Moving purposefully towards the head of the fish.

Posted by Pointman on March 9, 2018 · 26 Comments 

If you’re like me, and decided you have better things to do than keeping an obsessive track of what seems to be an endless stream of day after day detailed revelations about the corruption and lawlessness of the Obama years, the occasional summary of the events so far that fits the pieces of the puzzle into some sort of coherent picture is very helpful. I have to say, what impresses me about such summaries is the punctilious research, objectivity and fairness to a regime which nearly by definition the people putting together such timelines are naturally hostile to.

In the years in question, the fourth estate lay like a cur about the heels of a master it adored and all critical faculties fled, taking with it its traditional responsibility to protect the people and the constitution from the creeping illegalities of the totalitarian forces that always lurk behind some political masks of urbanity. In essence, the cynical opinions always under the sheep’s clothing of some elected politicians to the basic precepts of a democracy that they in their secret heart of hearts despise.

Once the press watchdog allowed itself to become their willing lap-dog, it became so much easier to achieve political aims by any and all underhand means, while all the time protected by a shield of unquestioned probity, because the supposed questioners had become cheerleaders. The more the administration got away with, the more unbridled and excessive its behaviour became. That’s the invariable pattern of systemic political corruption. It grows exponentially.

So once again, and not for the last time, when the traditional guardians of civil liberty all fell asleep at their post or were beguiled away from it by allowing their personal politics to overrule their integrity, it fell to the unpaid militiamen to spring to the defense of the essential founding principles of the nation, while seemingly the whole of the body politic and its compliant media was in a circle jerk that meant nothing to anybody outside the beltway of a frighteningly out of touch Washington.

The direction they were taking the country in, by hook or crook, and dispensing with any consultation nonsense with their idiot constituencies, suited them and their beautiful self-image of themselves perfectly.

As for Joe Schmo and his bovine wife with their brood of squabbling brats – screw ’em. Their usual combination of dim-witted passivity and disinterest in the face of the great political events moving around them would ensure they’d all fall into line with their usual apathy and tramp along behind whatever was happening like barely sentient specimens of humanity who would always need a gangmaster with a cattle prod to get them shuffling along in the approved direction.

It’s all your basic arrogant corruption and you do have to have a slightly cynical nose, which I have, to get a faint whiff of it from an individual or organisation but once you get that little lick of that fetid aroma, no more than a modicum of looking into them and the affairs of the supposedly above reproach organisations they’re at the top of, reveal the full-bodied stench of rotting corruption that’s unmistakable.

The bad news is that it’s very hard to bring either the corrupters at the top of the political hierarchy or the greedy hands-out beneficiaries of it to any notion of justice, never mind a guest appearance in a criminal trial where an overwhelming weight of evidence would convict them even before a jury of complete retards.

From whatever angle you look at it, people like Hillary Clinton should not only be facing a motion of strong censure from Congress, but answering criminal charges in a court of law. In her case, an old fashion charge of something as serious as treason against her country would be an easy case for any proficient prosecutor.

But those people appearing in a court to face criminal charges would be problematic in the current political climate. You do have to protect the offices of state, otherwise it’s an attack on the infrastructure of that state. The charges might be quite justified but the perception of the reasons behind them could easily be seen as settling old political scores. It’s a contentious move unless it enjoys an unusual degree of popular support amongst the electorate. If bringing a criminal to justice involves dragging down a high office of state into disrepute, what do you do when you win power and wish to appoint someone to that post? Who’d want that poisoned chalice?

As always, let’s attempt to get our head space into the environment they were operating in. There are a number of real problems they have.

The first is a natural consequence of the habit, alluded to earlier, of corruption growing bolder and bolder as it goes on unpunished for year after year. Mid-level minions look around, see everybody else, especially those above them, on the take or getting away with blue murder, and think I want my slice of the cake. It’s a natural process that percolates corruption all the way down a hierarchy. A fish rots from the head downwards, to use an old saying which never loses its pithy truth with the passing of the decades.

So, after eight years, there are a lot of people with something to hide; either undeclared income, because money is always at the bottom of it, or the favours rendered in exchange for it which though having the stamp of authority, such as the oppressive Kafkaesque IRS audits of Obama’s political opponents and their families year after year, were highly questionable, if not just plain illegal.

