The “soft coup” under way in Washington

If Donald Trump had any kind of presidential strategy and propensity to take command, he would have had all the intercepts of Russian chatter gathered up weeks ago. He would then have had them declassified and made public, even as he launched a criminal prosecution against Obama’s hit squad­-John Brennan,

Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett for illegally unmasking and leaking classified information.

Such a course of action would have crushed the Russian interference hysteria in the bud.

.. At bottom, the latter was a rearguard invention of the Deep State and Democratic partisans. They became literally shocked and desperate for a scapegoat early last fall by the prospect that the unthinkable was happening.

Namely, the election by the unwashed masses of an outsider and insurrectionist who could not be counted upon to serve as a “trusty” for the status quo; and whose naïve but correct instinct to seek a rapprochement with Russia was a mortal threat to the very modus operandi of the Imperial City.

.. After all, it didn’t take a Kremlinologist from the old Soviet days to figure out that Putin did not favor Clinton, who had likened him to Hitler. And that he welcomed Trump, who had correctly said NATO was obsolete, that he didn’t want to give lethal aid to the Ukrainians, and had expressed a desire to make a deal with Putin on Syria and numerous other areas of unnecessary confrontation.

.. Given that he is up against a Deep State/Dem/Neocon/ mainstream media prosecution, the Donald has no chance of survival short of an aggressive offensive of the type described above.

But that’s not happening because the man is clueless about what he is doing in the White House and is being advised by a cacophonous coterie of amateurs and nincompoops. So he has no action plan except to impulsively reach for his Twitter account.

.. “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt”

So alone with his Twitter account, clueless advisors and pulsating rage, the Donald is instead laying the groundwork for his own demise. Were this not the White House, it would normally be the point at which they send in the men in white coats with a straight jacket.

.. Mueller is a card-carrying apparatchik of the Deep State, who was there at the founding of today’s surveillance monster as Director of the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11. Since the whole $75 billion apparatus that eventually emerged was based on a vastly exaggerated threat of global Islamic terrorism that doesn’t exist, Russia had to be demonized into order to keep the game going­-a transition that Mueller fully subscribed to.

.. To wit, Mueller’s #1 hire was the despicable Andrew Weissmann. The latter had led the fraud section of the department’s Criminal Division, served as general counsel to the F.B.I. when Mueller was its director, and, more importantly, was the driving force behind the Enron task force the most egregious exercise in prosecutorial abuse and thuggery since the Palmer raids of 1919.

.. Exactly four years ago in June 2013, no one was seriously demonizing Putin or Russia. In fact, the slicksters of CNN were still snickering about Mitt Romney’s silly claim during the 2012 election campaign that Russia was the greatest security threat facing America.

.. But then came the Syrian jihadist false flag chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013 and the US intelligence community’s flagrant lie that it had proof the villain was Bashar Assad.

.. To the contrary, it subsequently became evident that the primitive rockets that had carried the deadly sarin gas, which killed upwards of 1500 innocent civilians, could not have been fired from regime-held territory; the rockets examined by UN investigators had a range of only a few kilometers, not the 15-20 kilometers from the nearest Syrian base.

.. in the eyes of the neocon War Party, this constructive act of international statesmanship by Putin was the unforgivable sin. It thwarted the next target on their regime change agenda­-removal of the Assad government in Syria as a step toward an ultimate attack on its ally, the Shiite regime of Iran.

.. the entire apparatus of Imperial Washington­–the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department and a long string of Washington funded NGOs­-was on the ground in Kiev midwifing the putsch that overthrew Ukraine’s constitutionally elected President and Russian ally.

.. the Ukrainian civil war and partition of Crimea inexorably followed, as did the escalating campaign against Russia and its leader.

.. Indeed, given the Stalin-era animosity between the Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimean regions of the confected state of Ukraine and the virulent anti-Russian populations elsewhere­ – including descendants of the Nazi collaborators with Hitler during WWII­ – there could have been no other outcome. And that was especially the case after Washington designated “Yats”, a neo-Nazi sympathizer named Arseniy Yatseniuk, as the guy to takeover the Ukrainian government at the time of the Kiev uprising.

.. Russia moved to protect its legitimate interests in its own backyard resulting from the Washington-instigated civil war in Ukraine, including protecting its 200-year old Naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. The War Party simply characterized these actions falsely as acts of aggression by a potential sacker of the peace and territorial integrity of its European neighbors.

