Month: March 2017

Let’s post our favorite songs from the solo careers of the Fab Four. Me first:

I’m ready to receive alternative points of view.

Russia’s 1989 plea for a new world order was rejected, and so Putinism was born | The Guardian – Spotlight |

Long before Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, the stage was set for Russia’s current confrontation with the west by the failure to achieve a transformed and inclusive peace order after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

 « click for more info »

 « click for more info »
Two incompatible narratives came into conflict after the Eastern Bloc began to crumble in 1989. For the west, nothing needed to change. The Atlantic community had effectively won the cold war, demonstrating the superiority of the western order, and thus all that was required was for Russia to join the expanded western community. The door was indeed opened, but the terms were not right. Boris Yeltsin made this clear, in an incoherent and contradictory manner. Putin ultimately made the same point, rather more forcefully. The west invited Russia to join an expanded Atlantic community, but Russia sought to join a transformed west and a reconfigured Europe, goals that remain active to this day.

For Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, the end of the cold war represented a moment when Moscow could work with the western powers to create a new political community as equal founding members. The historical west, with Nato and the European Union at its core, would, in the Russian idea, become a greater west, with Russia a founding member of a new political community. This was accompanied by various Gaullist ideas to establish some sort of pan-continental greater Europe, stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

But the Atlantic powers, fearing that Russia was trying to drive a wedge between its two wings in Europe and America, rejected these ideas. In practice, Russian and western views were not so far apart. What was required was some sort of reconciliatory framework, and it is this intangible but essential ingredient that has been missing in the post-cold war years.

Instead, the end of the cold war reinforced one side at the expense of the other, and without a transformation of world order. This means that in structural terms the cold war never really ended.

○ Trump, Putin and the New Cold War | The New Yorker |

○ Merkel: Germany to heavily increase Bundeswehr budget | DW – Oct. 16, 2016  
○ Germany rejects US pressure for Nato spending rise | BBC News – Apr. 1, 2017 |

How true, a statement by Clint Watts of George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at the Senate Intelligence Hearing this week …

Russian deception influenced election due to Trump’s support, senators hear

Urging a response to Russian interference in the election, Watts said the US approach to Russia was provocatively ambiguous.

“I’m not sure what our policy or stance is with regards to Russia at this point in the United States. I think that’s the number one thing we’ve got to figure out, because that will shape how they interface with us,” he told senators.

This is your occasional reminder that the president of the United States is a fraudster:

A federal judge has approved a $25 million settlement President Donald Trump agreed to late last year in a bid to head off a civil fraud trial over his Trump University real estate seminar program.

U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel issued a 31-page ruling Friday deeming the deal fair and overruling claims from some former Trump University students that they should get larger payments or be allowed to drop out altogether in a bid to force Trump into a trial.

Under the settlement, former Trump University students are expected to get 80 percent to 90 percent of what they paid — typically about $1,500 for a three-day seminar or $35,000 for an in-depth mentorship program.

Curiel called that result “extraordinary” when measured by the yardstick of other class actions that are often settled for pennies on the dollar.

And let’s not forget that Donald Trump attacked this judge and said that he couldn’t be impartial because of his Mexican-American heritage.

Let’s go back to last June:

Until Donald Trump’s comments about the ethnicity of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the judge overseeing the fraud case against Trump University in San Diego, Curiel was anything but a household name.

Then Trump began calling Curiel a “hater” who was being unfair to him because the judge is “Hispanic,” because he is “Mexican” and because Trump is building a wall.

Trump also guaranteed us that he would prevail at trial despite the judge’s supposed lack of impartiality, but then he moved to settle as soon as he unexpectedly and disastrously was elected our president.

“We’ll go to court with that one. It will be a long case but it will end up in a victory ultimately because, again, almost all of [the Trump University students] have given great reviews of the courses.”

It’s easy to forget that Trump ripped people off, sometimes at $35,000 a pop, and still got elected president. I just wanted to remind you.

Also, that stuff he said about Judge Curiel? It was kind of racist.

