By A Friend
Friday, October 18, 2019
Taibbi, Steyn, et al.: We’re in a Permanent Putsch
We're in a Permanent Coup Matt Taibbi.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup
Mark Steyn on Matt Taibbi:
Matt Taibbi is a man of the left, but he is an iconoclastic one and The Washington Post's recent attempt to #MeToo him has probably made him more so. He's also a much better writer than most lefties, hobbled as they are by the Downton-Abbey-for-progressives rules of identity politics. Ten years ago, I was very admiring of his evisceration of The New York Times' beloved comic figure Thomas Friedman:
Friedman frequently uses a rhetorical technique that goes something like this: 'I was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, "We need better headlights for our tri-plane."' And off he goes.
Indeed Taibbi can do Friedman rather better than the original:
After Thomas Friedman correlates (on the back of a napkin) freedom and the price of oil, Mr Taibbi correlates, rather more plausibly, happiness and the size of Valerie Bertinelli's ass (with accompanying graph).
A lot of us were content to do low comedy a decade back. But these are ever more fevered times and Matt Taibbi has written a sobering piece after three years of what he calls "a permanent coup". The nub of his argument:
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 Democrats, the media and a big chunk of the media are now proposing to impeach and remove the lawful elected head of state on the word of a lone anonymous witness who happens to be a CIA officer working for a rival presidential candidate.
That's banana-republic-level bananas. As I like to say to judges in my endless court cases, a reasonable man should draw reasonable inferences. When hitherto more or less normally functioning levers of power go brazenly wacky, there are two possible conclusions:
a) they really are bananas (the "Trump Derangement Syndrome" theory);
b) they're sane people desperate to avoid the uncovering of something truly awful.
As you'll know from last week's "Outsiders", I'm betting on the latter.
~North of the border, Ottawa's Mister Dressup, unable to get back to the old boot polish for another week or two, is making do with an ostentatious and lumpy bulletproof vest, out of concern "for the safety of my family and for all the Canadians in the room". In which case why's he the only one to get the bulletproof vest? Mr Trudeau puts this down to what he calls "an increase in polarization in election campaigns" - which is a not so subtle way of implying that his political opponents are violent goons who seek to kill him.
That's an odd card to play in one of the oldest and most placid multi-party democracies in the world. It's not as bad as America's "permanent coup" but it is part of the same malign trend: the de-legitimization of political difference.Meanwhile, across the pond in the Mother of Parliaments, we are at the beginning of the last week in which to leave the EU with a deal - or alternatively not to leave at all. As in the United States, there has been a three-year battle from the losing side (here, in a presidential election; there, in the Brexit referendum) to maintain its control of all levers of state power and subvert the other chaps' victory.
Thus, my old boss Boris Johnson presides over a government that cannot govern because it has no parliamentary majority; at the same time, the parliament he does not command prefers to keep him in office without power rather than force a general election. As in America, the civil service, the courts and the media obstruct him ever more openly, and thereby nullify a vote they have never accepted.
There is, however, a critical difference. To return to Matt Taibbi's essay:
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...
And that "open break" has gaped ever wider with each passing month - so that we now think it entirely normal that a foreign president or prime minister cannot have a private conversation with the Oval Office without risking the transcript being on the front page of the papers. The latest wrinkle - the arrest of two Ukrainian-American contacts of Rudy Giuliani - is the usual brazen bollocks from a corrupted Department of Justice: The indictment even redacts the date (page 20, above the signature line) lest it betray the politically motivated timing of its enforcement.
So we live in a world where an unsubstantiated "dossier" of lurid kompromat sluiced by Russian disinformation through a foreign spook paid by the President's political opponent provides sufficient of a fig-leaf for a high-level White House briefing by the head of the FBI:
I said I wasn't saying this was true, only that I wanted [Trump] to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [redacted] and that we were keeping it very close-hold.
So "close-hold" that it was then leaked to the media and the fact that the President was briefed on it by such high-level officials turned out to be the only "news hook" anyone needed - as almost all the heads of the "intelligence community" had planned in advance.
As we see in the UK, Canada, Europe and elsewhere, a permanent state power is ever more comfortable suppressing the possibility of political change. But in America the active partnership between the most lavish and secretive agencies on the planet and the Democrat-media complex is a threat of an entirely different order. Matt Taibbi understands that America can survive a "bad president", but that it cannot survive the normalization of the Comey-Brennan-Clapper-McCabe rogue state.
I find it fascinating that there is a faction of the left that takes strong issue with the Establishment Left because of a fundamental disagreement with them on the impeachment-related matters as well as regime change wars in the middle east.
One believer in that philosophy is Jimmy Dore, whose videos I have been watching a lot of on Youtube.
Their lucidity doesn't seem to extend to identity politics, where they seem to believe in hoaxes such as widespread police brutality, Trump is a racist, yada yada. But the fact that they are dead on correct when it comes to the issues involving the attempts to overthrow Trump (and, more broadly, our system of government), and the fact that forces them to take sides against a huge establishment that is in other respects largely on "the same side" as they are, leads me to feel they very much deserve listening to.
It seems to me there are enough of them to deserve a label for their political faction, but I'm not sure what label is appropriate. The "sane left"? The "pro rule of law left"? (Although they do not seem to believe in the rule of law when it comes to immigration, which is another of their blind spots.)
