It took very little time Thursday, after the Department of Justice’s Inspector General report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton emails case was released, for the usual media suspects to declare there to be no “there” there.

NBC News, which led its coverage with a “pick your poison” narrative indicating that opposing sides of the political divide can come to opposing conclusions on the IG report, said that former FBI director James Comey was the big loser.

The Slim Times reported that while Comey was the incontrovertible Black Hat, it was his personal arrogance which botched the Clinton investigation and not a love of Hillary Clinton.

And the Amazon Post alleged “major missteps” in the investigation, but wouldn’t say there was partisan bias in the Clinton probe.

All of which is fine. But if you take nothing else from the IG report, take the revelation between now-infamous FBI agent Peter Stzrok and his paramour Lisa Page, which to date had not seen the light of day, that when Page asked Strzok “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?,” the latter responded “No. No, he’s not. We’ll stop it.”

That, by itself, is enough to color the entire case.

Understand that Strzok, who for some unfathomable reason still has a job in the federal government, was in charge of both the FBI investigation of the Clinton emails case AND the Trump-Russia investigation and clearly prioritized the latter, was also one of the key actors in getting Trump elected.

Seriously. He was. He didn’t want to be, but the IG report notes that Strzok was the moron who sat on the FBI’s discovery of more than 300,000 emails from Hillary Clinton on Huma Abedin’s laptop computer in late September of 2016, not moving on the investigation of that stick of dynamite until three weeks later, just on the cusp of the election, when FBI director James Comey’s letter to Congress noting that the Bureau was looking into those emails with a view to their illegalities shortly before the election may well have played into the result. The report leaves the firm impression that if Strzok hadn’t been a Clinton partisan acting to influence the election from his post at FBI — something he promised Page he would do — he might have actually been able to help his preferred candidate.

The report doesn’t come out and say this. It suggests the obvious bias of Strzok “clouds” the investigation of the Clinton emails, but it doesn’t make the accusation that ideological bias is the reason the FBI cut her loose. In this, it has come under some fire from Republicans irritated with the inability of Washington to make definitive statements of the obvious.

But anyone can see what’s going on here.

Comey is eviscerated for going public with his infamous press conference exonerating Clinton in the email case, an exoneration we know was the product of massaging between Comey and the Clinton partisan Strzok, to indicate her behavior was at one time considered grossly negligent, which would have been a violation of federal law, and then later extremely careless, which wasn’t. The press conference was in violation of FBI policy and considered insubordinate by the IG report, which was picked up by the legacy media as though it was the only item of substance in the report; that isn’t the juice here. What Comey was doing was to attempt to bury the Clinton emails piece well in advance of the election in an effort to make himself indispensable to what he figured was the incoming president.

They all thought that.

Things got so bad that Peter Kadzik, assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs at the Department of Justice, hit Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon up for a job for his son in April 2015, while Kadzik was involved in discussions about Clinton-related matters. Kadzik was pals with Clinton campaign guru John Podesta and never bothered to recuse himself from the investigation, which somehow the IG report didn’t find material to its findings.

It goes on and on. Including the revelation that yes, foreign intelligence services hacked Hillary’s bathroom email server like everybody thought they would, which should put her in direct jeopardy of a federal indictment in a sane world.

You might not think this report is a bombshell based on what the legacy media says about it. You’d be wrong. The Clinton email scandal, regardless of the fact nobody is going to jail over it, contains bombshell after bombshell.

Let’s bear in mind that this IG report doesn’t even get started on the Robert Mueller investigation, which we now know is the fruit of a poisonous tree planted by Clinton partisans at FBI as they believed their candidate would win. That report will come later, and it is exceptionally likely to deliver a lot worse to the Deep State gang.

All of this is very bad. The American people, who probably haven’t followed this the way they did the Watergate investigation simply because of the diversity of media coverage available today compared to the mid-1970s, still get it — the in-crowd in Washington didn’t want Trump to win and were willing to break the law and screw the Constitution in order to make Clinton president and yet were too pathetically incompetent to make that happen despite all of the resources of the federal government at their disposal. That’s reflected in polling which indicates the folks are less and less impressed with the Mueller investigation — which is the bastard child of the FBI’s 2016 bias .

This is a hopeful thing, at the end of the day. It suggests we are not slaves to our supposed masters in Washington and can still beat them when push comes to shove.

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So there is this advice — “don’t ask a girl where she wants to eat. Tell her to guess where you’re taking her to eat, and then take her to her first guess.”