Nancy is correct to emphasize that it’s quite possible, likely even, that many folks are drawing the wrong conclusions from the fact that Michael Flynn is seeking immunity before he’s willing to talk again to the FBI or testify before Congress. All it definitely means is that there’s a high probability that Flynn will invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Whether he has something worthy of a trade for immunity is a separate matter. In other words, some folks are willing to say that they’re eager to talk to Congress, and others are warning that they’ll clam up real tight if called or subpoenaed to testify. Flynn is in the latter camp, and for obvious reasons.

If he was ever in any doubt about it, he now knows with a certainty that he’s been the subject of a multiagency counterintelligence investigation since at least July of last year. He’s seen the allegations made against him in the Steele dossier. If those things weren’t terrifying enough, he apparently was “less then forthcoming” with the FBI when they questioned him about the content of his communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. It’s also increasingly clear that even if the Intelligence Community and, in particular, the CIA didn’t see him as potential turncoat and Putin-controlled mole, he attempted to make war on them and lost.

His legal vulnerabilities are therefore huge and his enemies determined, which makes it less than helpful that he’s been caught dead to rights failing to report payments from the Russian government for his travel to Moscow to meet with and fête Vladimir Putin, nor to divulge that he was taking money from Turkey and was therefore serving as an agent of a foreign power. One might imagine that he’s committed perjury by paperwork on these issues as he got himself cleared to work as Trump’s National Security Adviser.

And then there’s the possibility that he could actually be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit kidnapping, which he had the lack of foresight to engage in in the presence of a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey told CNN Friday that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn met with representatives of the Turkish government in 2016 and discussed potential ways to send a foe of Turkey’s president back to face charges in that country,

As a representative of his consulting firm, Flynn Intel Group, Flynn met with senior representatives of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government in September 2016, Woolsey said. Woolsey was a Trump campaign adviser at the time and attended the meeting, but said he arrived after it was already well underway.

Woolsey claims that those present discussed sending Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim leader who Erdogan has accused of being behind a failed military coup to overthrow him, back to Turkey to face charges — possibly outside the legal US extradition system.

“What I saw and heard was sort of the end of the conversation — it’s not entirely clear what transpired because of that,” Woolsey said on “CNN Tonight” with Don Lemon. “But it looks as if there was at least some strong suggestion by one or more of the Americans present at the meeting that we would be able, the United States would be able, through them, to be able to get hold of Gulen, the rival for Turkey’s political situation.”

If a president could be impeached for lack of judgment, Trump’s decision to name Flynn as his National Security Adviser would be sufficient to remove him from power. It’s hard to gauge how crippling it would be to the administration for Flynn to discuss all of his criminal and potentially criminal activities in front of Congress. And that’s before he might divulge anything about Trump or his campaign or any coordination with the Russians.

Needless to say, if the FBI wants Flynn to talk, they have enough potential jail time to wave in front of him to make him sing like a canary. The question is, can Flynn help them enough in their counterintelligence investigation to make it worth trading away a bunch of convictions, some of which would be very easy to prove?

Some people have suggested that only by implicating Trump could he give the FBI a bigger scalp, but the FBI’s interest in understanding the facts and the scope and the nature of Russia’s tactics could be enough of an enticement to get them to talk about immunity. If that would tend to exonerate or vindicate Trump, it might still be good enough.

However, with so much criminal liability, Flynn won’t want to commit more perjury. So, either he’s going to keep quiet and take his medicine or he’s going to tell what he knows.

And that can’t be a comfort to Team Trump.

If he were insanely lucky, me might trick Congress into immunizing him against prosecution the same way that Congress inadvertently immunized Oliver North and John Poindexter against prosecution. I could definitely see Rep. Devin Nunes being a willing collaborator in that effort. But, that would still involve him testifying before Congress about everything, which could also destroy the Trump administration even if it saved Flynn’s hide. And, in any case, Nunes can’t give Flynn immunity unilaterally.

The best case for Trump is that Flynn invokes the Fifth Amendment and goes to jail without doing them any further damage. And he might do that if he can’t cut a deal.

Of course, a plea bargain may be the best he can negotiate, since there are so many looming charges against him.

So, no, the fact that Flynn has sought immunity doesn’t mean that he’s about to drop a dime on President Trump. But it does mean that Trump’s presidency is in a world of trouble.