If there’s one thing to take away from reading this article – is that it’s always about money. People spin a good yarn about the best of intentions or noble cause corruption, but that’s always for the consumption of a gullible jury who are being fed shovel fulls of nice lies like that by the shyster lawyers engaged by white-collar criminals trying to escape a jail sentence.

The perfect conspiracy involves just you and nobody else. Pull in a co-conspirator, and whichever way you look at it, you’ve now got a liability you didn’t have before. My friends will never betray me is on the headstone of nearly every failed conspiracy there’s ever been. When the number of people roped in gets too large, one of them will inevitably prove to be the weakest link should a fickle world turn against you and a good prosecutor is let loose on the whole thing.

Like the good predator he needs to be, he’ll circle the herd, always compressing them closer and closer together in mounting fear of which one he’ll pick out, but eventually he’ll sniff out the weak one and flip them, and then suddenly ranks have been broken and it’s panic in Detroit as everyone starts to rat out everyone else for that magic plea bargain.

There are simply too many people paddling around the Washington swamp, like a pod of turds floating around in your toilet that just can’t be flushed away once and for all. Inevitably, one of them will be the first domino to fall over, and because it’s a long chain with inevitably more than a few weak links, one of them will break. Good old metaphor murder by mixed mashing with a bit of alliteration thrown in as a bonus.

That’s never a pretty sight, but it’s coming down the road towards us. Despite a lot of virtuous face-saving speeches from each paddling rodent’s lawyer on the steps of the court about his wonderful client, who was always, be it remembered, some sort of innocent victim of circumstances suborned into a political crime culture who’d just had to go with the flow, it’ll actually be save my ass time and screw everybody else.

In the ordinary way of things, the problem of somebody turning state’s evidence isn’t a problem just as long as you’re sailing along sustained by the blissful assumption that you’ll retain political control for the foreseeable future. When you’ve suborned not only the organs of law enforcement who might come after you, but also the judiciary who control them, you can tap dance your way across the massed empty skulls of the marginalised protesters of your nefarious activities, towards a handsome retirement package and your account of modest gratuities safely tucked away in the Caymans.

There’s a thing in Rugby Union and American football called a scramble defense. It has a name, but nobody can really teach a player how to do it because it’s what you do as a defender when as a team you’ve been much too aggressive attacking the opposition who have possession of the ball. You run at them too early or too recklessly, and a fleet-footed carrier on the attack side spots the hole in the defense and is through it like an electrified jack rabbit, or a rat up a rain pipe as they say in the Antipodes.

From then on, it usually comes down to one gifted player on the defense who’d seen the potential disaster unfolding unusually early, and is already running the 45 degree intercept course down field to prevent the try nobody else is in a position to do. The whole stadium becomes spectators of two people; someone running towards the line with the ball, and the one man who’s on a possible intercept course to stop him. It’s only usually a truly gifted defender who wins that foot race.

But also, it can mean when you had possession of the ball and were doing an overly aggressive play and unexpectedly lost possession of the ball, usually through an intercepted pass, and now have to suddenly go from being the aggressor to suddenly restructuring what was an attacking posture to an impromptu defensive one. That’s also called a broken play. Either way, you had a brilliant game plan, it’s all turned unexpectedly to shit, and now the name of the game is damage limitation. Smother it, kill it, contain it.

Pretty much, that’s what you’re seeing with one revelation after another about the Obama years – it’s a scramble defense of a broken play. Nobody is planning anything except how to stay out of a court of law. They fully expected Hillary Clinton to win the presidency, and because they’d become so assured and arrogant, and felt invincible after so many years in office doing absolutely whatever they liked, they really didn’t spend much effort concealing the questionable activities that had become almost routine for them.

Unfortunately, a new player entered the scene, and one who played the political game a lot better than any of them, and therefore took the presidency. He cruelly revealed them as the incompetent politicians they actually were and now as equally sloppy conspirators. They may not see it yet, but they’re yesterday’s men, but one thing they do know is there’s a lot of scandals to be buried as a result of those yesterdays. Trump has proven to be the perfect storm coming ashore at Washington and scouring out the swamp. He’s jogging to the touchdown line with the ball and the few half-hearted people chasing him stand no chance of bringing him down, but there’s a lot more happening than just that.

