Sunday, December 31, 2017

The most hilarious video on YouTube is also terrifying



I literally collapsed in laughter while listening to this paranoid moron attempt to communicate.

But: This video has received over 400,000 views. Other videos from the same personage have had far more views.

Watch this video if you want to know why Trump won. There are millions of ill-educated dullards out there who truly believe this nonsense. Millions of Americans have no training in formal logic, no standards of evidence, and no ability to spot the obvious "tells" which indicate a hoax. These people also have a very limited ability to pronounce, to compose or to understand sentences written in the English language.

And yet they think they're the hippest of the hip. They think that they are the clued-in ones. They think that we are the ones who need to take the red pill.

Hilarious as this presentation is, it may also leave you in a very bleak mood. I'm so depressed I can barely eat my Aborted Fetus Chocolate Torte.

Hope you have a happy New Year's Eve celebration. My invitation to party in Gstaad with Soros seems to have gotten lost in the mail, so I'll be hanging out in Dundalk.

They did it to us AGAIN!

The right wing -- which apparently has some moles in the mainstream media -- is trying to convince the populace that some horrifying, damning, new new NEW information has come out concerning Hillary Clinton and Human Abedin and Anthony Weiner and those damned emails.

Guess what? It's not really new. They are re-using the same old trick. From Politico...
The State Department on Friday released 2,800 work-related emails from Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, that were found by the FBI on the laptop computer of Abedin’s husband, disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York.

Five of the messages from Abedin were marked classified, like numerous other emails that were sent or received by Clinton or her aides then deemed classified by the State Department in the process of preparing them for public release in response to Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits. Friday’s batch of emails is connected to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative group that is seeking access to work messages Abedin sent from a personal email account.
The key words here -- which few on the right (or the left, for that matter) will bother to notice -- are "classified by the State Department in the process of preparing them for public release."

Here's the evidence:



That's the classification stamp on this big, bad new release. Check out the date. This file A) did not originate with Hillary and B) was not classified until 2015.

We've been down this road before.

In the early days of the email scandal, the right wing propagandists kept screaming that classified emails were on the server. And it always turned out that none of this stuff was classified at the time.

As the pseudoscandal progressed, one document actually marked (c) finally showed up. That particular document was a piece of piffle involving the new leader of Malawi -- a document which never should have been classified in the first place, since it offered no information not available to anyone with access to Wikipedia.

(Besides, it's freakin' Malawi.) (No insult meant to the people of that country, which I'm sure is a lovely place.)

The right-wingers are masters at this. They keep repackaging the same bullshit and making it seem new. Remember the recent story about those two FBI personnel who were dating, and whose emailed communications privately expressed distaste for Donald Trump, and who were fired by Mueller even though (in my opinion) they did nothing wrong? The right-wingers took those few facts and repackaged them for over a week. Every day, I'd wake up and see scary headlines. "Has the case taken a new turn?" I'd ask myself. Nope. Same damned information; new headline. Sometimes I think we're living in the Fox News remake of Groundhog Day.

Perhaps it would be as well to say a few words about the newly-released email which received that belated "confidential" stamp (the lowest level of classification -- a level so low it barely counts as classified). I've read that email. As you might expect, it's just more piffle -- talking points for a call with Prince Saud al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia. There's a note to Hillary outlining what to say if the Prince should bring up the cables leaked by Wikileaks. And what did she say to the Prince? The same thing everyone in the State Department said whenever that subject came up. Big effing deal.

Putting a classification stamp on this stuff in 2015 is silly. At any rate, I must repeat: It wasn't classified at the time.

That's the part that the right-wing newsers never tell you.

Politico and CNN also leave that part out, although I don't know why. That's how they sullied the reputation of Hillary Clinton. That's why Donald Trump is president.

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Turns out it WASN'T the dossier

Today's big news is that the FBI did not start investigating the Trump-Russia connection based on Christopher Steele's dossier. It all started in May of 2016, when Trump adviser George Papadopoulos went drinking with a friend named Alexander Downer, who was connected with the Australian diplomatic corps. Georgie told his Aussie pal that Moscow had stolen lots and lots of Democratic emails.

This all happened in the Kensington Wine Rooms. In vino veritas.

The Aussies held onto this info for a while, until those stolen emails found their way online. At that point, the Australians decided to call the FBI -- who, shortly thereafter, also had THAT dossier to work from.

I'll be amazed and amused to see how the right-wingers spin this. In recent weeks, Trump and his supporters have twisted themselves like Plastic Man in their attempt to give the impression that the FBI somehow did something wrong when the Bureau decided to pay attention to these leads. Obviously, the Bureau would have been remiss if they had ignored this information.

The Trumpers have even told us that the fact that the FBI took this information seriously means that Hillary colluded with the Russians.

No, it doesn't make sense to me either. The people who think this way -- if "think" is indeed the right term -- must live in a surrealist painting. For the Trump-loving conspiracy buffs among us, things don't need to make sense; in their world, logic can only obscure the beatific vision.

I'm sure that Trump will now tell us that Georgie-poo may have known all about the Great Russian Mail Theft in May of 2016, but nobody else in the Trump campaign knew. Not Trump, not Roger Stone, not Paul Manafort, not nobody. Just George.

Riiiiiiiiiiiight.

Nevertheless, that "George dunnit" yarn is something you have to believe if you insist on going along with Trump's protestations of innocence.

Israel...? The most interesting paragraphs of the NYT are buried way, way down:
It is unclear whether Mr. Downer was fishing for that information that night in May 2016. The meeting at the bar came about because of a series of connections, beginning with an Israeli Embassy official who introduced Mr. Papadopoulos to another Australian diplomat in London.

It is also not clear why, after getting the information in May, the Australian government waited two months to pass it to the F.B.I. In a statement, the Australian Embassy in Washington declined to provide details about the meeting or confirm that it occurred.
Seems to me that the NYT writers are hinting at more than they can say. What was the nature of these connections? Who is this other Australian? And what the hell do the Israelis have to do with this? Was this Israeli official helping Team Trump? Was he or she working with the Australians?

What the hell is going on here?

Look, I know that it has become a bit of a cliche: Here I go again, sounding the paranoia alarms simply because Israel was mentioned in a story involving a covert operation. But we really do need to know if the Israelis were in any way involved with helping Trump get elected. Conversely, they may have been worried about the Trump contacts with Russia.

Or perhaps they simply stumbled into this business -- although it's hard to believe that one could just stumble into the world of George Papadopoulos in May of 2016.

Other sources. Digby directs our attention to this piece published in the Guardian back in April.
GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.

Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said.

The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the “Five Eyes” spying alliance that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said.
Looks to me as though the Beast With Five Eyes was on to Trump from the very beginning. Apparently, everyone knew about Team Trump's collusion with Russia except for Donald Trump.

It seems very possible that someone decided to get Georgie-poo sloshed because that someone needed to verify the SIGINT.

So here's the big big BIG question, the question which (as longtime readers know) I've been asking for a while: Why was a Trump presidency allowed to happen? The spooks had major dirt on Trump. They could have upended his presidential bid early on, back when he was comparing dick sizes with Marco Rubio.

Perhaps they simply presumed that Trump, vulgar and unstable creature that he is, would simply destroy his own candidacy. But I've long favored another view.

I think that Trump had helpers within the intelligence community.

Never forget that Cambridge Analytica is composed largely of right-wing British intelligence veterans. Never forget that CA had strong ties to the American intelligence community.

Never forget that James Comey could have told the world about the FBI's investigation of Trump. If Comey had done so, he'd probably still be running the Bureau.

There's a deep, subterranean level of the Trump/Russia story that no-one (on either the right or the left) wants to talk about. A spooky level. And I'm talking about our spooks, not the FSB. Even the liberal media rarely glimpses this aspect of the story.

Fun historical facts. Do you know why Adolf Hitler joined the fledgling NSDAP? He was a spy, working for Army intelligence. He was sent into the group to compile a report on their operations.

Also: Did you know that NSDAP got a lot of money early on from Henry Ford? Ford might be considered the Putin of his day, channeling big money to far-right causes. The Ford money came in at a time when German industrialists disdained Hitler's movement. Without Ford, Hitler would have remained a footnote figure.

Here's the important part: These overseas bucks were covertly "washed" through German military intelligence. Even in the early days, there were people in that world who wanted the Nazi party to succeed. Now, you can call this operation anything you like -- but if you want to use the right terminology, you had better feel comfortable using the word conspiracy.

Don't believe me? Look it up in Poole's Who Financed Hitler? That's the book on the topic.

What's past is present. History repeats itself.

Friday, December 29, 2017

Perception management

This post is not about taxes. It's about perception management.

But let's start with the tax bill. Here are a couple of tweets from Kurt Eichenwald:
Here are the Texas Republicans I know who have discovered, to their dismay, that they are NOT in the 1% (they thought they were) and their taxes are going up A LOT: 1. Lawyers 2. Doctors 3. Dentists
Many don't understand how the class system works. The truly wealthy live on rents, interest, investment. People who work are not in that class, even if they are very well-paid.

