The Big Business of Fear

 The Paper of Record is running yet another big front page advertisement for the highly competitive private cybersecurity industry, whose stock prices seem to rise every time the Media Industrial Complex announces a new foreign threat.

The New York Times's latest scare piece, written by a crack team of two lead reporters and three contributing staffers, has the FBI and National Intelligence directors using information provided to them by several of these private security firms. The businesses sounded the alarm that Iran and Russia both are "hacking" publicly available voter registration rolls. Iran then supposedly sent spoof emails from "The Proud Boys" to some voters in Alaska and Florida. Vote for Trump, or else! was the threatening message allegedly traced by one Silicon Valley firm to a server in Estonia.

Russia is not doing anything specific or new at this precise moment, but they have "inspired" Iran, the article claims. So why not give them a gratuitous mention?

I don't know why they even bother. I've been getting extortion emails direct from the Trump campaign all week long, warning me that since I have not donated any money to re-elect The Donald, they have officially placed my name on the dreaded Joe Biden Supporter list for all to see. The only way I can get taken off the blacklist is to fork over some cash to Trump.

I also get a lot of emails from the Democrats slugged "Final Notice" in hopes of scaring me into opening them because they so resemble those terrifying cut-off messages from the power or cable company.

But I digress. My main beef with the latest Times fear-mongering is that they buried the unintentionally hilarious lead deep within their thinly-disguised advertisement for Security, Inc. They quote Senator Angus King (I-Maine) as saying:

“This may be the beginning of a more concerted operation. They don’t have to do anything; they just have to make people think they are doing something.” (my bold.)

"They" were intended to mean our alleged foreign enemies.  But it could also be easily interpreted to mean that the public-private partnership which is making tons of money manufacturing and marketing all this fear on a regular basis are the ones who have to make people believe in their endless streams of bullshit.

You probably notice that the Times always tries to feebly cover its ass when writing the propaganda on behalf of the Security-Industrial complex. They put the Big Lie in the headline and in the first few paragraphs, knowing that many if not most readers will not proceed beyond this point.  Then they get on with the disclaimers and the waffling. Such as:

There was no indication that any election result tallies were changed or that information about who is registered to vote was altered, either of which could affect the outcome of voting that has already begun across the United States. The officials also did not claim that either nation hacked into voter registration systems — leaving open the possibility that the data was available to anyone who knew where to look.

The voting rolls throughout the country are with very few exceptions widely available, either online or in physical public office space. How else could our home-grown political candidates know where to send their own fear-mongering flyers about their opponents into people's homes? 

The main qualms that the Times seems to have in spreading the latest fearsome propaganda is that it threatens to directly benefit Trump's own propaganda: that the election results will be rigged against him. That puts Rachel Maddow, the prima donna of the pro-Democratic #Russiagate propaganda franchise into a real quandary. Even Democrats and their wealthy donors invest heavily into these private security firms and profit mightily from them.

So she had Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on her show Wednesday, right after the "authorities" made the latest Big Reveal to assure the liberal audience that despite all Trump's lies about election rigging, his administration is telling the absolute truth when it blames Iran and Russia!

“From the briefing, I had the strong impression it was much rather to undermine confidence in elections and not aimed at any particular figure,” he smarmily told Maddow, according to the Times article.

Although the FBI and Trump's national intelligence director made the announcement of the "threat," the Times then reassures its readers in a rather oblique way that since it was a handful of private companies which provided the information to the government agencies tasked to protect the citizenry, it's all legit. 

Proofpoint is casually mentioned, almost in passing, as the source of information that the fake "Proud Boys" emails emanated from a server in Estonia (which, unlike the secret public voter rolls, apparently cannot be used as a proxy by any average Joe or Jane who goes to an Internet proxy site for purposes of hiding one's identity.) 

Visit Proofpoint's glitzy website and the first thing you learn is that October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month! It includes a quarterly Threat Report to incentivize customers and investors, along with publishing its own Threat Blog. Gary Steele, the company's founder and CEO, lists his main credential as being a "thought leader" who is regularly featured by the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Forbes, Fortune, Fox Business and other media outlets with a concentration on business rather than on national security and foreign affairs. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science.

The New York Times goes on to uncritically quote John Hultquist of the firm FireEye in an attempt to further bolster the credibility of Russian and Iranian election interference. "Their focus is to prey on existing fears that election infrastructure will be subverted and hacked, as well as fears of voter intimidation," he said, before going on to promote his company's big free ad in the Times on Twitter.

