Friday, April 19, 2019

The Eternal Fairy Tale of Russiagate



Since many of humanity's most enduring myths and legends are thought to have their origin in humanity itself, we can't expect the Russiagate saga to die any time soon either. It makes lots of money, spinning straw into gold for franchise owners and investors by the hour, by the month, by the Thousand and One Nights and A Night.

 It also seems to fill a great psychological need for the spinners, who still quaintly describe themselves as journalists. Were it not for the fact that their military/surveillance state-serving narrative edges us ever closer to confrontation with a nuclear-powered Russia, among other less-weaponized sovereign nations, I'd just say let them have their delusional fun while they can.

I haven't yet read the whole Mueller report, not even close - but I have glanced at the various interpretations of it. Whenever I see a headline with the words "Ten Things You Need To Know About the Mueller Report Right Now!" or " Fifty-Two Takeaways From the Mueller Report," my psyche goes into self-protective shutdown mode. I search in vain for other interesting or threatening things to learn about, such as Trump's barely-noticed veto of the Congressional resolution to stop the US-enabled Saudi genocide of Yemenis.

So it's mainly been through some magical process of osmosis that  I've absorbed the gist of Mueller's pricey report. To wit:

Richard Nixon has been vindicated!  Anything is legal if you're president. To paraphrase Donald Trump himself, when you're a president, you can do anything. You can grab the country by the short hairs and it's gonna let you. Mueller, who has sadly devolved from Father of Our Country into Absentee Deadbeat Dad, apparently as much as admitted that Trump cannot be prosecuted for obstruction of justice because presidents can obstruct justice all they want. And if they can act stupid or paranoid or emotional or spoiled rotten while they're at it, it's all the better for them. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. (I knew there was a reason that the report was released on Maundy Thursday, a/k/a the Last Supper eve of the crucifixion.)

Plus, as Zephyr Teachout lays out in Corruption in America, when you're an oligarch, you can do anything, such as buying Congress and the Supreme Court and changing the corruption laws in America. Under our current system of legalized crime, the only thing that could get Trump prosecuted is his being caught personally accepting a bag full of cash in exchange for a veto or an executive order.

This legal restriction of corruption to quid pro quo, Teachout writes, was codified by the Citizens United and McCutcheon vs FEC Supreme Court decisions, which dictated that political donations are protected political speech, and not bribery. The redefinition narrows the scope of political corruption only to explicit deals. 
"It reclassifies influence-seeking as normal and desirable political behavior. It purportedly avoids difficult problems of definition. It attempts to wring the moral content out of the term corruption and tell a story about corruption that is consistent with a world populated by self-interested actors."
Since liberal pundits and politicians cannot reverse this process, absent a social democratic revolution (the prospect of which they loathe even more than they pretend to loathe Trump) they must revert back to fairy tale mode. The money and the arms must continue to flow to the military-industrial complex and its Wall Street/Silicon Valley investors. An Enemy Outside which "sows dissent" must always be conjured up to keep the domestic populism down. Therefore, they will keep spinning their propaganda straw into gold while there is still a viable world and a well-appointed newsroom or broadcast studio to spin it in.

So what else, besides six and seven figure salaries, explains the lasting appeal of the Russiagate folklore franchise to careerist news personalities and stenographers?

  The late fairy tale interpreter and Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz gives us a clue about what could be going on in their heads and those of their fans:
Actually. you can interpret a myth or fairy tale with any of the four functions of consciousness. The thinking type will point out the structure and the way in which all the motifs connect. The feeling type will put them in a value order (a hierarchy of values) which is also completely rational. With the feeling function, a good and complete fairy tale interpretation can be made. The sensation type will just look at the symbols and amplify them. The intuitive will see the whole package in its oneness, so to speak; he will be most gifted in showing that the whole fairy tale is not a discursive story but is really one message, split up into many facets. The more you have differentiated your functions, the better you can interpret because you must circumambulate a story as much as possible with all four functions. The more you have developed and obtained the use of more conscious functions, the better and more colorful your interpretation will be.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, the best-known spinner of the nightly Russiagate fables, is not about to give up her Scheherazade role. She's made a fortune and a career out of connecting the dots on charts to explain how various low-level or innocuous meetings of Trump operatives with Russian operatives have amounted to one great overriding plot, with the grand overarching motif that Donald Trump is a Putin agent. The more details and dot-connections she can offer, the more believable that she makes her yarn become.



 Her "intellectual" approach feeds into the competing feelings of inchoate Trump-hatred and powerlessness within the psyches of her audience of millions. We know, we just intuitively know, that the foreign agency of Trump must be true, especially when the message is constantly being split up and spun off among so many different expert storytellers in our six major media conglomerates. The more that the story can go round and round (circumambulation) the truer it becomes, and the more colorful the embellishments that can be added all the time. It gets so complicated that the plot holes and even the original plot gets fuzzy with time. It is a continuous closed feedback loop. And like climate change itself, it is proving very hard to stop, now that it has achieved a life of its own.

