Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
The Washington political scene is looking less like The Apprentice and more and more like the old Marlon Perkins Wild Kingdom show, with giant crocodiles slithering down the muddy banks to encircle Donald Trump paddling fecklessly in his leaky dugout while a chorus of angry birds shrieks in the surrounding treetops. Yes, it really looks that bad all of a sudden for Ole Number 45, the Golden Golem.
RussiaGate is flaring to a toxic shock level event. Everything that spun out of Monday’s House Intelligence Committee hearing made all parties look bad. The spooks are everywhere and nowhere. The spooks are leaking to the press. The president is tweeting instead of governing. The two parties are literally at war in congress, and the news media is playing it all like a Stockhausen cantata for kazoo and trashcan lid.
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One can’t help marveling at the way the “Russian interference” motif has shifted the spotlight off the substance of what Wikileaks revealed about Clinton Foundation and DNC misdeeds onto Trump campaign officials “colluding” with Russians, supposedly to support their interference in the election. It’s true that the election is way over and the public is no longer concerned with Hillary or her foundation (which is closing shop anyway). But the switcheroo is impressive, and quite confusing, considering recently retired NSA James Clapper just two weeks ago said on NBC’s Meet the Press that there was “no evidence” of collusion Between Trump and Russia. Okay… uh, say what?
On Monday, FBI Director James Comey revealed that his agency had been investigating the Trump Campaign since at least last August. Is that so…? Investigating how? Some sort of electronic surveillance? Well, what else would they do nowadays? Send a gumshoe to a hotel room where he could press his ear on a drinking glass against the wall to eavesdrop on Paul Manafort? I don’t think so. Of course they were sifting through emails, phone calls, and every other sort of electronic communication.
Trump’s big blunder was to tweet that he’d been “wiretapped.” Like the FBI patched into a bunch of cables with alligator clips in the basement of Trump Tower … or planted a “bug” in the earpiece of his bedside phone. How quaint. We also don’t have ice boxes anymore, though plenty of struggling weight-watchers across the land speak guiltily of “raiding the icebox.” But if it’s true, as Mr. Comey said, that the FBI had been investigating Trump’s campaign, the people around him, and Trump himself, since August, how could they not have captured some of Trump’s conversations?
Anyway, the action on Monday shifted to the question of how General Michael Flynn was “unmasked” after the CIA recorded a phone conversation between him and the Russian ambassador. (The CIA is expressly forbidden from spying on US citizens, and anything overheard incidentally when bugging foreigners is supposed to remain suppressed or “masked.”) Somebody at the CIA just handed the info straight to The New York Times, The WashPo, and CNN. That story broke in back in January. How come the CIA has not rooted out the culprit and handed him/her/zhe over to the Department of Justice?
For the record, apart from the General Flynn matter, I have no idea what connections Trump & Co. may have had with Russia before, during, or after the election. But nobody has yet demonstrated that the allegations about Hillary, her email, her foundation, the DNCs treatment of Senator Sanders, or the John Podesta letters were anything but truthful, either, and that was why Hillary lost the election.
It is also worth considering that candidates for high office in all advanced nations have relationships with people in other countries. It’s not against the law per se to speak to people in Portugal, Singapore, Germany, Argentina, and a hundred other places, including, yes, Russia — which, by the way, is no longer a communist imperium bent on world domination, though Senator Chuck Schumer would like you to think so.
Then, on Wednesday, House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes (R-Cal) told the news media that an “unnamed source” in the Intel community informed him that Trump had indeed been surveilled during the transition period following the election. Was he just blowing smoke up America’s ass? I guess we’ll have to stand by on that one.
So, the long and the short of it is that the RussiaGate story is spinning out of control, and Trump’s adversaries — who go well beyond Congress into the Deep State — might be getting enough leverage to dump Trump. Either they will maneuver him and his people into some kind of perjury rap, or they will tie up the government in such a web of investigative procedural rigmarole that all the country lawyers who ever snapped their galluses will never be able to unravel it.
While the nation remains entertained by all this, the Potemkin financial system will wobble, crash, and burn and the humiliation of Donald Trump will be complete. Abandoned by the Republican Party, isolated and crazed in the White House, tweeting out mad appeals to heaven, he’ll either voluntarily pass the baton to Mike Pence or he will be declared unfit to serve and removed under the 25th amendment.