FireEye, for its own  part, does not at all prey upon existing fears through its own employee recruitment pitch:

 At FireEye, we fight evil  by bringing together frontline human expertise, nation state-grade threat intelligence and innovative technology – creating a unique innovation cycle that allows us to provide the most effective cyber defense platform for our customers.

As an innovator, thought leader and trusted advisor, you'll relentlessly protect our customers from the impact and consequences of cyber attacks.

Are you ready to join us on our mission?

According to his bio, before spinning through the revolving doors to a career in the rapidly expanding private security industry, Hultquist was a "senior US intelligence analyst" who was "involved in counterinsurgency operations in the US Army."

Don't just take FireEye's word for it, though. In an effort to triple-verify its propaganda message, the Times next turns to the competing Trustwave, which went the extra mile and discovered that those free, publicly available voter rolls were also being offered for sale on the Dark Web! Whether any rube of an adversary was dumb enough to buy information that is there for the legal taking, the Times does not say. But the company's global vice president, Mark Whitehead, told the paper that he had immediately and patriotically notified the FBI of the attempted scam.

“The consumer and voter databases that we discovered hackers are currently selling significantly lowers the barrier to entry for nation-states to execute sophisticated phishing, disinformation and intimidation campaigns,” Mr. Whitehead said.

Trustwave's own team of "ethical hackers" calls itself SpiderLabs. 

As a master's degree graduate of the NSA/Homeland Security "Cyber Defense University," you'd think that Whitehead could easily have accessed the government's very own existing database of every email on the planet, stored in a massive Utah desert warehouse, to get the same information for absolutely free, without the need for spidery ethical hackers spinning their sticky public relations webs for fun and big, big returns to investors.

What is with the fancy two-word names of all these private security companies, anyway? Double the titles, double the fear, double the profits. 

Salongate Threatens To Overshadow Russiagate

You know what really blew my mind about Nancy Pelosi's illegal blowout? The surveillance video proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that she does indeed have her own hair. And here I'd been laboring under the petty impression that she wears a wig. She is, after all, 80 years old, and only half of all women still have a full head of hair by the time they reach 65. 

So instead of using her outdoor San Francisco press conference to bitch about being "set up" to break the law, she should have bragged about having the tresses of a woman half her age. She could also have mentioned that the combover of her frenemy and legislative dance partner Donald Trump hides such an unsightly bald spot that it's exposed with every gust of wind. She certainly took full advantage of the strong Pacific breezes blowing out her own blowout for that natural tousled look. The sad upshot was, she didn't look half as bad as she sounded. Blaming others for one's own bad behavior is something that Trump does. Maybe it was Salongate coming the same day that the Kennedy she'd endorsed for the Senate was so badly beaten. 

 She should probably just stick to the expert finger-wagging, laconic speech-ripping and grimacing Kente cloth-kneeling that she is so good at from now on, or at least until that magical day when she is beaten in a primary, and/or quits Congress forever to spend more time with her designer ice cream stash.

Trump, of course, will never keep his mouth shut or quit the presidency, even if Joe Biden squeaks through. I don't think, as others do, that he'll refuse to physically leave the premises on Inauguration Day. I think they'll still be counting the votes and litigating the results well into 2021. The interregnum between Trump I and Trump II, or worse, between Trump I and Biden I, will be toxic no matter how you slice it.

But back to the important stuff. Pelosi also could have claimed that the grainy footage of the black-robed woman with the slicked-back  hair was either Judge Judy Sheindlin or Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, both of whom have forsworn the high maintenance carefree blowout for the more severe kind of 'do that doesn't require constant attention from the concierge glam squad that's usually at Pelosi's beck and call whenever one of her servants picks up the phone to order a session.

The Speaker Sneaks (Pelosi)

Justice Ginsburg

Judge Judy

Naturally, the New York Times and Washington Post are barely covering the frippery of Salongate - not when there's the outright flummery of the continuing Russiagate saga with which to send chills and thrills down the spines of the American electorate.

The latest episode has our old indicted (Mueller Theatre charges since dismissed) friend, the Internet Research Agency, allegedly setting up a website with which to attack Joe Biden from the left. Using such well-known and trustworthy sources as "The Authorities" and "Officials"  the establishment media are again gaslighting the public and sowing doubt about all the information that we do not read in the Times and the Post, or watch on CNN and MSNBC.