As we know, any tax relief is transient for those not truly wealthy; the permanent cuts are solely for those who live on rents, interest, investment.
Ive now heard from small business owners I know that they have discovered in fury that their taxes are going up because of the GOP bill. More proof that the "I want a win, let's rush a bill in a couple of weeks changing the entire tax code" is not a good strategy. Policy matters.
This anecdote from a DU reader sounds a similar note. The reader had a conversation with a banker friend, a conservative living in Georgia:
After the closing, he told me that his bank, a small local entity, was planning on marketing the hell out of equity lines of credit and second mortgages in 2018.

I asked him if anyone had gotten the message, that the new tax law expressly eliminates the interest deductibility on new and existing home equity loans. He looked at me incredulously, and admitted he hadn't heard that bit of news.

He offered that, perhaps, maybe, there would be some sort of offset hard-wired into the bill that would balance the scales in this regard. I told him, "nope".
This banker's perception of the bill did not match the Thing-In-Itself. He probably watches a lot of Fox.

Not long ago, in the pages of TPM, Josh Marshall and John Judis had a debate over the tax bill. Judis does not think that the bill will necessarily hurt Republicans in 2018...
Finally, I hear liberals and Democrats pointing to polls showing the tax bill is unpopular. I distrust these polls, especially when they concern voters’ opinion of a complex piece of legislation. Whether a policy is popular or not is usually settled during campaigns when the candidates try to interpret its results. What I am suggesting is that during the campaign next year, the Republicans will not be at a huge, or perhaps even a significant, disadvantage because they passed this bill. If the economy is still perking, they might even be able to turn the bill into a net political plus.
Marshall's response:
Now, the reply to all this is that whatever the bill’s unpopularity now, starting next year people are going to start seeing more money in their paychecks. They’ll see that it really was a tax cut for them too and their opinions will change.

Is that probable?

Not really.

We have a recent example, the legislation Obama and the Democrats passed in the midst of the financial crisis included temporary middle income tax cuts larger than the current cuts in this bill. Politically speaking it made no difference at all. Indeed, most people didn’t even realize they’d gotten a tax cut.
Bingo. Without realizing it, Marshall has pinpointed the problem. THE problem.

At this point, this post ceases to be about the recent tax bill. As I said at the start, I'm here to talk about perception management.

Most people still don't understand that Obama's stimulus package was largely a matter of tax cuts. Most people still think that the stim package was a massive government make-work program which created few jobs. That perception, wrongheaded as it is, drove the creation of the Tea Party, a powerful movement populated with Americans who sincerely believed that their taxes had gone up.

In 2010, polls revealed that the vast majority of Americans refused to see that Obama had cut their taxes, even though he demonstrably had.
Here's the poll question: "In general, do you think the Obama Administration has increased taxes for most Americans, decreased taxes for most Americans or have they kept taxes the same for most Americans?"

The answer:
• 24 percent of respondents said they INCREASED taxes.
• 53 percent said they kept taxes the same
• And 12 percent said taxes were decreased.
Can we criticize Obama for poor messaging? He mentioned the tax cuts in many speeches. Not good enough, apparently: The number of people who wrongly thought that taxes had increased was double the number who knew taxes had gone down.

Perhaps Obama would have done better if he had pulled some Trumpian stunt.

For example, suppose Obama had "accidentally" uttered these words in front of a hot mic: "These dumb motherfuckers don't realize that I cut their taxes." Of course, there would have been a national fainting spell over the horrifying spectacle of a president who uttered the word "motherfucker." The Republicans would have demanded impeachment on that basis alone.

But: The sheer repetition of that sound bite would have driven the message home. At the end of the day, far more than 12 percent would have told pollsters that taxes were decreased.

In that sense, Trump's obnoxious behavior has a certain genius to it.

In the present case, many people will see tax rates go down -- temporarily. At the same time, deductions and health care premiums will rise -- permanently. Will the citizenry put it all together? Will they understand that they are losing money in the long run?

I'd like to think that Americans are smart enough to comprehend such things. But how can I? I've just shown you the polling evidence from 2010: More people believed Fox News propaganda than believed the evidence of their own personal finances.

Let's return, for a moment, to the more recent tax legislation. Forget what the polls are telling you now. By November of 2018, the tax bill will work to the benefit of Republicans. Present criticism of the bill will be used to buttress the "fake news" meme. Such is the power of propaganda.

When viewing side-by-side pictures of Trump's inauguration crowd and Obama's crowd, Trump supporters say that the Trump crowd is larger, despite the evidence right in front of their own eyeballs. Millions of people who don't know what a computer server is think that Hillary committed a crime when she had one set up. Millions of people still think that Hillary's "30,000 emails" were "bleached," even though the FBI recovered most of those messages and found them to be piffle. Many people think that Hillary sent classified messages on her email system, even though she never did. Many people truly believed that she was at death's door, health-wise, during the campaign, even though she wasn't. (I expect her to outlive me.) Many people still believe in Pizzagate.

Many in this country believe that, in 2016, Comey favored Hillary and treated Trump unfairly. That's like saying Russia invaded Germany in 1940. Yet people buy it.

Trump and his supporters keep repeating that Rosenstein is a Democrat, or that Mueller is controlled by the imaginary Great Dem Conspiracy, or that the Russia investigation is the creation of a Great "Globalist" Conspiracy. Some right-wing congressfolk are actually starting to talk about the "Globalist" bogeyman in public. What's next? Are we going to see references to the Illuminati on the House floor? Are Republican senators going to warn the world that Queen Elizabeth is a space lizard?

And now Trump wants to bring back birtherism. I'm not kidding. Does Trump truly believe that Obama was born in Kenya? I doubt it. But he wants Obama to be so perceived.

Fox News and the Republican media machine could convince half the country of any proposition, however absurd, if they put sufficient resources behind the campaign. They can convince a huge chunk of the country that white people glow in the dark. That really buff dudes can fly by flapping their arms. That Roy Moore didn't just win in Alabama but also in three neighboring states. That Social Security creates tooth decay. Anything.

How can we have a democracy when the managers of perception routinely turn reality into silly putty?

Thursday, December 28, 2017

Milo wrote a book

Milo Yiannopoulos wrote a book. Not a very good book, it seems. His editors sent back the manuscript with many requests for changes, citing racism, weak jokes, bad arguments and so forth. The whole thing is now the centerpiece of a $10 million lawsuit, although I'm not sure where that figure comes from, since Milo received an advance of $255,000.

That's right. If you act like an asshole blowhard and you attract a sufficient amount of attention, someone somewhere is going to toss a quarter-million at you.

Fascinatingly, the court case means that the entire manuscript, including editorial notes, is now online. (If that link doesn't work, just hit the link in the first sentence of this post.)

His chapter titles follow a pattern: "Why the Progressive Left Hates Me," "Why the Alt-Right Hates Me," "Why Gamers Don't Hate Me," "Why My College Tour Is So Awesome" and so forth. Many readers won't realize that these titles resemble the chapter titles in Friedrich Nietzsche's Ecce Homo (the autobiographical work he wrote after the crazy kicked in): "Why I am so wise," "Why I write such excellent books," "Why I am a destiny" and so forth. This bit was funnier when Freddy did it.

Here's a sample from Milo's book, Dangerous:
Trolling is far more complicated and joyous than that. It is an art, beyond the grasp of most mere mortals. It is one part trickery and one part viciousness -- the ideal troll baits his target into a trap, from which there is no escape without public embarrassment.

The young memester faction of the alt-right accomplished this flawlessly by getting a popular cartoon internet frog called Pepe branded a "hate symbol." Now, left-wing activists, journalists, and "anti-hate" organizations will descend in a firestorm of fury on anyone who shares the frog picture, no matter how innocent the context, invariable making themselves look ridiculous in the process.
No they don't. Or rather, they look ridiculous only to the small, unlovable creatures in Milo's world, who (like their counterparts on the left) routinely delude themselves into thinking that their world is THE world.

Educated people understand that anything can be a hate symbol if enough haters use it as a symbol. The obvious example would be the swastika, which once had a benevolent meaning and which is now indisputably a symbol of hate. But anything will do. The three elves who decorate each box of Rice Krispies can become a hate symbol if enough of Milo's nazified compatriots were to fasten onto that imagery.

This process isn't clever or artful: All it requires is mindless repetition and groupthink. It's a game won by mere numbers. The troll is, in a real sense, a sheep -- a born follower, a face in a mob. But he fools himself: He thinks that he can think. Each Alt Right troll considers himself a bold and brilliant individualist, even though he's just another nameless sac of protoplasm shopping for a brown shirt to match his beige skin.

(I'm the first to admit that a somewhat similar "groupthink" dynamic often occurs on liberal websites.)

I haven't read the rest of Milo's book, but I suggest that you get hold of the thing. If all publishers understand that this kind of dreck-y "insight" is available for free, Milo will not only be forced to return the advance, he'll never receive such a deal again. Download away!

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Gossip

Remember the brouhaha when that Omarosa personage was escorted out of the White House? It is now being reported that she's writing a book which will tell the full, dirt-filled truth of Donald Trump's marriage to Melania.

