Insanity

In the image above, a billionaire asks for handouts.

What the hell is going on in this country?

This cryptic story implies that Comey just had a very grim, very secret meeting with senators on the intelligence committee. Is Comey finally delivering the goods on Trump? If so, why did the FBI Director do everything in his power to get Trump elected? Or is Comey going to concentrate his fire on leakers, as the vile David Nunes has requested?

Update: Sorry to interrupt in mid-rant, but Hot Air has done some truly marvelous tea-leaf reading. Marco Rubio has suggested in a tweet that Comey managed to turn around some or all of the Republicans. David Frum has suggested that the NYT or another major news organ will soon drop a bombshell. Trump must sense this: He's tripling down on his insane campaign to convince the country that everyone in the news media is a liar. Indications are that the intelligence committee and/or the media will be following the money trail.

Added note: Fox News -- yes, Fox -- offers a remarkable account of the Comey briefing, or what we know of it. 

And now, back to my rant as originally written...

How can the Republican mind rationalize the mutually contradictory claims that the leaks are real but the news based on those leaks is fake?

How can Republicans continue to justify the actions of a man who lets his unvetted Mar-A-Lago cronies in on matters that should be kept confidential? Trump ran on bullshit allegations about the alleged insecurity Hillary's email server, which didn't handle any secret material. (And no, she did not erase 30,000 emails.) Of course, you could never explain the truth to Trump's audience, because most of them don't even know what a computer server is.

Remember when Julian Assange -- the founder of freakin' Wikileaks -- was hypocritically scoring Hillary for the alleged insecure handling of classified information? Now Dear Leader uses insecure systems while letting his country club pals in on things they have no business seeing -- and his hard-core supporters are fine with that. Paradoxically, Trump claims to be aghast at the very idea of leaks, even though he owes his office, in part, to Julian Assange, the former King of Leaks.

The incoherence of Donnie's views are matched by the incoherence of his speech.  I've met a few actual schizophrenics in my time; they usually sounded more lucid than Trump did at that instantly-infamous press conference. We now know that his bizarre performance repelled his chosen replacement for Michael Flynn, Vice Admiral Robert Harward.

You've surely heard or seen these words already, but let's savor them again:

You know what uranium is, right? It’s this thing called nuclear weapons. And other things. Like lots of things are done with uranium. Including some bad things. But nobody talks about that.

This is literally the single stupidest utterance ever emitted by any American politician. Even Louis Gohmert could not have concocted such a verbal spectacular. "You know what uranium is, right?" I have the horrific feeling that, until recently, Donald Trump did not.

And then there was that exchange with the Jewish reporter -- a reporter who went out of his way to establish himself as friendly to Trump. Yet when this journalist asked What to do about anti-Semitism? Trump reacted as though the reporter was accusing him of being an anti-Semite.

(I've learned from hard experience that the words which right-wing conspiracy buffs hear will often differ from what was actually said. That's why one should never talk to such people.)

Trump ranted about how he is the least anti-Semitic, least racist person in the world, and never mind the fact that he brought a leader of the Alt-Right movement into the White House. The wicked flee when no man pursueth. And the guilty proclaim their innocence when no man questions it.

This is insanity. Insanity.

If I ran SNL, I'd open the show with Alec Baldwin (in character) doing a cover of "I am the Walrus" -- with Spicer, Conway and Death singing "Umpa Umpa" in the background. Nobody would be surprised if Trump's next tweet read "Semolina Pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower. Sad."

The problem goes way beyond Trump: Our entire culture has gone barking bonkers. Across the political spectrum, everyone has entered into an alternative universe in which old opponents become new allies. In truth, I'm not even sure what the spectrum is any more, since the rules of reality have become so deformed.

Take, for example, Louise Mensch, whose twitter feed has become THE go-to place for the latest on the Trump/Russia linkage. She's a British conservative, a former member of Parliament, an employee of Rupert Murdoch, and a one-time Alt Right fellow traveler with profound links to the intelligence community. In normal times, I would consider her part of the problem.

But she sure as hell has the right enemies. The Breitbarters bash her continually, having transformed her into one of their "paranoia pinatas." In their crazed attacks, they trotted out all of the usual cliches, such as "cuck," and "SJW." How clever.

Mensch says that the spooks came to trust her because she was a staunch critic of Snowden. Now she is working with them to expose Trump. Yet Trump (who thinks whatever Fox News tells him to think) has said that he wants to execute Snowden -- and his pal Putin may give him the chance to do so.

