Frankly, I don’t understand why anyone would have a problem with the Deep State removing this guy. Some other guy? Sure.
But not this guy.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Is stupidity an impeachable offence? Right off hand I was thinking GWB of course.
Can anyone be worse to the effects of the Repubs/neocon initiative for the War on
Terror and damage to universal human value and rights of sovereign nations …
All completely foreseeable, which is why when you asked if I was prepared for the consequences of overturning the electoral college (which we both understood was fantasy) that I was already on board with it. So far he’s surpassing even my expectations. I didn’t expect him to appoint so many god damn generals.
The longer he remains in power the more the Republic (and the world) is threatened. No one told Trump to surround himself with “his Generals”. We have effectively no civilian control of the military. Now that part should have been foreseen by all. Why? He promised it! What do people think bombing the shit out of ISIS would entail? Trump having some plan where he oversees the war? Would you listen to him if he said to nuke? I’d hope to whatever Gods there are that the people who push the buttons refuse to do so. And that in itself is completely destabilizing.
Brian Beutler has a great column on this:
Keep the Trump Leaks Coming; The president is too incompetent to serve, and Congress must be pressured into removing him.
He concludes with:
All the more dangerous because Trump knows nothing, everyone advising him has their own agendas, and he loves blowing shit up. But sure, Glenn Greenwald, let’s yell about “the deep state” some more.
If that doesn’t sum up Trump and the Republican base in a single sentence, it can’t be done.
Default on our debts? Sounds good. Science? The base doesn’t do math that’s not used to calculate their tax cuts. Empathy? Long term view? Infrastructure investment? Human investment? Education?
The conscientiousness of maintaining their willful ignorance is truly astounding. So of course the biggest ignoramus around is their Dear Leader. He’s the personification of their collective hate, ignorance, nihilism, and refusal to conform to minimum norms of courtesy.
On that, about how “the base” soldiers on in complete disregard of what we think of as “reality”:
I was at the gym yesterday. Hannity was on. I thought that with Aisles and O’Reily and Shine and Kelly gone, that they might start to ease back towards what we think of as “reality”. It’s NOT happening. It was more unhinged than ever. The words were spilling out of Hannity’s mouth at warp speed, Unmasking, Susan Rice, Hillary, Deep state, slow coup, ISIS, Clinton Foundation(!), Mueller is a criminal, Comey is a criminal, George Soros, Seth Rich murder. It wasn’t in sentences, it was just a rant, with these trigger words coming one after another, on and on. And I only watched for maybe 3 or 4 minutes. It was like getting a remote hands-free lobotomy.
Then Kellyanne Conway came on and let us know that Donald Trump was working 24 hours a day to make America Great Again, and how the bad people need to stop hindering the great man. I wanted to watch, to learn more about these people and their strange ways and beliefs, but I turned it off after about 30 seconds, I couldn’t deal with it, it was just sad and upsetting.
It’s not slowing down. If anything, with Trump on the verge of a catastrophic failure, the pace of the right wing noise machine is picking up, and with the new alt-right additives it’s more toxic than ever. This is how those voters maintain their willful ignorance, to answer your question.
This article in the Washington Monthly spells out our danger. The last two paragraphs are the killer, he ended up agreeing with the two leaders!
Somebody leaked those transcripts. That in itself does huge damage to the presidency, which means someone in the WH believes Trump is such a danger, it’s worth hurting America’s position in the world to stop him.
Every story about Trump convinces me more and more he has early onset Alzheimer’s.
.
Many people want to blame Trump’s major malfunctions on a neurological disorder. I’m inclined to believe he’s got deep psychological disorders which may or may not have a neural cause.
The answer is unknowable. It’s quite apparent the President’s disorders will remain untreated while the morally bankrupt conservative movement and its leaders continue to enable his absurd narcissism.
His narcissism is on display all the time accompanied by vindictiveness like when he goes after all things Obama.
The main reluctance is:
(1) It is a bad precedent to do it openly when it might already be occurring discreetly.
(2) President Pence shorts the circuit tying Trump to the GOP until Pence proves himself a liability.
With the history now in, it is an interesting exercise to determine who exactly took down Richard Nixon. Was that a Deep State job or a job against the Deep State? Which part of the Deep State?