The after-effects of that will be something to behold: a “lose-lose” for both old-line political parties. The Trumpists will never forgive the Republican Party, and the Democrats will have gained nothing. Don’t let the door bang you on the butt on your way out.
I don’t know why I wasted my time reading this. Every Kunstler article I’ve read so far puts the worst spin on events and it’s doom and gloom. I have faith in The Donald.
It was OK until Kunt got to the Russia collusion and made it into Armageddon.
The Russia gambit is over; the media and Dem’s may try to make something out of nothing but the public that has a working brain knows better.
Ah Kokoda, “…the public that has a working brain knows better.”
That is a very, very small percentage of the population of the USA. I wouldn’t rely on that portion of the populace to save us from the lies.
Wildly gyrating seems to be the best way to describe everything about America today. On Monday, it looked like it was over for President Trump. By Thursday the tables have turned with the Intel committee chairman’s revelations. All of this with the economy ready to collapse and the next war just a hairs breath away (but where? Asia, Europe?). It’s funny, but it seems that explosive unpredictability is the new norm.
Get used to it.
Matt Taibbi’s piece on the start of the Trump administration is equally pointless, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-on-trump-the-destroyer-w473144 but at least he has his standard few humorous turns of a phrase. It’s hilarious watching these people get totally overwrought and lose their shit. Like the waiter in the Blues Borthers telling Elwood “wrong glass, sir”.
Trump has the nerve this morning after strong arming this stinko, giant turd healthcare bill to say, “that he should have done tax cuts first”. I just threw up in the back of my mouth.
Mericans will get tax relief when hell freezes over. Every member in CONgress needs to be thrown out and Trump & Co. stinks to high heaven. Rise up, wake up and get rid of these parasites..
You’ve gone off the rails.
So what you are saying is you like the concept of passing healthcare bills before we know what is in them, koko?
Life imitates ad dept:
https://youtu.be/bgfVIPP1R70
Again with the “wiretap” gaffe. Jeeze, lay off already, he used an outdated word. The horror.
You’d a thunk he mispronounced corpsmen –> “corpse-men”, or called his wife “Michael”.
Go lay down on your davenport for awhile Kunstler.
If you will remember the exact same thing happened while passing Obamacare. No one knew what was in it…the dems and neocons passed it anyway.
RacistWG
Are you in favor of this type of governance? Treaties that we know not what lurks inside, healthcare legislation that could be hiding death panels (and most likely is hiding in some form). The founding fathers are spinning, spinning I tell ya.
Kunstler – writing towards irrelevancy – One Column at a time.
In the exact set of circumstances, rhetorical retards like Kunstler make it very easy to imagine what would happen if the tables were turned.
Just take the above gobblygook and point it towards a hypothetical, ideological “mirror”.
For example, if Obama’s National Security Advisor pick, James L. Jones, or Tom Donilon, or (heaven forbid! Susan Rice), were pressured to step down over illegal leaks involving the illicit unmasking brought about by the Intelligence Agencies under George W. Bush, I suspect Mr. Kuntsler would be writing his columns on the largest governmental scandal in American history.
The illegality involved with the “unmasking” of Flynn (and others in Trump’s administration) surpasses Watergate by magnitudes exceeding tenfold. The Russian collusion narrative is merely spun to provide cover to the overwhelming corruption within the highest offices of the American government.
What happens next in this battle of narratives (i.e. “spin”) regarding “Russia” vs. “Leaks”, will determine the fate of the U.S., if not the entire world. IMO.
In case you haven’t notice the Democrat/Deep State/ MSM position is that you can do nothing. No ‘wall’, no making the states that expanded Medicaid pay for it ( repeal Obamacare), no tax simplification aka as reform because the tax code is what Congress sells, no cutting the fat our of government agencies, not even a goddamned space program if it doesn’t study global warming on earth! Nothing can be done!
That will remain the default setting of the United States unless and until Trump takes one of these hick GOP Congressmen and tells him if he doesn’t shape up he is going to be shipped out even if Trump has to personally find and fund a primary opponent to get rid of him!