So here we are, reaching the "what did the President know and when did he know it?" in the FISAGate scandal.
For you young-uns, the "what did the president know" meme was made famous by then Sen. Howard Baker (R-TN) during the hearings of the Watergate committee headed up by dear old (actually very canny) Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC).
Of course, the FISAGate thing will never get as big as Watergate, partly because Democratic scandals are never as big as Republican scandals. The mainstream media make sure of that. And besides, FISAGate cannot be a big thing, because that would mean that President Obama was involved and that would be racist.
Yesterday, texts between FBI love-birds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page revealed that "potus wants to know everything we're doing."
Well, well, well. And here I thought that President Obama never knew anything unless he'd read about it in the newspaper.
As this self-inflicted scandal starts to knife into Democrats, it is important to get one thing clear.
High government officials are not what you are taught to believe: dedicated public servants, highly qualified experts, keen analysts, men of the people, and all that stuff.
They are idiots. They are fools, knaves, and weaklings stumbling around trying the clean up the latest fine mess their fools, knaves, and weaklings of bosses have got them into.
By bosses, I am thinking, of course, of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Knowing that these two were supposed to be the one-two First Black President and First Woman President is bound to tell you something about their personal intellectual qualities.
Now I don't know if the whole FISA court shenanigans was a four-stage deep state plot to influence the 2016 election, as Conservative Tree House seems to think, or whether it was just a Keystone Kops affair of idiots tripping over themselves. It really doesn't matter now.
But I will tell you what. The "brilliant" idea of the Trump-Russia collusion thing will go down as the biggest mistake in recent American history. What if the Obama administration had been using the FISA court to spy on the Trump campaign? The Republicans would never have raised it after winning the election, because it would be too hard to give it traction without the help of the mainstream media. The only way to be sure that Republicans would investigate it would be to back them into a corner with a Trump-Russia special prosecutor investigation, because it just makes it a bit easier to make sense of the foolish Trump-Russia conspiracy meme.
However, I do think that the Republican investigators do seem to know what they are doing, and they have been quietly working away for the last year building a trap for the Obama administration Heffalumps to fall into. Why do I think this? Because things seem to be falling into place with curious regularity on the FISAGate front.
One thing that is curious to me is the choice of Carter Page as the reason for the FISA court application. As information comes out it appears that Carter Page was an FBI informant and seems to have been used in counterintelligence against the Russians. This is a man that Ann Coulter calls Agent 000. (Er, is that Agent Double-Oh Zero or Agent Triple Zero?). I suppose that Carter Page was just the convenient name that happened to be around. I mean, you wouldn't want to compromise real intelligence investigations with a dead herring like Carter Page. Plus, the only reason he was associated with the Trump campaign was apparently, according to Coulter, that nobody in the foreign policy community would have anything to do with Trump, dahling. So the Trumpists were stuck with a fellow not quite out of the top drawer, old chap.
All this is to say that regimes and dynasties all have their sell-by date. That's because the scions of the revolution aren't quite as sharp as the original revolutionaries. Stalin was not as smart as Lenin, although certainly just as brutal, and Gorbachev was totally lacking in the brutal ruthlessness that a true tyrant needs.
Our present progressive elite has been around more or less since the end of the US Civil War, and the world we see around us is the result of their political agenda to create a wise and compassionate administrative state. But today's progressive scions really don't know what they are doing or why. They are just Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls from good families that learned their lessons well.
If you listen to their propaganda, you will hear that they have heroically tamed the capitalist (and now racist sexist homophobic) beast and saved capitalism (and the white patriarchy) from its own worst instincts.
But I think that our progressive elite has merely looted the modern economy, like any conqueror, to reward its supporters. Eventually they will run out of other peoples' money and then the fun will begin.
In the old days the political elite was confined to its necessary role as protector against existential perils like the Mongols. That was merely because the pre-industrial state could not support a government sector that extended much beyond defense; it just did not have the money.
But today's elite has looted the economy to pay pensions to grandpa, health care to grandma, free education to Johnny, and a welfare bureaucracy to keep the poor out of the way. And now they are having a problem coming up with an encore. Meanwhile their government-employee supporters are looting government services like police and fire and education to pay for their well-deserved retirements.
The elite's self image of educated and evolved experts wisely helping the oppressed and the marginalized has had an amazing run. But now it is challenged by Trump, who is offering an alternative narrative.
Whereas the progressives have done a great job splitting off the working class and now minorities and women from the mainstream of American life, Trump is proposing to unify the whole country around the narrative of celebrating America, good ordinary America and Americans, and anyone can join.
It is going to be really interesting to see if he can pull it off. There is one thing that is going for him. Lefties like Stalin and Hitler resorted to the nationalist meme because they realized that in the modern era it was the only way to unify people to their standard. You can say that Stalin and Hitler were monsters, but they surely knew how to play the game. People belong to nations now, and nothing else works as well.