This is an interesting bit, of course, because if the relationship is a good one it’s excellent advice and one can rarely go wrong. If she ends up where she guessed, there is the perception of common thinking, which is quite valuable in a relationship, and assuming her guess reflects hope it’s the satisfaction of desire which usually goes well.

However, in a relationship which isn’t going well this advice can be like kerosene to a flame. If she thinks her man is a skinflint or a dunce and guesses accordingly, and the restaurant choice fulfills that expectation… uh oh.

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I should tout the Prager University videos more in this space, but the most recent one in which Jordan Peterson appears to lay down a perfect indictment of the cultural Marxist bent in American and Western higher education is unquestionably worth watching.

Peterson has made himself an invaluable resource simply by vociferously defending that which was understood by everyone in Western culture just 20 years ago, and for this he’s become one of the most controversial figures in the culture. Congratulations to him, and we need many more with his courage and character. At a time when Western civilization has clearly and incontrovertibly won, and is unquestionably dominant — the Third World is adapting as quickly to our ways as they can, and the communist world is melting amid clear evidence their fantasies will not survive reality — we are nevertheless somehow incapable of closeting the idiots among us who continue bleating various strains of Marxism.

But Peterson is willing to call them out for who they are, and his success is unquestionable. Good for him, and we need more people willing to attack the academic Left for the seditious scum they are.

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Remember when Colombia was the Latin American nightmare and Venezuela was the prosperous country people wanted to move to? It wasn’t that long ago.

Of course, back then part of the reason Colombia was such a hellhole was that communist revolutionaries, fueled by drugs and foreign aid from… oh, Venezuela!… were rampaging through the hinterlands. Now, it’s a little different. It isn’t petrodollars from Venezuela flowing into Colombia, it’s refugees from communism. To the tune of a million people in less than two years.

Explain that one, Bernie Sanders. Oh — cat got your tongue?

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There’s an interesting column at USA Today from Monday by the Detroit Free Press’ Rochelle Riley complaining that Donald Trump is beginning to co-opt the black vote in America…

Anyone who thinks Trump’s decision to pardon boxer Jack Johnson and commute Alice Marie Johnson’s unfair sentence wasn’t part of a greater plan is delusional. Donald Trump is wooing black voters. He doesn’t really have to do much. He does it by inviting the presidents of some of the nation’s historically black colleges to gather in the Oval Office for a photo-op and watch them do it, because their schools are struggling or dying. He does it by freeing the Johnsons — freeing the history of Jack and commuting the sentence of Alice. Anyone who thinks that Trump didn’t gain some black votes by those recent actions doesn’t understand the power of connecting with the disconnected. In Detroit, and other urban areas — where we can’t get more than 14% to 20% of registered voters to turn out for a municipal election and where many people still love Kanye West (though he thinks slavery was a choice) or R. Kelly(who is avoiding jail by inexplicable means) — Trump might be resonating.

Even more entertaining is this part…

Trump is succeeding at something few people thought possible. He is getting some black people to compare him to Barack Obama. Obama didn’t get Alice Johnson out of jail. Obama didn’t pardon Jack Johnson, even though Ken Burns asked him to and produced an entire documentary explaining why. Trump isn’t killing the Republican Party. He is killing the Democratic Party. He is single-handedly making people forget the strength and resilience and heart of the party that once tried to define itself as the place for the little guy, for the left-outs, for the have-nots.

Some of this is panic on the part of Riley, who is a Democrat partisan, but some of it is true. Trump has always had a little bit of cultural cachet with black Americans, for the simple reason that he gives off the kind of “Mack Daddy” vibe which resonates in urban America. He’s a doer, and he’s unapologetic, and he’s tough. That is sellable. What’s also sellable is Trump got elected despite the GOP establishment, which Black America has been told for decades is hopelessly racist, opposing him. And furthermore Trump is willing to challenge conventional wisdom — which again and again has held that the fortunes of the black community are tied to Democrat politics. Trump was willing to engage that fight not by touting all the GOP policy-wonk solutions for engaging black neighborhoods but by indicting the atrocious performance of urban Democrats over the years.

And now that Trump’s economy is fueling the bank accounts of black Americans at a rate fairly similar to other ethnic groups, there is no alternative to noticing he’s offering what works.

It’s a nightmare for the Democrats, and Riley is right to notice it. If the GOP could ever manage to grow its share of the black vote from 10 percent to 20 percent, most of the blue states across the country would move to purple — and nearly all of the purple states would become red.

The Democrats have made the complete capture of the black vote in America their top priority. But what they’ve not done is performed for those voters. Trump is actually doing it. Riley is noticing the fact that the consequences could be ruinous for the gang in blue.