Donald Trump, Establishment Sellout

WHICH side are you on? Are you with Donald Trump, or with the Washington insiders who want to undo his election? Do you favor the legitimate president of the United States, or an unelected “deep state” — bureaucrats, judges, former F.B.I. directors, the media — that’s determined not to let him govern? Are you going to let a counterrevolution by elites bring down a man who was elevated to the White House precisely because the country knows that its elite is no longer fit to govern?

This is how the debate over Donald Trump’s mounting difficulties is being framed by some of my fellow conservatives, from Sean Hannity to more serious pundits and intellectuals.

.. But Trump is not actually governing as a populist or revolutionary, and the rolling crises of his first four months are not really about resistance to an “America First” or “drain the swamp” agenda

the various outsider groups that cast their lot with him

  1. working-class ex-Democrats to
  2. antiwar conservatives to
  3. free-trade skeptics to
  4. build-the-wall immigration hawks to
  5. religious conservatives fearful for their liberties —

have seen him pick very few difficult fights on their behalf.

.. his legislative agenda has been standard establishment-Republican fare — spending cuts to pay for upper-bracket tax cuts, rinse, repeat.

.. he’s mostly handed foreign policy over to his military advisers

.. Religious conservatives got Neil Gorsuch because he was a pedigreed insider. But they aren’t getting anything but symbolism on religious liberty, because Trump doesn’t want to pick a fight with the elite consensus on gay and transgender rights.

the establishment keeps winning:

  1. Planned Parenthood was funded in the budget deal and
  2. the border wall was not, the promised
  3. NAFTA rollback looks more likely to be a toothless renegotiation, Trump’s occasional talk about
  4. breaking up the big banks is clearly just talk,
  5. we haven’t torn up the Iran deal or
  6. ditched the Paris climate accords, and more.

.. populism needs a seat at the table of power in the West, and the people who voted for our president do deserve a tribune.

.. Trump is not that figure. As a populist he’s a paper tiger

.. too incompetent and self-absorbed to fight for them.

he’s not being dogged by leaks and accusations because

  1. he’s trying to turn the Republican Party into a “worker’s party” (he isn’t), or because
  2. he’s throwing the money-changers out of the republic’s temples (don’t make me laugh), or because
  3. he’s taking steps to reduce America’s role as policeman of the world (none are evident).

.. he’s at war with the institutions that surround him because he behaves consistently erratically and inappropriately and dangerously, and perhaps criminally as well.

.. there is no elite “counterrevolution” here for them to resist, because there is no Trump revolution in the first place.

 

Comey’s Memos & Obstruction Of Justice

It’s pretty lame that the Times ran this story not having seen the memo, but only having had it read to them over the phone. But that’s the blood-in-the-water atmosphere in Washington now. Seriously, do you doubt for a minute that this Comey memo exists?

.. Comey could be lying, but we already know that Trump fired Comey in part because of the Russia investigation, because Trump said so himself in the NBC interview.

.. Trump is ignorant of the norms and practices of the presidency, and thinks he can trample them.

Hubris makes you stupid. Trump came to Washington knowing that the Deep State would have it out for him. They hardly have to lift a finger — he’s taking himself down.

Obama Lied About Removing All Chemical Weapons from Syria

I mean, the way they did this story was Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction. We went to war and people died!

.. There are people who think that this attack in Syria using chemical weapons on Syrian citizens is a setup designed to draw President Trump into military action in Syria, just as Bush was drawn into action in Iraq.

.. But the upshot is that there are people now thinking that these intelligence people…

There were many Clinton holdovers just like there are now Obama holdovers, and that many people ran a scam on Bush. They knew that there were not mass quantities of weapons of mass destruction, and they let Bush go in there on purpose to embarrass himself. And there are people who think, “Look, that happened once, it can happen again. Mr. President,” they’re saying to Trump, “please being very careful before you make a move on Syria, ’cause you could be in the process of being entrapped again, just like Bush was.”

.. the British media think got sucked into a trick. There weren’t weapons of mass destruction and he was lied to and he bought the lie, and so people are afraid. People who support Trump are afraid that he may be falling prey to the same kind of trick

.. The Democrats want you to believe that Putin helped Trump win the election by somehow screwing Hillary and the whole Democrat effort. They colluded. They don’t have any evidence for it, but they’re convinced it happened, right? So Trump and Putin are buddy-buddy. Trump doesn’t ever criticize Putin.

What in the world, then, would Trump be talking about going into Syria for?

.. Trump attacking Syria undercuts the entire narrative that Trump and Putin are buddies