The Washington Post has become the lead media in the ongoing Trump/Russia “scandal.” I put the word scandal in parentheses not because I disbelieve that dirty dealing between the Russian Gang and the Trump Gang has happened, but because I do believe in the old saying “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” If the entities that are trying to take Trump down were themselves not guilty of equal and greater crimes, I would be overjoyed to see him fall. But that is not the case, and this single fact turns the whole deal into just another in a long line of efforts  by the Permanent Government/Deep State to maintain control of the U.S. on all levels by any means necessary.

It is a spat between and among competing criminal gangs, nothing more and nothing less.

The Smart Gang vs. the Dumb Gang, in a nutshell.

So…here’s the shortcut. The Washington Post has a paywall up. I refuse to pay in order to consume lies, so I won’t pay their pittance. WAPO is also invariably the lead media in Google News top-of-the-page reporting on this hustle.

Like this:

If you click on most of the WAPO google links without a subscription, you get a cutesy little blurb about how you obviously love good reporting and thus should give them your money posthaste. But when WAPO is acting as lead paper in the quite clearly Intelligence Community-led fight against Trump, the paywall magically goes down. (You do know about the Bezos/WAPO/Amazon/CIA nexus, right? You should if you don’t. Do a search. A Google search, even. )

Shortcut to the hustle chase:

Get rid of your WAPO subscription if you have one. All of the anti-Trump hustle is more than thoroughly covered by the rest of the PermaGov-controlled media. Then click on WAPO headlines in Google News. If the paywall is down, the hustle has a new angle. If it’s up, it’s just the same previous news cycle’s PermaGov shit being re-shoveled.

Today’s HOTTEST THING EVER!!!, WAPO-paywall-down hustle news?

Sure.

Here it is:

The Trump White House is in deep legal trouble, according to Trump’s own standards

Followed by a page of lockstep mumbling about how stupid and contradictory the Trump Gang’s positions are in terms of seeking immunity from prosecution.

Mainstream political posturing, nothing more. The PermaGov Gang has got its shit so together that it never needs to “seek immunity,” because it owns the investigative processes that would make that a necessity.

Duh!!!

And so it goes.

AG

P.S. Read my sig.

Things are not what they seem . . . nor are they otherwise . . .

It’s like dat. Exactly like dat. Believe none of it. Whatever is really going down is not being reported by any of the competing media outlets. Not a word of it. It’ll trickle out over the years just as did the real deals surrounding the ’60s assassinations, Watergate, 9/11 etc.By then, it will be too late. The damage will already have been done.

Rove:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Like dat.

So far…

Watch.

○ A statement by Robert K. Kelner counsel to General Flynn

‘General Flynn Certainly Has a Story to Tell’ | The Atlantic |

A request for immunity isn’t an admission of guilt or wrongdoing. It may be sought by witnesses who fear that their words could be used against them, as a condition of their testimony. The Journal previously reported FBI agents had questioned Flynn in January shortly after the Trump administration denied he had spoken with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak the previous month. While the precise nature of that interview is unknown, it is a federal crime to lie to the FBI during a criminal investigation.

But the move could also be a purely prophylactic measure.

“Not withstanding his life of national service, the media are awash with unfounded accusations, outrageous claims of treason, and vicious innuendo directed against him,” Kelner said.

“He is now the target of unsubstantiated public demands by Members of Congress and other political critics that he be criminally investigated. No reasonable person, who has the benefit of advice from counsel, would submit to questioning in such a highly politicized, witch hunt environment without assurances against unfair prosecution.”

Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 03/07/2017 6:02:45 PM

Re: FKmn Intel Group Registration

Dear Ms. Hunt:

We write on behalf of our clients Flynn Intel Group and its Chairman and CEO, General
Michael T. Ftynn, to submit a Foreign Agents Registration Act (“FARA”) registration and
supplemental disclosure statement, in connection with Flynn Intel Group’s previously disclosed
representation of Inovo BV, a corporation organized in the Netherlands.

In September 2016, Flynn Intel Group publicly disclosed its representation of Inovo BV
in a federal Lobbying Disclosure Act (“LDA”) registration that was filed with the Secretary of the
Senate and Clerk of the House. After General Flynn was named in mid-November 2016 to serve
as National Security Advisor in the new administration, Flynn Intel Group shut down its
operations, did not renew its contract with Inovo BV, and tiled, on December 1,2016, a final
public disclosure report terminating its lobbyist registration for Inovo BV.