Secrecy corrodes democracy and accountability. Absolute secrecy corrodes democracy and accountability absolutely. Sessions better be careful what he wishes for. He might get exactly that.
No it doesn’t. There was no more a leftie faction of the deep state then than there is now. The others were fine with Nixon. The CIA merely declined to take the rap for the Watergate break-in because they hadn’t done it and were in enough other hot water at the time. There is simply no way to discount CRP that was an organized team Nixon operation. The “plumbers” stumbled and got caught. Even then they kept their traps shut until Sirica began handing down the tough sentences and McCord chose to squeal. From then on it was Nixon shoveling to cover-up and others, mostly Congress, that couldn’t decline to investigate.
Mark Felt was Associate Director of the FBI. Surely that qualifies as being part of the Deep State. Felt is generally attributed as being the “Deep Throat” who guided Woodward and Bernstein in their investigation of the Watergate Burglary and surrounding Nixon excesses.
To say that there are factions within the Deep State does not mean that there are hidden “lefties”. I would not characterize Hayden and company relative to Trump as “lefties”, just a different faction.
The CIA is not the only organization in the Deep State. Nor are the “17 agencies of the intelligence community”, which includes the FBI. Select members of Congress have their place (Dana Rohrabacher has moved through several different roles all working deep state policy instead of public policy.)
Apparently Felt got FBI information before either Patrick Gray or Judge Sirica. He did not specifically leak it but dropped hints to Woodward and Bernstein that allowed them to amplify the information when it did appear before Congress or hinted as related information.
What exactly was Mark Felt up to with his deep background leaks to Woodward and Bernstein?
Uh, no. A criminal case was at the front end of everything referred to as Watergate. DOJ and the FBI were involved from day one. (Mitchell resigned within a week.) Felt knew what had been collected, but so too did FBI investigative agents and the assigned prosecutorial team. Here’s a good summary of the developments.
This is spot on:
At best Felt only advanced the timeline for public awareness. (A public that didn’t really care much about it.) L Patrick Gray, Acting FBI Director was also talking/sharing — to the WH – and Nixon did subsequently nominate him for the job. His Senate confirmation hearings in February 1973 did not go well. (Senators by then knew too much.) Gray resigned that April. As did AG Kleindienst who appears not to have interfered with the burglary prosecution but didn’t keep Congress informed of what he knew.
There was too much institutional competence at the FBI and DOJ and Congress and the fortuitous bad luck of drawing Sirica as the judge for Nixon and his appointees to shut it down.
Out of curiosity, which of the Deep State folks mentioned in Robin Wright’s piece were not public and outspoken backers of Hillary Clinton in 2016?
That is, which have become outspoken since the inauguration? Has there been movement of will as well as opinion against Trump?
They “remove” this guy?
But not this guy?
Or his many allies?
Sump’n’s wrong with the “removal” system.
If you know what I mean.
And if you do not know what I mean?
You are beyond help.
Later…
AG
This is a silly post even for you, Art.
We didn’t do anything about Kissinger, so we should, what, leave Trump alone?
Or we should talk about Hillary or Obama sitting next to Kissinger? I think you’re right, I’m going to tune it to Hannity to learn more about that Huma Abedin Gmail problem!!!
—————-
It’s a textbook example of “Whataboutism” Arthur.
–>Hat Tip to MtAiryGirl.
If Kissinger had been tried and convicted for his many crimes…which he was not at least in large part due to the Clinton/Obama axis…this country wouldn’t be mired in the deep shit in which it now wallows.
Keep on betting on the bad guys, bt1138. You will always lose eventually.
Karma is long, deep and serious. On alllevels.
AG
Хорошего дня
This is America, Buddy.
Speak Spanish!!!
AG
P.S. Pendejo!!!
Yes Arthur, because before one of them was an adult and while the other was a 36 year old lawyer who was dating and then married to a not even yet up and coming future president, Kissinger was doing very bad things. The people who let him get away with those bad things should totally be named after two people who wouldn’t have power for more than 30 years after those bad things happened and were not in any way shape form or fashion in power at the time any of those decisions were made.
If the group of people existed 30 years before “Clinton/Obama” could even begin to affect or effect policy, it’s illogical and blatant propaganda to name the group after those people.
Good luck with those.
That’s ag you’re addressing, there.
He’s a seer. He sees what we merely well-informed and rational inhabitants of the Reality-Based Community are incapable of.
