Real Characters episode 44 Coronavirus doing what Democrats couldn't.

                President Barack Obama is in the White House knowing that he can’t run for a second term.  He has overseen a presidency with many scandals from fast and furious to Benghazi, to using the IRS to attack his political opponents.  None of this really phases him as he is a Democrat so enjoys the full spin and cover by the mainstream media.  His plan is to pass on his legacy to Hillary Clinton to cement himself in the history books.  As he looks at the Republican field that has narrowed from nearly 20 candidates down to a just a handful, there is one clear front runner.  His name is Donald Trump.  Many precautions have already been made with all the leading candidates in how to use the awesome power of the government to attack them.  With Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have gone to Ukraine, England, Australia and other countries to help them take down Trump.  They are all too willing to agree because they don’t want to strain relations with America and all indications point to Hillary Clinton being the next president of the United States.

                Although President Obama has used the IRS and DOJ as his own personal revenge arm, he is not the one spearheading this.  Hillary Clinton has taken the lead as Obama looks forward to enjoying the rest of his time in peace without the weight of the free world on his shoulders.  After all, it’s Hillary’s presidency they are ensuring so if she’s not going to be the most ardent fighter for it, then who would be?  In late July 2016, Hillary Clinton calls Barack Obama and states, “Mr. President, I need you to do something for me.”

                “What is it?”

                “I’ve had our friends across the pond dig up some information on Donald Trump.  They have been feeding information into the FBI through a variety of sources to make it seem like corroboration.  There is a man named Anthony Ferrante, who is working on your National Security Council in your white house.”

                “I’m with you so far.”

                “He needs to have some freedoms to assist me.  I need you to pass an order in reaction to a cyber problem that highlights our need for security and guys like Ferrante.”

                “Well, the DNC was hacked.  I could start there.”

                “Yes, the Russians hacked the DNC.  That would be a perfect message.”

                “In the meantime, I will have the FBI look into how the Russian were able to do that.”

                “Don’t bother.  Let’s just say that I have it under control.  I don’t want the FBI anywhere near it.  I’ll pay lip service to it and have an outside company that’s loyal to me named Crowdstrike look into it and find nothing.”

                “I will do what you ask.”

                After he got off the phone, Barack Obama calls Anthony Ferrante who answers, “Yes Mr. President.”

“I need to write a directive giving you some freedoms that you may not have now.”

“Yes sir, I am aware.”

“Since I’m not too keen on the specifics, I was wondering if you could develop it for me and see that it gets implemented.”

“Given I’m the one that needs it implemented, yea that would be great.”

On July 26, 2016, Barack Obama issues President Policy Directive (PPD) 41 in reaction to a US Cyber incident that involved the role of the department of defense.  A few days before that, Hillary is on the phone with Christopher Steele, the Englishman that is putting his name on a dossier written primarily by Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, whom Hillary has paid through a law firm Perkins Coie.  Steele is an informant for the FBI and CIA though the FBI thinks he is exclusively their source.  Steele has been leaking his dossier to everyone from John McCain’s campaign to Buzzfield to the DOJ, to Mother Jones.  Steele answers the phone, “Mrs. Clinton, how may I have be of service.”

                “You need to add a memo to the dossier.”

                “Saying what?”

                “Russia’s cyber campaign to hack the DNC.  The president is going to issue an executive order about it soon.”

                “I’ll work on it right away.”

                As it turned out, the memo in the dossier was dated July 26, 2016, the same day as the directive.  Both the PPD and the memo in the dossier include the news about Russia hacking the DNC and it being a very serious threat.  Five days later, the FBI officially opened an investigation into Donald Trump named Crossfire Hurricane.  Around this time, Steele gave the dossier to Buzzfeed who leaked it to the world. 

                Despite Hillary’s best efforts in sabotaging Trump, Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton, became the 45^th President of the United States.  Even though Donald Trump had a hit TV show where he made the phrase ‘you’re fired’ a tag line, he decides to be diplomatic and not fire all Obama holdovers in his White House.  This would prove costly in a number of different ways.  One of which is that Anthony Ferrante is still with the NSC as their cybersecurity advisor.  Now that Trump is president, it’s his job to undermine him and get him impeached, which means desperately trying to get anything in Steele’s dossier to stick. He continually gathers information and reports back to the FBI where he was a former agent.  Eventually, it is determined he is not very effective inside the White House so he leaves in April 2017 because Rod Rosenstein, Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe and various other have decided to appoint a special council to investigation Russian collusion with President Trump even though they know that didn’t happen.  Upon their request, Ferrante leaves the NSC and joins a consulting firm named FTI.  From there, Buzzfreed hires him and pays him 4.1 million dollars to use what he learned as a cyberspy to verify any part of the dossier. 