Robert S Mueller III, loyal establishment player that he is, is playing right along with the Russiagate franchise.The contrived existential threat of Putin-meddling is in the intro to his report. He was hired for a specific reason. Trump, painted by the media and now by Mueller as a con man and a stooge, might have dodged a personal bullet, but the country has not. The country, with at least 800 military outposts around the world still must be taught to fear a country with a grand total of nine. 

Be afraid, be thrilled, be very afraid, be very thrilled. Because those Russian internet trolls who planted a couple hundred Facebook ads and walked around the United States wearing Trump masks to fake protest rallies are not only still at large, they are lurking under the Freedom Bridge to US Election Nirvana. They are plotting, right now and as Rachel Maddow speaks, to pull you down and drown you on your way to vote in 2020.



11 comments:


  1. Robert Mueller III is a Solomon who certainly knows how to slice a baby in half, or alternatively 1/4 - 3/4, or 1/10 - 9/10, or whatever fraction suits your views about the evidence supporting Russiagate, obstruction of justice and all that. In any event, Mueller has not delivered the baby intact into the arms of either the pro- Russiagate mama or the anti-Russiagate mama. Feel free, everyone, to stack the play blocks of evidence––or lack of them––as you please. Or, to use Karen's image, spin gold or spin silver.

    There are paragraphs of legal subtleties (and lots more stuff between the lines of Mueller's report) to satisfy ALL views. After $40 million spent for a crack team of Suits, Mueller has put no big question or charge to rest. A more commonplace way to describe it is that Mueller has merely kicked the can down the road.

    The angry dogs on both sides of Russiagate will continue the fight over the who-what-when-where-and-why-and-to-what-degree indefinitely. Look at the headlines of the many Mueller stories in the NY Times today. Apparently the editors found in Mueller's report enough fuel to carry on about the Trump-Putin connection until 2020 and beyond. Over at the so-called leftish [cough] TruthDig, more of the same: Bill Blum finds ample support to continue his SOSO pump up of Russiagate.

    For a completely opposite interpretation of Mueller, read Glenn Greenwald over at The Intercept. GG argues Mueller's report is a slam dunk, game-over, no-question-about-it dismissal of the DNC-inspired charges against Trump and the Russia connection. But, if you go to the comments that follow GG's piece, you can watch the pre-Mueller debate unfold anew. Not all who contradict Greenwald are part of TI's resident troll community.

    What Mueller has done very successfully is to leave it up to big, medium and little media, the Congress (a house already divided) and Mueller's bosses in the Justice Department to resolve the same old questions down the road.

    As has been pointed out here and elsewhere many times, Russiagate, no matter which side you end up on [ y a w n ], will distract us indefinitely from the real issues needing quick attention, like war, poverty, infrastructure and the environment.

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  2. Put cheese on a nothingburger and you'll have a slice of cheese but you still need that social revolution to move forward.

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  3. Having taken the low road to Donald, the establishment finds themselves spinning their wheels in the muck, with no intention of stopping, or any way to move on. While that might seem a disaster, it does make it clear they've become a scab that will eventually be shed, if not peeled off.
    Having been gaming out the global reset for some decades, here is a short essay I wrote, trying to get to the core of the problem;
    https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/the-worm-in-the-apple-of-modern-capitalism-a46081000d5a?source=friends_link&sk=3715800efb829b19940b70366a33570f

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  4. Mueller had a problem in that the Russian actors were cutouts, not directly linked to the Russian government.

    Rachel Maddow might be more of a Cassandra than a Scheherazade....

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  5. voice-in-wildernessApril 20, 2019 at 11:30 AM

    A quibble with what Karen says -- I don't think there is anything that would get Trump prosecuted, that he had it right when he said he could shoot someone on 5th avenue.

    However, I would like to see what his true financial status is and to what extent he is bankrolled by the Russians, even as he is likely to stay in office for six more years (unless he blows a major blood vessel during one of his tantrums). The image of being a rich guy is one of the very few things Trump cares about. And if he is as dependent on Russian funding as I think he is, then it would explain why he acts as an unwitting agent ("useful idiot" in the spy trade).

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  6. Woman of Many NamesApril 20, 2019 at 12:43 PM

    Now that the only real 'fact' (unproven allegations) coming out of Mueller's report is that Russia interfered in our election, something weird is happening.

    Maggie Haberman, Paul Begala, Ronan Farrow and other Democrats are lining up to apologize (via Twitter anyway) to Mitt Romney for supposedly getting it right in 2012 when he named Russia as our greatest threat and Obama made fun of him. The apologists are even using the same word 'prescient' for Mitt, supporting the belief that Russia has been up to no good all along, and implying that Obama was wrong, either by being too dumb or too weak on national security. Never again!