All the scams, schemes and outright criminal and illegal behaviour generated by eight years of corruption, have little in the way of a cover story. Everything, all the paper trail and evidence is there after a minimum amount of investigation, because the criminals in question never imagined in their wildest dreams that they’d ever have to answer for any of it; EPA corruption, IRS weaponisation, Benghazi, selling fissionable materials to what is still an enemy nation, bribing Iran, operation Fast and Furious, FISA abuse, bugging Americans with impunity and some other things that haven’t come to light yet.

Because they’re so exposed, they’ve been obliged to shred or delete the paper trails, or in other words, blatantly destroy evidence. While that’s bad enough, the real scandal is that most of the people engaged in these highly illegal and prosecutable activities are either supposedly respectable Officers of the Court or law-enforcement professionals.

I wrote an article about a year before he was elected as president, because after getting over what seemed to be a universal snigger reaction at his chances of making it, and running the slide rule over him, I slowly came to realise he was strolling his way into the Oval Office. Depersonalised analysis of any significant player is not about what you read about them, hear about them, nor even what it’s reported they say themselves – it’s about proven track record.

How many times have they succeeded? How many times have they failed? How many times did they come back from failure to win in the end? When I scoreboarded Trump on that simple factual basis, I realised how formidable an opponent he actually was, especially in the relatively easy context of political mediocrities like Clinton, Obama and the non-entities he ran against in the primaries.

His winning card is always to invite his enemies to underestimate him, simply writing him off as some sort of brainless village idiot who manages to fluke his way through one sticky situation after another and yet somehow always managing to blunder his way through in the end.

If you’re interested in body language, hunt up on Youtube the concession speeches of all his GOP opponents in the primaries announcing their withdrawals as he picked them off one by one. Turn off the sound and look at their faces and it’s always one of two messages to be read, depending on how politically acute they are. The dummies are truly mystified, still trying working out just what the hell just happened to their shot at the title, but the political sharpies are thinking – I never saw him coming until it was way too late.

Again, his pattern if you watch it, is to make some outrageous statement or unexpected move. The effect is always to keep his opponents on the back foot. They rarely get to initiate anything, it’s always him landing the first unexpected blow, and as they almost reflexively by now start playing a scramble defense, he gets on with progressing whatever measure he’s really interested in while the opposition complain about getting their moral pussy grabbed to a furiously nodding media nobody is actually listening to anymore.

They’re up against someone who enjoys winning, and after a year of him quite simply knocking the Bejazus out of them, they’ve developed a loser’s mentality. They’re like a leaderless team that’s lost its way.

There is very definitely an element of what my grandmother called old devilment about him, which is an engaging failing, if that, which endears him to Mr & Mrs Schmo who are so sick and tired of a priggish judgmental media which seems to live on the planet Zaarg, or failing that Butte Montana (and not even the good end of there by the way).

If you look at his two-year political career (yes, that’s all it is), and run any sort of even vaguely objective scoreboard on him, the successes and failures, the conclusions about him are there in your face and illustrative of how cleverly he’s played the game. I’m not a convinced fan of IQ scoring, because intellectual imagination is much more important, but I’d put him somewhere in the 145 area. After two years, and most amazingly still getting away with playing the oaf, the aging Dem leadership still think they’re dealing with an Alzheimer victim, whereas the reverse in certain cases is becoming alarmingly apparent with each passing day.

You see, his intent is to bring down the whole temple, and because he’s in no hurry, nobody will get overlooked and the destruction will be biblically complete, because be in no doubt, his true intent is to socially re-engineer America. Everybody, including the State Department and all those Spooks queuing up for a congressional seat for the Dems because they think he’s only after the DoJ and its fallen creature, the once proud FBI, think again. He’s after all the swampers, and you won’t be getting any free pass – he’ll be getting around to you in due course after he’s completed his evisceration of your cat’s paws. JFK may have said he wanted to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces, but Trump’s intentions are a lot more devastating than that I suspect.