                After two years, the special council fails and has to conclude that there was no obstruction and no collusion.  Technically, they don’t make a decision on obstruction but the new Attorney General Bill Barr is quick to determine that.  It is at this point that the supporters of the president know all about how the Obama administration illegally used the NSC database, manipulated the FISA court and illegally spied on the Trump campaign.  They fight back against the deep state Obama holdovers.  One group in particular, Judicial Watch, uses multiple Freedom of Information Applications (FOIA) to gather information.  One such FOIA is against the FBI for documentation about former FBI director Jim Comey’s spies in the White House.  As this includes Ferrante, his secret is exposed but he manages to become lost in the news of other more heinous culprits of the underhanded vile tactics used against a seated United States president.  Ferrante, however, does not evade the inspector General Horowitz report into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane as he confirmed Ferrante was reporting back to the FBI when he worked on the NSC.  Buzzfeed’s $ 4.1 Million turned out to be a waste of money because Ferrante never did verify anything in the Steele dossier despite his spying.  By 2020, only Arther Snell, who is a managing director of Steele’s company Orbis, is publicly defending the dossier.  He says it is valid but can’t give one single example of a verified claim.  This statement, however, didn’t come out of the blue.  It was in reaction to another article that confirmed what everyone by now knew; that the dossier was based on fabricated information. 

                In 2020, it is now the Democrats turn to have a primary with a crowded field that is beginning to narrow.  Once again, one man has emerged as the clear favorite and front runner and his name is Bernie Sanders.  Not learning anything from four years ago, those on the right start pumping up Bernie Sanders because they believe him to have the least chance to beat Donald Trump in an election.  Anyone who remembers the 2016 Republican primaries may remember all the candidates quoting poll after poll that Donald Trump could not beat Hillary Clinton in a national election.  Why would you believe them now?  More shrewd Republicans, however, know their history.  Nobody considered Adolf Hitler a threat as he rose through the ranks.  It was only after it was too late did they realize how damaging and charismatic he could be.  Bernie Sanders is similar as he has a cult following that is spreading.   Conservatives know that there is no such thing as near zero chance to win when you’re the nominee for a major political party.  It’s for this reason that Tucker Carlson, Dan Bongino, among others are preaching that he needs to be stopped immediately and nipped in the bud so that he truly has no chance to run for president because he lost the primary. 

                As any student of history can tell you, almost every socialist country had the infamous last words that it couldn’t happen there but it did.  It is easy to dismiss it as people being stupid and the continued prolonged ignorance of the populace but there is a less pessimistic and sinister view.  People long to be taken care of so they like hearing that something is ‘free.’  By offering people ‘free things’ you manipulate and play on this yearning.  Most people underestimate the power of free because they don’t understand this basic tenet of human nature.  The problem is that the same people yearning to be taken care of don’t realize that ‘free’ isn’t free.  There is no money fairy and someone has to pay for it.  Those who seek to benefit believe Sanders’ lie that the rich are the ones that will pay.  This isn’t a new phenomenon as Milton Friedman commented on this when he cautioned, “You think your neighbor is paying but he thinks the same thing.”

                The reality is everyone pays and it’s the middle class that pays the most since the most amount of money is centralized with them despite what the mainstream media and academia tell you.  In three years, President Trump has had enormous success with a booming economy that Obama called impossible and so unrealistic, you would need a magic wand to do it.  Trump’s popularity among blacks is between 35-42%, which is a marked improvement from the 8% he had in 2016.  This is due to unemployment in blacks being at a 50 year low.  The unemployment rate on any metric is impressive as women and Hispanics hit an all time low as well and Trump’s unemployment is below that of Bush’s.  With this economy, it would be hard for anyone to beat Trump. 

                In the last week of February, the Democrats finally caught a break.  After tariff wars and strong rhetoric with China, China has concocted a virus known as the Coronavirus and unleashed it on the world.  Luckily, President Trump acted quickly and put China on the travel ban list so the United States was less affected as no American has died from it as February comes to a close.  This, however, did nothing to stop Americans from panicking and the stock market lost around 20% in a week.  Since the Democrats love lying and spinning tragedy to attack their political opponents, they immediately blame President Trump for the virus that originated in Wuhon, China.  They called his travel ban premature and racist but, like most things they attack the president on, time would prove President Trump right.  The media and Democrats pounce and inform the world that President Trump cut funding to the CDC and that is why it can’t effectively deal with the Coronavirus.  They used this tactic against Bush during Hurricane Katrina and figured renewing the strategy couldn’t hurt. 

