SUMMARY: Joseph R. McCarthy and Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky were right. We are surrounded by traitors, spies, saboteurs, and wreckers. Last year I warned about the dangers of the systematic betrayal and sellout of this country that seem to be underway at the highest levels of the Trump campaign. Though my words were pooh-poohed at the time, particularly by Democrats who were more afraid of being thought tainted by “McCarthyism” then they were of losing what might be an existential election in our history, my fears have been borne out. Every policy undertaken by the Trump administration has been tainted with treason. The policy direction of the United States under Donald Trump is not in America’s interest, but that of Russia. The revelations of the nature and extent of Trump and his associates’ connection with the Moskovsky Kremlin are rapidly approaching critical mass for probable cause to believe the treason has been committed and that Trump and his personnel have committed it. Trumpism, as I warned last year, is treason.
Joseph R. McCarthy and Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky were right. We are surrounded by traitors, spies, saboteurs, and wreckers.
In June, 2016, I posted in this blog a warning that Trumpism is treason. The better part of year later, my warning has been vindicated and largely borne out by events. The amount of aid and comfort which has flowed from the Trump, or should I say Trumpov, administration to the Kremlin has been astonishing, frightening, and, thankfully, the subject of increasing scrutiny by the media. By the media, whom gospodin Trumpov has insistently characterized in Leninist terms as “enemies of the people.”
Last June, I suggested that gospodin Trumpov’s uncritical support for Brexit was intended to provide aid and comfort to the Kremlin’s ongoing Kriegßpiel against the West, to the Kremlin’s effort, underway since 1949, to fracture the Atlantic alliance and the generations long project of European unity that was French statesman Robert Schuman’s lifework.
I suggested also that gospodin Trumpov’s ongoing and continuous critique of NATO, and his uncritical admiration for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, together with his “policy” formulations on the American position in Asia were all intended to affect a diminishment of American stature, American authority, and American power, not only in the region but also worldwide.
To these ominous and lowering warning signs we may now add a further and much more comprehensive bill of particulars.
The steady drip, drip, drip of revelations concerning the contacts of people in or close to the Trumpov administration, including quondam National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Reichsleiter Jared Kushner, Atty. Gen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, campaign advisers Paul Manafort, J.D. Gordon, and Carter Page, Trumpov sons Uday and Qusay (Donald, Jr. and Eric), Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Commerce Sec. Wilbur Ross, and Trumpov dirty trickster Roger Stone, with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Russian banking/business interests, or agencies of the Russian government itself, has continued, slowly accumulating toward a critical mass which would justify any federal grand jury in the country in returning a true bill of indictment for treason against some, or all, of the senior leaders of the Trumpov administratsiya. (Since we appear to have been the victims of a hostile takeover, we may all have to start learning to Russianize our vocabulary.)
In short, we have been betrayed at the highest levels by those who now occupy the highest levels of government in this country.
As Thomas Jefferson once put it, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
THE BORDER WALL: By insisting upon building a foolish and useless border wall along the Mexican border, Trumpov and his administratsiya have managed single-handedly to degrade our relationship with México to the point of rupture. Relations between the White House and Los Pinos are at a low point not seen since the days of Woodrow Wilson and Victoriano Huerta. The prime beneficiaries of any rupture between the United States and México are, of course, Beijing and the Kremlin. The red Chinese and the Russians will be happy to occupy the vacuum engendered by the diplomatic falling out between Washington City and México City engineered by Trumpov and his alt-right racist, Russophile, supporters.
TRUMPCARE: The Republican effort to roll back Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act has come to be known, is nothing more than a gratuitous effort to undo one of the cornerstones of Barack Obama’s legislative legacy. However, by depriving millions of Americans of healthcare, the administratsiya not only condemns those millions of Americans to sickness and possible death, but it also provides aid and comfort to the Kremlin in the process. It is in Russia’s state interest if millions of Americans are too sick to participate in the American economy or to stand watch at the walls of the West. A sick America is a weak America. A weak America is one that lacks sufficient strength to withstand the lascivious oglings of Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man, with whom, Rudyard Kipling once warned us, we should make no truce.