Unless I'd had the Times to fill me in, I never would have known that an obscure site called Peacedata.net even existed, and that it not only "tricked" real American independent journalists into writing for them, it actually paid them for writing for them. This practice of paying real money for freelance content is actually becoming quite rare in the Land of the Free.

Intrepid Times reporter Sheera Frenkel tracked down one of these American writers, who admitted by email that the editor of Peacedata not only is not a Real American, but that he also (suspiciously) wasn't as obsessively interested in criticism of Trump as more trustworthy media outlets must be in order to rake in millions of new subscribers. This freelancer further said that he's turned down payments of between $75 and $200 per article, claiming that he preferred to provide copy for free. And that kind of leads me to believe that the Times source may himself not be a Real Struggling Freelancer at all. The doubt is being sown so hard that I can almost feel the furrows deepening in my brain.

Oh well, I'm probably just jealous that Peacedata never noticed Sardonicky, or solicited any of my articles in its terrifying Internet search for lefty dupes who'll stoop to writing for money.

 So I think I'll just call it a day and go wash my hair with my cheap Suave shampoo and then it let it air-dry into silky flatness the way I always do.

Commentariat Central: Bernie Panic Edition

The plutes and the pundits were caught flat-footed Saturday when, despite their best propaganda efforts, Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucuses not only by double digits, but with a broad coalition of old, young, white, black and brown voters.

Realizing that Bernie was ahead, but not realizing yet by how much, the mainstream media had begun spreading the latest iteration of Russiagate in the days before the caucuses: to wit, Vladimir Putin wants Bernie to be nominated so that Donald Trump can win. That story fell to pieces when voters effectively ignored it in Nevada and are ignoring it in the rest of the country as well, judging from Bernie's increasing lead in the polls.

The on-air personalities of MSNBC reacted to Bernie's win in much the same way they reacted to Donald Trump's election in 2016: stunned disbelief that their fear-mongering narrative had been revealed as a complete and utter dud. Chris Matthews became so confused that he abandoned his previous nightmare of Communist executions in Central Park to comparing Sanders voters to Nazi troops invading France in World War Two. He was obviously plagiarizing his colleague Chuck Todd's previous casual on-air reporting - immediately prior to last week's debate - of a slur calling Sanders supporters "digital brownshirts" or Gestapo. This slur allegedly prompted Bernie himself to almost physically attack MSNBC brass last week. But even the leak in the right-wing New York Post tabloid, insinuating that Sanders flew out of control and terrified the brass over a minor little insult, backfired. We were obviously supposed to fret over Bernie's temper instead of cheering for it.

MSNBC, much like Joe McCarthy before it, has been disgraced.

For now, anyway. As of this writing, Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd still have their jobs.

I, for one, do not trust the reasonable liberals who only yesterday were bashing Sanders and his supporters, but who have done a near-complete 180 and who are now urging party unity as he supposedly is on an unstoppable glide path to the nomination. Michael Bloomberg, who so dominated the discourse last week, was hard to find in mainstream media discourse this morning.

But as they grudgingly accept Bernie as inevitable, it's not a good idea to relax. They no doubt have plenty more dirty tricks up their sleeves. The Russophobic propaganda isn't working, so stay on the alert for voting machine breakdowns, voter roll purges, all manner of made-up scandals. Since their credibility is now on the line, the tricks will proceed off the air and out of print.

Meanwhile, their current "we surrender" narrative of Bernie inevitability might lull voters into so much complacency that they will lose much of the urgency needed to knock on doors and even show up at the polls in the record numbers needed on Super Tuesday.

***************

I wrote two New York Times comments on Saturday - right before the caucus results were in - and one on Sunday night, when liberal pundits began, in varying degrees of grudging-ness, to admit that Sanders is not only electable and a threat to Trump, but that his presidency would not be the end of the world after all.

Columnist Frank Bruni, pre-Nevada caucus blowout, was all worried about a brokered Democratic convention and how of all the candidates, Bernie Sanders was alone in not pledging to abide by superdelegates anointing a winner in the absence of a clear majority.