                As the Associated Press is reading what their fellow mainstream media is saying, the editors sigh.  As writers line up to pile on, the editor utters, “Look, the president has a unique ability to make us look like fools and turn our attacks against us.  This is so easily disproven that we’re playing right into his hands if we write a hit piece on it.  It’s time to save face and not get on this losing horse.  Someone write a piece calling the Democrats out on their bullshit with the Coronavirus.  Lauren Neergaard and Calvin Woodward raise their hands.  They both assert, “We’ll write the article.”

                “Fine, but keep in mind you may be vilified.  In this climate, anything short of pure unadulterated vitriol against the president is unacceptable. “

Lauren and Calvin explain in the article that President Trump didn’t cut CDC funding.  What happened was he proposed to congress to cut it but they said no.  By the time a new budget was in order, congress got the president to sign a bill that increased funding to the CDC.  The article goes on to discredit their sister organizations by dismantling the narrative that President Trump decimated public health organization leadership as almost all the top scientists in those fields have been there for over three years.

Unfortunately, not everyone has a problem with telling ridiculous lies.  The New York Times doesn’t hide their bias when they write an article entitled, “Let’s call it the Trump Virus.”   Elizabeth Warren tries to use the Coronavirus scare to defund the border wall by passing a bill to use border wall money for the virus.  Given that Americans have yet to be seriously affected by the virus, having open borders to let people who are not as inoculated from the virus is so intuitively stupid you wonder if Warren is even capable of rational thought.  Despite no Americans dying from the Coronavirus, President Trump calls a panel to investigate how to stop the epidemic.  As the media MO is to attack anything and everything that President Trump does, they point out that most people on the committee are white.  I guess the insinuation is that white people are incapable of finding root causes of diseases. 

During the virus scare, Warren is still on the campaign trail.  She is about to wish she had canceled it because a Navy SEAL calls her out for forcing tax payers to pay for their neighbors kids to go to school.  He brings up how he had to join the military to pay for school and now she wants to make him pay for everyone else to go to school.  As examples and analogies are the best way to drive a point home, he points out that nobody forced the students to take out the loans so why should others be responsible?  He wonders aloud that once this is established, why not force people to pay his mortgage too?  The Navy SEAL, like most conservatives, believe it is nothing short of immoral to take from others when you are fully capable of doing it yourself. 

As there is a lot of disinformation about the Coronavirus, a man named Gordan Chang who is an expert in China and South Korean affairs, starts doing media hits to inform people of the truth.  In an interview, he is asked, “What are your thoughts of President Trump overreacting and putting a racist travel ban on China?”

“I don’t think that’s an overreaction at all.  That is the problem that South Korea is having right now as their anti-Israel president has opened the border with China.  Due to this, the Coronavirus is now devastating South Korea too because they were unfortunate enough to have this happen under their far left leader now.”

“What of the reports that the virus is de-escalating and the crisis is better now than it was before?”

“You can’t trust anything that comes out of China.  China, like every other communist country in history, lies to save their reputation and their face.  If the virus was subsiding, they wouldn’t be bribing people to go back to work like they are doing.  If it wasn’t too bad anymore, they wouldn’t be trying to stop foreign virologists to examine the virus.”

“How close are we to finding a vaccine?”

“I’m not sure but I believe it to be a very difficult task because the disease is mutating.  Like I said, China is not taking the steps that resemble what you do for a declining virus.  This is dangerous.”

“Well, thousands of people have died from the flu and that isn’t a market killing epidemic, why can’t Coronavirus be that?”

“China is lying about the incubation period.  Like I said, you can’t believe anything coming out of their country.  It’s about twice as transmittable as the flue.”

 “What about those that claim this was a scorched Earth policy by the Chinese.  As communists don’t value human life, they are willing to kill their own people in order to achieve their objective.  By unleashing this virus on the world, they destroy the American markets and that is retribution for the trade war.”

“I’m not sure if I buy into that because China will take a long time to recover.  The point of a scorched Earth policy is you hurt yourself in order to hurt the enemy more.  In this case, you get hurt more than your target.  I don’t think that’s what this is but you have to remember, it’s not just affecting China but multiple countries.  When your business partners no longer want to work with you, it messes up the supply chains and demand.  China sent a message that they’re not safe to do business with and that will annihilate their economy for years to come because although they have a lot of natural resources, trade with other countries is essential.  As for the United States, our trade partners will still want to do business with us as we represent 51% of the world’s demand.  Our nation has gotten through Anthrax, Ebola, Sars, West Nile and probably some I missed, so this is just a temporary setback.  There’s nine months before the election so plenty of time for a rebound.  The infrastructure of the economy is still in place so as long as President Trump doesn’t overreact and try to spend his way out of it or use bailouts, then we should recover much quicker than they do. 

                President Trump has taken on and beaten a lot of powerful opponents but if voters go to the polls with an economy that is still reeling from the February market collapse, then voters may prove Trump’s declaration in his state of the union that the United States will never be a socialist country wrong.