Trump Administration vs. Deep State
“Mike Flynn has fallen farther faster than any powerful official in any Government in the 20th Century, in America. We are watching, in real time, very quickly, a powerful counter intelligence investigation run by the FBI, with the assistance of the CIA and NSA that is targeting the top of this government.”
The intelligence branch of the MIC/Deep State has decided to change the results of our national election, and Democrats are perfectly OK with that (especially at GOS where they believe the CIA is defending "democracy").
My personal opinion is similar to Max Keiser's, in that Trump is the "new Boris Yeltsin, the puppet idiot installed by America’s neo-cons and Wall St. bankers".
OTOH, I also recognize that there is historical precedent for Deep State security forces influencing who runs the executive branch - the Imperial Praetorian Guard. That's not a good thing.
In a liberal democracy, how things happen is often as important as what happens. Procedures matter. So do rules and public accountability. The chaotic, dysfunctional Trump White House is placing the entire system under enormous strain. That's bad. But the answer isn't to counter it with equally irregular acts of sabotage — or with a disinformation campaign waged by nameless civil servants toiling away in the surveillance state.As Eli Lake of Bloomberg News put it in an important article following Flynn's resignation,
Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do. [Bloomberg]
Those cheering the deep state torpedoing of Flynn are saying, in effect, that a police state is perfectly fine so long as it helps to bring down Trump.
It is the role of Congress to investigate the president and those who work for him. If Congress resists doing its duty, out of a mixture of self-interest and cowardice, the American people have no choice but to try and hold the government's feet to the fire, demanding action with phone calls, protests, and, ultimately, votes. That is a democratic response to the failure of democracy.
Sitting back and letting shadowy, unaccountable agents of espionage do the job for us simply isn't an acceptable alternative.
Down that path lies the end of democracy in America.
I would also add that it's not just "how things happen", but also "who makes them happen", because it reveals why they are happening.
In this case it's a matter of the dirtiest agency in American history making the call.
“What’s at the core of this is an effort by some in the intelligence community to upend any positive relationship between the U.S. and Russia,” Kucinich said.
And in his opinion, there is a big money motive behind it.
“And I tell you there's a marching band and Chowder Society out there. There's gold in them there hills,” he said. “There are people trying to separate the U.S. and Russia so that this military industrial intel axis can cash in.”
Kucinich added the intelligence community could start a war to succeed.
“There’s a game going on inside the intelligence community where there are those who want to separate the U.S. from Russia in a way that would reignite the Cold War,” he said.
The simpleton worldview of Team Blue vs. Team Red that so many Democrats (and Republicans too) see the world is a hindrance to understanding what is actually going on here.
In the past it was considered scandalous for senior U.S. officials to even request the identities of U.S. officials incidentally monitored by the government (normally they are redacted from intelligence reports). John Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was derailed in 2006 after the NSA confirmed he had made 10 such requests when he was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control in George W. Bush's first term. The fact that the intercepts of Flynn's conversations with Kislyak appear to have been widely distributed inside the government is a red flag.
Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told me Monday that he saw the leaks about Flynn's conversations with Kislyak as part of a pattern. "There does appear to be a well orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration," he said. "From the leaking of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern."
...
Nunes told me Monday night that this will not end well. "First it's Flynn, next it will be Kellyanne Conway, then it will be Steve Bannon, then it will be Reince Priebus," he said. Put another way, Flynn is only the appetizer. Trump is the entree.
Comments
I found it
It seems I'm a RT nutjob and a Putin apologist.
Funny, how that works with my support of universal health care, a universal minimum wage, pro-environment, and being anti-imperialism, anti-war, anti-corporate and anti-drug war.
I guess all it takes to be "a RT nutjob and a Putin apologist" is to oppose WWIII and arming Nusra Front.
And yes, I've noticed how they've changed, but they think I'm the one who changed.
I guess their worldview revolves around the political environment rather than values.
BTW, it's ironically funny being called CT by TOP.
@gjohnsit
Yeah, an "RT-linking" Putin-lover. Funny, we had a radio station here that ran Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann and Ed Schultz. I used to listen all the time. That radio station went bust and now that Hartmann and Schultz are on RT I guess they're Kremlin operatives and no longer credible.
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.
I was curious
I was curious so I went and read it.
Yeah, guess you're just some RT, CT Pro-Putin troll.
You know, cause not wanting to go to war with a nuclear superpower is now a bad thing right?
It truly is frightening how these people view the significant risk of nuclear war so nonchalantly.
