Headfake Follies

I'm trying to get the gory details about the latest palace intrigue straight.

My take: Our A.D.D. president breaches national security by dishing to the Russians about some top secret classified intel involving yet another laptop terror plot. And then the media-political complex clutches their pearls and shrieks that Trump has endangered an "ally" even as they themselves dish to the whole entire world about the alleged plot which Trump dished to the Russians. It is not a breach of national security or a betrayal of secrets, apparently, when the right politicians and the approved media outlets dish out state secrets for all the right and high-falutin' reasons.

It's not as though, before Trump's faux pas, we proles couldn't connect the dots and figure out the reason that the airlines were suddenly banning laptops from international flights. It's not as though the media didn't report, all day and every day, the geographical locales where ISIS has set up shop. (Trump apparently let slip the geographical source of the "intel," thus endangering our foreign spy friends.)

The sources for the latest White House leak to the Washington Post, the New York Times and other major media outlets are an anonymous current official and an anonymous past official. We can thus surmise that the current official dished state secrets to the past official, in order that the media could confirm the story and responsibly dish it out to the rest of us in one unified, neat, prepackaged, journalistically "ethical" narrative.

To make the intrigue even more fun, Trump's top security advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, immediately denied that Donald had dished. And then this morning Donald promptly threw McMaster under the bus by tweeting, that yes, he had indeed dished to the Russians. Because as president, he can say whatever he wants to whomever he wants. He broke no laws.

That might be true, say the Miss Mannerses of the Deep State. But what an egregious breach of spying etiquette. We the consuming audience are given   only two choices: Trump is either a clueless oaf, or he is a deliberate traitor. From the New York Times:

 It was not clear whether Mr. Trump wittingly disclosed such highly classified information. He — and possibly other Americans in the room — may have not been aware of the sensitivity of what he was sharing. It was only after the meeting, when notes on the discussion were circulated among National Security Council officials, that it was flagged as too sensitive to be shared, even among many American officials, the former official said.

Hmm. Sounds a lot like those Hillary Clinton emails, which were only deemed "classified" after she unwittingly pushed Send. Sounds a lot like Obama's head of Intel, James Clapper, when he falsely told Congress that the NSA does not "wittingly" collect the private communications of every man, woman and child in America. Clapper is now esconced in his new gig as a latter-day John Dean, telling the Sunday shows that there is not only a cancer on the presidency, but that Trump himself is the core disease.

It should be obvious by now that Trump enjoys chaos for the sake of chaos. He keeps even his most powerful advisers and his most intimate confidantes on their toes at all times. If nobody tries to sabotage him on any given day, then he's always happy to do the honors himself. It's the ratings, baby!

There is no such thing as bad publicity when it concerns Donald J. Trump. And the more he appears to be persecuted by the Washington establishment, the more his fans come to his defense.

And while the media-political complex tries to foment ever more Russophobic outrage among the citizenry, Congressional impeachment still appears to be off the table. In a CNN Town Hall appearance on Monday night, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi admitted that there is no proof - yet - that Trump has committed an offense egregious enough or sufficiently outside the norms of the usual political graft and corruption to justify any official attempt to remove him from office:

 If you're talking about impeachment, you're talking about, what are the facts? Not, I don't like him and I don't like his hair and -- you know, I think, what are the facts? I don't like what he said about this. What are the facts that you would make a case on? What are the rules that he may have violated? If you don't have that case, you're just participating in more hearsay.

If Pelosi refused to consider impeaching George W. Bush for the illegal invasion of Iraq, for torture, and for other war crimes when her party still enjoyed a majority, the chances of them going after Trump are slim to none. As I mentioned the other day, he is a very useful idiot. Every time he says or does something outrageous, the Democrats and their veal pen offshoots go into fund-raising overdrive. Where, for example, would Hillary Clinton's new dark money anti-Trump SuperPac be without Donald to kick around all day and every day? And as far as the Republicans are concerned, the more that Trump can distract the country, the more secretly they can go about ripping up the social contract behind their closed doors.

If the media spent even a tenth of their energy on exploring the root cause of terrorism - unfettered American militarism for the benefit of a reckless oligarchy - they probably wouldn't be wasting so much of their time and ours trying to convince us that Donald Trump is some sort of anomaly. 

All they know how to do is gaslight us to death. If we are made to fear Trump all day and every day, perhaps we'll forget all about the rest of our workaday problems.

Not likely. And their desperation is definitely showing, all day and every day.