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Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and David discuss the debate over unemployment benefits, the firing of the State Department’s inspector general, the recently declassified email from Susan Rice, and the team makes their VP picks for Joe Biden.
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Generally, I violently agree with Dispatch analysis including in its anti-Trumpism. That’s why I’m surprised that in this episode David especially is so dismissive of the Obama admin/FBI’s abuse of power in handling the Russia probe. We have laws and norms to govern the behavior of our intel and law enforcement agencies because when they use their vast resources against even an American citizen in a counter-intel investigation, he or she has very limited protections. The Flynn investigation flouted these protections.
To dwell on this, as Andy McCarthy has for years now, is not to engage in conspiracy theorizing or to make light of the fact that Flynn is clearly a sleaze who had committed other concerning violations. Rather, it’s to care about the rule of law and norms that the Obama admin may have broken by opening a CI investigation into Flynn—FISA surveillance of Kislyak would have given them insight into those perfectly kosher phone calls—and clearly broke once it re-opened the investigation. The precedent for surveillance against political enemies has now been set and given the states of our two political parties, I think we should worry about what that means for the future.
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I have high hopes that theDispatch will provide reasoned and unbiased analyses of events and policies; duplicating the methodologies of Foxnews and MSNBC surely is not the way to that end. Stretching events and facts to the limits of plausibility to support an argument, ignoring other facts and circumstances are just another flavor of TDS(r).
More Steve Hayes, please. Less David and Jonah
Thanks
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