More on the Taibbi piece:
I read all the comments beneath the piece --- one by Taibbi himself. Below are the best half dozen:
MATT TAIBBI: I can't stress enough that the Russiagate insanity, and specifically the Steele leak, began before Trump took office. If it was not framing exactly it was certainly manipulation of wrong intelligence, on par with using Chalabi's tales to start war.
There are only three explanations for the January 7, 2017 "intel chiefs" meeting:
One, they sincerely believed Trump was a cultivated foreign agent as Steele reported. I don't buy that this is possible. They had half a year at least to investigate these extremely serious claims. If they were true, leaking to CNN and letting Trump take office is an extremely weak response.
Moreover, no evidence to substantiate the idea ever surfaced.
Two: Steele was on some level genuinely reporting rumors he heard, and the agencies merely waved this dicey intel on to the public via leaks (and gave it gravitas with leaks of their meeting) because it was explosive and expedient, advancing political goals they had. This to me is the most likely explanation. A sub-possibility is Steele was duped by Russian disinformation and the agencies either knew this and waved it through, or weren't sure and waved it through anyway.
Three: the agencies had a direct hand in creating the Steele nonsense. I think this unlikely. It's what Trump and Giuliani believe, and it's not completely unsupported, given Steele's relationship with the FBI and Fusion's dubious history, but I have a hard time believing such a Dr. Evil narrative absent hard hard evidence. Still, option #2, i.e. cynically using/leaking wrong intel to cripple an incoming president, would be an awesome corruption/meddling story, beyond anything Trump has done.
CHUCK McCLENON: "What was Russiagate all about, if it was not the agencies framing Trump? If it was not the Deep State constructing deliberate lies in order to protect the Swamp against an intruder. If Trump IS impeached and removed on the basis of a false narrative construed by the IC community, then that proves the Deep State is not merely beyond the law, but the Dark Force guarding the Empire."
MARCYINCNY: "It is indeed frightening. They're perfectly willing to take us all down with the Pequod for any chance to get their orange whale."
NANCO: "...It's so hard for me to understand why my liberal, and especially, my progressive friends don't get this. Even If Ukrainegate does rise to the level of 'high crimes and misdemeanors'— and I'm willing to withhold judgement on that for now— any impeachment hearings are tainted by the ravenous searching for crimes that began immediately post-election. I remember Watergate. The hearings were deliberate and no one, neither Democrat nor Republican — was anxious to impeach. That, as you point out, was not our preferred way to change administrations. I also believe that we are at a critical point. If we do this now, there's no turning back, and a president who makes it through four years will be a rarity."
CHUCK McCLENON: "We've long whispered about the Deep State, assuming that the Intelligence Community should have counter-intelligence responsibilities, out of sight, protecting the Executive branch from moles planted by foreign foes, and that our secret agents would, if necessary, quietly dispatch a Manchurian Candidate. But we assume that he deep state are protecting us from foreign foes, and that the less said beyond that, the better. And we assume they operate out of some sub-basement of the CIA in Langley.
"But what we appear to have here is an alternative version in which the Deep State protects the Domestic interests of the Elite — that group of financial powers of whom nobody went to jail for any misdeeds leading to the 2008 crisis, that group which also happen to control the media which control the boundary lines of permissible political discussion, as Matt has documented in his precious book. Let us suppose that the Washington Swamp works for that elite, serve it and profit from it. And let us suppose that the Deep State are not there to protect the constitutionally designated Executive branch, but to guard and protect the Swamp.
"And so for a candidate from outside of those boundaries to be elected president, that's not merely a threat to the power of the institutional media, it's an existential threat to the security of all the swamp creatures. Alligators are usually solitary and don't usually work in teams, but we suppose they are wired to respond with the same instincts and to swarm and attack the intruder. And since you and I understand that the alligators in the moat, or in the swamp, are there to protect against invaders, and we see them attack, we are conditioned to cheer for the alligators. They are doing their job. And if they are promoting the story that they are protecting us from Russians, all the better.
"But who do the alligators serve? Who can protect us against them? That's the context in which Matt has framed the question, which is the worse choice to lead the country, Donald Trump, with all his known flaws and evils? Or the swamp gators? I heard Rudy Giuliani last week say something to the effect that Trump was elected on the promise of draining the swamp, but none of us has a clue how bad the swamp was. Say it ain't so.
USERFRIENDLYYY: "Russiagate: one big hoax. Leaks about Russiagate: CIA trying to overrule voters with a hoax. Ukrainegate: Not a hoax, but so penny ante that it doesn't even break my top 10 list of things presidents have done and should have gotten impeached and/or gone to jail for. It's not even the worst one Trump has done."
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup
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Trump cannot win at poker with a 7 high card against a "royal flush"--which is basically the hand he's facing at the table.
ReplyDeleteWith the knowledge that he will be dealt the same hand in 2020--AGAIN--why would he keep playing?
Why run again?THAT'S the real question.
--GRA
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"a big chunk of the media are now proposing to impeach and remove the lawful elected head of state on the word of a lone anonymous witness who happens to be a CIA officer working for a rival presidential candidate."
ReplyDeleteTHEY WERE PLANNING TO IMPEACH TRUMP EVEN BEFORE HE GOT THE NOMINATION.