Leaks and lies

Australia’s newspapers gave front-page treatment over the past week to a leaked transcript of President Donald Trump’s telephone conversation with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. It can’t be denied that it made interesting reading, not least the PM’s assurance that the US need not take a single Manus resident if it would only go through the motions of vetting applicants.  While Mr Turnbull’s willingness to endorse a sham process made headlines here, on the other side of the Pacific the transcript’s leaking has prompted Mark Steyn to observe a larger game:

… The Deep State isn’t just deep, it’s broad and bloated – and it decided last November that it would not accept the result of a perfectly lawful and proper election. So it doesn’t care about putting the Turnbull transcript all over the press, because, while the Australian Prime Minister may recognize Donald Trump as the President of the United States, the Deep State does not. So anything goes.

From November to January we had three months of blather about the “peaceful transfer of power”, but that is in fact precisely what the losers have denied the winners: Instead, they weaponized the transfer. Do you think, after last week, the Aussies regard this as a normal “transfer of power”? What we are witnessing is a slow-motion coup against a duly elected government by people determined to use whatever they have to hand – national-security leaks by the permanent bureaucracy, money-no-object fishing expeditions by hopelessly conflicted prosecutors, domestic surveillance of political opponents by Obama officials, and indifference to most of the preceding by a GOP congressional leadership that has no interest in seeing Trumpism succeed.

If they prevail, they will be teaching the electorate a very dangerous lesson: you can vote for change all you want, but you ain’t gonna get any. And that leads nowhere good…

Steyn’s column can be read in its entirety via the link below.

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