It ain’t what you don’t know …

Posted by Pointman on June 8, 2018 · 19 Comments 

One of my favourite movies is a slightly obscure Western called the Long Riders, which I can recommend highly. It’s a pretty accurate history of the James-Younger gang which probably didn’t reach the fame it should have because of a lack of PR investment at the time it came out, but if you’re a fan of the western movie genre, it has a well-deserved cult status. Directed by Walter Hill, music by Ry Cooder and with four families of capable actors playing the Jameses, the Youngers, the Millers and the Fords, it’s difficult to cock that one up.

There’s a scene where they’re sharing out the proceeds of a bank robbery that’s gone wrong because one of the Millers lost their head, and while that’s being sorted out, Cole Younger and his kid brother are on horseback atop a hill standing watch over the others while they prepare the gang’s escape. His brother asks him, “Why are we on guard? You said the local posse won’t chase us this far”. “They won’t”, replies Cole, “but just once in a while, I’m wrong”.

Like Cole, I long ago realised I can get it wrong and as Samuel Langhorne Clemens observed; it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. I initially got Trump wrong, considering him to be an almost buffoon candidate, but after watching him scythe through his opposition, I quickly realised he was going to win for several reasons I’ve gone into elsewhere.

Having had an interest in politics for most of my life, I have realistic expectations of the people in that area of endeavour. At end of day, they’re people just like us, which means they come with the same failings at times, and yet we seem to hold them to an impossibly higher standard, or at least the commentariat does.

Certainly, that’s a desirable thing for us, but you have to be realistic about these things. I’ve met more than a few people who after getting a rude awakening out of a youthful gullibility in aspirational political rhetoric, turn 180 degrees and they never thereafter trust another politician, to the extent that they take an almost perverse pride in never ever again turning up at a polling booth for the rest of their lives.

We all know how embittering a shattered first love can be, but by not voting, my feeling is if you’re no longer in the game, you’re irrelevant, so don’t whine to me about politicians or the state of politics. In democracies, once every four years or so, we get a chance to vote any politician out of office and back onto the working for a living roster, and boy do they know that. Every politician goes into overdrive around election time, so if you’re pissed off at your local one, by not turning up to vote for his opposition, you’re keeping him in his cushy sinecure.

Putting it bluntly, every elected politician knows they can get fired at periodic intervals.

Certainly, like anyone who had a youthful belief in what politics could achieve, I had my reality wake up call, but in the aftermath and upon reflection, took the position that there would always be some rotten apples in the barrel. You do have to look at each politician and make a value judgment on them, which can be difficult at times since 90% of the art of politics is saying all the right things to your constituency that they want to hear.

The rough rule of thumb I use is that if over a period of time their actions and voting patterns match up to their rhetoric, then I’m probably looking at a decent one. When they don’t match up and they’ve always got a quasi-plausible reason for time after time going back on their promises, my experience is I’m looking at a scoundrel.

On the occasions of note when I see a politician standing by his promises on an important issue, even though it’s costing him what’s called political capital, I know I’m looking at a man of integrity and more importantly, one with an overriding drive to not only represent those who voted for him, but a backbone dedication to give service not just to them, but to an idea of a greater good, perhaps their country, irrespective of the political damage to their career. Those are the ones you decide to keep tabs on.

Compromises have to be made by all politicians, but the great ones have lines which they’ll never cross, which is the essential difference between the scoundrels and the good ones. What’s in between those two extremes is an average person, and the usual to and fro between goodness and human frailty.

Many people tend to think that elected bodies are government in its entirety, but the reality is that they are analogous to the brain running a larger body; the executive organs of government. Law enforcement, the judiciary, the security services and the civil service or administrative departments of government such as the tax collectors.

The universally accepted principle is that these executive arms of government have to act in an apolitical manner otherwise chaos would ensue at every change of administration. Imagine if you will, the laws, their interpretation and their selective enforcement changing after every general election, and you can see why that would be. Without that principle in place, any sort of smooth continuity in governance would be impossible.

It’s a necessary rule but as always occurs, there are occasional abuses of it when a political influence is brought to bear on an executive organ of government to use it for purely political purposes. An example of this sort of abuse would be the Obama administration’s use of the IRS to target political opponents and their families for year after year onerous tax investigations of their returns.

Again, I take the view that also in the executive organs of government, there will be the occasional abuse done by the few bad apples. The people inside these departments are salaried employees who have little or no protection when leaned on by powerful political forces. The classic solution to this problem has always been to promote up the ranks and to the top, strong leaders who could protect their people from such abuses. The civil service mandarins. I won’t go into the details to any extent, but any political appointee who repeatedly insisted on trying to use the department he was put in charge of as a political cricket bat to attack opponents, soon found themselves playing on a sticky wicket.