THE END OF INTERNET PRIVACY: The extent to which the Kremlin benefits from the end of Internet privacy could not be more clear. By permitting Internet providers to sell the search history of subscribers, the Trumpov administratsiya has extended an engraved invitation to phony business concerns fronting for Russian intelligence, or to American law enforcement, to buy from Internet service providers information which would otherwise be barred to them by American trade regulations or, in the case of American law enforcement, by the Fourth Amendment.
THE DONALD’S UNCRITICAL ATTITUDE TOWARD VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH: Gospodin Trumpov’s unwillingness to say anything at all even slightly critical of the Russian strongman strongly suggests, to the point of probable cause to support criminal prosecution, that the allegations contained in the so-called Steele dossier are at least partially true, and that the Russians have assembled a considerable amount of kompromat on gospodin Trumpov which renders him susceptible to blackmail, and thus to Kremlin control.
THE DONALD’S CURIOUS LACK OF UNDERSTANDING OF THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ATLANTIC ALLIANCE: If insulting our neighbors immediately to the south was not bad enough, The Donald’s insulting behavior toward German Chancellor Angela Merkel stands as yet another demonstration of his status as the Kremlin’s poodle. Our relationship with the Bundesrepublik has been a foundation of our foreign policy for nearly 70 years. Indeed, our commitment to the Atlantic alliance and our till-recent wholehearted support of the European unity project have been part not only of our foreign policy, but also of the foreign policies of the rest of the world as well. By behaving toward Chancellor Merkel like a wiseguy from a Mafia protection racket, gospodin Trumpov has not only demonstrated his fundamental lack of respect for our Atlantic alliance partners, but also his fundamental preferential option for the thug in the Kremlin. If this does not give aid and comfort to the Russian state, then nothing does.
THE DONALD’S HOSTILITY TOWARD CRUCIAL AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS: Now, a certain reasoned skepticism toward the institutions of American civil society is not, in and of itself, treasonable. One may criticize the judiciary if one disagrees with the reasoning of a judicial opinion or with the proclivities of a judicial nominee. But what one must not do, particularly not if one occupies a high-ranking post in the executive branch of the government, is to attack the legitimacy of the judiciary per se. By attacking federal District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, impugning his integrity because the Hoosier-born judge presiding over the Trump University fraud case is of Mexican heritage, and by attacking “so-called” District Judge James Robart for ruling against him in Washington v. Trump, gospodin Trumpov has given aid and comfort to the Kremlin through his outrageous contempt of court, by which he intended to, and did, call the legitimacy of the Courts of the United States into question.
In addition to attempting to delegitimize the Courts of the United States, The Donald has also given aid and comfort to the enemies of freedom worldwide by attacking the American media, one of the freest and most fearless in the world. The freedom of the American press is one of the greatest, noblest attributes of our society, its freedom to speak truth to power is an essential component of American liberty and formidable to tyrants only. Once again, attacking the legitimacy and the critical structural role of our media does nothing to help the American people, but instead gives a boost to Vladimir Vladimirovich and his Kremlin thugs.
One could go on with a lengthy bill of particulars against gospodin Trumpov and his administratsiya; at the risk of sounding like Soviet show trials prosecutor Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky, every single thing this administration does is touched by and tainted with treason and betrayal. If there are “spies, saboteurs, and wreckers” at every level of the federal government, it is only because gospodin Trumpov and his associates have worked to place them there.
But as much as there are indeed spies, saboteurs, and wreckers at every level of government in the United States and the West, Americans still don’t like to contemplate that possibility. Indeed, Democrats, members of my own party, have been so conditioned over the last 60 years to reject and oppose anything that smacks of “McCarthyism” that the administratsiya and their Republican fellow travelers on Capitol Hill and throughout Washington City have managed to co-opt “McCarthyism” into their arsenal, using it as a weapon to try to shut down any efforts by Democrats or left-leading media to call the nation’s attention to the systematic treason that is being perpetrated inside the Beltway.
Because we have been so conditioned to reject anything that smacks of “McCarthyism,” we Democrats tend, when confronted with allegations that we are involved in some sort of so-called witch hunt, to go into a crouch and piss all over ourselves, floating away on waves of our own fear pee, terrified of being thought complicit in “McCarthyism” or witch hunting. Our reluctance to embrace the hard teaching that Joe McCarthy was right to be worried about subversion (even if his methodology and execution were morally blameworthy), or the equally hard teaching that sometimes subversion is real, and that it extends to the highest levels of government, crippled Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
When the Donald openly asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, that should have been an immediate disqualifying moment. His party either lacked sufficient courage or sufficient fundamental loyalty to this country to tell The Donald that he could no longer be their standard bearer. Though Trump’s call was accurately characterized at the time as manifesting criminal intent, the GOP chose to put party over country, to put the Kremlin over the Capitol, to all intents and purposes running up the Russian flag over the Capitol building and Trump Tower.
