No Consequences/No Accountability

 

I wish I had tidings of great joy this holiday season.   I really do.  Instead, I have a warning.   Hold close to the people around you.  Prepare, mostly by preparing yourself for the dark and treacherous days that lie ahead.  We have entered a period no less turbulent than WWII.   I mentioned to someone the other day that reading Eric Larsen’s book on Churchill’s first year in office and the Battle of Britain gave me a sense of what it was like during those dark, uncertain years.  We are going through something quite analogous.  It will be as difficult a challenge as the Blitz.  Like Great Britain, we will stand mostly alone (perhaps the Visegrad nations will be with us).   Great Britain was bombed from above.  Our foes have already penetrated the interior.  

I have argued that 9/11 exposed the weakness in our defense structure.  A handful of barbarians with limited technology was able to inflict a devastating blow to our nation, and hit us in the heart of our financial center and defense center.  Without the heroic acts of the passengers on Flight 93, our capitol would have like been destroyed.    The real estate crisis of ’07 and ’08 exposed the fragility of our financial system.  The real estate frenzy and the push to make loans to noncreditworthy borrowers resulted in a panic and deep and long recession.  2020 with COVID19 and the riots exposed our social and moral decrepitude.  

No consequences/No accountability

I wrote earlier this year that we have undergone what I called a “criminal inversion,’ as we lionized criminals George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks, honored Floyd with multiple funerals and yet when a true American hero, Neil Armstrong passed, there was little fanfare.

Rioters and Looters.

Very few of the rioters and looter  were even arrested.  Of the ones that were, most were sprung from jail almost immediately, and activist funds posted the bail for many others.  Unbeknownst to most people, the bail posted by activist funds revert to the perpetrator.  The rioters and looters actually kept the money.  So, not only were there no consequences for the rioters and looters, many were actually subsidized.

Worse, the attacks of many rioters and looters justified the use of deadly force against them.  Rioters in Portland, Chicago, and other locales threw bricks, frozen water bottles, threw incendiary devices and pointed blinding lasers in the eyes of law enforcement officers.  Very few of these perpetrators were even arrested.  Closer to home, a “defund the police” protest escalated at Northwestern University, students broke windows and vandalized stores in Evanston and threw bricks at police – an act that justifies deadly force.  President Morton Shapiro’s response?   Writing a public letter of rebuke expressing “disappointment” in the students.   Again, no real consequences for potentially deadly assaults.

Most astonishingly, there have been no consequences for the political class whatsoever.

New York mayor Bill DeBlasio’s wife Chirlane McCray was entrusted with overseeing ThriveNYC, an initiative that was to funded to fight drug abuse, homelessness and depression.  Last I  noticed, there was plenty of that going around in New York.  But $850 million is missing and unaccounted for.   There have been no consequences and no accountability for her.  The MSM has lost interest in the scandal.

The wife of Bernie Sanders, Jane, was being investigated for bank fraud.  As president of Burlington College, she fraudulently misrepresented pledges the college was to receive in order to receive a loan.  The college ultimately went bankrupt. Defrauding a bank by misrepresenting collateral is a serious offense, yet the matter was quietly dropped.

In an earlier era, Eric Swalwell would have been summarily hanged for treason.  His tryst with Chinese fundraiser and spy revealed, Swalwell has since gone on the offense, demanding to know who leaked this information and incredulously asserting that he can’t comment on any of this because it is “classified.”  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vigorously defends Swalwell and refuses to take him off the House Intelligence Committee.

Another august member of the Intelligence Committee is Ilhan Omar.   The Marxist Somali routinely makes anti-Semitic remarks and bellows for the defunding of police.  Yet, she has funded herself pretty well, egregiously violating conflict of interest rules by steering campaign funds to her former lover and now husband.   After calls for censure for her anti-Semitic remarks, Pelosi introduced a watered down version that essentially said that any bigotry should be frowned upon.  Omar still sits on the committee and has been re-elected.  Her purported immigration fraud likewise has been kicked to the curb.

And then there is Hunter Biden.  Hunter belongs in his own special category.   I won’t repeat all that has been written about Hunter (and then covered up and censored by the media—Russian disinformation, you know), but here’s a guy so brazen that he fought paying child support to the pole dancer that he impregnated.  There has been no explanation as to why

Andrew Cuomo.  After dispatching 6,300 COVID19 infected people into nursing homes that resulting in thousands of deaths, Cuomo received an Emmy and then had the chutzpah to write a book on his own leadership capabilities.  In any other venue, deaths resulting from a mistake in judgment of this magnitude would result in disgrace, removal and exile, if not worse.  But undeterred, Cuomo continues on to his next project.  Having presided over the deaths of thousands of individuals, he is shutting down the restaurant business in New York and presiding over the deaths of thousands of businesses.

9/11 exposed our defense shortfalls.  The Great Recession showed our financial fragility.  COVID and the riots exposed our social and moral decline.  We have entire criminal and political classes that now have a veritable force field around them and are impervious to the consequences of their horrendous acts.  In each of these cases, the members are of a protected class that suffer no ill effects whatsoever for the damage they have wrought.