Brief notes

(Please scroll down if you want to know why I wasn't surprised to see Barr come up in the Zelensky transcript.)

Have not read the Complaint yet; will do. Maguire is speaking now, but I stopped watching. Seems to me that he revealed all in his opening: When this is all over, he hopes to go back to his old job. I don't think he truly wanted to hide this Complaint. In fact, I think he wanted things to work out just as they did: The Complaint has been released, and his fingerprints are not on it.

But seriously, how can anyone claim executive privilege in this context? Executive privilege does not cover illegal acts, and the perpetrator of an illegal deed cannot be the one to determine whether the act is, in fact, illegal.

I think that this WP story has it wrong: Trump does not actually believe this revisionist bullshit about Crowdstrike, any more than the Holocaust revisionists truly believe that the Holocaust never happened.

I make that comparison for a reason. Some evidence suggests that this Crowdstrike nonsense began with Qanon. I believe that the originators of the Qanon hoax are a notorious group of fascist bullshit-peddlers who used to work for The Barnes Review, which was founded to promote Holocaust revisionism. They've gone far beyond that remit, and have devoted themselves to concocting all sorts of political falsehoods. Those guys produce new versions of the Protocols hoax the way Nabisco produces cookies.

The Crowdstrike malarky was invented to create a revisionist narrative about Russian interference in 2016 and to make the Dems look like the perpetrators of an operation in which they were victimized. Trump hopes that the revisionism will serve several goals: 1. Removing the "original sin" besetting his presidency. 2. Helping Roger Stone escape prosecution (because Stone's defense rests on this absurdity). 3. Smearing the Democratic Party as Conspiracy Central.

Unfortunately, that last smear has become the default position of far too many Americans.

Well, I'm sure that a lot has happened since I started writing this. I'll do more writing after I've done more reading.