Ah, 2019—when the disaster of the 2020 presidential theft was a distant possibility, and long before Lord COVID descended from his Chinese chemical lab to sow destruction upon us all. Back, then, our greatest concern was incompetent government bureaucrats running us over, then ticketing us for the pleasure.
That’s the story behind this post, which discusses Jim Treacher’s near-death encounter with a federal SUV, and the efforts of the feds to shift the blame to Teacher, rather than the federal agent who mowed him down.
Well, they can flatten our dreams, our economic prospects, and our freedom, but they can never flatten our hope. Here is 23 March 2019’s “Out of Control Feds“:
A benefit of writing this little blog is that I read (and, usually, skim) a great deal of material from all over the web, and come away knowing more than I otherwise would. My hope is to take some of the flotsam and jetsam I come across and condense and give context to it.
Such was the situation with Jim Treacher, the pseudonym of Sean Medlock. Treacher/Medlock is a lukewarm Never Trumper (from what I can gather) who writes for PJ Media. Treacher wrote a piece earlier in the week about “conservative” website The Bulwark, which is unhinged neocon Bill Kristol‘s new pet project since The Weekly Standard was unceremoniously shuttered a few months ago.
That piece, “In What Sense is The Bulwark Conserving Conservatism,” is not the point of this post, but it is a disturbing read. Treacher examines the self-righteous scribblings of Molly Jong-Fast, who covered CPAC for The Bulwark. CPAC is the major event in conservative activism, and every year generates plenty of controversy between the warring factions of Conservatism, Inc. Jong-Fast (hyphenated names make my skin crawl) basically spent the entire conference shuddering about how “anti-choice” the conference was, and making jokes about a group of conservatives wanting to limit the size and scope of the federal government.
What did you expect, baby? CPAC isn’t a meeting of the D.C. Workers’ Soviet. Yeesh. Read the piece to get the full flavor for this foolishness. It proves the claims from Dissident Right figures that modern “conservatism” doesn’t conserve anything, and yesterday’s Leftist utopia is today’s “conservative principle.”
Tough words to type, but in the case of Kristol and his ilk, terribly true. Regardless, in the piece Treacher mentions in passing being struck by a State Department vehicle in 2010, which prevented his attendance at CPAC.
That took me down a frightening rabbit hole: a State Department vehicle struck Treacher, who was in the crosswalk at the time. The State Department agent driving the vehicle, Mike McGuinn, did not apologize to Treacher; indeed, Treacher was issued a ticket for jaywalking—while in his hospital bed!
Some key excerpts from The Daily Caller‘s piece about the incident:
An agent in the vehicle, Mike McGuinn, did not identify himself to Medlock at the scene, or apologize for running him down. Indeed, Washington, D.C., police drove to a local emergency room to serve Medlock with a jaywalking citation as he lay prostrate in a hospital bed, while a man who identified himself as “special agent” stood by watching and taking notes….
At the hospital, DC police officer John Muniz arrived to issue Medlock a $20 jaywalking ticket. Medlock was lying sedated on a gurney, so Muniz delivered the ticket to a Daily Caller colleague, who was at the hospital with Medlock. He looked embarrassed as he did so. Behind him stood a man dressed in a dark suit who identified himself as a “special agent.” He said nothing but wrote in a notebook.
Curiously, the ticket says that Medlock was struck at an intersection four blocks from where the accident actually took place. And it claims that Medlock was walking diagonally across the intersection at the time. In one of his strikingly short conversations with the Daily Caller, agent Mike McGuinn acknowledged that Medlock was not jaywalking at all, but walking “outside the crosswalk when the incident occurred.”
The question is: Did the federal agent driving the SUV, faced with potential liabilities from the accident, encourage local police to issue some sort – any sort – of citation to Medlock, to establish his culpability?
Three years later, Treacher wrote a piece for The Daily Caller detailing the State Department’s practice of hiring law enforcement personnel with checkered pasts.
Here we have a federal bureaucracy utterly indifferent to the lives of the citizens it ostensibly serves. In Treacher’s case, I can’t tell if it’s malignant indifference, or rank incompetence. Bureaucracies of all stripes try to avoid liability and controversy—they exist to protect and expand themselves, after all—but only the federal government could get away with running someone down in a crosswalk, ticketing that person, and never owning up to its mistake.
I wrote yesterday about the presence of Deep State, anti-Trump actors in the State Department, and of their collusion with the Obama administration’s Department of Justice. If they have the gall to attempt the takedown of a duly-elected President, then imagine their contempt and disregard for us.
Now that the Mueller probe has ended (I think that’s the takeaway from the promise that there would be no more indictments), Deep State perfidy will only grow more sinister. Gird your loins, President Trump.
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