    Admittedly, Obama did little about the 'attack on our democracy!'. Maybe it's because he knew all along there was no there there other than 13 trolls and a bottle of vodka. Clinton's dirty dossier on Trump was the whole enchilada, tasty looking but contaminated during the Clinton manufacturing process.

    So what's behind these apologies to Mitt Romney other than covering their sorry asses after the Trump-Putin balloon burst? Whatever else is accomplished, they're helping make a case for someone stronger (than Obama) on national security. Do they have a particular candidate in mind?

    I have my own suspicions, of course. They're not just making hay out of Russiaphobia, they're cooking up a celebratory Hillary Comeback Cake using Mueller breadcrumbs.

    (Even) Stronger (Back) Together! Eat at your own risk.

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  7. I'm plodding thru the Mueller opus in very brief stages, because a person can stand only so much of it at a time. Much of it is a rehash of stories from the Times and the Post, leading me to believe that Mueller was overpaid for what amounts to a cut and paste job. It is widely based upon contemporaneous note-taking by various minions, jottings which we're expected to believe are true on their face.

    William Barr, who avoided jail only by the grace of a Poppy Bush pardon way back when, seems to be paying it forward for his new boss same as the old boss. While I usually avoid criticizing the personal appearance of people, this guy's evil just seems to ooze forth from his jowly corpulent corpus. He looks like a character out of Dickens.

    My one satisfaction is that Nancy Pelosi increasingly looks like the corrupt hypocrite she is by refusing to support impeachment (which would hopefully branch out from Russiagate and on to Trump's true crimes). While I hate to draw attention to her personal appearance, it's hard to tell whether the perpetually shocked look on her face is the result of Botox and cosmetic surgery, or simply sincere shock that her corruption is finally catching up to her and that AOC and her ilk will outlive her.

    Though I no longer have cable TV, I did put aside Mueller just long enough yesterday afternoon to watch the latest YouTube streams from CNN and MSNBC. I hadn't watched them in months, but even I was shocked at how the coverage of Russiagate has gotten so off-the-wall hysterical. Interesting that CNN's two talking heads in one segment were the daughter (Pamela Brown) of the former KY governor and Miss America, and the other the daughter of Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. Just an orgy of meritocratic ruling class paranoia.

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  8. Mueller is a head start towards impeachment? Convince me with a table showing the
    pluses AND the minuses of such a venture.

    Oh-oh, Hillary in 2020? The DNC wants another chance to make Trump great again? I too worry about the second (or is it the third) coming of Hillary. But even if she does not emerge as a ghost from DNCs Past, the new Democratic hopefuls are also worrisome.

    The least fearsome is Bernie, who in a worst case scenario might turn out to be another [adjective-deleted] Obama. Bernie last time was said to be a pretty good bet to beat Trump, but there will be more uphill against Trump the incumbent. In a best case scenario, Bernie as prez will stay true. He will keep the crowds hot so they lean hard on Congress. Otherwise, he'll never get a bill to shrink the disparities. So much for domestic policy.

    I've seen no evidence Bernie has the desire or the courage to clip the wings of Empire. Is he bothered by Uncle Sam's wars, bases and bully habits? Then the MIC, CIA and Security State: too many fronts to take on at once. Got kevlar? Wall Street is the only target in his sights.

    With such a handicapped guy as prez, which Democrat might serve Bernie and the rest of us well as Vice-President? Well, someone younger, preferably not white or male, at least one degree left of center, a stem-winder able to pull votes, raise money, build the party and continue Bernie's promised countermarch against neoliberalism. Right, and she should also be willing to don kevlar every day,.

    We have nothing to fear but the Duopoly itself. Go ahead, google the Greens. They sleep! Nothing much on their website about 2020. Over there, everyday is a bird-twittering Earth Day. Looks like Jill Stein, MD, is no longer moonlighting as their presidential candidate. Will Green even rise to the level of a protest vote? Who needs them if the Dems have a plank called called the Green New Deal?

    For this bro, it's gotta be a no-sheepdog Bernie with a V-P insurance policy. Otherwise, I stay home as will, hopefully, Hillary Clinton.

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  9. Woman of Many NamesApril 20, 2019 at 7:30 PM

    I like Tulsi for VP to President Sanders.

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  10. Jay,

    You get Wall St and you stick a pin in the military. Government borrowing is the foundation for the financialization of the economy; storing/burning through alot of that surplus money. The military just gets to play with it. Eventually we will find blowing up other countries isn't a profitable investment, but until then, Wall St and the military are joined at the hip.

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  11. In case this slipped by any of you Sardonicky regulars, I think this is a huge story that seems to have gotten zero play in the media-verse, be it the usual suspects NYT/Guardian/cable tv "news" and/or the abomination that is (anti)social media....apparently Mango put in a call weekend before last to a certain sunday school teacher down in south GA and was summarily issued a rather blunt assessment as to why China is eating our lunch economically.


    https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/19/jimmy-carter-us-most-warlike-nation-in-history-of-the-world/

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