Bruni, good centrist voter-shaming gaslighter that he is, asked readers to contemplate an implausible scenario whereby a candidate with more delegates than Sanders would nonetheless lose the nomination to Sanders out of plutocratic fear of the mob. Wouldn't, for instance, Michael Bloomberg's well-heeled supporters then feel every bit as betrayed by the System as the regular folk?

If Sanders supporters stay home in November, they would therefore be acting just like Trump, who

 if defeated "will manufacture any and every argument to say that he was robbed. And in a country in which the messy guts of our institutions are increasingly conspicuous and the merchants of cynicism grow ever bolder, he'll find takers aplenty.
After all, getting worked up is so much less tedious than getting along.

My published response:

 It's all right out there in the open. According to Politico, Mike Bloomberg's operatives are already importuning the superdelegates for their votes on a second ballot.

 The Democratic candidates who raised their hands against actual voters determining the nominee simply signaled that when push comes to shove in divvying up their delegates, they can be bought off. Whether this in the form of Bloomberg cash for future campaigns, a Bloomberg cabinet appointment, a Bloomberg job for a family member, or simply a Bloomberg donation to their favorite charity is moot.

I have to say that Elizabeth Warren's raising her hand after so masterfully trouncing Bloomberg at the debate and after railing so passionately for so long against political corruption, was a profound disappointment. Remember, she too had not so long ago agreed that Bernie was cheated by the party apparatus in 2016. 

As far as Frank Bruni suggesting that we save our wrath for the "next time" - forget about it. Since the writing is on the wall and the Bloomberg checks are being written at the "heads they win, tails we lose" lightning speed of an automated Wall Street trade, now is the time to pressure our super-delegated elected reps to either follow the will of the electorate, or expect a primary funded by small-dollar donors doing an end-run around the Bloomberg-owned party apparatus.

  This is not being nasty. This is exercising our rights as citizens in what they still quaintly call a representative democracy.

************** 


Maureen Dowd devoted her own column space to opining that Trump is a parasite because he dissed the South Korea Oscar-winning movie "Parasite" and compared it unfavorably to that good old racist classic "Gone With the Wind."
This is more earth-shatteringly disgusting, apparently, than professional liberals ignoring Michael Bloomberg's racist Stop and Frisk crusade. Dowd doesn't even mention the red-baiting Bloomberg by name in her column but she does wholeheartedly endorse the unsubstantiated narrative that not only does Russia continue to interfere in "our elections," but that it is magically boosting Bernie Sanders.

As the Democrats sputter and spat and fight over federal giveaways and (Bloomberg's) N.D.A.s, the unfettered president is overturning the rule of law and stuffing the (unaccountable spy) agencies with toadies.

My published comment:

("Although if they win the Senate back, Democrats will probably end up impeaching him again and this time have plenty of witnesses.")

 Maureen (in a parenthetical, no less) seems to be forecasting that Trump will win a second term. And if Bloomberg does succeed in his quest to buy the nomination, she is most likely right on the money.

Bloomberg is Trump, but without Trump's gift for stand-up comedy. The Godzillionaire Mayor's bizarre performance as Mary Poppins, one of the many disturbing clips being unearthed these days. doesn't even have the saving grace of macabre humor. 

As far as tweeting goes, Bloomberg has "people" for that. A mere 70 his campaign's Twitter accounts being suspended due to fakery is a joke, given that his whole campaign is nothing but a head fake of epic proportions. And it's also an assault on democracy.

But the big news that's supposed to scare us into stupefied compliance is that Putin is magically elevating the campaigns of both Trump and Sanders. Once again, it's Russia and not good old American political corruption that's endangering our sacrosanct. pristine democracy. MSNBC's Chris Matthews is forecasting Communist executions in Central Park. And Lloyd Blankfein, the banker who helped crash the economy, is so scared of Bernie ruining "our" economy that he may be even forced to vote for Trump.

The elites who own the place are rapidly losing any minimal credibility that they still had left. Maybe they can develop a new app for that.

***************

Charles Blow, while superficially casting his lot with Post-Caucus Bernie on the premise that hey, the guy is electable after all, is nonetheless worried about Sanders identifying as a democratic socialist. After asserting that "I don't believe that most people know what that means, but it is different and Trump will make it sound frightening, and many Americans are likely to be wary of it," Blow proceeds to consult experts who also can't explain it precisely.

