through a lens of chaos, fear, and violence. In doing so, they feel they can perpetuate our continued perception of the world as such, and actuate our own participation as scared and confused people seeking order and protection We become slaves to their reality.

      Their goal is clear and it has been vocalized repeatedly – the total destruction of the Republican party and all those on the right of the political spectrum. The result of accomplishing the goal is to create a Progressive Socialist form of government wrapped in red, white, and blue as to deceive the public into believing that the United States of America still exists as founded. We have already drifted too far from the Constitution that our Founders envisioned. The Republic is in grave danger. Can it still be saved?

Random Thoughts in Today's World

By

       M. Richard Maxson

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it" and "The most basic question is not what is best but who shall decide what is best." - Dr. Thomas Sowell

     Dr. Thomas Sowell was an American economist and syndicated political commentator. He was a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

He has written more than 30 books. He occasionally wrote a column entitled “Random Thoughts”, which was published in newspapers nationally giving his observations on life in America. The American Constitutionalist has honored his work in the past and continues today with his, and our own, Random Thoughts in Today's World

• The wisest and most knowledgeable human being on the planet is utterly incompetent to make even 10 percent of the consequential decisions that have to be made in a modern nation. Yet all sorts of people want to decide how much money other people can make or keep, and to micro-manage how other people live their lives.

• Among the common phrases of the past that we seldom hear today is "None of your business." Apparently everything is other people's business these days, including the media's business and the government's business.

• We live in a country run by politicians and bureaucrats who can’t do anything right and yet they think the solution to that problem is to give them even more power over our lives.

• America is a very deeply divided nation, and it is getting worse with each passing day. The left has already shown that they are willing to become very violent when push comes to shove, and what we have seen so far is just the small tip of a very large iceberg.

• "Isn't it strange that after a bombing, everyone blames the bomber, his upbringing, his environment, his culture but ... after a shooting, the problem is the gun?"

• The combined estimated cost of the recent natural disasters is $220 billion which is just a fraction of the $700 billion the US will spend on the military in 2017. Instead of spending money on war, which leads to destruction, we should spend money in the US to help Americans.
  

• If the mainstream media and liberal leaders continue to stoke the flames of hatred and continue to incite violence on a daily basis, we are going to see much worse in the months ahead. 
   
  
• As America’s problems have gotten bigger and more intractable, our politicians have created phony problems to solve instead of dealing with real issues.

• The real egalitarians are not the people who want to redistribute wealth to the poor, but those who want to extend to the poor the ability to create their own wealth, to lift themselves up, instead of trying to tear others down. Earning respect, including self-respect, is better than being a parasite.
  

• There are always people in D.C. who think they have a better idea of what to do with my life and my money than I do. I don’t need any “help” from the government and I’m not okay with the government using my money to help people who should be helping themselves. When I want to give to charity, tithe to my church or buy Christmas gifts for a poor family, I do it.
  

• I don’t much care for people who are lazy, dependent on the government or who want others to do what they should be doing for themselves. Unfortunately, we live in a country where the government takes the first group for granted and uses it like a piggybank for the second group.
  
  
  
  
   
  

The "NEW" Democrats are NOT the Party of Our Parents

by

       Zeno Potas

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." – Sir Winston Churchill

      On Jan. 10, 1963, Congressman Albert S. Herlong Jr. of Florida read a list of 45 Communist goals into the Congressional Record. These are the one's pertinent to this article:

• Capture one or both of the political parties in the U.S. (Note: In his book, "Reagan’s War," Peter Schweizer demonstrates the astonishing degree to which Communists and Communist sympathizers have penetrated the Democratic Party.)

• Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for Socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

• Infiltrate the press. Get control of book review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.

• Gain control of key positions in radio, TV & motion pictures.

• Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all form of artistic expression.

      Now, with the accomplishment of these goals, John Bachtell, chairman of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA, has penned a 2,000-plus-word essay explaining to his True Believers why the party has chosen to use the Democrats as its vehicle. It can be found on their website. Former Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin explained in his writings that the ultimate goal of Socialism is Communism.

      They are now seeing the results. The rise of newly elected, Communist inspired, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who is being touted as one of the rising stars of the “new” Democratic Party. Ocasio-Cortez is not of the old Democratic party of our fathers. That doesn't exist anymore. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest Socialist organization in the United States. A number of

Democratic Socialists of America leaders have publicly

endorsed communism, an ideology that, according to some estimates, is responsible for the unnatural deaths of 100 million people during the 20th century. The DSA doesn’t merely want to create new government-run social programs, it desires, in the words of a member of DSA and the editor of the Socialist magazine Jacobin, to “in the long run … end capitalism,” - to change the United States into something the Founding Fathers would abhor.

      At the foundation of all of Ocasio-Cortez’s reforms is her commitment to Socialism, an economic system that in its most utopian form aims to eliminate nearly all private property. Ocasio-Cortez’s radical left-wing policy proposals and her socialist ideology present a significant threat to America’s economy and its longstanding commitment to individual liberty. For example, Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal includes “upgrading every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency, comfort and safety,” a plan that would cost trillions of dollars and give government access to every household in America. Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t simply want to tweak our existing system, she wants to complete Barack Obama’s goal of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

      How does Ocasio-Cortez plan to pay for free education, health care, living income, etc, these massive programs? She has called for printing money to pay for her socialist reforms. In a “60 Minutes” interview with Anderson Cooper that will air on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez suggested that some of her plans could be paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy to rates as high as 70 percent. But even that huge tax increase wouldn’t be nearly enough to pay for her numerous policy proposals. Raising taxes on all citizens, perhaps to 50%, would eliminate the middle class and bring about true Progressive Socialism.

      Back in the 1940s, Communists were also infiltrating the Democrats, but back then, there was resistance. Hubert Humphrey rose to national prominence as mayor of Minneapolis when he crusaded to drive the commies out of the Democrats. He was joined by a large cohort of anti-communist Democrats, people like Henry Jackson. Somehow, these days, there is no expectation of resistance to this infiltration. Ocasio-Cortez wants to impose her radical, socialist vision on every single American citizen, a fact most of those in the mainstream media, who have spent the past several months fawning

over her, refuse to tell the public. That fact is that Socialism has two classes – the proletariat, the workers which would be 95% of the population and the ruling class, the uber-rich, who will tell the proletariat what they can and cannot do or say and administer to them as they see fit. Also known as “The Nanny State.)

      There is nothing trendy, cool, or desirable about Socialism. And those who advocate it are, well, let me be blunt, lying, deceptive jackasses – the symbol of the Democratic Party. The ugly face of Socialism has destroyed the beauty of Venezuela and many other countries while murdering millions to achieve this so-called utopia These “new” Democrats will turn our nation which could be termed a little piece of heaven on earth into a living hell.

"Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it."

                                                  – President Ronald Reagan