http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-16/leading-progressives-say-even-a...

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. And I tell you there’s a marching band and Chowder Society out there. There’s gold in them there hills. There are people trying to separate the U.S. and Russia so that this military industrial intel axis can cash in.

and

It's not just this administration. I want to remind the views and all those who are on the panel that in the closing months of the Obama administration, they put together a deal with Russia to create peace in Syria. A few days later, a military strike in Syria killed a hundred Syrian soldiers and that ended the agreement. What happened is inside the intelligence and the Pentagon there was a deliberate effort to sabotage an agreement the White House made.

And Glenn Greenwald, quoted in the same article, calls it "a prescription for destroying democracy in the name of saving it."

[T]here are lots of really great ways to resist them, such as getting courts to restrain them, citizen activism and, most important of all, having the Democratic Party engage in self-critique to ask itself how it can be a more effective political force in the United States after it has collapsed on all levels. That isn’t what this resistance is now doing. What they’re doing instead is trying to take maybe the only faction worse than Donald Trump, which is the deep state, the CIA, with its histories of atrocities, and say they ought to almost engage in like a soft coup, where they take the elected president and prevent him from enacting his policies. And I think it is extremely dangerous to do that. Even if you’re somebody who believes that both the CIA and the deep state, on the one hand, and the Trump presidency, on the other, are extremely dangerous, as I do, there’s a huge difference between the two, which is that Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving. But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They’re barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity. That is a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it. And yet that’s what so many, not just neocons, but the neocons’ allies in the Democratic Party, are now urging and cheering. And it’s incredibly warped and dangerous to watch them do that.

If this is allowed to continue, we won't have even our current shadow of a democracy left, or any hope of ever regaining it. That is, we few survivors who are left after most of us become the "acceptable losses" in their nuclear war.

of this battle, but what's at the core of it is a power struggle to determine who will dominate -- the POTUS or the combined intelligence agencies and their MIC allies. Trump is the first President to have seriously challenged the IC alliance since John Kennedy. I doubt he'll have any more success than JFK did, but I guess you never know until you try. I hope to be proven wrong, but I'm afraid that Trump, like Kennedy, has badly underestimated the ruthlessness and capability of his adversaries.