I don't find the Life & Style story at the other end of that link very credible, since it relies heavily on "sources" and "insiders." The article quotes Omarosa's noted appearance on Good Morning America:
“There were a lot of things I observed over the past year that I was uncomfortable with,” she said. “When I have the chance to tell my story, it’s quite a story to tell.
But that quotation is gerrymandered. Here's what she actually said:
"I'm not going to expand on it because I still have to go back and work with these individuals, but when I have a chance to tell my story, Michael, quite a story to tell as the only African-American woman in this White House as a senior staff and assistant to the president, I have seen things that made me uncomfortable, that have upset me, that have affected me deeply and emotionally, that has affected my community and my people. And when I can tell my story, it is a profound story that I know the world will want to hear," she said.
The real quote suggests that Omarosa's book will be about Donald Trump's racial attitudes. The Life & Style piece leads readers to think that the book will offer nothing but sexy piffle.

Last June, this blog published a link to a story suggesting that Melania was seeing the head of security at Tiffany's in Trump Tower. For more about that, go here. So it's not as though I'm completely immune to the attractions of gossip...

Silence of the purists

Dissing mainstream Dems is the national sport. Both the left and the right loves to indulge in that pastime. But right now, the Democrats -- not all of them, but some of them -- are the only ones talking impeachment.

The "purist" left? Not so much.

Bernie Sanders cautions Democrats not to jump the gun on impeachment. By comparison, there were three efforts to impeach Nixon before the Watergate scandal hit big; two were registered during the first term, and one of them was initiated by John Conyers. (I fear that history may remember how that fine man's career ended while forgetting the great things he did in 1972, and at many other times.)

The "premature anti-Nixonites" never had any reason to feel ashamed of what they then did. They had and have every reason to feel proud of their foresight.

Now go here:
Comrade Jill Stein and the Green Party have been very quiet about impeachment. Often cited progressive critics of the Democratic party like Cornel West and Susan Sarandon are mum about impeaching Trump choosing instead to continue to attack Democrats by name-calling them as neo-liberals even though Democrats are out of power in DC. Finally, even Bernie Sanders, who often rails against Trump's corruption is trying to tamp down impeachment talk.

Indeed, many of the groups that are supposedly to the left of mainstream Democrats have been pretty quiet about impeaching Trump despite the lawlessness and obvious corruption of the Trump administration.
Trump's recent tweets against the FBI are obvious examples of obstruction of justice. Sanders and his fellow progressive purists should require no further "evidence" for impeachment. They would certainly ask for no further evidence if anyone named Clinton did the same thing. If Hillary were president, and if Hillary took any steps to obstruct an FBI probe directed against her, Sanders and Stein would demand her head on a spear's point now now now.

In his attacks on the American justice system, Trump has cited no concern for any case except his own. He is not attacking systemic corruption at the DOJ and the FBI.

Clearly, he wants those organs of the government to overlook his own crimes and to function as attack dogs directed at his enemies. Cognate institutions in Russia function as Putin's pit bulls. Trump and his GOP cronies hope to replicate that system here.

That's not enough grounds for impeachment, Bernie? You want more?

Again: If any Democratic president had done what Trump has done, Sanders would scream like a banshee for impeachment.

This is not a time for purity. It's time to preserve what we have.

The GOP deliberately blew up the deficit in order to bring about their goal of ending Social Security and Medicare. Of Paul Ryan:
Rising debt, in fact, strengthens his zeal for his preferred deficit-reduction policy. That policy is to reduce spending by shrinking the size and scope of government that Democratic political initiatives have built.

In particular, Ryan wants to curb spending on the giant "entitlement" programs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. "How you tackle the debt and the deficit," the speaker declared recently, is by "entitlement reform."
No.

The right way is the Clinton way: Get the country out of the red, get us on a clear (and surprisingly painless) path to complete eradication of the deficit, and preserve Social Security and Medicare as sacred institutions, overwhelmingly popular with the vast majority of Americans.

That's what Bill Clinton did. Don't let our ill-schooled youth forget it. Don't let the GOP propagandists and the faux-left history-twisters teach young people (and their forgetful elders) a false account of what actually happened.

By the way: During the election, Hillary Clinton was the only one who pointed out that Social Security could be preserved for the foreseeable future through the simple expedient of raising the cap. 

The relationship between fascism and libertarianism. Personally, I think that many Alt Rightists know full well that unfettered Ayn Randism will destroy this country. That's the point. A crisis will create a power void, into which the neo-Nazis hope to march.

The Nazis took over in Germany in 1933 because the system had failed. That system provided only "classical" economic solutions to the Depression. The leaders of the Weimar Republic could see no possible course of action other than a path that Milton Friedman would have chosen. Heinrich Brüning and Franz von Papen were hardly socialists.

That history provides the template for replication.

In the present day, the imaginations of people who think like Richard Spencer are not ignited by an economic ideology. The Spencerites, the Bannonites, all of those "nationalist" freaks who think that Julius Evola was a genius: These people do not think the way Paul Ryan thinks. If you visit the far right sites, you'll see that they often view Ryan with disdain.

Nevertheless, they would like Ryanism/Randism to prevail for a short time, though not because they think that Ryanism/Randism is sound. In fact, they know that such a system is doomed to fail. People will learn to value the social safety net once they lose it. Middle-aged people trying to survive in a society without a minimum wage will resent having to take care of their grandparents.

Consider Russia in the 1990s. A failed libertarian experiment quickly resulted in outrageous corruption, the rise of the oligarchs, the power of the mafiya, massive poverty, institutionalized theft, hideous wealth inequality -- and ultimately, falling life expectancy. All of these things paved the way for Putin. Libertarianism is the necessary predecessor to dictatorship. First Brüning, then Hitler; first Yeltsin, then Putin.

Libertarianism will fail. It always has failed and it always will fail. That failure will result in revolution. As I keep telling progressives: The only revolution likely to occur in this country is one that the left will not want to see. Such a revolution will allow the Nazis to seize power in the United States of America.

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Comparison

Many have scoffed at Mike Huckabee for comparing Winston Churchill to Donald Trump. Actually, I welcome the comparison.

One was a famous wit. The other is an infamous half-wit.

One was a war hero. The other dodged the draft.

One wrote history. The other distorts history.

One wrote A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. The other can barely speak English, never mind write a book.

One was a surprisingly good painter. The other has the worst taste imaginable.

One was an intellectual who suffered from bouts of depression. The other depresses anyone of intelligence.

One despised Nazis. The other coddles them.

One was a great orator. The other speaks like a brain-damaged six year-old.

One made no attempt to hide his thinning hair. The other...well, just look at him.

One stayed married to the same woman -- a woman of intelligence and independence -- for 57 years. The other...? Heh heh heh. Ha. Ho. Heh. Hee hee. Heh.

One dressed well. The other could trip on his own tie.

One had the ability to respect his enemies (Michael Collins, for example). The other holds inane grudges forever.

One mistrusted the Russians. The other laundered money for Russians.

One said "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." The other proves the point daily.

One said: "We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out." The other probably regrets that interview with Lester Holt.


See? There's nothing wrong with comparing Winston Churchill to Donald Trump. I wish more people would look up the meaning of the word "compare" in the dictionary.

Monday, December 25, 2017

Back tomorrow (I hope)

I gave myself a vacation from thinking about Trump. That was my Christmas present. It was glorious.

I hope that you, too, had a marvelous season. All my life, I have said "Merry Christmas" -- but this year, I'll say "Happy Holidays," precisely because doing so will piss off people I don't like.


Thursday, December 21, 2017

Saving Mueller (and more)

Signing a petition may not seem like much, but it's something you can do right now. So do it.

Despite the anti-Mueller propaganda blitz, the majority of Americans still favor his efforts:
56% of Americans think Trump's public statements on the Russia probe have been mostly or completely false

47% of Americans approve of Mueller's handling of the Russia probe vs. 34% who disapprove
Thirty-four percent means that the only people who are buying the Fox party line are the Trumpian hard core. That said, 47% approval is dangerously low; we can't let the number drop further. Fox propaganda can have a subtle effect on the thinking of average citizens who don't necessarily vote Republican. People start to think: "There must be something genuinely reeky about that person they are attacking, even if I can't specify what that something is."

Here's the problem: While most Americans understand that Fox is slanted, they do not yet understand that Fox lies.

It's time for Democrats to apply some variant of the "fake news" sobriquet to Fox.

First to go. The Palmer Report believes that the first head on the chopping block will be FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
For weeks, Fox News and other pro-Trump propaganda outlets have been falsely accusing Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe of being some kind of secret operative for Hillary Clinton. This is based on no evidence of any kind, but that never matters to these types. Trump has eagerly bought into this conspiracy and has launched Twitter attacks on McCabe several times. In Trump’s delusional mind, it’s McCabe who’s somehow really out to get him, as he continues to believe that Hillary is somehow the architect of his demise from afar.

This week Donald Trump has also begun taking shots at McCabe on Twitter. Congressman Trey Gowdy, a corrupt Trump shill, couldn’t contain his excitement and ended up bragging to the media that he believes McCabe will be fired soon.
There has to be a deeper reason for this barrage of anti-McCabe paranoia. A tactical reason. He doesn't have any direct power over Mueller. So...what is it? Exactly how would the destruction of McCabe aid Trump's chances of survival?