In document, the shares of FIG are noted:

(j) Give a complete statement of the ownership and control of the registrant.
Ownership as of November 31, 2016, was as follows: Michael T. Flynn (350,000 shares), Bijan Rafiekian (300,000 shares),
Philip Oakley (250,000 shares), Dr. Payman Arabshahi (5,000 shares), Darkshore LLC (1,000 shares). The corporation acts
pursuant to its bylaws, under which the Board of Directors governs the organization. Directors include Michael T. Flynn,
Bijan Rafiekian, and Philip Oakley.

See my recent diaries …

○ Flynn Intel Group / Woolsey and Turkish Lobby
○ Diplomat, Perestroika Ambassador with Charm, Soft Spoken

Amidst all of the frenzied weeping and whooping going on in the PermaGov press and its subsidiary followers regarding “THE RUSSIAN ISSUE!!!”…most of the perpetrators of which are media dupes themselves, plain and simple fools honestly reporting their credulous belief in the scam and thus amplifying it even further with every passing day…several truly important issues are being submerged in the resultant shitstorm of unverifiable information. (At the very least, it is “unverifiable” except by quite thoroughly verified professional serial liars of the spook persuasion.)

Read the following excerpts from two articles in today’s issue of Counterpunch for more. (Thurs, 3/30/17)

Read on.
[Emphases mine]

Enough of Russia! There’s an Epidemic of Despair in the US by Howard Lisnoff

If the left is waiting for Donald Trump to be impeached by the Republican Congress, then we need to take a collective deep breath and be ready to wait until hell freezes over. Trump-Russia ties are all the rage on nightly news programs and in the print media. The pontificating is almost without end. And it’s the liberal commentators who seem to be giving the issue the most emphasis on their nightly programs.

James S. Henry gets to the heart of the matter on The Reality News Network in “Why Further Revelations on Trump’s Russian Connection Might Fail to Bring Him Down” (March 24, 2017). Henry, an economist, attorney, and investigative journalist put it this way:

I think there’s a risk that the U.S. center-left is basically obsessed with this story and is looking for kind of a magic bullet solution to the Trump administration. That’s going to distract us from going back to work doing the kind of organizing at the grassroots level that’s necessary for the 2018 elections. We need to fight and get ready for all of the issues that are on the table… with respect to climate change, Obamacare, the social programs that are being stripped, the outrageous increases in the defense budget.

James S. Henry got it right! This obsession over Trump’s and Trump’s advisers’ connections both before and after the 2016 election to Vladimir Putin and Putin’s lapdog oligarchs is keeping those on the left focused on issues that won’t add up to a hill of beans save some nonexistent photo or video of Donald Trump literally in bed with someone. And even that wouldn’t do all that much damage given the words and audacious actions by Trump that are already known. People were beaten up at Trump campaign rallies and that didn’t do much to sway his base and, it may even have garnered him more support. He refers to women with the degrading word  “pussy,” and he gets a lion’s share of a segment of the vote of white women. He talks about an O.K. Corral scenario on Fifth Avenue and he still gets elected! He gets pummeled on healthcare and his base conducts extremely small but sometimes violent rallies around the country.

If readers really want to see some compromising information about interference in elections around the world, then a brief journey into U.S. direct interference in democratic elections would fill volumes, in fact it’s an alphabet soup of interventions of both electoral and military kinds (“The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere,” The Washington Post, October 2016). Interventions in Chile, Iran, Iraq, and Vietnam come to mind with disastrous and lethal human consequences.

—snip—

Back on the ground and grounded in reality, The Washington Post reports in “New research identifies a `sea of despair’ among white, working-class Americans” (March 23, 2017), that suicide rates among both white working-class men and women have skyrocketed since the late 1990s and dwarfs the suicide rate among people from other industrialized countries. The two Princeton University researchers who conducted the study point to “family dysfunction, social isolation, addiction, obesity, and other pathologies,” for the worsening suicide epidemic in the U.S. And this is the electoral cohort who gave Trump his Electoral College victory and propelled him in a losing alliance with the extreme right in Congress in their failed attempt to take healthcare benefits away from this voter base. Besides the terror of despair that can cause people to turn to suicide, it seems that this base of disaffected people are crying out for social, political, and economic remedies that will bring them back to health and well-being in the wealthiest society on Earth. Digging up dirt, both real and imagined, on Vladimir Putin isn’t going to accomplish anything and will serve to keep us occupied while the far right tries and succeeds in getting away with murder of one type or another.