Even worse, both Trump and the Russians want him to be the nominee! And he seems to be running not with the Democratic establishment, but against it!

So, Blow says, Bernie "has a lot of work to do." (And in keeping with his front-runner status, Sanders is indeed tamping down some of that "revolutionary" rhetoric in his increasingly high profile prime time interviews, most recently on 60 Minutes.)

My published Times comment:

Concerns about the democratic socialist label are misplaced, given that Trump regularly smears even Nancy Pelosi and other centrist Democrats as "the radical socialist left."

The Tea Party, the precursor to Trumpism, was fond of labeling Barack Obama a "Marxist Leninist" when in fact his politics were closer to Reagan's. In professing his own allegiance to free market capitalism, Obama only half jokingly once remarked that Nixon had been more liberal than he.

 So I say let the Dems embrace rather than run away from the "S" word. They might point out to their detractors that Trump himself is the beneficiary of a lifetime of socialism for the rich, via tax loopholes and basically free land for "development" purposes.

Public education is a socialist enterprise. So are community fire departments. So are public works projects, which used to be known as "sewer socialism."

 Poll after poll reveals that the younger the voters, the more apt they are to be amenable to socialism as the alternative to the neoliberal capitalism that has indebted them and destroyed their dreams.

There is nothing "radical" about what Bernie is espousing. The debt jubilee, or debt forgiveness in hard times, is a philosophy and a humane practice going all the way back to Old Testament times.

 The more that "liberal" elite pundits and billionaires wring their hands over the prospect of better lives for ordinary people, the more they signal they wouldn't mind if Trump is elected to a second term.

Son of #Russiagate

First let's get the obligatory "I'm not a Trump fan" disclaimer out of the way. The transcript of the July phone conversation that the U.S. president had with the Ukrainian president did indeed showcase Trump at his oafish, garbled, self-interested worst. He did indeed sound like a less talented and less subtle Tony Soprano.

 A smoking gun, though,the phone call definitely was not, Besides hinting that he wanted dirt on Joe Biden and his lovely son Hunter, Trump seemed just as interested in getting dirt on CrowdStrike. That's the investigatory agency employed by the Democratic National Committee which provided the FBI with its subsequent "assessment," or best guess, that the theft of emails so embarrassing to the Clinton campaign was done via  Russian hack rather than through an inside job. The FBI never independently examined the DNC servers, which Trump and others believe might currently be residing in Ukraine. There is an ongoing Department of Justice investigation into the actual origins of #Russiagate.

(I, for one, would love to get the dirt on CrowdStrike and the Clinton origins of Cold War 2.0)

The one thing that might nail Trump is the attempted cover-up of the transcript before he finally blinked and released the transcript - after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally blinked and agreed to at least consider impeachment. The CIA whistleblower, according to a just-released letter, claims that the phone call transcript in question had been illegally secreted within a separate White House computer system in order to protect Trump.

Even before the release of both the transcript and the whistle-blower complaint, the corporate media went into full hysterical overdrive last weekend. What finally changed Pelosi's mind were demands by the media and a group of so-called "Frontline" Democrats for impeachment. These congress critters, many of whom just happen to be former CIA and Pentagon employees, apparently made her an offer she couldn't refuse.

This is the same Nancy Pelosi who built her entire political career on the House Intelligence Committee. This is the same Nancy Pelosi who refused to impeach George W. Bush over his own abuses of power, including ordering torture and  illegally invading Iraq based solely upon fraudulent CIA claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that he planned to wield against the United States.

And this is the same old Democratic Party that would rather manufacture enemies and instill fear in voters than give voters what they actually want and what they truly need:  Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, medical and student debt forgiveness - you know, everything that Bernie Sanders is campaigning for. Once again, the elites are trying to co-opt non-elites in another one of their intra-oligarchical battles.

And who knows, maybe this is even their passive-aggressive way of getting rid of Joe Biden while they smarmily pretend to defend him against all manner of Trumpian slings and arrows. It could even be their passive-aggressive way of  getting Trump re-elected. They certainly aren't doing any favors to Elizabeth Warren's anti-corruption platform when she becomes forced to defend the corrupt Bidens on behalf of the party.

The best outcome will be the election of Bernie Sanders. This, of course, will happen over the DNC's cold dead body. (Fingers crossed.)