For days now, I've presumed that Rosenstein would be yanked during the Christmas holiday. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe I've made an insufficient check of the right-wing blogosphere (can you blame me for limiting my time there? That place is toxic), but there seem to be relatively few calls for Rosenstein's execution, compared to the mob demanding McCabe's blood.

Bannon. This piece on Steve Bannon is bizarre for any number of reasons, but I was particularly struck by this passage:
The siege on Roy Moore’s campaign continued. The previous day, Ivanka Trump told the Associated Press “there’s a special place in hell for people who prey on children.” Bannon was incredulous she’d make the comment. “What about the allegations about her dad and that 13-year-old?” he said, referring to the California woman who alleged Trump raped her when she was a teen (the suit has since been dropped.)
I've always presumed that the "Katie Johnson" suit was a fake created by Team Trump, intended to deflect attention from the real sexual misdeeds in Trump's past. Yet Bannon's comment makes sense only if one presumes that the suit had validity.

Does it? Have I been wrong about this matter all along?

I heard an interview with Gloria Allred recently which convinced me that she sincerely believes in Katie. Allred insisted that her firm vets all such cases before taking them on. I'd like to know just how this one was vetted.

Of course, the fact that Allred believed Katie doesn't mean that we need to take Katie seriously.

Still...I'm starting to wonder...

Purity of Essence, Peace on Earth. Finally, a message from Kurt Eichenwald:
Remember: All the Nader voters preened about their purity. Then, reckless tax cuts, wars and they grew up. Now they all go "How could I have been so stupid?" The same will happen to the people who refused to meaningfully participate in 2016.
When they face consequences of knowingly deciding to play no role in the direction of government, they have to accept responsibility for treating voting as irrelevant to future govnt policy, but is about "statements." Voting for someone who cant win is narcissism.....
I'll add this: The candidate you think is so freakin' "impure" is probably a lot better than you think -- while Bernie Sanders is as pure as an overfilled septic tank.

It all comes down to propaganda. Young people think that they can't be fooled by it. Oh yes they can. Hell, they're the easiest to hornswoggle.

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

The crisis is coming



Senator Mark Warner warns that Trump will take steps to fire Mueller. Many are saying that the hammer will drop this weekend: In all likelihood, Trump won't do the job directly; instead, Rosenstein will be replaced by someone willing to perform this filthy task.

Senator Warner warns that this action will result in a constitutional crisis. True enough, but it's a crisis that Trump will probably survive. If the probe continues unhindered, his survival is far more questionable.

What's truly amazing is the easy with which the right has taken one basic story -- the Peter Strzok and Lisa Page email exchange -- and repackaged it endlessly. With each passing day, the same familiar facts generate new headlines. An acorn's worth of "evidence" has become, in the public's mind, a forest of conspiracy.

THE STORM! (Or: How do we get out of this mess?)

This is a long essay which uses a number of small examples to illustrate a very large problem.

Trump can cure cancer! Popular right-wing conspiracy freak Mark Taylor has assured his audience that President Trump will, in his second term, release the long-suppressed cures for cancer and Alzheimer's. For many years (says Taylor), these cures have been suppressed by the evil medical profession, which (as everyone knows) is controlled by those hideous, money-grubbing and endlessly scheming J....er, globalists.

You'd think that Trump would reveal the cure for cancer during his first term, and perhaps during his first week. Any president who can cure cancer would be a shoo-in for reelection. Any president who can cure cancer should be able to end Obamacare without opposition.

Taylor also says that "Satan's frequency" blinds Americans to Trump's many virtues: "This bombardment of frequencies that we have going on right now, it’s been proven scientifically that it will literally change your DNA, and that’s what’s happening to a lot of Christians." Curiously, Taylor neglects to cite the journal that published this landmark study of the effects of Satan's frequency on genetics.

Jedi. Alex Jones has decried the new Star Wars movie as state-sponsored propaganda. I cannot fairly evaluate this argument as I have not seen the film and would prefer to avoid spoilers. However, I worked on the outskirts of Hollywood for quite a few years and never once met, or heard about, a screenwriter who complained that the State changed his or her scripts. Screenwriters complain about everything else, but not that.

Since the GOP runs "the State" right now, Jones must think that the Republican party likes to fiddle with Star Wars movies. That's the problem with being a right-wing conspiracy theorist in age of Trump: You cannot scream about the menace of "THEM" when your team becomes "THEM."

Hillary. The continuing smears of Hillary Clinton have had an impact. Her approval ratings mirror Trump's. A large portion of our population continues to view this retired political figure as a major menace. Hillary-hate has replaced the orgasm as America's favorite form of emotional release.

"Gloom and misery everywhere." The newest, grandest conspiracy theory to enter the market -- by way of 4chan, natch -- is called The Storm. (The link goes a great piece published by New York Magazine.) Even though I do not yet fully comprehend this matrix of weird accusations, my "Spidey sense" tells me that this one is going to be bigger than Pizzagate.
Like Pizzagate, the Storm conspiracy features secret cabals, a child sex-trafficking ring led (in part) by the satanic Democratic Party, and of course, countless logical leaps and paranoid assumptions that fail to hold up under the slightest fact-based scrutiny. However, unlike Pizzagate, the Storm isn’t focused on a single block of shops in D.C., or John Podesta’s emails. It’s much, much bigger than that.
Now pay attention, 007:
On October 28, someone calling themselves Q began posting a series of cryptic messages in a /pol/ thread titled “Calm Before the Storm” (assumedly in reference to that creepy Trump quote from early October). Q claimed to be a high-level government insider with Q clearance (hence the name) tasked with posting intel drops — which he, for some reason, called “crumbs” — straight to 4chan in order to covertly inform the public about POTUS’s master plan to stage a countercoup against members of the deep state. It was, in short, absolutely insane. However, thanks to some rather forced coincidences — like Q kind of, sort of guessing that Trump would tweet the word “small” on Small Business Saturday, and this one time the internet decided that Q was “totally on Air Force One” because he posted a blurry picture of some islands while Trump was on his trip to Asia — and a whole heck of a lot of wishful thinking, people believed he was the real deal.
Within the conspiracy community, there is a myth (which I first heard in the late 1980s) that "Q clearance" is the highest level of clearance within the United States government. (A novel by Peter Benchley seems to have initiated this meme.) In fact, the term is used only within the Department of Energy to denote those granted access to nuclear secrets. Rick Perry, God help us, has Q clearance.
According to Q, Trump was never really involved with Russia, and isn’t actually under investigation by Mueller & Co. On the contrary, Q insists that it’s actually Clinton and Obama who were corrupted by Putin (and are now actually under investigation by Mueller) because they’re obviously just evil, money-hungry globalists who’ll do anything for the highest bidder. (Oh, yeah, and they’re also apparently into raping and killing children, though the crowd is split over whether this is because they’re satanists or just part of some weird blackmail scheme involving the CIA.) Q also claims that Trump, the genius that he is, figured all of this out way back when he was just a measly presidential candidate, and has been pretending to love Putin and/or be involved with Russia ever since as a way to force a third party to investigate these horrors — without drawing the attention of those evil Dems-who-must-not-be-named, of course — because he’s just that selfless of a leader.
In this fantasy world, all of the far right’s wildest dreams come true: Q promises that Clinton, Obama, Podesta, Abedin, and even McCain are all either arrested and wearing secret police-issued ankle monitors, or just about to be indicted; that the Steele dossier is a total fabrication personally paid for by Clinton and Obama; and that the Las Vegas massacre was most definitely an inside job connected to the Saudi-Clinton cabal.

They believe all of this will be coming to a head any day now. That “The Storm” — of arrests, political turmoil, and Republican vindication — is coming. Though there have been some, uh, miscalculations as for exactly when.
From time to time, this humble blog has received comments from crazed conspira-trolls confidently predicting that Hillary, Obama, Soros and their partners in evil will soon be rounded up and led off in cuffs. Now I know the origin point of these forecasts.

Have we met Q before? "Q" -- whoever he is -- has fastened upon a familiar ploy. Do you remember TBR News and "The Voice of the White House"? If the name doesn't ring a bell, allow me to ring it.

During the Dubya administration, this alleged "insider" manifested himself within the cyber-pages of a website called TBR News. Many visited that place without understanding that "TBR" stood for The Barnes Review, a pseudo-scholarly organization devoted to the promotion of Holocaust revisionism. The Barnes Review was the creation of a notorious neofascist named Willis Carto, who, in turn, was an associate of Francis Yockey, a mastermind of the post-war fascist underground.

(William Turner's Power on the Right describes a speech given by Carto in a hall bedecked with swastikas. Carto's Noontide Press catalogue offered Hitler: The Unknown Artist and other examples of Adolf Adoration.)

The editor of TBRNews called himself Walter Storch, who also writes under the name Gregory Douglas, and whose real name may be Peter Stahl. Another dubious writer calling himself Henry Makow is also associated with "Douglas." (There is talk of a family relationship. Hell, Makow may be Douglas.) I've read that these deceivers may have links to the rarified field of art forgery. In sum and in short: These people live in a world best described as "The Blacklist with brown shirts."