@gjohnsit Well, I admit,
Well, I admit, for my part, that a leader of a superpower who DOESN'T want to destroy the world in nuclear fire starts looking better to me than one who does.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
@Azazello
I'm really wondering about brainwashing. One long-running internet friend of mine in New Hampshire, a big Bernie supporter, suddenly became a Clinton supporter, despite previously knowing better. She said that someone had shown her a site which explained that Hillary hadn't done any of the things we'd previously discussed or that I'd just mentioned and while I'd pointed out that we'd have to agree to disagree on that one, we have not been the same since and have gone from often daily ongoing chats with multiple messages to practically no communication at all.
This is an intelligent, informed person I've known for years... and miss...
Edited to remove a redundant word.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
I'm sure the site your "friend" informed her now-corrected
opinion about Killary was the same one that proves the Russian hacking was real.
Please, Ellen, get me the name of that website so I can be re-educated before being sent to a FEMA camp.
At least
At least make sure it is in your browser history. That's what they truly check. Then you should be good to go.
@Strife Delivery
Lol, some of the things I've looked up because I had no freaking idea what they were should provide a very misleading dossier on me. They are absolute idiots with this spying nonsense, aren't they? (Yes, that was rhetorical...)
Edited out a spare 'of' which turned out not to be useful.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
@Alligator Ed
I don't know the name of the one she saw, but I expect there are a lot of them in the sort of internet areas requiring not only barn boots but hip-waders. She'd become very uncomfortable with, I suspect, not so much political discussion but the hopelessness of the political/environmental/economic/social/global/nuking situation and, I again suspect, grasped the 'hope' she was allowed to hope for - that The Mad Bomber would be survivable and possibly even bring some improvement to the 99%.
That required some considerable sidestepping of fact, possibly required for her mental health at the time, dunno.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
@gjohnsit
They tried to kill her daddy and now Clinton's going to bomb Russia (and China and the rest of her order list from The Payers That Be) into the Nuclear-glowing Stone Age to teach their citizens to have a better leadership? At least, as soon as Her delayed Royal Coronation finally goes through.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Glad to see somebody else sees it.
Honestly, I'm still kind of shocked that so many people are so outraged by what Flynn did. So many more than were outraged, for instance, by what Cheney and Scooter Libby did to Valerie Plame. Outing a CIA agent in the field is OK, but calling the Russian ambassador before being appointed to a Cabinet position is not? Or how about how Hillary just barely, by the skin of her teeth, skirted the boundary of actually selling US foreign policy for her family's personal gain? I say she skirted it only b/c what she sold was access to herself; we don't have proof she sold promises to provide the right foreign policy for the right price--at least I think we don't.
But seriously, these things we roll our eyes at. And Flynn?
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Yes, it's ludicrous.
Robert Parry has more.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/71201/trump-caves-on-fl...
dfarrah
The Dems are outraged because they're trying to
whitewash their own crimes.
@LoneStarMike
Dear LoneStarMike, I love you forEVAH! I can't believe you just made me laugh.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Deep state won. Consequences.
Here are the consequences as I see them. Foreign policy and war policy will be run independent by the CIA, Pentagon, and to some extent the State department neocon bureaucracies. This does not mean they are coordinated and of like mind--nope. It will be more a competition to ascendancy. As was the case with Obama at the end of Obama's term, Pentagon generals were ordering air strikes against Syrian army positions to destroy a cease fire organized by Kerry. We had the scene in Norther Syria where CIA and Pentagon backed groups started fighting with each other.
Trump will have no control over treaties and even military expeditions. The Seal fiasco in Yemen was blamed on him even though he was in no way doing any logistics.
Second, more long term, the IC will be able to openly insert itself into elections and policy making at every level. The elite mass media outlets have pretty much joined forces and will act as the propaganda arm of the IC. They will have the support of the democratic party base and establishment to do whatever they want. By 2020 they will be picking which candidates each party is allowed to run. Eventually, there will a STASI like fear throughout many government bureaucracies.
I would give up there ever being a "peace and reform candidate" for the next several generations.
It would not surprise me if domestic policies were also decided in the Deep State. For example, the NYTimes ran an article that claimed that resistance to TPP was Putin inspired. And Hillary claimed in a speech that Putin was behind fracking protests. Probably assert total control over voting machines.
@MrWebster I do not envision us
I do not envision us lasting for generations as the USA.
But my outlook is always extremely bleak.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
I think
your description could have been written at the beginning of WWII, but definitely it has been true since the end of that war, in my opinion. Accurate.
@MrWebster I don't think TPTB are
I don't think TPTB are organized and unified enough to be fully entrenched YET. The majority of citizens on the 'right' do not trust the government at all. Dems are starting to become former Dems in significant numbers.