And from two well respected, high level ex-intelligence operatives who have opposed what is going on here for a long, long while, William Binney and Ray McGovern. (See their bona fides at the end of the article.):

The Surveillance State Behind Russia-gate: Will Trump Take on the Spooks?

Although many details are still hazy because of secrecy – and further befogged by politics – it appears House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was informed last week about invasive electronic surveillance of senior U.S. government officials and, in turn, passed that information onto President Trump.

This news presents Trump with an unwelcome but unavoidable choice: confront those who have kept him in the dark about such rogue activities or live fearfully in their shadow. (The latter was the path chosen by President Obama. Will Trump choose the road less traveled?)

What President Trump decides will largely determine the freedom of action he enjoys as president on many key security and other issues. But even more so, his choice may decide whether there is a future for this constitutional republic. Either he can acquiesce to or fight against a Deep State of intelligence officials who have a myriad of ways to spy on politicians (and other citizens) and thus amass derogatory material that can be easily transformed into blackmail.

This crisis (yes, “crisis” is an overused word, but in this highly unusual set of circumstances we believe it is appropriate) came to light mostly by accident after President Trump tweeted on March 4 that his team in New York City’s Trump Towers had been “wiretapped” by President Obama.

Trump reportedly was relying on media reports regarding how conversations of aides, including his ill-starred National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, had been intercepted. Trump’s tweet led to a fresh offensive by Democrats and the mainstream press to disparage Trump’s “ridiculous” claims.

However, this concern about the dragnets that U.S. intelligence (or its foreign partners) can deploy to pick up communications by Trump’s advisers and then “unmask” the names before leaking them to the news media was also highlighted at the Nunes-led House Intelligence Committee hearing on March 20, where Nunes appealed for anyone who had related knowledge to come forward with it.

That apparently happened on the evening of March 21 when Nunes received a call while riding with a staffer. After the call, Nunes switched to another car and went to a secure room at the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House, where he was shown highly classified information apparently about how the intelligence community picked up communications by Trump’s aides.

The next day, Nunes went to the White House to brief President Trump, who later said he felt “somewhat vindicated” by what Nunes had told him.

The `Wiretap’ Red Herring

But the corporate U.S. news media continued to heckle Trump over his use of the word “wiretap” and cite the insistence of FBI Director James Comey and other intelligence officials that President Obama had not issued a wiretap order aimed at Trump.

As those paying rudimentary attention to modern methods of surveillance know, “wiretapping” is passé. But Trump’s use of the word allowed FBI and Department of Justice officials and their counterparts at the National Security Agency to swear on a stack of bibles that the FBI, DOJ, and NSA have been unable to uncover any evidence within their particular institutions of such “wiretapping.”

—snjp—

So, were Trump and his associates “wiretapped?” Of course not. Wiretapping went out of vogue decades ago, having been rendered obsolete by leaps in surveillance technology.

The real question is: Were Trump and his associates surveilled? Wake up, America. Was no one paying attention to the disclosures from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 when he exposed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as a liar for denying that the NSA engaged in bulk collection of communications inside the United States.

The reality is that EVERYONE, including the President, is surveilled. The technology enabling bulk collection would have made the late demented FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s mouth water.

—snip—

Intelligence Community’s Payback

However, earlier this year, there was a stark reminder of how much fear these surveillance capacities have struck in the hearts of senior U.S. government officials. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that President Trump was “being really dumb” to take on the intelligence community, since “They have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Maddow shied away from asking the logical follow-up: “Senator Schumer, are you actually saying that Trump should be afraid of the CIA?” Perhaps she didn’t want to venture down a path that would raise more troubling questions about the surveillance of the Trump team than on their alleged contacts with the Russians.

—snip—

At his evening meeting on March 21 at the Old Executive Office Building, Nunes was likely informed that all telephones, emails, etc. – including his own and Trump’s – are being monitored by what the Soviets used to call “the organs of state security.”

