Steve Bannon Turns Himself In For Arrest After His Arraignment.
New York State's Partisan AG Laetitia James Puts Chains on Him and Frog-Marches Him for the Media, Anyway.

This cannot go on. We cannot have two systems of justice.

Different countries have different systems of justice.

Bannon was arraigned for supposedly money-laundering. He raised a lot of money, supposedly to build part of Trump's unfinished wall. I'm not sure where that money went.

But I don't trust New York's highly partisan AG to find the answers.

Neither does Bonchie from RedState.

Forgive me for not giving James, who has shown herself to be a partisan hack over the years, the benefit of the doubt here. Everything about this appears to be prompted by politics. Why would they perp walk him in front of the media after he had already turned himself in? What was that accomplishing except giving the salivating media the shot they wanted for their reports, which will no doubt give any credence to Bannon's side of the story?

Cue the liberal Democrats of NeverTrump: That's not who we are.

We're not "we," pussies. You're on the Democrats' side. You're objecting because you don't want us doing to you what you have been doing to us.

Drop the "we" act. You're leftwing Democrats and always have been.

I absolutely have no idea what the facts are here. So don't take this as a comment about Bannon. It's prompted by the Bannon arrest, but it's not about Bannon.

I think a lot of political fund-raising is almost entirely for the benefit of the fund-raisers. See the North American Man-Boy Lincoln Association, for example, and Steve Schmidt's quest for personal "generational wealth."

I get the sense that it especially goes on in conservative political fund-raising. I think leftwing fundraising is a bit better directed towards the actual claimed goals of the fundraisers. (Though, obviously, the fundraisers are also all making $250,000+ per year.)

For example, leftwingers donate to dark money PACs and then those PACs fund anti-conservative propaganda outfits like The Bulwark and The Dispatch. At least you can see where the money goes, even if where it goes -- into Jonah Goldberg's fat munt -- isn't appetizing.

Do I think that Bannon was targeted because he's associated with Trump? Yes I do.

But as to the general matter of conservative political fundraising:

We cannot make any progress as a movement, especially as a grassroots populist movement, when the donations given by patriotic grassroots populists are just used for the benefit of the grifter class.

I don't want Laetitia James or any other Democrat authoritarian involved in patrolling the right's fundraising.

But we do need someone with some credibility and probity to set up some kind of board of accountability for the various grifting, I mean, fundraising and organizing groups. A rating system for how much of a group's raised funds actually go to the promised ends, versus how much go into the pockets of the fundraisers and owners of the grift, I mean, of the PAC.

I don't know how much longer this "system," if you can call it that, can go on. Eventually the people who make the "system" work, the ones donating the actual dollars, are going to start to realize that their dollars are not doing the work they were promised they would, and they're going to stop donating. Then the "system" collapses -- and, probably, good riddance to bad rubbish on that -- but unfortunately it will also depress the grassroots populist movement and teach it that it just can't win, no matter what it does, so it should stop trying and just give up.

And that would be a disaster.

posted by Ace at 01:16 PM

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