Treason.

Posted by Pointman on February 2, 2018 · 33 Comments 

With the publication of the FISA memo, you’re going to be getting finely detailed analyses, retrospective construction of the pertinent timelines, what’s actually in it and so on. Instead of following that route, I’d like to make some general observations, drawn from my own experiences dealing with similar but more modest situations, about how the events detailed in it could ever come about, who I think are the other culprits ducking furiously the fan-propelled ordure, the eternal question of what is to be done, and last but not least, what are the deeper implications of the insight America has just had into the inner workings of what President Trump rightly named the Washington swamp.

As usual, Trump has used the opportunity to its most devastating effect. It’s another Trump Zugzwang, with no non-damaging way out of it for the opposition. He’s been extremely careful to stay remote from its production but its timing, or rather the long delay in bringing it to the public, has worked beautifully to both build a massive feeling of expectation, and all against the counterpoint of various parties such as the FBI, DoJ and the DNC insisting it shouldn’t be published (guilty conscience), names should be redacted (hide the traitors), demanding the people who produced it be fired (plain silly at this stage) and of course cobbling together their very own memo about something or other that they seriously think is going to get a minute’s notice from anybody but CNN in the coming days.

As Julian Assange remarked today – “I find it remarkable how comprehensively the Democrats, DoJ and FBI have played into Trump’s hands over the Nunes memo. By conspicuously trying to hide information they have aligned themselves against the public, drawn suspicion and imbued the memo with totemic power.”

There are times when the full bad news can only be broken to someone in successive stages, otherwise it would be too much to take in at one go. Like eating an elephant, it can be done, but only mouthful by mouthful. The contents of the memo will come as a large shock to a lot of decent Americans not particularly aligned along any political divide, but who still believed with a few reservations in the integrity of the offices and major branches of the state. I’ve known as much as anyone outside Washington can, of how corrupt the Obama years were, especially in its second administration when it seemed to be able to get away with anything.

All the bad signs were there to be seen.

There’s a saying most people know – power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I agree completely with the second part of it, but the first part requires certain prevailing conditions for it to be equally true. If the person or persons wielding power do so within a framework of accountability, then them having power doesn’t necessarily lead to them becoming corrupt. When such people operate within an environment completely devoid of any accountability, then corruption will ensue as surely as night follows day.

Real accountability is a meaningless concept outside of a real democracy, and within that framework it is the duty of certain groups of people to keep a watchful eye on the activities of an elected government and its executive organs. Those particular groups ensuring some accountability are the ones you’d expect.

The judiciary, of whom Ronald Reagan famously said only exists at times to protect the people from their own government, turned a blind eye. That man had many true insights into the real functions of organs of American governance. The judicial system failed lamentably, because they allowed themselves to become nothing more than appointed puppets of an administration who cherry picked its way through every field of candidates looking for the compliant ones who had friendly political beliefs. They never had a problem finding suitable candidates.

The political opposition parties, a part of whose usual job is to highlight any abuses of power which might occur, were mute. They were totally ineffective through a mixture of incompetence and having no stomach for a fight, especially the latter. They just coasted along, refusing to engage in any conflict, and just relying on the eternal turn and turn again of politics. Eventually, after enough years, the Democrat administration would fall out of voter favour and they’d take over from them. Notice that the last thing they were considering with such a saturnine approach was America or God forbid, the welfare of its people.

None of those parties did their job in the eight years of economic, political and societal decay that characterised the Obama era. However, the traditional group on whose shoulders should have rested the main burden of enforcing accountability, the press, essentially gave the administration a free pass for eight years. There was never to be any holding to account for failures, no criticism of blatant corruption and everything was spun as sunshine and light. The only exception was to be the character assassination of anyone who dared to note that the regal Obama wasn’t wearing any clothes.

The Obama era was eight years of industrial decay, rising unemployment, running down of military capability, political corruption on a grand and blatant scale, oppressive use of the executive branch such as the IRS to intimidate political opposition, illegal wiretapping and bugging of opponents, rising crime, deliberate and unprecedented stoking of racial tensions, a seemingly ever-growing and unstoppable opioid crisis and a foreign policy shambles that resulted in America being at war somewhere around the globe, and with no realistic prospect of winning, for every single day of those eight years.

Even the Secretary of Defense in the last month of the administration, when asked how many wars America was currently entangled in, replied he didn’t quite know. For eight solid years, the administration was never brought to task by the mainstream media to defend that litany of successive disasters, blunders, corruption and abuses of power.

There was absolutely no hand brake of accountability to stop the administration corrupting both the judicial and executive branches of the government, meaning the DoJ and the FBI, and that’s exactly what it did. It bred a compliant attitude amongst its appointees who’d do whatever was asked of them by the politicians, irrespective of whether it was illegal or unconstitutional. All the oaths to protect the constitution and the laws of the country were dumped in favour of career advancement, and the prospect of joining some inner circle of powerful people in the Washington swamp.