I tried my best to comprehend this goose-stepping masquerade ball in this long, weird post published in 2009. If you're fascinated (as I am) by All Things Strange, hit that last link. You may also want to read an excellent investigative piece published in 2006 by Kos.

Bottom line: The Storch/Douglas/Makow "team" -- if we can call it a team -- is devoted to the creation of elaborate fakes, deriving either from bogus documents or from ersatz "revelations" offered by nameless insiders. This blitzkrieg of bogusness has a fourfold purpose: 1. To foster paranoia. 2. To spread anti-Semitism. 3. To cast a favorable light on Nazi Germany. 4. To make Americans lose faith in democracy.

Back in the Dubya era, liberal websites often got suckered in by the Voice, which seduced lefties by telling them what they wanted to hear about Bushian malevolence. Since TBR News usually kept the anti-Semitism sotto voce, many lefties went along with the simplistic presumption that anyone who hated Bush just had to be cool. Until very recently, most progressives refused to understand that the ultra-rightists despise the Bush family as much as they despise the Clintons.

Why am I rehashing this history? Frankly, my Spidey sense is telling me that Q and the Voice of the White House could be one and the same. Of course, my Spidey sense is far from infallible. Even if it is wrong in this instance, I suggest that Q is best understood as a very gifted student of the Makow/Douglas/Stahl/Storch school of manipulation.

Pizzagate on steroids. Let's return to this important New York Magazine expose of a phenomenon which -- like early-stage Trumpism itself -- has managed to infect much of our culture while attracting little mainstream attention:
Over the last month and a half, the Storm has spread from the depths of 4chan and 8chan to Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter, where it’s found hundreds of thousands of devout followers. Some of the most popular explainer videos boast nearly 200,000 views, and the QAnon hashtag has gotten so popular, it’s honestly difficult to track. (I signed up for one of those freebie “Track Your Hashtag Now!” services and #QAnon hit the 2,000-post limit within four hours.) Some poor soul even took the time to write a 117-page book charting Q’s rise to power, which I’m guessing has been seen at least as many times as this very aggressive Imgur guide, which was at 137,000 views as of Sunday night.
It is claimed that Roger Stone has slyly pushed Q-friendly material. I don't know if that claim is true. If it is, color me unsurprised.

Bottom line: How do we get out of this mess? The above-linked NY Mag story caused one reader to offer this comment:
This type of thinking is ABSOLUTELY treatable with medication. Not kidding.
I doubt this. I believe that "conspiracism" -- like alcoholism -- should be considered a form of addiction, and I'm not sure that addiction can be cured by psycho-pharmacology.

For the sake of argument, let's stipulate that this assertion is true. Do we want to live in a country in which those who make dubious and dangerous claims are forcibly medicated? Who will decide which Americans receive drugs? Who watches the watchmen?

That, in a nutshell, is the conundrum we face in the era of Trump. I used to have faith that unregulated free speech was a self-healing organism. I used to believe that free speech was like Wolverine's skin: The bad guys could bruise it, batter it, stab it and shoot it -- but after a period of pain, everything would return to normal.

I've lost that faith. The bullets have hit vital organs and the holes don't seem to be closing up.

Conspiracy madness is destroying this country. Neo-Nazis are using (or abusing) free speech to eradicate democracy. In the end, they hope to institute a totalitarian state in which free speech will be no more.

Infuriatingly, the only way to combat their abuse of free speech is to restrict free speech. But that option is unthinkable. Any state which has the power to hide or prevent the lies told by Q or "Gregory Douglas" or the Pizzagators will also have the power to restrict what I have to say and what you have to say.

Perhaps the best film about Nazism is Kevin Brownlow's 1965 masterpiece It Happened Here. Toward the end of that movie, one character offers this horrifying paradox: "The appalling thing about fascism is that you've got to use fascist methods to get rid of it."

When I first saw the film at a revival theater in early 1980s, that line made me angry -- and I was not the only one who felt disturbed. A few in the audience applauded; some hissed.

How do I feel now? I don't know. I just don't know.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Firing Mueller


(The image above came from here.)

Writing in the WP, former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti says:
On Sunday, though, Trump insisted that he will not fire Mueller but is contemplating firing Rosenstein or Attorney General Jeff Sessions, realizing that firing Mueller would be a “step too far,” according to The Washington Post.
Trump made noises about canning Sessions some time ago, but did not go through with it. There must be a hidden story there. I don't think that Sessions will leave.

It seems clear now that the plan is to get rid of Rosenstein and to replace him with someone who will fire Mueller. Trump prepared the way for this move when he labeled Rosenstein "a Democrat," even though Rosenstein is a Republican.

Will Move On be able to whip up large protests if Rosenstein goes? I doubt it.

From Trump's POV, the smart move would be to keep Mueller in place for a few more weeks while the Noise Machine drums up even more anti-Mueller hysteria. The smartest move of all would be to replace Rosenstein with a compliant Democrat -- someone susceptible to blackmail or bribery.

Mariotti goes on:
Why would Trump hold off on firing Mueller? Because if his goal is to undermine the investigations into Russian interference in last year’s campaign, keeping Mueller around is probably the best way to do it.

[Trump always lashes out when he’s cornered. He told me so years ago.]

Firing Mueller would not end the investigations that the former FBI director leads. Although we often speak about the “Mueller investigation,” inside the Justice Department that term probably refers to several different but related investigations. Some of those, such as the investigations of Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, began before Mueller was appointed. Others, such as the inquiry into obstruction of justice, began later.

Those investigations would go on even if Mueller leaves. When the Justice Department initiates an investigation, it can’t be closed without following a set of procedures that ensure cases aren’t shut down for improper reasons. If a case is opened, it can’t be “declined” — closed without bringing charges — without a detailed justification for closing the case. As a former federal prosecutor, I’ve declined my share of cases, and it takes time. Declining even a routine case requires a written explanation justifying the declination, citing specific reasons that are consistent with Justice Department guidelines. In more complex or high-profile matters, much more extensive memorandums are prepared. Once in my career, I inherited a complex case that another prosecutor unsuccessfully sought to decline, and I ultimately charged the case.
This is a bit naive. Trump doesn't care about what goes on behind-the-scenes; he wants the case deep-sixed PERIOD. If a "detailed justification" is needed for closing the case, heads will roll until he finds someone willing to write a detailed justification. Simple as that.

Understand this: Donald Trump is actually guilty, and that he will do whatever it takes to save his skin.

Jim Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, knows what's what. Here's what he told CNN recently:
I think this past weekend is illustrative of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president … You have to remember Putin’s background. He’s a KGB officer. That’s what they do. They recruit assets. And I think some of that experience and instincts of Putin has come into play here in his managing of a pretty important account for him, if I could use that term, with our president.
Two days ago, Seth Ambramson offered an important Twitter thread, which I shall try to translate into conventional prose.
Hey, want to know who ran the Clinton email investigation? Republicans. Want to know who's running the Trump-Russia investigation? Republicans. Want to know who's prolonging the Trump-Russia investigation? Republicans.

Special Counsel Bob Mueller is a lifelong Republican, and the man who oversees his work daily—Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—is a lifelong Republican. The Republican Rosenstein—who appointed the Republican Mueller—was himself appointed by a Republican: Donald Trump.
I need to interrupt at this point. Democrats are the ones who should be outraged by the choice of Mueller to head this probe, since a special prosecutor is traditionally someone who belongs to the opposite party.

Ken Starr was a Republican. His corrupt investigation went far beyond the Whitewater pseudoscandal (of which Clinton was completely innocent) and transmogrified into an out-of-control, all-purpose attack machine. The Starr Chamber, unlike the Mueller probe, leaked damaging information on a near-daily basis. Starr kept Susan McDougal jailed on bullshit charges in an attempt to force her to tell lies about Clinton. Unable to find any substance to the Whitewater allegations, Starr decided to focus on the president's sex life, offering a completely inane justification for this shift.

(Without using Google, can you recall the justification Starr offered? Of course not. At this point, nobody can remember it. Maybe Starr can remember it off the top his head, but nobody else can.)

Imagine the outrage that would ensue if Mueller decided to look into Trump's sex life.

Yet back in the 1990s, Democrats put up with Ken Starr's bullshit. They tolerated an utterly unfair and abusive inquest. Why? I'm not entirely sure, but much of the blame belongs to the supposedly-liberal media -- the NYT, the WP and so forth. These publications convinced many liberals that Whitewater and the other bogus Clinton pseudoscandals were based on something real. After Starr came up goose eggs on Whitewater, everyone realized that the WP hated Clinton almost as much as Rush Limbaugh did.

Today, the ever-docile Dems have decided to agree with the Republican insistence that only Republicans may investigate Trump. In fact, Democrats crow about the fact that Mueller, Comey and Rosenstein are Republicans.

The right-wing propaganda machine (Fox News, Brietbart, Limbaugh, Alex Jones and so forth) has spent decades convincing the population that all Dems are evil, conspiratorial schemers. Dems have given up on fighting this perception. How can we hope to clean up politics in a society that grants Republicans the presumption of innocence and Democrats the presumption of guilt?