Despite such obvious GOP disloyalty to this country to invite Russia, and of course WikiLeaks to commit plundering, criminal forays into the DNC, into Hillary Clinton, and, indeed, into the email accounts and Twitter feeds of loyal Americans everywhere, the Clinton campaign was too fearful of the decades of “anti-McCarthy” conditioning to which Democrats had subjected themselves to take the gloves off and proceed to destroy Trumpov so comprehensively that The Donald would have been a grease spot on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower by the time the proceedings were over.
Instead, Hillary let herself be guided, nay, misled, by the counsels of cowardice which preemptively equated any attack on gospodin Trumpov with McCarthyism and witch hunts. The Clinton campaign knew or should have known that the weapon of “McCarthyism” would be deployed against them no matter what they did. Indeed, WikiLeaks and the traitor Julian Assange --who have never had anything at all even slightly unkind to say about Russia or Vladimir Vladimirovich– were quick to deploy exactly such a weapon.
What Hillary and her campaign staff should have done would have been to take a leaf out of the Republican book, coming out forthrightly with a ringing declaration that the country was in danger, and that Joe McCarthy had indeed been right.
By pulling their punches, by not exploiting the endless opportunities Trump had given them to shape the narrative, by constantly letting themselves be put on the defensive, the Hillary Clinton campaign managed to lose an election they were overwhelmingly favored to win by every single polling outfit in the country.
But the piss poor performance of the Clinton campaign is not our subject. The fact remains, as has been suggested hereinabove, that we have been, and are being, betrayed and sold out at the highest levels. The direction of American policy is not in America’s interest, but in Russia’s. We may only hope that before this country slips away from us entirely, our besieged and beleaguered institutions will rally against the Russian traitor and usurper currently residing in the White House.
This country faces an existential crisis.
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
John Benoit, An Appreciation
Summary: The death of Fourth District Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit came as a shock to the political community in the Coachella Valley, but sadly, not as a surprise. In a year in which we have been bereft of such people as Glenn Frey, Prince, and Carrie Fisher, we in our Pleasant Desert must add John’s name to that doleful litany. If 2016 sucks, we find ourselves forced here to embrace the suck, swallow hard, and say goodbye to John Benoit.
Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit died earlier this week. His passing offers a curious parallel to the experience of his predecessor in the Fourth Supervisorial District seat, Roy Wilson, who also died in office.
I first met John Benoit in early 2003, when as a newly elected and installed City Councilmember for Cathedral City, I made the semi-obligatory pilgrimage to Sacramento to attend the League of California Cities orientation for incoming elected city officials. Part of my task while there was to introduce myself to the various elected officials in the Assembly and the Other House representing Cathedral City.
Among them was then-Assemblymember John Benoit, representing an adjacent district to my own. Though one of my colleagues was at pains to out me to the Republican Assembl member as a liberal Democrat, her effort to stir up animosity between us backfired. As I left John’s office, leaving my impatient colleague in the corridor outside, John and I quietly assured each other that on matters where common ground was possible, he would be happy to work with me and my colleagues.
That was the beginning of a political friendship between we two Francophones that lasted until John’s death. We both had discovered that, at least in his office in Sacramento, the American tradition, inherited from our British forebears, of political civility and bipartisan cooperation was not yet dead.
In due course, John left the Assembly after being termed out and then, when Roy Wilson passed away, leaving an empty Fourth Supervisorial District seat, John was the logical choice to succeed him. John resigned his then-seat in the state Senate and returned to the Valley to take up Roy’s mantle. When the time came for John to seek election to the seat for a full term in his own right, I was happy to offer him my support.
I did so because, notwithstanding the partisan tribalism that has come to infect our national politics, my experience with John at the state and local level had been positive, beneficial, and informative. Though a number of local Democrats took exception to my crossing the aisle to support John’s candidacy, I did so because I felt that he had demonstrated a pragmatic ability to listen to, and work with, Democrats at the local level. It was my pleasure, during the supervisorial campaign, to offer John such counsel as I could in his race.