What it produced over nearly a decade was a cadre of insiders spread across all the organs of government whose only allegiance was political and that to the Democrat party, and who not only saw themselves exalted and above the law, but in their heart despised those little Americans.

As an example of the kind, James Comey’s twitter account has a header “a higher loyalty”, and what that actually means is the loyalty to the higher ruling elite, which comes in well above such petty things as America and the constitution. It was he, when he was still head of the FBI, who passed notes to a friend of private meetings he was having with the president, so they could be leaked to the press. Since Trump fired him, he’s since been invited to lecture on ethics at a college …

The attitude of that cadre was and still remains – you vulgar little people can go to a polling booth and do your silly little voting, but it means nothing to us because we’re the ones who actually run the country, whether you know it or not. We, us, your masters and betters, will never give up until we restore the country to the control of its natural rulers. Not only was the stink of that arrogant corruption present before and during the presidential election, but it has continued unabated into the first year of the Trump presidency.

In one year, Trump eviscerated ISIS, successfully fronted up Putin and North Korea, pulled manufacturing back to America, got nearly a quarter million Americans back in work, reduced black and Hispanic American unemployment to levels never before seen, re-budgeted the armed forces with an increase of $56 billion, slashed job-choking regulations left right and centre, put the country on an unprecedented 4% pa growth curve, rocketed the Dow Jones on to successive record-breaking highs, gave the American worker a huge tax cut and most importantly put some chest-swelling pride back into saying you’re an American and one who no longer feels obliged to go around apologising to the rest of the world about it.

How was that little lot covered by the mainstream media? It wasn’t, it was ignored, as the FISA memo was. It’s non-news, snopaked out of the non-stop 24/7 media stream of jabbering airheads hyperventilating over nothing for all they’re worth. Instead, it’s become critical to report how many scoops of ice cream Trump had when treating his extended family to a private dinner to celebrate winning the presidency, or whether his wife is wearing high heels. The American mass media took a huge gamble and lost, and what they lost is irreplaceable – the trust of the ordinary person.

People will need to be dismissed from government posts with complete loss of any benefits accrued over however many years of employment. Organisations like the FBI and DoJ have fallen into such disrepute, that only a brutal and very public, root and branch cutting back of its leadership structure stands any chance of restoring the respect and trust they formerly enjoyed, and I most certainly do not exclude elements of the intelligence community from the great purge with its attendant criminal trials.

Why wasn’t the president apprised by his own intelligence services of such a senior management and widespread campaign of treason against him? They were either blissfully unaware of it, which I simply cannot believe, or were cynically content to turn a blind eye to such treason for their own reasons. They too, should not be allowed to slink away without a thorough investigation of what involvement they had, or what they chose to ignore.

Throwing a few middle-management minions on the mercy of the courts will simply not do, because they got their orders from more senior players, who’re the senior figures, the corrupters who should be standing trial. The argument will be made, and in most circumstances is one I support and have supported in the past, is that the high office they occupied, such at Attorney General of the United States, has to be protected.

You have to protect the office of state by not bringing it into disrepute, even if that’s at the cost of allowing some lowlife who momentarily occupied it to slither out of any fitting retribution. It’s like the army saying – you salute the rank, not the perhaps indifferent man who might be wearing a superior officer’s uniform.

But I think in this case, any injury to an office of state will have just have to be borne, because what these men were up to was conspiring against the will of the American people, the constitution and willfully breaking laws with impunity. That’s called treason. There are no nicer words for it and the laws pertinent to it are still on the statute books and active. But that’s not my deepest concern about these people because I know their type. They are not nice people.

Every admission you get out of them is like pulling teeth one by one, and the one thing you can be certain of is that when they tell you that’s all they know, there’s surely more and they’re just lying to you, so you keep going at them until you’re absolutely sure you’ve squeezed them dry. I can assure you, the memo is only the beginning, there’s a lot more to come out, and I think it could be even worse.

There’s something else I know about them and that’s where their limits are. They have no limits. They will pursue their objectives and neither law nor constitution will deter them until those objectives are reached. They failed to stop him being elected, they then failed to sabotage his administration, they’re going to fail to stymie the wave of investigations into their activities, so there’s only one more thing left to try, and I wouldn’t put it past them.

They are true fanatics, so the very real possibility of arranging a political assassination of the president simply cannot be ruled out. Only a continued, detailed and thorough investigation of their activities in Washington can give assurance that no plans of that nature, however tentative, were discussed.

Once in a while, you get to see the real face of a corrupt and arrogant person, and for a fleeting instant all the well-groomed urbanity is stripped away when they lose their habitual iron control. It nearly always happens when their authority is questioned or their pride offended. It’s their true face.

That’s the sort of face you’re looking at above.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Zugzwang.

How to get run over by the Trump juggernaut.

The great purge of the Republican party begins.

Find them, fix them and then destroy them.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with Donald Trump, FISA, FISA memo, James Comey, Julian Assange, Politics, Trump