The intelligence community in America have made one colossal blunder after another, especially in foreign intelligence gathering, and yet coming from an incestuous background of East coast ivy league smugness, consider themselves to be the real power behind the throne, and are prone to bouts of exercising that power in covert defiance of public policy in furtherance of what they arrogantly consider to be what’s truly best for America.

I said in a previous piece, that when you’ve a personal fortune conservatively estimated at $10 billion, it buys a lot of investigation of your opponent’s misdeeds, but can also be used to bribe open a lot of what might be thought to be sealed lips. I’ve no doubt, Trump reaching down the back of the settee to get his hand on a few nickels and dimes, knows every grubby secret of both the Obama and Clinton years. You see, once your former master is out of power, and the new president’s men drop in on you for a friendly chat, you go with who’s now got the power, because your old boss can’t protect you anymore. It’s survival 101.

Looping back to my observation about you can’t attack offices of state, that’s a problem for someone like Trump who I’m sure is still determined to get Obama, and it seems to me he’s found a solution. To digress, Obama a number of years ago humiliated him in public, him and more importantly his family and most particularly his memory of his father, so from one viewpoint, we’re definitely talking revenge. He may be of American/Scottish descent, but scratch him and it’s pure New York Corleone when you get right down to the bedrock. All the debts will be settled.

Having been largely complimentary about Trump, and these thoughts please recall are only my personal assessments of him, let me tell you something about him which I know to be true. He never forgives a slight, and because I’m afflicted with the same character flaw, I think I can see where he’s going and how he plans to get there.

If you watch him being interviewed, he’s a good listener. He rarely interrupts unless it’s an aggressive conversation, and he’s particularity good at that sort of unscripted debate warfare. But, in the main he listens to someone until they finish, and if a decision is required, he makes it on the spot. It’d be all too easy to gain the impression he’s an impulse thinker, when the opposite is actually true. The reason he trounced Clinton and the others, is quite simply, their thinking doesn’t extend much beyond their next sound bite in the current news cycle, whereas his strategic thinking is always ambitious, always innovative and very definitely long-term. That’s how you get to be worth $10 billion and as a coda to your life, el Prez at an age when most men are retired or dribbling in care homes.

There’s only one man he’s after but he can’t go directly after him. What he can do, is leak, indirectly provide or furnish people in the new media with all the dirt he’s collected on Obama’s minions. One by one, they’ll be discredited by a seemingly endless train of fresh scandals, and by cross-referencing their lies to Congress or hearings, and we’re talking not so much about the plainly corrupt Comey, McCabe, Mueller, Lynch, but all of the underlings as well. Everybody in that hierarchy chart heading this article is going to get squeezed, and in a full blaze of publicity.

They may or may not end up in some court to answer charges, but after two or three years of being dragged before various investigations, they won’t have much left in the way of reputations or credibility. What’s important is the effect on public opinion of every Obama underboss and minion always being in the centre of some corruption investigation for the next two or three years.

If everybody under him, every man Jack or Jane of them, is perceived to be totally corrupt by a jaundiced and jaded electorate, thoroughly disenchanted by a grand sounding Office of State staffed by such low-lives and integrity-free types, going after an ex-president for real won’t seem so extreme a thing to do. That’s the two to three-year plan.

To all those clowns out there screaming impeachment, I’d like to remind them the last president to be impeached was Bill Clinton, and he also got banned from even practicing law, neither of which stopped him completing his tenure as President of the United States. Trump can string along people like Mueller and the likes of him for years, because they’re window dressing playing to a media balcony nobody believes anymore, and therefore of no particular relevance.

It’s that little drip drip of revelations every week, for months and then years, that are the death of a thousand scandals he’s got planned for Obama.

I rather suspect whatever Trump has in mind for Obama, doesn’t involve a graceful exit from the political landscape, and Obama, by niggling away at the edges of the Trump administration rather than doing the usual ex-presidential retirement from politics, is showing his usual arrogance and stupidity, and confirming Trump’s killer instincts to finish him off once and for all. It will be an exit with dishonour, but a couple of years down the line. Obama is already in Trump’s taken care of column, though a few years hence as events unfold. Yesterday’s man.

It’s MAGA that’s important to Trump.

©Pointman

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