You have to hand it to Donald Trump. Not only is he an expert at controlling the media he only pretends to despise as "fake," he also knows how to stir up corporate churnalism to a sustained furious boil, salted liberally with outrage from a can.
It took a Trump to turn George Bush's torture architect and Barack Obama's drone assassination guru into Resistance, Inc's latest action hero. John Brennan, former CIA director, has now usurped Omarosa Manigault's top spot in the daily news cycle. Not only does he merit the top left corner of the New York Times homepage, he's also glommed onto the upper right plot with the newspaper's lead editorial. I guess that makes him an extreme centrist.
Refusing to become another victim of the cartoon president, Brennan vows that Donald Trump will never silence him. This is pretty rich, given that his Times op-ed tacitly attempts to silence what he calls dupes of Russia. True spook that he is, though, he doesn't bother naming any names: (He no doubt has them all written down on a piece of paper which he keeps cosily in his pocket.)
Before, during and after its now infamous meddling in our last presidential election, Russia practiced the art of shaping political events abroad through its well-honed active measures program, which employs an array of technical capabilities, information operations and old-fashioned human intelligence spycraft. Electoral politics in Western democracies presents an especially inviting target, as a variety of politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright by Russian intelligence operatives. The very freedoms and liberties that liberal Western democracies cherish and that autocracies fear have been exploited by Russian intelligence services not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation, increasingly via the growing number of social media platforms....
They troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters. Too often, those puppets are found.
The implicit message is that independent media dissent against the status quo should be suspect, if not of Russian origin... unless proven otherwise. This is the very same rationale that Brennan used when devising his Kill List during the Obama years. All Muslim males in the prime of life are deemed to be militants until (never) proven otherwise.
And of course he doesn't mention the CIA's own role in fomenting dissent and crafting intelligence in other countries besides our own.
It is really quite stunning that the Times gifted Brennan with its prime real estate on the very same day it moralistically published a free press manifesto from the nation's newspapers. Even more stunning, and disheartening, is that the vast majority of reader comments on Brennan's op-ed are overflowing with praise and gushing, fawning thanks for his courage, patriotism and service.
My own deeply buried comment:
How does Trump deflect the public's attention from the Omarosa book, with its juicy revelations of racism and corruption?
He trolls John Brennan and other exiled military/surveillance actors, revoking some arcane thing called "security clearance."
Brennan, who couldn't even be confirmed by the Democratic majority during Obama's first term because of his alleged role in Bush's torture program, has thusly become the #1 hero of Resistance, Inc. The comments section is awash with gratitude for his patriotism and service to his country.
The condemnation that the CIA under his watch garnered for its admitted burglary of Senate computers during the torture investigation is but a hazy memory now, thanks to the common enemy named Trump.
The American values which John Brennan holds so dear include the program he dubbed the Disposition Matrix, aka the rationale for droning suspected terrorists - defined by him at the time as any Middle Eastern male in the prime of his life. We still don't have a full accounting of those killed and maimed by Predator drones, so I look forward to an op-ed from Mr, Brennan giving us the full information we deserve.
As a latter-day free press champion in the Age of Trump, Mr. Brennan has certainly come a long way from his advocating censorship of the Egyptian media during the Arab Spring..
Meanwhile, where is the outrage over Trump's complicity in the Saudi genocide in Yemen, which includes the recent bombing of a school bus full of children?
Senate Minority Weasel Leader Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) warned Donald Trump more than a year ago that the US intelligence agencies have "six ways from Sunday" of eliciting his respect and making him believe that Russia interfered in the elections. Schumer told Rachel Maddow that even a savvy businessman like Trump was being "really dumb" for comparing the meddling claims to the false intelligence on WMDs leading to the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.
And of course he isn't behaving himself in office and believing what he has to believe. The last straw for the permanent political class came when Trump fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe two days before what was to have been a very lucrative, perk-heavy retirement at the ripe old age of 50. Former CIA Director and current NBC performer John Brennan blasted out this mighty Tweet to Trump on Saturday:
You know we've reached the point of no return when the architect of Barack Obama's drone assassination program, the burglar who ordered the hacking of Senate computers containing still-repressed torture documents, and the once-and-future champion of dirty tricks and torture, is lecturing Donald Trump on morals and corruption. That's the beautiful thing about Trump. He makes all kinds of scoundrels not only look like choirboys, he has actually promoted them to Cotton Mather status. And the corporate media are falling all over themselves to furnish this new breed of militaristic virtue signaler with their own bully pulpits.
Trump has effectively canonized the FBI, so maligned throughout its history for its own dirty tricks, ranging from the Palmer Raids, to spying on Martin Luther King Jr and later urging him to commit suicide, to infiltrating the anti-war and civil rights movements, to entrapping Muslims in manufactured terror plots, to breaking up the Occupy movement, to spying on American citizens on the Internet. And this is not even including its investigative failures, such as not heeding Russian warnings of the Boston Marathon bombing and most recently, its inaction on several tips related to the Florida school shooter. The FBI, the NSA and the CIA are now posing as moral bastions of democratic liberalism, which in turn has been newly and perversely defined as McCarthyism and Russophobia. And many Democrats are eagerly embracing thia authoritarian dogma, in a reactionary frenzy once thought to have been the sole purview of rightwing fanatics and Dick Nixon's Moral Majority.