Let's get back to Abramson:
When the Republican Trump appointed the Republican Rosenstein, top D.C. Republicans overwhelmingly approved the appointment. And when the Republican Rosenstein appointed the Republican Mueller, top Republicans overwhelmingly—again—approved the Republican Rosenstein's choice.

The FBI Director now—Wray—is a lifelong Republican, just as the *former* FBI Director (Comey) was a lifelong Republican. The Republican Comey was fired by the Republican Trump. The head of the DOJ—Sessions—is a lifelong Republican, just as the *acting* head (Rosenstein) is.

Republicans control the White House. Republicans control the United States House of Representatives. Republicans control the United States Senate. That means Republicans control every one of the three Trump-Russia investigations that are currently ongoing in Washington, D.C.

Republicans control the Trump-Russia investigation in the House Intel Committee. Republicans control the Trump-Russia investigation in the Senate Intel Committee. Republicans control the Trump-Russia investigation in the House Judiciary Committee. Three Republican-led probes.

Republicans also control all the committees in the House of Representatives and Senate that we'd *normally* expect would be conducting investigations into ties between Trump and Russia but are not—because they're Republicans, and they run everything that happens in Washington.

Republicans controlled both the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate in 2015 and 2016, too. And that means Republicans were in control of the entire legislative branch in Washington, D.C. for the full course of the Clinton email investigation.

Speaking of the Clinton email investigation, not only was it run by a Republican—Comey—but the FBI field office that was in charge of the Clinton investigation was *so* Republican that it was (and is) called "Trumpland." Of course, some of the investigation was done by NYPD.

*NYPD* is so Republican it was illegally leaking news—some of it false or misleading—to lifelong Republican Rudy Giuliani (an advisor to the Republican Trump) for the full course of the Clinton investigation. The Republican Giuliani then leaked to the Republican-led Fox News.

FNC is America's most-watched cable news. It's run by a lifelong Republican—Rupert Murdoch—a pal of the Republican Trump. Top FNC anchors include lifelong Republican Sean Hannity—advisor to Republican Trump—and lifelong Republican Jeanine Pirro (advisor to Republican Trump).

The reason the FBI probe run by the Republican Comey took so long is that a veritable clown-car full of lifelong Republicans—including Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn—either lied to the FBI (which is a federal crime) or did anything they could to lead probe investigators astray.

No one has done more to undermine the Trump-Russia probe than the Republican Trump—who, on the advice of the Republican Sessions and the Republican Rosenstein, fired the Republican Comey after he'd been overseeing the probe for a year, forcing unnecessary, significant delays.

The Republican Trump has also used Twitter, Republican rallies, and even a false statement he wrote for his Republican son to generate a flurry of *new* crimes the Republican Mueller must now—with the help of the Republican-led FBI—investigate in addition to everything else.

The Republican Trump, with Republican Congressional allies and Republican advisors nominally working as "journalists" for Republican-run FNC, has also delayed the probe by bringing up nonsense like the idea he was wiretapped in Trump Tower or the GSA is part of a secret plot.

Turns out the GSA—whose General Counsel was a lifelong Republican appointed by the Republican Trump—warned the lifelong Republicans at Trump for America who staffed the all-Republican Presidential Transition Team that their emails would be available to the Republican-led FBI.

So with Republicans running the White House, Congress, DOJ, and the FBI, and therefore all Trump-Russia probes—and having run Congress during the Clinton investigation that was run by a Republican field office of the Republican-led FBI—Republicans have announced a complaint.

Their complaint—naturally—is that DEMOCRATS staged a massive DEMOCRAT plot to plant a mountain of inculpatory DEMOCRAT-developed evidence against the president while erasing a mountain of inculapatory DEMOCRAT-created evidence that would've incriminated the DEMOCRAT Clinton.

This DEMOCRAT plot involved DEMOCRATS somehow convincing several dozen Republican politicians and advisors to lie to the FBI, America, and one another about their contacts with Russia. The DEMOCRAT plot also involved saying not-nice things about Republicans via text messages.

So only a partisan—or conspiracy theorist—would see anything in this wall-to-wall Republican sh*tshow but a big DEMOCRAT conspiracy to (wait for it) put *Mike Pence* in the presidency instead of Donald Trump, as Trump was once a Democrat but Pence never has been.

Sunday, December 17, 2017

Michael Flynn and THE woman

I've read (well, listened to) Luke Harding's Collusion, which I highly recommend. Anyone who can read this book and still assign "nothingburger" status to Russiagate must be either a purchased propagandist or an Alt Right zealot.

I'd like to draw your attention to the book's section on General Michael Flynn's time at the Defense Intelligence Agency. At one point shortly before the annexation of Crimea, Flynn attended an  intelligence conference in Cambridge, where he met "a talented Russian-British postgraduate."
The woman, born in Moscow, showed Flynn some of her recent discoveries in Russian archives. Flynn was so struck with her that he invited her to accompany him on a forthcoming visit to Moscow, as his official interpreter.

The trip didn't come off: soon afterward Putin annexed Crimea. According to Andrew, Flynn and the postgraduate student subsequently conducted an "unclassified correspondence" via email. Their discussion were on Soviet history the woman had written her dissertation on the Cheka. She was researching the role of GRU spies in infiltrating the fledgling US nuclear program for a future book.

The woman, Svetlana Lokhova, is understood to dispute some aspects of Andrew's account. There is no suggestion that she is linked to Russian intelligence. Flynn would normally have been expected to report any meeting with a foreign national to the DIA. He didn't.

In his emails, Flynn signed off in an unusual way for a U.S. spy. He called himself "General Misha."

Misha is the Russian equivalent of Michael.
Actually, "Misha" is the short, familiar form of "Mikhail." (It also means "bear.")

"Andrew," in this passage, refers to Professor Christopher Andrew of Cambridge, the official historian of MI5. At this point, it is traditional to say these words: "He has excellent ties to the British intelligence community." So consider that duty fulfilled.

One may have to read the above excerpt a few times before formulating a should-be-obvious question: How did Andrew gain access to the Flynn/Lokhova emails?

The first thing that popped out at me when I heard this passage was the phrase "There is no suggestion that..." Most Americans aren't familiar with this ploy. In the UK, libel laws are rather more onerous than in the US, especially when dealing with an individual with a litigious history, as is the case with Lokhova. British writers have come up with a workaround: They deny an idea in order to get it on the record. The phrase "there is no suggestion..." often proves useful in these instances. Example: "There is no suggestion that Sir Michael Hanley covered up an MI5 smear campaign against Prime Minister Harold Wilson." Nowadays, one can make that claim directly, but in former times...well. There was no suggestion.

(This trick does not work in the United States. I've tried it. American readers are simply too thick.)

Who is she? There are a number of stories about Lokhova on the internet. This one traces back to Luke Harding. He and his co-writers offer some additional details:
Lokhova also listed Flynn as one of four referees who would provide selective endorsements for her book, which is expected to detail how Russian spies penetrated the US atomic weapons programme.

Though there is no suggestion of impropriety, Flynn would have been expected to “self report” any conversation with an unknown person, especially with links to an “adversary” country, such as Russia. Lokhova has informed us that she does not have privileged access to any Russian intelligence archive and there is no suggestion that she has ever worked with or for any of the Russian intelligence agencies.
Price Floyd, a spokesman for Flynn, said: “This is a false story. The inference that the contact between Gen Flynn and a Russian [dual] national described in this story should be seen in any light other than incidental contact is simply untrue.”
Multiple sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the CIA and FBI were discussing this episode, along with many others, as they assessed Flynn’s suitability to serve as national security adviser.

The Cambridge meeting was part of a wider pattern of “maverick” behaviour which included repeated contacts with Russia, the sources said.

After he resigned from the DIA in 2014, Flynn became a contributor to RT, formerly known as Russia Today, the Kremlin’s English-language news channel.
At this point, a digression may be in order.

What happened to Flynn? In the context of a discussion of Flynn -- was it on Stephanie Miller's show? I believe so -- Malcolm Nance once noted that Russian spies often try to recruit individuals recently fired from positions in the American intelligence community, on the theory that a man bearing a grudge may be approachable. I'm quite sure that Flynn would angrily deny that he switched loyalties. There is no suggestion that he became pro-Russian. However, I think it may be fair to suggest that there has been a certain evolution in Flynn's mentality, and that -- contra Nance -- this evolution occurred before he was "axed" to leave DIA.

Collusion has this to say about Flynn's DIA period:
One source, citing DIA sources, spoke of Flynn's obsession with Iran and his incapacity for "linear thought." He had a tendency to "jump around. People thought Flynn was crazy."
Those who spend too much time in the company of Michael Ledeen often catch a bad case of Iranophobia.

I nodded in recognition when I read about Flynn's alleged incapacity for linear thought and tendency to "jump around." These phrases remind me of the time I spent hobnobbing with conspiracy buffs, who were infuriatingly non-linear. On many occasions, I would try to develop a normal argument in which A leads to B which leads to C, but the buffs would have none of it. Their minds don't work that way. In their minds, A leads to Q leads to C leads to Pre-A leads to Post-X leads to Orange leads to Pi leads to Lando Calrissian. And so on. When a conspiracy buff speaks, the results resemble what you'd expect from a random word generator.