I watched all Trump’s election speeches on Youtube all the way through because there was no choice; fake news was distorting so badly everything he said on pretty much every occasion. In passing, on one speaking event, too many people turned up, so he gave the same speech twice that night to a second tranche of supporters. Needless to say, that wasn’t reported on by the fake news harlots. By that stage, the only doubt I had about him was if a seventy year old body could take the stresses of being president of the US of A. That unexpected display of stamina dispelled any such concerns.

Watching him, I noticed he labelled situations and people. At a superficial level, he was handing out derisive nicknames, but a nickname that isn’t accurate simply never sticks. On the other hand, if it’s right on the button, it sticks, and he did so many button jobs on all his opponents in that fight, Willie Cicci, a button man himself, would have been envious of such ruthless dispatching of opponents.

On a more serious note, higher levels of cognition always involve the recognition and teasing out of patterns from the general blizzard of daily input. You know there’s something out there, a vague shape in the storm, but until you put a name on it and the discriminants that uniquely identify it, it hasn’t coalesced into a distinct thing. It’s still a part of the general blur.

But, when you label it and correctly categorise its identifying properties, with “correctly” meaning there’s a consensual acceptance by others of its general form, it becomes a real thing and more importantly, becomes a transferable concept, portable, a meme if you like. One of the labels he created and used all the way through the election process was the Washington swamp and the promise to drain it.

I’d written off that term and the whole idea as pure electioneering. It was just an oratorical device, a concept, to get the ignored and media despised elements of basic mom and dad middle America, who felt totally ignored and alienated by a distant Washington, on his side. You could see it playing so well with the people who turned up to hear him speak. It galvanised all that resentment of the forgotten people who hadn’t bothered to vote for years because it wasn’t a choice but a dilemma between virtually indistinguishable candidates of virtually indistinguishable parties, both of which had done absolutely nothing for them in living memory.

That was the second mistake I made about Trump.

What has become obvious to me with each passing day’s batch of fresh revelations, is that the swamp is a real thing. It’s not the few bad apples situation I’d originally taken it to be; it is actually a swamp. There does not appear to have been a single major organ of the executive branches of government that wasn’t deeply subverted, if not fully weaponised, by the Obama administration to spy on and attack any political opposition.

What’s worse is that it wasn’t some mid level bureaucrats who were compromised, but the very heads of departments like Comey at the FBI, Lynch at the DoJ and Brennan at the CIA. These were the leaders, the people who should have been setting some sort of example, yet who acted like they’d been pimped out onto the mean streets of Washington and leapt with alacrity to do their master’s bidding.

One thing leads to another, but in this situation it seems to lead to a lot of others. As one rock gets lifted, there’s a scurrying of even more dark creatures fleeing the light. They’re all lawyering up and cadging for deals. While I never had a particularly high regard for the FBI, I never thought I’d see the day when an ex-Deputy Director of it would be trying to wangle an immunity deal before he gave evidence to a congressional committee.

The corruption appears to be systemic, rampant and utterly shameless. The Attorney General of the United States, the highest law officer in the land, flies into a secluded part of an airport from Washington, has a half hour conversation with the husband of a woman currently the subject of an FBI investigation, and then flies back to Washington. In what twilight zone of jurisprudence is that not a gross breach of any tenuous notion of professional standards?

Even after the meeting is blown, she has the brass cheek to say Hillary’s case was never discussed, all they did was have a friendly chat about the grandchildren. Really? How nice. That’s a lot of trouble to go to just for a chat you could have had by simply picking up the phone. The fact that such a lame excuse was accepted by a bend over and grab your ankles news media speaks volumes. And by the way, news hounds, as far as I can find out, Loretta Lynch doesn’t have any grandchildren. I guess the dark art of checking out a story also died when journalism metastasized into liberal activism.

I mentioned earlier on about politicians essentially getting fired at election time, but when it comes to salaried government employees, it’s pretty much a sinecure. Once they’ve got through their provisional period, they’ve got it made. Nothing short of gross behaviour can get them fired, but given the level of corruption, that’s the only way forward to resurrect the reputations of these sullied departments of state.

Some harsh examples will have to be made, to not only restore the public’s trust in those organisations, but also to serve as a salutary warning to those working within them of the perils of allowing themselves to be used as political footballs. Nothing lasts forever, and that most certainly includes political protection for activities you should never have got up to in the first place. While your former masters are out of office and bringing home $50M book deals, you get to be the one left holding the shit end of the stick, and you soon learn nothing has a shorter half life than political loyalty.

The reality is there actually is a swamp and it’s full of denizens of a self-appointed deep state, but Trump is steadily draining it.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

How to get run over by the Trump juggernaut.

Politicians, thieves and those greedy pigs in between.

The deep state.

The loss of faith in the political class.

Click for a list of other articles.

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