Wednesday, January 31, 2018

We live in outlandish times

Remember Peter Strzok, the FBI guy who dissed Trump repeatedly in his personal emails to Lisa Page, also employed by the FBI? The wacko right -- by which I mean "the right" -- continues to treat those messages as proof that the FBI is engaged in a "Deep State" conspiracy to bring Donald Trump down.

Strzok! Hillary! Deep State! Secret societies! Illuminati! Build-a-burgers! Comet Pizza! The lizard people! It's all connected!

Guess what? We now know that Donald Trump wouldn't be president if not for Peter Strzok!
Emails obtained by CNN show the FBI agent at the center of a Capitol Hill storm played a key role in a controversial FBI decision that upended Hillary Clinton's campaign just days before the 2016 election: the letter to Congress by then-FBI Director James Comey announcing the bureau was investigating newly discovered Clinton emails.

The new revelation about FBI agent Peter Strzok comes as Republicans accuse him of being sympathetic to Clinton while seeking to undermine Donald Trump during the heat of the 2016 campaign season.

Strzok, who co-wrote what appears to be the first draft that formed the basis of the letter Comey sent to Congress, also supported reopening the Clinton investigation once the emails were discovered on disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner's laptop, according to a source familiar with Strzok's thinking. The day after Strzok sent his draft to his colleagues, Comey released the letter to Congress, reigniting the email controversy in the final days of the campaign.
With alleged "friends" like Strzok, Hillary sure as hell didn't need enemies.

The right has spent untold hours trying to portray the FBI as a Clinton-controlled conspiratorial powerhourse. This, despite the fact that most agents -- and most higher-level officials in the Bureau -- tend to be quite conservative. This, despite the fact that Hillary would probably be president today if Comey had not written that damned letter and publicized it.

Chris Hayes has offered an elegant tweet:
This is a narratively perfect denoument.

The man supposed to be behind the FBI's anti-Trump conspiracy was behind the letter that did more to get Trump elected than any single event.
I predict that nothing will change, because nothing will ever convince the Trumpist right that these events actually occurred. The right is wedded to the conspiratorial worldview. Conspiracism is a mechanism which allows one to discard truths and replace them with the lies that make one feel better.

SEC-recy. Remember when we were told that a Hillary White House would be run by and for Goldman Sachs? Check THIS out.
Since winning Senate approval as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission in May, Clayton had talked tough about protecting small investors. But he had already given Wall Street any number of gifts, from easing up on enforcement of major firms to easing the rules for companies seeking to go public.
Clayton is a man Wall Street itself might have picked to run its most important federal regulator. Except for the two years that Clayton clerked for a federal judge after graduating law school, he has worked his entire adult life at Sullivan & Cromwell, an elite law firm based in downtown Manhattan that includes many of the country’s largest publicly traded companies as clients.
Throughout the crisis, Clayton was a go-to lawyer for some of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks. He advised Goldman in its negotiations with the government over $10 billion in federal TARP bailout dollars and in its efforts to raise another $5 billion from Warren Buffet. Clayton also represented Bear Stearns in its crisis-related fire sale to JPMorgan Chase.
It gets worse from there. You definitely ought to read this one.

2 comments:

nemdam said...

Not that I was ever a skeptic, but I'm now more convinced than ever that the FBI, or elements within it (NY field office), conspired to help Trump and hurt Clinton during the election. With the complete farce revealed that shows Strzok, if anything, was pro-Trump instead of pro-Hillary, it makes me believe Trump is trying to do the Russian trick of accusing your opponents first of something harmful that you yourself have done that will soon come out. Since everyone's mind is already oriented around the idea that the FBI is pro-Clinton, when the truth officially comes out that the FBI was pro-Trump, everyone's minds will be so scrambled that its impact will be minimal. Goddammit we really are going to learn that the FBI really was against Clinton and made Trump President. I'm having a hard time not concluding that this election was a coup. Call me hysterical. I don't care.

I apologize for my language but fuck everything.

Anonymous said...

"Trump is trying to do the Russian trick of accusing your opponents first of something harmful that you yourself have done that will soon come out." Well said nemdem.

Trump also used this technique to great advantage during the campaign when he repeatedly stated that the "election was rigged". By doing this he got Obama and Clinton to protest that our electoral system had integrity. Then when our electoral system failed miserably, both Obama's and Clinton's hands were tied by their previous statements.

Donald may destroy everything and everybody he touches, but he is a master of manipulation.