When John came up for reelection in 2014, I was happy to support him again, though I was heavily pressured by local Democrats to support termed-out Assemblymember Manuel Perez. I again opted to proffer my support to John because I had formed a good working relationship with them, because he was a known quantity, and, above all, because his district staff looked like California. By that, I mean that his district staff literally included all sorts and conditions of Californians. Native American, Anglo, African American, Latino, straight, queerfolk, Republican, and Democrat alike. I could not say the same thing about Manuel Perez when he was a member of the Assembly. For me, as an openly queer man, the diversity of John’s office staff spoke volumes about the authenticity of his commitment to represent the entirety of his richly diverse constituency.
Moreover, John’s constituent services were top drawer. One never had the feeling that constituent services were only available to contributors, to fellow Republicans, or to members of a particular favorite ethnic or identity grouping. John’s offices did constituent services the way constituent services are supposed to be done; and having referred more than one client to Supervisor Benoit’s office, I was pleased by the reports that came back to me from them.
As County Supervisor, John managed that increasingly rare feat in local politics; he was, despite his Republican affiliation, truly “trans-partisan” in his approach. By “trans-partisan” I mean that he was able to transcend partisanship and the political tribalism that have marred our country so badly in recent years. In my working with John, even when he was in the Legislature as a partisan official, he could find common ground with even a liberal Democrat on issues that were simply too important to see through a partisan lens. After all, potholes don’t take a blind bit of notice of the partisanship of the driver whose day they ruin.
On issues of partisan politics, we could disagree agreeably, sparring with each other but never descending to ugly personal issues or angry triumphalism. And when we sparred, we remained terrible friends and amiable adversaries.
It was a pleasure to have been able to number John Benoit among my friends. I shall miss him terribly.
Requiem Æternam Dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat super eis. Amen.
Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit died earlier this week. His passing offers a curious parallel to the experience of his predecessor in the Fourth Supervisorial District seat, Roy Wilson, who also died in office.
I first met John Benoit in early 2003, when as a newly elected and installed City Councilmember for Cathedral City, I made the semi-obligatory pilgrimage to Sacramento to attend the League of California Cities orientation for incoming elected city officials. Part of my task while there was to introduce myself to the various elected officials in the Assembly and the Other House representing Cathedral City.
Among them was then-Assemblymember John Benoit, representing an adjacent district to my own. Though one of my colleagues was at pains to out me to the Republican Assembl member as a liberal Democrat, her effort to stir up animosity between us backfired. As I left John’s office, leaving my impatient colleague in the corridor outside, John and I quietly assured each other that on matters where common ground was possible, he would be happy to work with me and my colleagues.
That was the beginning of a political friendship between we two Francophones that lasted until John’s death. We both had discovered that, at least in his office in Sacramento, the American tradition, inherited from our British forebears, of political civility and bipartisan cooperation was not yet dead.
In due course, John left the Assembly after being termed out and then, when Roy Wilson passed away, leaving an empty Fourth Supervisorial District seat, John was the logical choice to succeed him. John resigned his then-seat in the state Senate and returned to the Valley to take up Roy’s mantle. When the time came for John to seek election to the seat for a full term in his own right, I was happy to offer him my support.
I did so because, notwithstanding the partisan tribalism that has come to infect our national politics, my experience with John at the state and local level had been positive, beneficial, and informative. Though a number of local Democrats took exception to my crossing the aisle to support John’s candidacy, I did so because I felt that he had demonstrated a pragmatic ability to listen to, and work with, Democrats at the local level. It was my pleasure, during the supervisorial campaign, to offer John such counsel as I could in his race.
When John came up for reelection in 2014, I was happy to support him again, though I was heavily pressured by local Democrats to support termed-out Assemblymember Manuel Perez. I again opted to proffer my support to John because I had formed a good working relationship with them, because he was a known quantity, and, above all, because his district staff looked like California. By that, I mean that his district staff literally included all sorts and conditions of Californians. Native American, Anglo, African American, Latino, straight, queerfolk, Republican, and Democrat alike. I could not say the same thing about Manuel Perez when he was a member of the Assembly. For me, as an openly queer man, the diversity of John’s office staff spoke volumes about the authenticity of his commitment to represent the entirety of his richly diverse constituency.