I responded over the weekend to the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof's hysterical Saturday column, which he penned even before the transcript and whistle-blower letter were released. He knew, he just knew, that there was something rotten going on. Because of the stinky stench! My published comment:

The Biden-Ukraine connection has been an open secret for some time. That Trump is using it for political gain has also been an open secret for quite some time. And it certainly is not the first, nor will it be the last,time that a president engages with a foreign leader for non-altruistic reasons.

 Look at the big picture. As the NYT reported back in May, "Hunter Biden...was one of many politically prominent Americans of both major parties who made money in Ukraine over the last decade. In several cases — most notably that of Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman — that business came under criminal investigation that exposed a seedy side of the lucrative Western consulting industry in Ukraine."

The fact that an employee of the CIA - perhaps the most secretive and unaccountable, de facto branch of the US government ever invented - is raising an alarm should also be taken with a huge grain of salt. In my view, both the media and the Democratic Party are being way too friendly to this agency, not least by constantly describing it as the "intelligence "community" as though it were a sewing circle. In fact, it is an often rogue operation that "tortured some folks" and quite recently burglarized Senate computers to meddle with that body's investigation and reporting of said torture.

 This is more palace intrigue designed to pit American against American based on their allegiance to one wing or the other of the oligarchic duopoly. That's what stinks.

Needless to say, my unpatriotic failure to jump on the impeachment bandwagon with the New York Times was not kindly received by some of the Reading Faithful. 

I can no longer access either the stand-alone comment (reprinted below) or a  follow-up from one "Mike Bonnell" who urged the Times to investigate me and other non-believers in order to confirm his suspicion that we are Russian assets. I flagged them both. After the better part of a day, the Times in its infinite wisdom finally removed them. Because if there is one thing they insist on, it's that people remain civil to one another as the Paper of Record drums up the xenophobia to a fever pitch. They also removed my own reply to "Mike" in which I surmised that Joe McCarthy must be cackling in his grave. I'd also politely requested that he divulge his complete list of tell-tale Russian code words in the interests of keeping my fellow Times readers safe from subversives.  

Mike BonnellMontreal, Canada1h ago
The Russians are hard at it. I've read at least three comments (names below) that made me think of caviar as I read them. I encourage readers to check out the 'letters' by the following and see if they don't find the grammar, expressions and sentiments a bit...Russian-trying-to-write-'good'-English like.
"Karen Garcia, Kirk & Lars"

Kafka Does Christmas In July

#Christmas planning has begun in the East Wing at the @WhiteHouse. I'm looking forward to sharing our final vision for this unique tradition in the coming months.

The ominous phrase "Final vision," juxtaposed as it is with Donald Trump's caging of thousands of migrants and refugees on the Southern border, certainly does bring back memories of past traditions. Just not the pleasant memories and traditions that Melania Trump's public relations shop wanted to distract us with.

But perhaps we should interpret her clumsy Tweet another way. Maybe she's getting started on Christmas way early because she doesn't plan on being in the White House very much longer. Maybe she got caught up in all the media hype telling us that Father of Our Country Robert Mueller's congressional testimony was going to be the final word, the real coup de grace,for her chubby hubby wubby. And then it turned out that not only is Mueller the Deadbeat Dad that so many feared that he was upon seeing his final tepid report. He's a Demented Deadbeat Dad on his last mental legs.

So call Melania delusional and lacking in good taste to your heart's content. Because anybody who still puts any credence in the #Russiagate franchise after Mueller's bumble-wumble testimony on Wednesday should probably also have his or her own head examined.

Was there anything more delusional and Kafkesque and surreal, for example, than the New York Times's headline that blared Mueller's claim that "the Russians" are in our country right now, interfering in our elections, placed right next to a sidebar analysis bemoaning how confused the aging prosecutor has been acting lately?

A Russophobe in good standing might be "halting and hesitant" about remembering what is in his own report, but when it comes to meddling he miraculously recovers from the muddling. He regains Father of Our Country status and mental sharpness as long as he sticks to the corporate propaganda that Hillary Clinton lost the last election not because of her own ineptitude and corruption, but because of a group of underpaid Kremlin Internet trolls.

So I say let Melania have her own visionary deluded fun as we anxiously await the grand final vision of the Trump family leaving the White House forever. It's a big asylum, and thank goodness we ain't in it.

Merry Christmas, and may Kafka's Goddess of Liberty bless us, everyone.

