Pun Salad

On Friday a federal magistrate judge unsealed the warrant for Mar-a-Lago, former president Donald Trump’s Florida home, which was searched by FBI agents last week. According to the warrant, the FBI was looking for evidence of crimes related to obstruction of justice, removal of official records, and the mishandling of information relating to the national defense.

I must confess, the search warrant gave me déjà vu.

On July 5, 2016, FBI director James Comey issued one of the most consequential statements in federal law enforcement history. He explained precisely why the FBI did not recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for mishandling “defense information,” some of which was classified at the highest levels of secrecy.

That statement not only influenced the outcome of a presidential election, its legal, political, and cultural consequences hover over American life. Nobody who’s evaluating Donald Trump’s conduct should forget Comey’s statement, and its standards should govern us today.

According to a search warrant inventory that was unsealed on Friday, the FBI found 11 sets of classified documents, ranging from "confidential" to "top secret," when it searched former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach last Monday. The top-secret documents included some that were labeled "SCI," or "sensitive compartmented information," an especially restricted category derived from intelligence sources.

On the face of it, Trump's handling of these documents, which he took with him from the White House when he left office in January 2021, raises national security concerns at least as serious as those raised by Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state. Trump has long maintained that Clinton's mishandling of classified material when she ran the State Department was egregious enough to justify sending her to prison. But in his case, he says, the documents at Mar-a-Lago, despite their labeling, were not actually classified.

How so? According to a statement that Trump representative John Solomon read on Fox News after the search warrant and inventory were unsealed, Trump had a "standing order" as president that automatically declassified material he moved from the Oval Office to his residence at the White House. That explanation raises additional questions about Trump's seemingly cavalier treatment of sensitive information, which I'll get to later. But first let's compare what Clinton did to what Trump did.

Ricky Shiffer thought he was Ricky Revolutionary. Now, he’s Ricky Rigor Mortis, who died as he lived on social media: pointlessly, fruitlessly, and stupidly.

Shiffer is the nincompoop who, enraged by the spectacle of . . . a law-enforcement agency serving a lawful warrant . . . attacked the FBI office in Cincinnati — as everybody knows, the True and Hidden Occult Capital of the Satanic Deep State is somewhere in Cincinnati — Thursday with a rifle and a nail gun. If his posts on Donald Trump’s social-media service are any indicator, he planned the assault poorly, and doesn’t seem to have quite understood how bulletproof glass works. (The general idea is that it is bulletproof.) Afterward, he led the feds on a mad scamper through Ohio and then engaged in a desultory shootout with them, at which point his life came to an abrupt and appropriate end.

Say this for Ricky Revolutionary: At least he had the courage of his idiotic convictions. You can’t say as much for the people who make a comfortable living manipulating misfits like him. Take Charlie Kirk, the young radio host and TPUSA entrepreneur who insists that the FBI’s warrant-service at Mar-a-Lago was nothing short of “a military operation against a political dissident.” Kirk’s followers take this message seriously: “There’s no time for politics, we are at war,” one representative response declared. p>This is standard Republican stuff right now: Florida governor Ron DeSantis insisted that the FBI was enabling the “weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents” — that capital-R “Regime” is telling — while Marco Rubio promised that those who use the government to “persecute political opponents” will, if he has his way, “face investigation and prosecution” by their political opponents, and he went on to describe the search as something we’d expect from “3^rd world Marxist dictatorships.” Poor Marco Rubio — the senator from U.S. Sugar got out-boobed in 2016 and has vowed never to let it happen again.

The present system for pharmaceutical drugs requires a doctor’s prescription as a precondition for their sale to members of the public.

At first glance this seems like a reasonable plan. After all, most people simply lack the necessary information to determine whether they need or can benefit from drugs such as Penicillin, Vicodin, Albuterol, Lisinopril, Levothyroxine, Gabapentin, Metformin, Lipitor, Amlodipine, Tamsulosin, Finasteride, Digoxin, Metoprolol, Celecoxib to name but a tiny sample of those drugs covered by this rule. Moreover, even if people had that knowledge, which the average person most certainly does not, they would be totally lost as far as proper dosage is concerned.

However, all is not well under present institutional arrangements. For here we are not talking about advice and counsel from a physician to a patient. That is all well and good. Rather, the problem is that the horse is placed before the cart: the client must seek the permission of a person who is for all intents and purposes an employee of his, not an employer.

That should be the proper relationship between the two, and in the free society that is exactly what would occur. Instead, nowadays, the patient is not seeking, nor obtaining, information, knowledge, advice. Instead, he must appear on bended knee to beg for permission from his physician.

Which movie directed by Rob Reiner is better, “This is Spinal Tap” which IMDB users rate at 7.9 or “When Harry Met Sally” which IMDB users rate at a mere 7.6 as of October 28, 2020? Obviously TISP is a better movie than WHMS, right? Of course not. Better is meaningless here. The higher rating for TISP means one thing and one thing only — the people who rated TISP on average gave it a higher rating than WHMS. That does not tell you what you might really want to know — if you can only watch one tonight, which one will you enjoy more? It certainly doesn’t mean that TISP is a better measure in any objective sense.

And I bring this up mainly because This is Spinal Tap is the only movie at IMDB that is rated out of 11. For better or worse, 10 is still the maximum rating you can use. But the average is listed as 7.9 out of 11. I cannot decide if IMDB should have let users give Spinal Tap an eleven.