Wake the fuck up and believe whatever ag hallucinates (then barfs out here).
“which he was not at least in large part due to the Clinton/Obama axis…this country wouldn’t be mired in the deep shit in which it now wallows.”
Clinton/Obama Axis? Are you fucking kidding?
This country is mired in whatever it’s mired in because one reason and one reason alone: because the wealthy like it that way.
You have revealed yourself an amateur hack linking the “Clinton/Obama axis” (what ever the fuck that is) to Kissinger not being behind bars.
Bet on it.
They had their chances. They allied themselves with Kissinger and his whole worldview instead.
So it goes.
AG
Arthur’s FSB tactic of the day: Whataboutism.
“Whataboutism is a propaganda technique formerly used by the Soviet Union in its dealings with the Western world, and subsequently used as a form of propaganda in post-Soviet Russia. When criticisms were leveled at the Soviet Union, the Soviet response would be “What about…” followed by an event in the Western world.”
Also, for a really interesting real-time read on propaganda check this out from #TeamDeepState
http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/
Make of this what you will:
https://twitter.com/4everNeverTrump/status/894202255041101825
Well the obvious. The more they get a taste for it the more theyll do it regardless of whether its warrented. Then again, its pretty clear that Turkey would have benefitted from their coup succeeding so its not sleays the worst option.
You might be right about Turkey, but consequences of coups have a habit of being unpredictable. Look what happened with the overthrow of Mossadegh, for example.
A point, and as illustrated by Thailand coups breed more coups as it becomes a more acceptable politiical act.
Although the quantity of information that we have about Trump and his family has grown significantly since the inauguration, the quality of it is unchanged since the campaign began in February of 2016 and since long before. Trump is who everyone always knew he is.
All of the institutional players that you keep counting and calling on to “do something” about Trump have, and have had, all the information and more that they need to come to a conclusion about him. Yet aside from a few individual exceptions, they have not acted in any way, and in no case have they acted in any coherent way. This speaks to nothing more or less than an institutional breakdown that seems to be increasing rather than diminishing as time passes.
The elected officials who have the means to remove Trump from office lack the motivation. The “deep state” actors who have the motivation to remove Trump from office lack the means. That was the case before the election just as it is the case now. Nothing has changed.
Trump is restrained by three things (in order):
Were it not for these he would have done much more damage by now than he has already done, and he’s done plenty. It’s impossible to see how Trump overcomes any of them; whether any of them can overcome Trump is an open question but until one does, or until Nov. 2020, he’s President. If we can’t understand that, it’s our problem not his.
Of course it could also speak to the fact that the institutions acting to check Trump are doing so under the rule of law and the accepted constitutional order. Seems pretty clear that first Comey and now Meuller represent the proper lawful vehicle for removal (barring an amendment 25 intervention), and the investigations appear to be proceeding with as much haste as is possible for such things.
Don’t personalize it. That’s not one of ours, it’s one of theirs.
Trump doesn’t exist. The Republican Party (including its constituencies) exists.
There has never been a regime that could be decapitated. It doesn’t work that way.
Trump’s people, who were Reagan’s people, didn’t vote (in either case) for the individual. They voted for the Republican Party platform: not the published one, but the one circulated behind closed doors by word of mouth: the one that begins and ends with headbreaking.
Here is how it goes, in every time and place.
First, you decide you want to break some heads. (“Decide” is not the right word for what is purely an emotional impulse.)
Second, you decide whose heads to break. The victims are chosen for convenience and can be replaced with other victims, if necessary, in the blink of an eye.
Third, you invent a pseudophilosophy to justify breaking those heads. This activity is declining today. Formerly a voluminous and mock-rigorous pseudophilosophical apparatus was considered necessary. The Nazis had millions of pages about the Jews to draw upon, going back centuries. Today, the threshold for violence is much lower and the respect for verbal discourse is lower.
Fourth, you build or capture a political/propaganda apparatus for seizing power.
Fifth and last, you pick a figurehead, a “charismatic” leader who originates nothing but who is chosen to exploit the fatal human tendency to take megalomaniacs at their own estimation of themselves.
Trump is the fifth step. The problem arose at the first step. No one understands the second step, as witness the doomed and wasted efforts to mitigate the situation of one victim group at a time.