Moreover, John’s constituent services were top drawer. One never had the feeling that constituent services were only available to contributors, to fellow Republicans, or to members of a particular favorite ethnic or identity grouping. John’s offices did constituent services the way constituent services are supposed to be done; and having referred more than one client to Supervisor Benoit’s office, I was pleased by the reports that came back to me from them.
As County Supervisor, John managed that increasingly rare feat in local politics; he was, despite his Republican affiliation, truly “trans-partisan” in his approach. By “trans-partisan” I mean that he was able to transcend partisanship and the political tribalism that have marred our country so badly in recent years. In my working with John, even when he was in the Legislature as a partisan official, he could find common ground with even a liberal Democrat on issues that were simply too important to see through a partisan lens. After all, potholes don’t take a blind bit of notice of the partisanship of the driver whose day they ruin.
On issues of partisan politics, we could disagree agreeably, sparring with each other but never descending to ugly personal issues or angry triumphalism. And when we sparred, we remained terrible friends and amiable adversaries.
It was a pleasure to have been able to number John Benoit among my friends. I shall miss him terribly.
Requiem Æternam Dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat super eis. Amen.
Sunday, December 25, 2016
CHRISTMAS, CELEBRATION OR REBUKE TO SINNERS?
Summary: Christmas is always a conflict at this time of year. Is it a celebration, or a rebuke to sinners? This Christmas, as we await with bated breath coming of an authoritarian, nay, Fascist, regime in Washington, we realize, perhaps more than ever, that it must be both. Our Savior called us to repentance and self-examination, and he also called us to a gospel of radical inclusiveness in which we love our neighbors as ourselves. To live that kind of gospel is necessarily to foreclose the approach of Donald Trump and his supporters, an approach that finds expression in exclusion, in comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. Today we recall that Jesus came into the world not only to reconcile us to God but to recall us sharply from the errors which made necessary this altogether singular divine intervention in our human history.
It’s Christmas.
This year, as on just about every year of my adult life, I find myself retreating to my office, on the theory that in a silent office, with no phones ringing, no mail delivery, and no other interruptions, I might be able to get some work done.
What began as an ad hoc need to find some time to do some ordinary work back at Christmas, 1989, has become very much a shibboleth since then. It is, I suppose, by way of saying “Bah, humbug!” to a crassly commercialized time of conspicuous consumption is beginning advances every year a little bit further into the liturgical season of Pentecost.
This year, I find in the Christmas season, or at least in the way we Americans do Christmas, less to celebrate than ever before. I find myself cringing at the way Donald Trump and the Republican Party have managed to appropriate the phrase “Merry Christmas,” turning it into a war prize in the annual phony culture war that ineluctably crops up at this time every year since that fascist Bill O’Reilly invented a so-called war on Christmas in order to boost ratings for Fox News.
Now, the Trump people have taken “Merry Christmas" and turned it into an ugly, triumphalist war cry, intended to remind everyone that in Donald Trump’s ‘Murica, we had all better be prepared to toe the line, or else.
Yet, despite the temptation that rises unbidden in my mind to respond to every “Merry Christmas,” Trump-tainted or not, with a snarl of “Bah, humbug!” I find myself confronted every Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with visible reminders that this day is supposed to be something different.
Seeing yesterday a homeless man crossing an intersection near my office, wending his way with a kind of sad, weary dignity, from one side of the street to the other, it came home to me forcibly that, as a Christian, a Catholic, an Anglican, an Episcopalian, I profess and confess a deep and abiding faith in a God Who took human form that we sinful humans might be reconciled to God. God made for that holy purpose an icon of Godself to draw all humankind to God.
And seeing that homeless man, I also remembered the words of the Lucan infancy narrative, and their powerful description of a couple caught up in the bureaucratic toils of an occupying power in an occupied territory who had, when the time came for the Blessed Virgin Mary to be delivered, no place to lay their heads.
Across more than 2000 years, the Lucan infancy narrative, with its central, profound theme of the paradox of power pouring itself into powerlessness, has become and remains one of the most precious possessions of the Western, nay, Christian mind. It is a story known to the entire Christian Republic. It tugs at our heartstrings, because it awakens in us a sense of compunction and compassion for the baby Jesus in the manger. It speaks, in that sense, less about awe then about “aww.”
