You Can’t Be Heard to Say You Looked But You Didn’t See

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That’s a rule in the courtroom. Not to look is negligence. You can’t testify that you exercised ordinary care by looking, if you then cause damage to something or someone that was in plain sight. You didn’t look—or you would have seen.
I just finished “The Doorbell Rang”, one of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. ( oh, nooo, I’m getting close to the end of the series, I’m going to miss Wolfe and Archie SO much!) It’s set in about 1967 and involves Wolfe exposing a plot by J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI to harass a citizen who has been distributing Cook’s book “The FBI Nobody Knows”. (That’s a real book like all the ones mentioned by Stout; he has led me to discover some amazing literature from the dark backward and abysm of time. ) Wolfe and Archie succeed in entrapping FBI agents! Beating ‘em at their own game! The title comes from the very last page: Wolfe’s doorbell rings, and through the peephole Archie sees “the big fish”(Hoover himself, though he isnt named) on Wolfe’s doorstep. My guess is he wants to recruit the duo. They don’t let him in.
This morning Julie Kelly has an article,on American Greatness, “The FBI Twice Interfered in the 2020 Election to Sabotage Trump. What Now?” It’s about the Whitmer non-plot and the FBI suppression of the Hunter Biden info. Are Republicans gonna do anything about these subversive efforts, which now lie open for everyone’s inspection?
I was struck by one sentence of Kelly’s:

“A free country cannot exist much longer under control of a Praetorian Guard that the opposition party is too afraid to confront.”

Welp—we HAVE existed under such a Praetorian guard since—and before- Stout wrote “The Doorbell Rang” . What the characters say about the FBI is not dated; it’s timeless.

We’ve existed 55 years and even longer. Everybody knows it: remember Schumer’s “six ways from Sunday” remark? He was right: the FBI did set out to get Trump in all six ways and more.

Kelly seems to hold out hope that the GOP will do something now that we know, if we look we cannot help but see, that the FBI created the Whitmer plot, and deliberately discredited the Hunter story, in order to throw the 2020 election.

But I can’t be so sanguine that the GOP won’t just say, yeah, we’ve looked at the FBI’s rôle—but um , we don’t see nothin’.

(And BTW, Amazon has one (1) copy left of Cook’s book.)

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Good call, Hypatia. We have to observe the lessons of (recent) history. When the voters of the USA gave the Institutional GOP control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, the GOP chose not to find the governmental equivalent of loose change to Build the Wall – one of the most popular parts of the movement which got them elected.

We are not going to vote ourselves out of this mess – sadly. It remains to be seen what the alternative routes out of the mess may be. With active proxy wars in the Ukraine, Serbia, and Taiwan, I can guess which way the smart money is going to bet.

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As a friend of mine said “once you see it, you cannot unsee it”. The politicians don’t run anything.

Neither party, when they hold all the power pass legislation that they got elected on, but both excel at passing legislation that take a dump on the bill of rights to grab power. It is like the Bill of Rights has been divided up. Dems you take the second, and we will surveillance.

Part of me wonders if the abortion ruling was an attempt to stem the tide. Not the red wave of “conservatives” but that of populism.

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They did look! They did see! And now they’re talking!

(Will anybody hear? )

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Complaint:

Hunter Biden answer/counterclaim:

Docket:

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