Fired FBI Director James Comey even posed as liberal Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on Twitter for awhile before mistakenly outing himself and then going all preachy-moralizy under his own name. Virginia Heffernan wrote a scathing take-down of this sub-manic, golly gee willikers Tweeter for Politico last year. His folksy book is already a bestseller on Amazon and it hasn't even been released yet.
Trump has single-handedly made war criminal John Brennan into something of a Democratic Party folk hero - not to mention indirectly enriching him via his new high profile gig as NBC's #Resistance fighter. Ironically, Brennan's platform is the very same behemoth media corporation which made Trump himself into the postmodern folk hero of cruel capitalism, rich and famous beyond his own wildest dreams.
in what now seems like the distant past, liberals were actually so outraged about Brennan's defense of torture - he'd Trumpily and falsely claimed that it saved American lives - that he was forced to withdraw his name when Barack Obama first nominated him to head the CIA in 2008.
But by 2013, as Glenn Greenwald observed in a New York Times op-ed, Obama was so popular that his fans willingly followed his lead in embracing Brennan as the country's top spook. Nobody cared that Obama was killing hundreds or thousands of Muslims from a Kill List devised by Brennan. Regarding the former president's refusal to prosecute Bush-era CIA torturers, Greenwald wrote, "Obama's Orwellian decree that we must 'look forward, not backward' has
convinced huge numbers of citizens to sweep this all under the rug and
pretend it never happened. That is what explains how Brennan went from
radioactive and unconfirmable in 2008 to uncontroversial in 2013."
Long before Trump won his own nomination and the election, the abnormal was becoming the new normal. Brennan was actually being lauded by officials and pundits and politicians for pivoting from the gruesome torture and imprisonment of Muslims to humanely droning them to death. Even U.N. drone watchdog Ben Emmerson praised the Brennan appointment, saying that he would be a "moderating influence" on the CIA's expansion of drone assassinations in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
"By putting Brennan in direct control of the CIA's policy [of
targeted killings], the president has placed this mediating legal
presence in direct control of the positions that the CIA will adopt and
advance, so as to bring the CIA much more closely under direct
presidential and democratic control," Emmerson told Wired.
"It's right to view this as a recognition of the repository of trust
that Obama places in Brennan to put him in control of the organization
that poses the greatest threat to international legal consensus and
recognition of the lawfulness of the drone programme."
Orwellianism knows no bounds. Kinder, gentler - and most of all lighting-quick - murder by Predator missile is fine, as long as it is committed in the name of democracy. Who cares if a rogue organization poses a great international threat, as long as it is controlled by a law-loving, moralistic man like John Brennan?
Lambert Strether of Naked Capitalism has done yeoman's work constructing a valuable spreadsheet which documents the creepy prevalence in the 2018 mid-terms of the MILO (military, intelligence, law enforcement) candidates actively recruited to run by the Democratic Party establishment.
So what's to stop the party from recruiting Brennan or Comey to run at the top of the ticket in 2020?
Stranger things have happened, including the Democrats seriously courting Oprah to run for president. America truly is the land of opportunity for the permanent ruling establishment. If John Brennan can go from despised to tolerated to admired in the space of a few short years, anything is possible. They aim high while Trump goes low. He is the gift that keeps on giving to the oligarchs who would, as Obama once said, really just like to play nicely together within the 40-yard line.
Everything was so mellow for the ruling class back in 2013, as Brennan was preparing to finally take the helm of the CIA. From a video interview:
BARACK OBAMA: In my conversations with Republicans, I actually think
the divide is not that wide. So what we just have to do is find a
pathway where Republicans in the House in particular feel comfortable
enough about process that they can go ahead and meet us.
This, by the way, Gerry (sp), I think is a good example of something
that’s been striking me about our politics for a while. When you go to
other countries, the political divisions are so much more stark and
wider; here in America, the difference between Democrats and Republicans
— we’re fighting inside the 40-yard line, maybe –
SEIB: You fooled most people on that in the last few months, I’d say.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: No, but — but — (laughter) — well, no, no, the — I — I
would — I would distinguish between the — the rhetoric and the tactics,
versus the ideological differences.
I mean, in most countries, you’ve got — you know, people call me a
socialist sometimes, but, no, you’ve got to me real socialists. You’ll
have a sense of what a — what a socialist is. (Laughter.) You know, the —
I mean, I’m talking about lowering the corporate tax rate. My health
care reform is based on the private marketplace. Stock market’s looking
pretty good last time I checked, and, you know, it is true that I’m
concerned about growing inequality in our system, but nobody questions
the efficacy of market economies in terms of producing wealth and
innovation and keeping us competitive.
Still wondering why nearly 10 percent of Obama voters later abandoned the Democrats and voted for Trump? The Orange Menace is not the disease; he is merely the latest, most glaring symptom of the disease.
So when Brennan tweetily bellows to Trump that "America will triumph over you," he simply means that the military/surveillance/oligarchic coup, disguised as liberal democracy, is well-nigh complete.