For you young-uns, the "what did the president know" meme was made famous by then Sen. Howard Baker (R-TN) during the hearings of the Watergate committee headed up by dear old (actually very canny) Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC).
Of course, the FISAGate thing will never get as big as Watergate, partly because Democratic scandals are never as big as Republican scandals. The mainstream media make sure of that. And besides, FISAGate cannot be a big thing, because that would mean that President Obama was involved and that would be racist.
Yesterday, texts between FBI love-birds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page revealed that "potus wants to know everything we're doing."
Well, well, well. And here I thought that President Obama never knew anything unless he'd read about it in the newspaper.
As this self-inflicted scandal starts to knife into Democrats, it is important to get one thing clear.
High government officials are not what you are taught to believe: dedicated public servants, highly qualified experts, keen analysts, men of the people, and all that stuff.
They are idiots. They are fools, knaves, and weaklings stumbling around trying the clean up the latest fine mess their fools, knaves, and weaklings of bosses have got them into.
By bosses, I am thinking, of course, of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Knowing that these two were supposed to be the one-two First Black President and First Woman President is bound to tell you something about their personal intellectual qualities.
Now I don't know if the whole FISA court shenanigans was a four-stage deep state plot to influence the 2016 election, as Conservative Tree House seems to think, or whether it was just a Keystone Kops affair of idiots tripping over themselves. It really doesn't matter now.
But I will tell you what. The "brilliant" idea of the Trump-Russia collusion thing will go down as the biggest mistake in recent American history. What if the Obama administration had been using the FISA court to spy on the Trump campaign? The Republicans would never have raised it after winning the election, because it would be too hard to give it traction without the help of the mainstream media. The only way to be sure that Republicans would investigate it would be to back them into a corner with a Trump-Russia special prosecutor investigation, because it just makes it a bit easier to make sense of the foolish Trump-Russia conspiracy meme.
However, I do think that the Republican investigators do seem to know what they are doing, and they have been quietly working away for the last year building a trap for the Obama administration Heffalumps to fall into. Why do I think this? Because things seem to be falling into place with curious regularity on the FISAGate front.
One thing that is curious to me is the choice of Carter Page as the reason for the FISA court application. As information comes out it appears that Carter Page was an FBI informant and seems to have been used in counterintelligence against the Russians. This is a man that Ann Coulter calls Agent 000. (Er, is that Agent Double-Oh Zero or Agent Triple Zero?). I suppose that Carter Page was just the convenient name that happened to be around. I mean, you wouldn't want to compromise real intelligence investigations with a dead herring like Carter Page. Plus, the only reason he was associated with the Trump campaign was apparently, according to Coulter, that nobody in the foreign policy community would have anything to do with Trump, dahling. So the Trumpists were stuck with a fellow not quite out of the top drawer, old chap.
All this is to say that regimes and dynasties all have their sell-by date. That's because the scions of the revolution aren't quite as sharp as the original revolutionaries. Stalin was not as smart as Lenin, although certainly just as brutal, and Gorbachev was totally lacking in the brutal ruthlessness that a true tyrant needs.
Our present progressive elite has been around more or less since the end of the US Civil War, and the world we see around us is the result of their political agenda to create a wise and compassionate administrative state. But today's progressive scions really don't know what they are doing or why. They are just Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls from good families that learned their lessons well.
If you listen to their propaganda, you will hear that they have heroically tamed the capitalist (and now racist sexist homophobic) beast and saved capitalism (and the white patriarchy) from its own worst instincts.
But I think that our progressive elite has merely looted the modern economy, like any conqueror, to reward its supporters. Eventually they will run out of other peoples' money and then the fun will begin.
In the old days the political elite was confined to its necessary role as protector against existential perils like the Mongols. That was merely because the pre-industrial state could not support a government sector that extended much beyond defense; it just did not have the money.
But today's elite has looted the economy to pay pensions to grandpa, health care to grandma, free education to Johnny, and a welfare bureaucracy to keep the poor out of the way. And now they are having a problem coming up with an encore. Meanwhile their government-employee supporters are looting government services like police and fire and education to pay for their well-deserved retirements.
The elite's self image of educated and evolved experts wisely helping the oppressed and the marginalized has had an amazing run. But now it is challenged by Trump, who is offering an alternative narrative.
Whereas the progressives have done a great job splitting off the working class and now minorities and women from the mainstream of American life, Trump is proposing to unify the whole country around the narrative of celebrating America, good ordinary America and Americans, and anyone can join.
It is going to be really interesting to see if he can pull it off. There is one thing that is going for him. Lefties like Stalin and Hitler resorted to the nationalist meme because they realized that in the modern era it was the only way to unify people to their standard. You can say that Stalin and Hitler were monsters, but they surely knew how to play the game. People belong to nations now, and nothing else works as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment