In other words: Tick tick tick...

Most of you know that Lawfare's Bejamin Wittes (friend to Comey) would occasionally tweet the message "Tick tick tick..." Inevitably, something big would blow up that day or the next day.

My understanding is that Wittes has promised not to tick anymore. However, he did tweet the following at 7:36 this morning...

It's going to be a long day. Buckle up.

To which his follower Pwn All The Things responded:

If this is what I think it is, it is more deserving of a full grown 12" howitzer blast than a baby cannon.

(Wittes' twitter feed has apparently been relying on an extended cannon metaphor -- which, I must emphasize, has nothing to do with me.)

I had planned to write something about what Louise Mensch is up to. Looks like we will have to deal with her anon; this is a day to await the big boom. Gotta admit: The anxiety has me at my Wittes' end.

Pwn may have offered a clue in his earlier tweets. He focused on Trump's anxiety over the fact that Mueller is now working with New York's AG. If Mueller and Schneiderman can skewer Manafort on a state charge, Trump cannot protect himself with the pardon power. Mueller will have the leverage he needs to force Manafort into ratting out the King Rat.

Do you think that the "buckle up" tweet refers to that?

If not...then what?

Antifa: Trump's secret weapon. I hope to god Mueller clinches his case and does so soon, because ballots won't rid us of Donald Trump. Absent a truly shocking indictment, impeachment won't happen unless the Dems win the House, and the Dems won't win the House due to gerrymandering.

A leading forecast says they’ll get 54% of the votes — and only 47% of the seats.

That brings us to 2020. I agree with Damon Linker that Trump could well win again in 2020, even if his popularity sinks below the 30% mark. (Remember, Boris Yeltsin won re-election even after his own approval numbers hit the single digits.)

If the election were being run right now, we'd see loops of protest footage showing antifa thugs beating up innocent protesters or taking a sledgehammer to a statue of Christopher Columbus interspersed with clips of some left-wing activist or professor praising the anarchists for their moral clarity and courage. Never mind that Trump's opponent in the presidential race, along with the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate, would almost certainly denounce such violence. Some leftist somewhere would say something stupid, and the right would fasten onto, highlight, and promote it endlessly for political gain. "These masked vigilantes display the murderous heart of the left for all to see! If the person running against President Trump denies it, it's only because he's playing politics. In truth, they're enemies of all you hold dear. Vote for Trump or America as you know it is over!"

The U.S. is a country of roughly 320 million people. All the Republicans need is for a tiny handful of them to regularly say or do something that can be used to portray "the left" as morally repulsive as well as uniquely threatening to "ordinary Americans." That's how negative partisanship works. Pushed far enough, it can become unnecessary to make any positive case at all.

Linker said what I've been thinking for a while. Always keep in mind: Many -- perhaps most -- Americans believe that the Occupy movement was Barack Obama's secret bully-boy army, even though Occupy actually was opposed to Obama -- at least, to his go-easy-on-Wall-Street policies.

Antifa has quite a few self-deluded nitwits within its ranks -- the kind of nitwits we can depend upon to create the visuals and say the words sure to delight Fox News and Donald Trump. Even if those nitwits did not exist, any loose-knit organization will inevitably be infiltrated by provocateurs. Worse: Fear of infiltration will lead to paranoia, which always causes activists to act in a self-defeating fashion. This is what destroyed the SDS.

Left-wing activists never learn from history. And I mean NEVER.

Suppose as few as ten Antifa demonstrators behave in a violent or foolish fashion. (Not an unlikely presumption.) What will happen next?

You know the answer as well as I: Fox, Rush, Breitbart and Sinclair will convince most Americans that those ten idiots represent the Democratic party -- and never mind the fact that those ten idiots will probably be the kind of lefties who hate the Democrats as much as (or more than) they hate the Tiki Torchers.

Dems will then bend over backwards trying to distance themselves from Antifa, but doing so will cause further problems. Putin's cyber brigades (or the GOP's cyber warriors) will flood Facebook and Twitter with denunciations of gutless "corporate" Democrats. In a misguided effort to mollify the hard left, mainstream Dems will probably embrace some position that only a third of the country finds agreeable -- for example, the removal of all public statuary that might possibly offend someone.

All of this otiose nonsense will repulse those white rural voters in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who helped Trump win in 2016, and who will propel him to a more substantial victory in 2020. It's all so bloody predictable.

In my last post, I warned that rigging the voting machines will be easier than ever, thanks to Trump's gutting of our cybersecurity efforts. Although that threat is quite real, gaming the machines may not even be necessary.