Back when things were normal, I ran the sort of blog that gave positive coverage to people like Annie Machon, not Louise Mensch. Hell, I once got mildly drunk on saki with Lou Wolf, editor of Covert Action Information Bulletin.

And yet...here we are.

Where, exactly, are we? How did we get here? And how can we go back to where we were?

Side note: One reason the Breitbarters hate Mensch is her feminism. Although she has been the target of a vicious cyberbullying campaign, she herself got in trouble for making some rather bullying comments about the looks of a reporter. Given these circumstances, am I allowed to confess that I think that Louise Mensch is really pretty? Just what are the rules here? Are there any rules left?

That's the theme of this entire post. What are the rules now? Are there any rules left?

Earlier today, an Australian reader submitted the following comment to the preceding post:

As an Australian I might add not only did the CIA fuck with one of our greatest Prime Ministers who was democratically elected and who in his short time made changes which have served our nation well and not forgetting we are a sovereign nation.. this affair has been canvassed for an American audience in the film "The Falcon and the Snowman" but they organised a coup in neighbouring Indonesia against Sukarno their democratically elected President leaving half a million people dead. There are blogs here confirming Anne Dulles - Obama's mother was centrally involved. This has given us a deeply autocratic military government to deal with - who also have a million man army but has seen both US European and Australian companies seriously rape the joint - look into the plight of West Papua if you want to understand the brutality and the desecration... So thank you CIA - Trump may well be a dead man walking if this is true and god only knows what sort of deal he'd make with Putin but if he gets a chance to fuck the CIA - and I mean seriously fuck with them - hold them responsible for what they have done then I'm liking him more and more...

My response:

Simon, much of what you say is quite true. I will be the first to admit that -- when viewed from an Olympian remove -- there is a kind of cosmic justice to what is happening to the U.S. right now, in that a government which has subverted and shaped so many other governments is now getting a taste of what it feels like.

Here's the thing: I don't live on Olympus. I live HERE. I can't see issues through the eyes of an historian looking back from the year 4000. I'm living right NOW. And I'm concerned that, with Trump in charge and destroying the EPA, we may not live to see 2100, let along 4000.

Now let's get to your most questionable claim. Obama's mother was named Stanley Ann Dunham, not Anne Dulles. You may not know this, but THIS blog was probably the first to detail the evidence that she may have had a relationship with CIA.

Since I wrote that series of articles (before the election of 2008), I've looked for further evidence to prove the idea. Hell, I even looked up her book about rural life in Indonesia. (And of course, I read bios of both of Obama's parents.)

I don't know of any evidence that Ann had any connection with the Sukarno coup per se. She did, however, marry a man who functioned as the point man connecting Suharto and American oil, and in my articles, I certainly raised questions about THAT.

I'm curious to learn about the "blogs" you cite. I suspect that you are referring to Wayne Madsen, who basically copied everything that I did without once citing me. (Check the chronology of our work and you'll see that I came first.) He added some material, but nearly all of it is dubious. I read his book on the subject, and it is TERRIBLE, brimming with extraneous items that have no relationship to his main thesis. As an old girlfriend of mine used to say: "That's not an essay. That's a brain dump."

While writing those words, I felt a twinge of nostalgia. I want to get back to the days when I was a critic of the wrongs committed by CIA and MI6. I want to get back to the days when I told people to read Lobster, not the tweets of Louise Mensch. I want to get back to the days when I felt comfortable discussing things like the Sukarno coup, the CIA's involvement in the removal of Gough Whitlam and a thousand cognate intelligence scandals, including the "fingerprints of intelligence" which I (and some others) have discerned on Barack Obama's resume.

If I had any confidence that Trump would reveal this hidden history and take steps to rectify the evils of the past, I'd be much less concerned about what's going on right now.

But Donald Trump is no do-gooder. He's an Alex Jones listener, not a William Blum reader. He doesn't want Truth and Reconciliation; he doesn't want peace and justice. He wants to transform the American military and intelligence community into ruthless attack dogs loyal only to him. Not to the country, not to any higher ideals: Just him.

Trump wants to transform the American intelligence community into something like the NKVD under Stalin. Worse, Trump is probably as crazy as Stalin himself was in his final days, when he was blathering on about the Doctors' Plot.

Like it or not, only the spooks can expose Trump. Let's hope they dethrone him before it's too late.