I suspect that, while head of DIA, Michael Flynn became converted to -- or perhaps addicted to -- the conspiratorial viewpoint. Nowadays, the path of paranoia often leads to Putinism. I'm not sure why.

(Hmm. Is this very essay guilty of non-linear argumentation? Perhaps so. Apologies.)

Let us return to Svetlana Lakhova. Here's her website. "Svetlana Lokhova is generally regarded as the world's leading expert on Soviet and Russian espionage." But there is no suggestion that she has ever worked for Russian intelligence. Similarly, there is no suggestion that Christopher Andrew is a spook.

At least, I make no such suggestions. However, Dr. Dena Grayson (wife of former congressman Alan Grayson) wrote a rather suggestive tweet:
Gen "Misha" #Flynn flipped to #Putin tool thanks to classic honey trap at Cambridge named Svetlana.
Although the term "honeytrap" implies a sexual relationship, I do not think that such a thing occurred in this case. Seriously. Don't read between the lines of this paragraph. I believe that Lokhova and Flynn became entwined on a purely intellectual level. That said: An intellectual relationship can be more compelling than the usual boy-meets-girl-on-foreign-trip scenario.

At this point, we turn to this BBC profile of Lakhova:
"Are you a Russian spy?" I begin by asking her. "Absolutely not," she replies. "I have no formal or informal connection with Russian intelligence whatsoever."

She acknowledges that the cynical will respond: "She would say that wouldn't she" - which has left her in what she describes as a "Kafkaesque situation"'.

The context of the story, she acknowledges, was part of the problem. She is female, originally from Russia and linked to Cambridge, home of the famous Cambridge spy ring recruited by the KGB in the 1930s.
Claims she was asked to travel to Russia and act as his translator, Lokhova says, are not true. She says she exchanged some emails with Flynn and his assistant after the event, although Flynn soon after left the DIA, after reportedly being forced out. "We had maybe a few emails going backwards and forwards," Lokhova says. These included details of events at Cambridge.
Hm. Luke Harding, whose source appears to be Christopher Andrew, says that Lakhova was supposed to function as interpreter. Andrew's source of information seems to be the Flynn/Lakhova email chain, which somehow seems to have reached his eyeballs. There is no suggestion that GCHQ intercepted these emails and handed them over to Christopher Andrew. (If you want to read between the lines of this paragraph, I can't stop you.)

Christopher Andrew and Lakhova. Here's where things become more interesting:
On the contrary, she says that because of her work with Prof Andrew, who has worked with defectors from the Soviet Union such as former KGB archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, who smuggled out its secrets, she is viewed with suspicion in Russia.

"In Britain, I am now being accused of being a Russian spy. In Russia, some think I am a British spy. And I am neither. I am just a historian who writes about an area that has become incredibly politicised."
So she works with Christopher Andrew, who somehow was given access to the emails between Flynn and Lakhova. In fact, she was a post-graduate student under Andrew.

Is she, in fact, just a historian? If so, she appears to be a uniquely privileged historian:
Ms Lokhova claims to have unique access to previously classified Soviet-era GRU material. This is highly unusual to say the least… According to a Russian historian:
“At least with the FSB and SVR [domestic and foreign spy agencies] there are places you can apply to view the archives, but with the GRU there’s not even a place to apply.”
Her other life. But there is an even more intriguing side to Lakhova. You see, she is not just an academic with an interest in the world of espionage: She's also a banker.
Ms Lokhova used to work for the London branch of Russia’s state-controlled Sberbank.

In 2015, she won a £3.2million payout after winning an employment tribunal case in London against Sberbank CIB for sex discrimination and harassment.

How Ms Lokhova metamorphosed from a Russian banker into a UK historian with expertise in GRU espionage and US atomic weapons is a bit unclear at this point.
"A bit unclear"? I'll say!

Remember when I said that Lakhova is litigious? Here are the details:
A banker dubbed 'Crazy Miss Cokehead' by her bosses claims her £3million pay-out was not worth the gruelling legal battle and the toll on her health.

Cambridge University graduate Svetlana Lokhova, 34, was driven to a breakdown by a 'vicious' campaign of sexual harassment by bullying male colleagues.

She won her case against Russian investment bank Sberbank after judges accepted she was unfairly forced to leave her £750,000-a-year role in London.

But Miss Lokhova says her huge pay-out – including £3.14million for lost earnings, £44,000 for hurt feelings and £15,000 in aggravated damages – has been a hollow victory.
I'm truly sorry about the indefensible insults that Lakhova had to endure. But one must ask: How does a historian (albeit one with unique access to GRU archives) get such a high-paying gig at a bank? I doubt that Lehman Brothers hands out such positions to graduate students who majored in history. I don't think that any high-paid wheeler-dealer at Goldman Sachs has ever said to himself: "Gosh, if I get an advanced degree in history, Mr. Blankfein will be so impressed!"

The folks at Sberbank certainly don't seem to have had much respect for Lakhova. So why did they hire her and what did she do?
The Moscow-born banker told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'I am one of the lucky ones in the sense that I obviously had some personal wealth because I have been in banking for a very long time.
She has been in banking a very long time? Even while pursuing a graduate degree in History at Cambridge? Even while poring through intelligence files at the GRU, a privilege accorded to no-one else?

Who does that? How is it possible to have such a career? Two such careers?

We need more details on the chronology: Did Sberbank pay her a hefty salary while she was writing Spook History and attending Spook U? (That's my new nickname for Cambridge. Spread it around; I want it to catch on.)

We should note that Sperbank is not just any bank.
Sberbank Capital’s CEO, Ashot Khachaturyants, is a former senior official in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and its Ministry of Economic Development and Trade.

State-owned Russian financial institutions are common conduits for surreptitious intelligence work in the country.
If you've been following Rachel Maddow -- or perhaps reading this humble blog -- you would know that Sberbank plays a role in the Trump/Russia scandal. From an earlier Cannonfire post:
The Chairman of the Board of Sperbank is Herman Gref, whose ties with Trump are undeniable. Google "Herman Gref Trump." In particular, see here and here.
Christopher Andrew is an unusual fellow. Let us return to the Intel Today blog. In the following, "CIS" refers to Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, where Flynn met Lakhova:
The CIS was set up by official MI5 historian Professor Christopher Andrew.

On December 17 2016, former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, former policy adviser at the White House Stefan Halper, and historian Peter Martland resigned from CIS.
“Suspicious were allegedly raised after claims a new digital publishing house called Veruscript, which helps cover some of the CIS’s costs, may be acting as a front for the Russian intelligence services.

The publishing house, which, according to its website, is based in London, is also publishing a new journal, the Journal of Intelligence and Terrorism Studies.

Some of those involved are thought to be concerned that Russia may attempt to use the link to the seminars to influence sensitive debates on national defence and security.”
I'm trying to get my head around this. To reiterate: Andrew is the official MI5 historian and the guy who helped to give us the Mitrokhin Archives (about which I remain dubious, although that is a topic for another time). He is very tied to British intelligence; one gets the impression that he could waltz into the MI5 archives as though he owned the place. Yet his graduate student is Svetlana Lakhova of Sberbank (an institution very tied to Russian intelligence) -- a banker/historian who was allowed to waltz into GRU headquarters as if she owned the place. Of course, there is no suggestion that she was ever any kind of a spy.

And Andrew's seminar itself may have been paid for by a Russian front. As though such a thing could happen without his Spookworld friends knowing all about it.

Cambridge Analytica. Remember when I called Cambridge University "Spook U"? You will not be surprised to learn that the university has direct ties to Cambridge Analytica:
In recent years, the company has moved to exploit the revolution in big data to predict human behavior more precisely, working with scientists from the Cambridge University Psychometrics Center. The United States represented a critical new market.
We all know that Cambridge Analytica helped Trump get elected. Cambridge Analytica, staffed in large measure by British intelligence veterans, has done very sensitive work for the British and American services. CA employed Steve Bannon, America's most beloved "nationalist." (That's the term we're supposed to use in polite society, though some may prefer another word beginning with N.) Robert Mercer is often said to be the owner of CA, although that claim is not quite true. CA has done very sensitive work for the British and American services -- and yet this private intelligence group has strong ties to Russia.

In the following excerpt from an earlier Cannonfire post, "Firtash" refers to Dmitry Firtash, the Russian oligarch linked to both Paul Manafort and (but of course!) Vladimir Putin.
How does Firtash -- a notorious Ukrainian gangster linked to both Putin and Paul Manafort -- tie into the firm? To be honest, we can't be sure. We know that a CA/Firtash link exists (doubters need only google Firtash Cambridge Analytica), but we don't know its precise nature.
If you want to trace the ties, start here. Warning: It gets complicated.

Something very strange is going on here. I don't claim to have a handle on it. Whatever it is, it goes much deeper than even Luke Harding's book suggests.