Gaslighting the Gaslighter-In-Chief

One of the New York Times's unacknowledged functions is transmitting blatant or cryptic messages to, from, and from within power centers. These messages, usually in the guise of anonymously-sourced news stories, serve both as public propaganda and as a means of pressuring or damaging chosen adversaries, and of dictating both domestic and global policy.

But the article published on Saturday about the United States' deployment of cyber weapons to potentially cripple Russia's entire power grid serves a much broader purpose than the standard saber-rattling by the weaponized oligarchy. It was planted specifically to embarrass Donald Trump with its revelation that the US military had performed an end run around him by deliberately keeping him out of the planning loop for such an attack.

The well-planted article further exposes Trump's own willful ignorance and his aversion to reading the fine print, given that he had willingly signed the bill granting the military this sole authority to launch such a cyber-attack without notifying him - or, for that matter, notifying or consulting with any other future president.

Even as Trump is rightly lambasted for all manner of unseemly dynastic power grabs, serial lying, corrupt practices and gross invocations of executive privilege, he is being at least partially stripped of his authority by unelected leaders and their compliant elected operatives in Congress. It's an intra-class struggle of a big group of oligarchs against one oafish oligarch who doesn't know when to keep his big mouth shut in the interests of his own class. He is a traitor to his class, but not in the good way that FDR was a traitor to his class. Trump is protecting nobody but himself and his immediate clan and by clannish extension, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Thanks to the cosily corrupt Kushner-Netanyahu connection, for example, Trump just had an illegal Israeli settlement in the Golan Heights named after him. It's terrible public relations for a United States which has always marketed itself as a bastion and defender of democracy. 

The Times article, wittingly or not, exposes the truth that the "Trump administration" is definitely not the same thing as President Trump. It is only tangentially related to him. Deliberately or not, it proves the existence of a shadow government, if not a coup government. This unelected, anti-democratic government operates with absolute impunity, while its corporate media stenographers not only collude with it and propagandize for it, they strenuously laser-focus the public's ire against Trump the person rather than at the far more dangerous Trump "administration" - which, really, is simply the convenient name given to the Military-Industrial Complex and the ruling oligarchy as they hide their identities and their agendas behind whatever "democratically" elected individual resides in the White House at any given time.

The Times article elicited the desired reactionary tweet-storm from Trump, who accused the Paper of Record of treason for spilling the secrets of cyber-war but, tellingly, did not also accuse "his" military of treason for the leaking of these secrets. 

He also failed (in public, anyway) to connect the dots between the Times leak and his recent order to investigate the "intelligence community" and the Obama administration for starting the whole #Russiagate franchise. He didn't address the probability that these same agencies and operatives are now getting their own revenge via this past weekend's gaslighting attack against him in the Times. He continues to ignore Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's warning, issued prior to his inauguration, that these agencies have "six ways from Sunday" of wreaking revenge on a president who doesn't acknowledge them as his superiors.

Nevertheless, the dichotomy between Trump and the permanent Security State is cynically bypassed right in the lead paragraph of the article written by the Times national security reporting team of David Sanger (who also served as the willing conduit of the "Obama administration's" leak of its Stuxnet virus deployment against Iran's nuclear program) and Nicole Perlroth:

The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said.
In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of American computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections.

So the Times acknowledges that it had known about the planning for cyber-war for quite awhile before it chose to alert the public over the weekend. "Former" government officials (not necessarily in the current administration) were among their sources. Later in the piece, they reveal that it was Barack Obama who "secretly" ordered the placement of the cyber tools within the Russian grid. So the timing of the story, right after Trump's initiation of a probe into the origins of Russiagate, is suspect. And the political motivations are obvious. The article is another neat way of keeping the Russiagate franchise alive after Robert Mueller found that no conspiracy existed between Trump and Vladimir Putin. It strives to weaken Trump, as the Democrats and their security state cohort have decided that actual impeachment should remain off the table.

And, it sends the not-so-subtle message to Putin that he should consider Trump to be a de facto lame duck president with no real power and that the US war machine will forever be in charge no matter who is president.