By sharing that information with Trump the next day – rather than consulting with Schiff – Nunes may have sought to avoid the risk that Schiff or someone else would come up with a bureaucratic reason to keep the President in the dark.

A savvy politician, Nunes knew there would be high political cost in doing what he did. Inevitably, he would be called partisan; there would be more appeals to remove him from chairing the committee; and the character assassination of him already well under way – in The Washington Post, for example – might move him to the top of the unpopularity chart, displacing even bête noire Russian President Vladimir Putin.

—snip—

Now, we suspect that much more may be learned about the special compartmented surveillance program targeted against top U.S. national leaders if Rep. Nunes doesn’t back down and if Trump doesn’t choose the road most traveled – acquiescence to America’s Deep State actors.

William Binney (williambinney0802@comcast.net) worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA. Ray McGovern (rrmcgovern@gmail.com) was a CIA analyst for 27 years; he briefed the president’s daily brief one-on-one to President Reagan’s most senior national security officials from 1981-85.

Financial analysts stated the failures of president Trump in his first 100 days confirm the real power lies with the members of U.S. Congress. Stocks keep pushing to higher levels.

Russia’s interference and effect on the U.S. election? Today still conjecture, just politics in DC and no hard evidence …

[A number of links added are mine – Oui]

Putin Didn’t Undermine the Election–We Did | The Nation – Nov. 29, 2016 |

Three weeks after Election Day, allegations of Russian interference in the contest continue to appear. Adm. Michael S. Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, stated that there was a “conscious effort by a nation-state to achieve a specific end.”

The Washington Post features an article alleging that independent research reveals that Russia ran a “sophisticated propaganda campaign” to interfere in our elections, weaken Clinton, and discredit our democracy. But much of the research cited comes from a group that insists on remaining anonymous and bases its conclusions on murky methodology.

Clearly, somebody hacked into the Democratic National Committee computers and into Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s e-mail. The intelligence agencies state that the former was done by hackers supported by or promoted by Russia. The agencies have been less clear about the source of the latter. Clinton campaign spokespeople have suggested that the Podesta e-mails–and the election-eve machinations of FBI Director James B. Comey, who no one argues is a Russian stooge–contributed to Donald Trump’s victory.

…
What were Russian President Vladimir Putin’s purposes in meddling with the U.S. election, if in fact he did so? (Putin dismisses the charge as “hysteria,” and cybersecurity experts argue there is no hard evidence.)

The Economist argues that “the Kremlin’s main objectives are to discredit the institutions of democratic elections and free press, and to weaken both candidates as much as possible.” It sought to make the election “look messy,” the Economist argues, and to “damage the brand.”

…
The hysteria being drummed up around Putin’s alleged intervention in the U.S. elections isn’t accidental. Neoconservatives and liberal interventionists have been pumping for a new cold war with Russia. Now, with Trump suggesting that he might seek a new detente with Russia, cooperate to attack the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and cool tensions over Ukraine, hyping Putin’s alleged intervention in our elections makes any cooperation more difficult.

In this situation, the press has to be careful that its reporting doesn’t peddle fear and neo-McCarthyite slurs rather than fact. For example, The Post’s front-page article touted “independent researchers” making the sensational claim that Russian propaganda efforts in the election “were viewed more than 213 million times” on Facebook alone. But the primary source of the report was the anonymous executive director of PropOrNot, which apparently started up just this summer and refuses to release the names of its leaders or the sources of its funds.

PropOrNot @BooMan by Oui – Nov. 24, 2016

PropOrNot – Criticism

Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper’s, was sharply critical of The Washington Post‘s decision to put the story on its front page, calling the article a “sorry piece of trash”.[1] Writers in The Intercept, Fortune, and Rolling Stone criticized The Washington Post for including a report by an organization with no reputation for fact-checking in an article on “fake news”.

In The New Yorker, Adrian Chen said that he had been previously contacted by the organization, but had chosen not to follow up with them. Looking more carefully into their methodology, he argued that PropOrNot’s criteria for establishing propaganda were so broad that they could have included “not only Russian state-controlled media organizations, such as Russia Today, but nearly every news outlet in the world, including the Post itself” on their list.