A final word: I have tried my damnedest to make this complicated story "linear." My intention was to write a logical, easy-to-follow post in which point A leads to point B which leads to point C. The problem with stories about this underworld is that one soon becomes bogged down in a very non-linear collision of plotlines. It's difficult to know which points are vital and which are digressions.

To be blunt: It's almost impossible to make sense of this shit. Maybe that's why conspiracy buffs are so "jumpy" in their thinking. 

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Don't think he won't do it



From The Hill (also here):
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said Friday that "rumors" on Capitol Hill suggest President Trump could fire special counsel Robert Mueller before Christmas, after Congress leaves Washington for the winter recess.

“The rumor on the Hill when I left yesterday was that the president was going to make a significant speech at the end of next week. And on Dec. 22, when we are out of D.C., he was going to fire Robert Mueller," Speier told California's KQED News.
"We can read between the lines I think," Speier said. "I believe this president wants all of this shut down. He wants to shut down these investigations, and he wants to fire special counsel Mueller."

The ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), also said Friday that he is worried that Republicans leading the committee are seeking to shut down the committee's investigation by the end of the year.
Christmas would be the perfect time for such a move, since people will be distracted by the holidays and by family obligations. Moreover, winter has hit the east coast rather hard. Normally, I love the idea of a white Christmas -- but not when we need to mount a mass protest.

Bias:
If Comey was pro-Clinton (as the Trumpers claim), why did he deep-six her election chances -- and why did he keep the Steele dossier under wraps? Why didn't Comey inform the public that Trump was under investigation?

I'm sure that some FBI personnel have indeed disparaged Trump privately and donated to Democrats. So what? They have that right. I'm sure that many FBI personnel have donated to the GOP: That, too, is their right. Everyone knows that most employees of the Bureau tend to be conservative. Comey is a Republican and so is Mueller.

As Ted Lieu noted in a recent tweet:
Dear @JohnCornyn: FBI Director Christopher Wray gave over $39,000 exclusively to Republicans. Are you okay with that? Because if you are, then you need to shut up with the partisan talk about our dedicated, professional and patriotic FBI officials.
(Lieu wrote in response to this.)

Bill Palmer says that that these rumors of Mueller's imminent firing are a massive head-fake:
The Republican Congress is making all the anti-Mueller noise that it can, so that once Mueller takes Trump down, it can tell Trump’s base that it tried to stop Mueller. This is all about the 2018 congressional elections.
That's my problem with Palmer: He presents optimistic, blue-sky speculation as if it were proven and irrefutable. Sorry, but I just don't do optimism. Jackie Speier would not be party to the effort that Palmer describes.

I listened to Rachel Maddow's recent "round table" discussion: At no point did any of her guests explain what prvents Trump from firing Rosenstein and finding someone willing to do the dirty deed. Everyone seems to think that Trump will refrain from taking such an extreme action because such things are not done. Haven't we yet learned? Trump will do what others would be ashamed to do.

Look once again at the image in the upper right corner of this blog. When a lone protestor stood up to the tanks in Tiananmen Square, the world admired the protestor. Trump praised the decision to call in tanks.

Never forget that fact.


A carbon blob offers his wisdom

Colorado state senator Jerry Sonnenberg says that reducing carbon emissions would kill trees and plants, which need carbon to survive and to produce oxygen.

Ah yes. As most of you will recall from your high school history classes, there were no trees and plants before the industrial revolution. Also, no air. It's a wonder mankind was able to build the first factory.

Friday, December 15, 2017

A family of idiots

Melania, Jared and Ivana tried to fill out absentee ballots in order to vote in the NYC mayoral race, but they messed up the forms, so their votes did not count.

Donald Trump also screwed up. He got his own birth date wrong.

There's a propaganda campaign to fire Mueller because an FBI agent called Trump an idiot. I wouldn't trust the intelligence of any agent who did not use the I-word.

How Batman's biggest fan could become president. (Seriously.)

As usual, so much is going on that one can barely keep track of it all. Last night, we learned that the Great Tax Bill is now in trouble. Marco Rubio has come to understand that the Mighty Fox Wurlitzer may not be enough to save a Republican senator who backs an incredibly unpopular piece of legislation.

(Added note: The bill has been rewritten to mollify Rubio. I'm betting that this trick will work and that the bill will pass.)

Meanwhile, the attacks on two FBI personnel who privately expressed a distaste for Trump continues to threaten the Mueller probe. No new facts have come out, but the right-wing propagandists keep rewording headlines to convey the impression that shocking new revelations are flying at us every day. The media barrage has worked, with more than half the population now persuaded that Mueller (a Republican) may be a Clinton-controlled Soros-bot.

The real question, which some Democrats have belatedly started to ask, is why those private emails were made public.

I'm still betting that Trump will use this ginned-up controversy as an excuse for firing Mueller. For the purposes of this post, however, let us posit that Mueller stays in place and that his probe can inflict fatal damage to Trump and Pence. What then?

In particular, what of Paul Ryan?

Ryan has signaled that he is thinking about quitting politics. At a press conference, Ryan denied -- almost under his breath -- that he has plans to go. Nevertheless, most observers think that he has formulated an exit strategy. Why? Why now?

The man is a staunch Randroid ideologue who has long sought the power to create Libertarian Utopia. Now that the Russia scandal threatens Pence as well as Trump, Paul Ryan (the third in the line of succession) actually has a shot at the presidency.

(I admit that the chances of such a thing actually happening are not great. This post is about unlikely-but-possible scenarios.)

Why would a man in his position want to head out the door now? Two possibilities:

1. Paul Ryan faces a strong challenge in his home district. The challenger is one Randy Bryce, a non-politician trade unionist laborer nicknamed "Ironstache." Although Ryan has the money and the name recognition, he simply isn't very popular, and the poll numbers aren't going his way. The Speaker of the House could experience one of the more humiliating losses in House history.

2. Ryan himself could get caught up in the Trump/Russia scandal. In June of 2016, before Russia was part of the national conversation, Ryan and others were recorded "joking" about Trump taking money from Putin. Many people think that this "joke" was not just a joke, and that Paul Ryan has always been privy to details about criminal behavior. Such foreknowledge could result in charges against Ryan. There are rumors that Russians have parked money in RNC coffers; so far, I've seen absolutely no evidence to back that notion.

(Do you know of any evidence? If so, please share!)

If the Mueller probe manages to endanger both Trump and Pence simultaneously, and if Ryan chooses that moment to declare that he is done with politics, then who becomes president of the United States?

Technically, the line of succession goes to Orrin Hatch, the president pro tempore of the Senate. Some months ago, Louise Mensch published an outlandish piece claiming that Hatch was already receiving security briefings because Trump, Pence and Ryan were doomed. That's when I stopped taking Mensch seriously.

Yet here we are, contemplating that very scenario.

Problem: Hatch, who is in his 80s, plans to retire next year. Mitt Romney intends to run for his seat, and almost certainly will win it. Does this mean that Romney has an outside chance to achieve his great dream of sleeping in the White House?

No. Romney would not inherit the title of president pro tempore of the Senate. That honor goes to the member of the majority party in the Senate who has served the longest.

We now face an issue which few thought would be an issue: Which party will be the majority after the elections of 2018? Before the Jones win in Alabama, I would have said that the Republicans had a lock on the Senate. Now, anything seems possible.

If the Republicans retain control of the Senate, the title of president pro tempore will probably fall to Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who will soon become the longest-serving Republican in the history of either house of Congress. (The current record is held by one Joseph Cannon.) If you agree with the proposition that one may fairly judge a man by his heroes, then you may be startled to learn that Cochran is a big fan of Jefferson Davis. He actually uses a desk previously owned by Davis.

If the Democrats gain control of the Senate, the president pro tempore will be Patrick Leahy of Vermont. He's the Vermont senator I like.

His hero, believe it or not, is Batman. From Wikipedia:
Leahy is a fan of comic books, and in particular the character Batman. He wrote the foreword to The Dark Knight Archives, Volume 1 (a 1992 collection of the first four Batman comic books), the preface essay for Batman: Death of Innocents (a 1996 graphic novel about the horrors of landmines), and the introduction to Green Arrow: the Archer's Quest (a single-volume collection of a six-issue story arc).

Leahy has also made several cameo appearances in Batman television episodes and films, beginning with an uncredited cameo in Batman Forever (1995).[53][54] He voiced a territorial governor in the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Showdown" (1995), appeared as himself in the film Batman & Robin (1997), and appeared twice in the Dark Knight Trilogy as a Wayne Enterprises board member. In The Dark Knight (2008), he tells the Joker "We're not intimidated by thugs", to which the Joker replies, "You know, you remind me of my father. I hated my father."[55] In The Dark Knight Rises (2012), he defended the legacy of the Wayne family against attempts to usurp the company by industrialist John Daggett.[56] Leahy also appeared in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, playing Senator Purrington, in a scene set during a Senate hearing which is subsequently destroyed by an explosion.[57]

All royalties and fees from Leahy's roles are donated to charities, primarily the Kellogg-Hubbard library in Vermont where he read comic books as a child.
Awesome. I don't need to know anything further about the guy. Leahy for President!

(Of course, the Court of Owls paid me to write that.)