The US is in a permanent coup, by Matt Taibbi, who usually writes for the left-wing Rolling Stone magazine. Even the thoughtful left is getting concerned about what is going on.
My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.
The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped. …
Imagine if the boot was on the other foot:
Imagine if a similar situation had taken place in January of 2009, involving president-elect Barack Obama. Picture a meeting between Obama and the heads of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, along with the DIA, in which the newly-elected president is presented with a report complied by, say, Judicial Watch, accusing him of links to al-Qaeda. Imagine further that they tell Obama they are presenting him with this information to make him aware of a blackmail threat, and to reassure him they won’t give news agencies a “hook” to publish the news.
Now imagine if that news came out on Fox days later. Imagine further that within a year, one of the four officials became a paid Fox contributor. Democrats would lose their minds in this set of circumstances.
The country mostly did not lose its mind, however, because the episode did not involve a traditionally presidential figure like Obama, nor was it understood to have been directed at the institution of “the White House” in the abstract.
Instead, it was a story about an infamously corrupt individual, Donald Trump, a pussy-grabbing scammer who bragged about using bankruptcy to escape debt and publicly praised Vladimir Putin. Audiences believed the allegations against this person and saw the intelligence/counterintelligence community as acting patriotically, doing their best to keep us informed about a still-breaking investigation of a rogue president. …
Why it is so dangerous:
It was also a bold new foray into domestic politics by intelligence agencies that in recent decades began asserting all sorts of frightening new authority. They were kidnapping foreigners, assassinating by drone, conducting paramilitary operations without congressional notice, building an international archipelago of secret prisons, and engaging in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans. We found out in a court case just last week how extensive the illegal domestic surveillance has been, with the FBI engaging in tens of thousands of warrantless searches involving American emails and phone numbers under the guise of combating foreign subversion.
The agencies’ new trick is inserting themselves into domestic politics using leaks and media pressure. …
I don’t believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.
CIA/FBI-backed impeachment could also be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Donald Trump thinks he’s going to be jailed upon leaving office, he’ll sooner or later figure out that his only real move is to start acting like the “dictator” MSNBC and CNN keep insisting he is. Why give up the White House and wait to be arrested, when he still has theoretical authority to send Special Forces troops rappelling through the windows of every last Russiagate/Ukrainegate leaker? That would be the endgame in a third world country, and it’s where we’re headed, unless someone calls off this craziness. Welcome to the Permanent Power Struggle.
This is not business as usual. Something new and nasty is happening in the USA.
Impeachment will very likely happen: the Democrat controlled House will vote to impeach, regardless of the flimsiness of the charges or the non-seriousness of the “crime.” But the impeachment will not get the two-thirds majority required in the Senate to remove Trump from office.
Meanwhile the impeachment witnesses are anonymous “whistleblowers,” coached in secret by Democrats and the intelligence services. The Democrats demand they stay anonymous, to “protect their safety.” Undoing an election using anonymous accusers — how third-world is that?
Charles:
This is like the communist show trails of the 30s under Josef Stalin.
What do we have?
- No public testimony, so the only things we hear are leaked by the Democrats to their allies in the media. If we had public testimony we could make our own judgments.
- Trump can’t have his legal representatives cross-examine the witnesses.
- Trump can’t call witnesses that would testify in his favor. The only witnesses who will testify are those that favor the Democrats.
If this is not seen as a kangaroo court then what would you call it? Nixon and Clinton were given these rights. Why isn’t Trump?
Hitler cheated and won. It looks like the Democrats and their allies in the media might too.