In December 2016, The Washington Post appended an “Editor’s Note” to its article in response to the criticism of PropOrNot’s list of websites.[10] The note read, “The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so.”

○ Germany alarmed about potential Russian interference in election: spy chief | Reuters – Nov. 16, 2016 |
○ German Intelligence Agencies Find No Evidence of Russian Interference | Newsweek – Feb. 7, 2017 |
○ US intelligence chief: Russia interfering in French, German elections | Politico.eu – 10 hours ago |

○ NATO and Soros Crossed Russia’s Red Line in Europe
○ Soros-Funded University Pledges to Fight Hungarian Crackdown

I enjoyed reading Jeff Greenfield’s little history of the 25th Amendment, but his editor should have told him that the fact that in 1970 Richard Nixon “was often abusing alcohol and prescription drugs, leading to stretches of incoherence and irrationality” didn’t exactly distinguish him from other politicians or businessmen of the time. If we didn’t live through it, we’ve surely seen a few episodes of Mad Men. In any case, you can listen to the White House tapes of Nixon having conversations with Henry Kissinger and his top aides, Erlichman, Haldeman, Colson, and Dean. They were a den amoral scoundrels, but they didn’t appear to be high out of their tree. Other than occasional glitches, especially once he knew his presidency was doomed, Nixon’s problem wasn’t incapacity.

For Greenfield, the arguments against removing Trump from power using the 25th Amendment are threefold. First, there’s the aforementioned case that we’ve allowed incapacitated presidents to serve before so what’s the problem with letting Trump serve now?

The second is that the 25th Amendment wasn’t enacted for the purpose of removing a president so much as it was enacted to help select a vice-president when a vacancy occurs. This obviously happened when Agnew had to resign and also when Ford became president. This part of his argument isn’t persuasive because it doesn’t matter what an amendment was primarily meant to address so long as the amendment also addresses what we’re concerned with here, which is a Birther president who is manifestly unfit to safely run our government and handle things like a looming crisis on the Korean peninsula.

The third is that, well, it won’t happen so why talk about it?

The notion that Pence and a Cabinet majority will look at Trump’s next tweets or telephonic fulminations and decide he’s not fit for the job is beyond absurdity.

On this last point, I am not going to argue as a predictive analyst that Greenfield is wrong. If you want to place bets, I’d advise you to listen to Greenfield on this subject. On the other hand, the central thing that is absurd is that Donald Trump is the president of the United States. It is a full blown crisis. You can go around pretending that Trump is fully dressed if you want, but he’s not. If you discovered that your child’s school bus driver had taken to wearing a blindfold, you wouldn’t say that it’s absurd to have him removed from his job. And if he managed to successfully navigate the bus route for a few days despite his self-imposed disability, your comfort level would not grow.

The people who are most acutely aware of Trump’s mental deficiencies and titanic character flaws are those who have to deal with him every day, and they’re the only ones who can conceivably go to a Republican Congress and convince them that it’s just not safe to leave Trump behind the wheel.

Trump’s tweets are only a small part of the problem, but they’ve already caused problems with allies like Australia, Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom. His policies and offhand remarks have created unnecessary tensions in places as diverse as Taiwan and Iraq.

So, the solitary point here is that the 25th Amendment is an option and the members of Trump’s cabinet can’t pretend that they don’t have ability to do something to save the country. They have the tool they need, and if the majority of Trump’s cabinet ever goes to Congress and tells them that the president isn’t fit to serve, they’ll only be telling Congress what the Democrats, the Intelligence Community, our allies, and every newspaper editorial board in the country has been telling them.

If they were ever to take that step, they’d have massive support. And, I believe, if James Mattis and a majority of the cabinet went to the Republicans in Congress and said that Trump cannot continue to be our president, that they’d have to listen.

In any case, they’d be much more likely to respond to an invocation of the 25th Amendment than they would be to impeach and convict the president on their own initiative.

This isn’t about what is likely to happen, or some fantasy. The fantasy is that Trump will become saner and more stable, or that he’ll somehow grow into the job.

To be clear, I’m not saying Trump has reached a tipping point yet where his cabinet should feel fully justified in removing him from power. I’m saying that that point will surely come, and his cabinet should be high alert to assure that we’re not having a nuclear exchange near Seoul before they’ve decided to act.