It is not until several paragraphs into the saber-rattling article that the New York Times finally, and almost casually. tells everybody (including the president) that he has been duped by the Deep State, largely as a result of his own ignorance and incompetence:

Mr. Trump issued new authorities to Cyber Command last summer, in a still-classified document known as National Security Presidential Memoranda 13, giving General Nakasone far more leeway to conduct offensive online operations without receiving presidential approval.
But the action inside the Russian electric grid appears to have been conducted under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into the military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer. The measure approved the routine conduct of “clandestine military activity” in cyberspace, to “deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyberactivities against the United States.”
Under the law, those actions can now be authorized by the defense secretary without special presidential approval.

Sanger and Perlroth ascribe no human agency to the mysterious "slipping" of these legal authorities into the military authorization bill. But Trump cannot help but notice that Congress, while waffling on impeaching him, is nonetheless sneakily disempowering him even as it gives "his" administration nearly a trillion dollars a year to wage endless wars.

Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.
Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.

Translation: the reason, beyond party politics, to keep the Russiagate franchise alive is to maintain the legend that Trump is a Manchurian candidate. Without constant deep state gaslighting, he might be tempted to honor his campaign promises and initiate anti-nuclear proliferation talks with Putin in a misguided effort to avert World War Three and total planetary annihilation. Such an overture to peace would be a slap in the face to American Exceptionalism. So, if the public is told that Trump is so dangerous that the ever-so-benevolent war machine is keeping him out of their aggressive planning, then even his imposition of harsh economic sanctions against Russia is rendered meaningless in the minds of a carefully terrorized American public.

All they (the same folks who wanted to deport John Lennon from the United States for criticizing American aggression) are saying is, Give War a Chance.

#Russiagate Exhaustion

I got tired just watching Robert Mueller III totter up to the podium on Wednesday to wearily announce that just because he'd found no evidence that Trump is a crook doesn't mean that Trump is not a crook.

Heads, which had barely begun to heal from the initial release of Mueller's written report, exploded anew when the special prosecutor announced he would prefer not to testify before Congress. His report, he said, speaks for itself. He is so, so done with it all.

Ranking House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries summed up his party's dilemma all too well when he groused that "there is a difference between reading the book and seeing the movie on the big screen.”

It seems that Trump isn't the only American who doesn't read.  Polls have revealed for years that most US citizens don't read more than one or two books a year. And despite its best-seller status, "The Mueller Report" is pretty dry reading, even for die-hard readers.

Who has the time, anyway? Even an article in The Week about people not reading much any more was classified as a "speed read" in a probably futile effort to get more people to read it. 

If it's not on a screen, then it doesn't exist. And with so many shows to choose from, the recent bravura C-Span-streamed marathon reading of the report by an ensemble cast of Democrats attracted only a tiny number of eyeballs.

Politics is spectacle. Politicians see voters as a blob of consumers addicted to their various screens. The consent has been manufactured by the corporate media conglomerate, and the learned passivity is complete.

So the longer that our congress critters can keep the Mueller-centered suspense (and the #Russiagate franchise) alive, and the electorate barely awake, the better they think it will be for their ultimate goal, which is limited to winning elections and raising scads of money to do so.

Since Democrats are damned if they do impeach and damned if they don't, they might as well do the right thing as ordained by the Constitution. Otherwise, win or lose, they won't be treated kindly in the history books.

Oh, I forgot. People don't read actual books, not when there are rage-filled twitter feeds and Facebook flummery to keep them amused.

That's why corporate media outlets pounced with glee when Trump wrote one of his typically garbled tweets this morning. "Trump Tweets and Then Retracts, Statement that Russia Helped Him Get Elected" shrilled the New York Times in a particularly egregious example of "gotcha" churnalism.

Here's the original tweet that had media heads exploding in Toldja So! triumph: 

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

 · 3h

Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax...And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist. So now the Dems and their partner, the Fake News Media,.....

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

....say he fought back against this phony crime that didn’t exist, this horrendous false accusation, and he shouldn’t fight back, he should just sit back and take it. Could this be Obstruction? No, Mueller didn’t find Obstruction either. Presidential Harassment!

53.4K

7:57 AM - May 30, 2019

It's somewhat surprising that the Times isn't also reporting that Trump falsely claimed that Russia has literally disappeared off the face of the planet for the sole fact that it had nothing to do with getting him elected. But that would have entailed getting their fact-checker to refer to Google Earth in order to determine whether Russia is still there, and then writing a brand new outraged article about Trump's Eleven-Thousandth Lie.

It's exhausting. And it's futile.

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.