Not only has the damning memo been released (Francis Turner blogs here at length on what it implies), but now the “lost” text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his lover have been recovered.
A journalist at Forbes published a timeline, which now seems to have been memory-holed by the paper [UPDATE: seems it is back]— but a cached copy is available here. Mollie Ziegler Hemingway weighs in here: NEW: Criminal Referral Confirms Nunes Memo’s Explosive Claims Of FISA Abuse.
What emerges is something that makes Nixon look like a naughty boy in comparison, and Watergate a schoolyard prank. (See also this, h/t masgramondou.)
In this context, the conspiratorial-sounding term “deep state” is often uttered, even by people as level-headed as Instapundit. Does this refer to some mysterious, nefarious, octopus-like conspiracy at the heart of the federal government? No, it is merely the current US term for a phenomenon with which Europeans (particularly the French) are intimately familiar: the “permanent bureaucracy” of career civil servants. Governments come and go, and the unelected permanent bureaucracy stays in place.
In an ideal world, the professionalism of longtime civil servants should act as a moderating factor and ‘sanity check’ on the less well-considered ideas of elected officials, as well as stop power-grabbing overreach on their part. In the real world, at least as far back as Plato, one faces the question most pithily asked by Juvenal: “who watches the watchmen themselves?”
My contempt for the loser in the 2016 electoral campaign is bottomless: she seems to have all the moral restraint of Lucretia Borgia combined with a peerless capacity for self-pity (read this serialized fisking of her book if you have a strong stomach). In contrast, I am at least willing to entertain the notion that the FBI agents desperate to exonerate her, and find fault with Trump, had sincerely convinced themselves that they were trying to save the Republic from a disaster. There is of course, paraphrasing C. S. Lewis, no worse tyrant than one who sincerely believes his actions are for your own good.
The career civil service bureaucracy in France is notoriously incestuous, with such a large percentage of senior civil servants being graduates of just one academy, the ENA (National Administration School) that some French quip about being ruled by “l’ENArquie”. The ENA is one of France’s élite “Great Schools” that inhabit the tier above mere ‘universités’ in that country’s peculiar system. Its students are a truly elite crowd selected by standardized exams graded anonymously (and hence free of favoritism and reverse discrimination). However, this quasi-Mandarin monoculture ensures a homogeneity in outlook, and only exacerbates the natural tendency of any governing elite to conflate its own collective self-interest with the interest of the nation.
Their American counterparts are a good deal less of an elite, and a good deal more of a ‘credentialed gentry’, to use Angelo Codevilla’s term. Yet they are at least as cocksure as their French counterpart, and at least as averse to an outsider ‘not one of us’ upsetting the applecart. It is, therefore, no surprise that Clinton, Inc. and the Chicago machine behind Obama would have found willing accomplices.
Nobody in their right mind would want to go back entirely to the ‘spoils system’. And there are still people working in the Federal apparatus that it is a privilege to know and who are both highly competent and dedicated to their country. It is, however, well past time for a thorough housecleaning. It is even more past time for those politicians who suborned elements—all the way to the top—in the country’s highest law enforcement authority to be called out, disgraced, and ostracized from political life forever. I used to dismiss the characterization of the Democrat Party as “a legalized crime syndicate” as irresponsible hyperbole. Used to being the operative word. Now I wonder instead: if it really were one, what would they be doing differently?
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!
UPDATE 2: More from Mollie Ziegler H.: How the media buried two FBI stories yesterday. “Where journalistic instincts go to die”, indeed.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 
…what would they be doing differently?
Looking more honest?
Democrat Party NOT RICO?
OK, so the “O” for Organized is weak, but the rest fits. Hillay and the Clinton Foundation? Chicago, Boston, New Your? The Welfare Industrial State? Gov Unions and Prevailing Wage?
Arbel is a great writer.
The conspirators truly believe that Republicans are evil and Trump in particular is an especially vile example of the species. They believe to this day that they were doing the right thing. Sure, they might have cut a few corners and bent a few rules, but they thought they were serving their country. That their country’s interests and the personal interests of the Clintons happen to be the same, as they often are, is just a happy coincidence.
Watergate doesn’t even rise to a boyhood prank and Nixon was not conservative.
Hi,
If we can’t (or shouldn’t) go back to the ‘spoils system’, what structure can we put in place that will prevent this in the future? I’m thinking along the lines of what Constitutional Amendment can be created?
No Constitutional Amendment needed, just throw the book at the guilty parties and send them into the federal penitentiary general population for a decade or ten and presto!, problem solved (or at least greatly minimized).