TOP represents what the Dem elites want but not really what Dem peasants want. The Bernie movement showed that clearly. There are still a lot of lurkers and marginal participants at TOP who are not happy with what is being presented there. There is not much more time to stop the idiocy, but now most people on the left are starting to realize that the current government does not represent anything we want. Occupy did that. The biggest problem until recently was that any criticism of Obama's policies was promptly labeled 'racism' by the left.
The most important focus needs to be redirecting the attention from Trump/Clinton/Obama to the policies and issues that matter. Maybe we can Occupy on the internet and increasing portions of the marches and demonstrations? Occupy was painted by the media as a silly but essentially harmless neoHippie movement. TPTB were terrified of Occupy because it was allowing the real wishes of the people to be aired.
@MrWebster
Reposting this:
...the corporate state now entirely owns and controls elections as well as political parties and is determined to ensure that The Right Corporate Party Candidate, regardless of Dem/Repub label, is selected every time.
Regarding any hope of any prospect of electoral change still being possible under current circumstances, the corporate state coup over elections enacted under the excuse of 'Top Secret National Security' is specified within the litany of unconstitutional anti-democracy measures taken:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN-cYCjAAXI
This following was first posted on C-9 by gustogirl.
(Emphasis mine)
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/01/08/this-is-a-coup-the-homelan...
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Pelosi (and Cummings) are too busy being duped by fake
Twitter accounts--so, she ain't got nuttin.
Seriously, how that stammering airhead remains a major Leader in the Dem Party is a mystery to me, regardless of her legendary fundraising skills.
Nancy Pelosi and Elijah Cummings duped by fake Flynn Twitter account
See video.
[Edited - Removed 's]
Mollie
"If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went."--Will Rogers
The original meaning of “fiscal conservative” may be gone. In fact, Democrats have had a better claim on the label in recent years than
Republicans.
____David Leonhardt, Journalist, NYT, January 9, 2017
"Every time I lose a dog, he takes a piece of my heart. Every new dog gifts me with a piece of his. Someday, my heart will be total dog, and maybe then I will be just as generous, loving, and forgiving."
____Author Unknown
Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong.
So Trump is not quite sociopath enuff
for the Deep State. Chris Hedges predicted this a while ago, saying if the deep state could not get Trump under control, they would get him impeached. Ugh, Pres Pence, gawd help us.
Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.
The leftwing is going to demand what the rightwing wants.
Pathetic. the US is collectively a bunch of morons. How collectively stupid are we? I'm sure Trump doesn't love the poorly educated anymore.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Groucho
Anybody interested
in protesting this coup?
dfarrah
@dfarrah I guess, but my ardor is
I guess, but my ardor is a little dimmed by the fact that they didn't give two shits when I protested everything else.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
The only thing that surprises me is that they might
be making this stuff up to get rid of him. With the sociopathic disorders that Trump lives under, grabbing pussies, banning muslims, building walls, it's hard to believe he's not guilty of plenty of shit that has not been uncovered.
You could say the same things
about the spies trying to get rid of him.
Trump is the lesser of 2 evils.
Believe it or not I think Trump is the lesser of 2 evils. Be careful what you wish for. The Republicans never wanted Trump and now they're disingenuously slowly coming around to investigating him right after he installed a cabinet so right wing it's touching the left wing on a circular graph. Trump was used to install the cabinet and now it's time to get rid of him and the left wing is going to do it while the rightwing pretends to protect him. We are a bunch of suckers.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Groucho
@the_poorly_educated
Recced and mostly agree but
Actual left wing would be running, screaming, if they were anywhere close to touching. They have vampire cooties, you know.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
@Blueslide
They can't very well complain about sociopathy they've been normalizing for decades. This puts them in a bind, but to them, the easiest thing is always to lie and smear, and they can do that in their sleep, which they've evidently been doing, as they come up with same old, lame old stuff, again and again....
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Well Mr President?
Do you actually have a pair of gonads or are you just happy that "they" allow you to be "President"? Well?????
Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.
@The Wizard
Or does he, perhaps, want to keep those gonads? This is a group who'll evidently stop at nothing, and not until they've left nothing at all.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
It's sad that these cabals don't destroy each other.
If they did, the rest of us could live in peace.
Rec'd!!
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
Touche
But I think the best we can hope for is one at a time. I'm not real fussy about the method, as long as Trump is gone. He's about to launch his program to deport 11 million illegals...not a place I want to live in. We'll take on Pence when he gets there.
As for the MIC-secret state, that is a by product of capitalist fiefdom. They don't go away without a revolution.
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