Yet, perhaps we should bring more awe to our understanding of the story. As the shepherds in the fields gaze with awe upon the infant God in the manger, so, too, should we tell the story of those blessed events in tones of hushed awe, for the Savior of the world is at hand, come, let us adore Him!
But, in rejoicing at this climactic act of divine intervention in human history, we should not allow ourselves to believe that we in any way have deserved this offering of divinity. For we do not deserve anything of our own merits, lost as we are in Original Sin, a sinfulness ever more obviously on display since November 8. What we see, instead, is a love offering, made by a passionate God, Whose passionate love for us is passionately expressed in the Incarnation, passion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ our Savior.
For if the world were not lost in sin, it would not have been necessary for God to pour God’s very essence into human flesh in the form of Jesus Christ. In that regard, the Incarnation we celebrate at Christmas stands as much as a rebuke as anything else. Because, in truth, the world has always organized itself very much without reference to the love to which God calls all of God’s children. Indeed, when we consider the events of November 8, 2016, in the United States, we are forced the conclusion that not only does the world organize itself without reference to the teachings and the faith to which God calls us by becoming Incarnate from the flesh of the Virgin Mary in Jesus Christ our Savior, but that in this sinful society, we have chosen to organize our world in flat defiance of the radically inclusive love of God and neighbor for which the suffering Savior was willing to die on the Cross.
The faith which we profess and confess as Christian people, both individually and as a Christian Republic, is about faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love, summed up in the radical inclusiveness which we Christians are called to witness and live not only in the Christmas season, but also on every day of our lives. Instead, we seem to have embraced a faith based upon hate, radical exclusion, and ugly triumphalism.
In the new climate in Donald Trump’s America, we find ourselves emboldened to embrace the worst aspects of our originally sinful natures; to turn our backs upon the strangers among us, to ignore the clear command of God that we should have a preferential option for the poor, to belittle women, to treat queerfolk as some kind of dangerous, “icky,” Other, and to treat our Muslim brothers and sisters, Abrahamic People of the Book, as subversives within our midst, meting out to them the same treatment Adolf Hitler’s Germany meted out to its Jews.
This is much the same kind of world into which Jesus was born in a manger in Bethlehem, consigned there because his parents had no place lay their heads. And indeed, what would the judgmental partisans of Donald Trump have thought a teenage girl traveling through Roman Palestine in the company of an older man to whom she was not married? Add to that the fact that Mary and Joseph were undoubtedly someone on the brown side, and you have a recipe for a terrifying application of America’s of original sin of racism.
For most Americans, confronting the Lucan infancy narrative without benefit of the context or pre-knowledge of 2000 years of retelling, would no doubt arrive at a number of negative, typically American, conclusions. Our American would probably assume a “distinct hint of tint” in this teenage girl and her older boyfriend, whom he would no doubt assume to be the baby-daddy of her unborn child. Our Americans would probably conclude, based on their itinerant status and inability to find lodging, that Our Lady and Joseph were some kind of homeless freeloaders, seeking to benefit from “the hard work of their betters.” In short, without the pre-knowledge and context of those 2000 years of Christian retelling, our American, whether a supporter of Donald Trump or, let us shame the devil and tell the truth, of Hillary Clinton, would probably see Our Lady and Joseph as common welfare cheats.
Yet, the same Jesus Whose birth is so poignantly recalled to us in the Lucan infancy narrative is nonetheless the same Jesus who shares with us the parable of Dives and Lazarus somewhat later in Luke’s Gospel, at 16:19-31, when he reminds us, in a rather pointed terms, of the dreadful fate that awaits those who are not prepared to do right by the poor.
For Christians who may have convinced themselves that there is no hell below us, and above us there is only sky, pace John Lennon, or who may have embodied Baudelaire’s now classic dictum that “the devil’s greatest trick is convincing the world that he does not exist,” the narrative of Dives and Lazarus, freighted as it is with an implicit command to do justice by the poor and to withhold invidious judgments against them, has become a truism devoid of any real meaning.
Yet, as we brace ourselves for the impact of an administration that proposes to govern America by, for, and in the interests of, the wealthiest among us, that believes that they are appointed by God to comfort the comfortable and to afflict the afflicted, the Christmas message could not be clearer or more pointed.
Jesus did not come into the world to comfort the comfortable. He came into the world to comfort the afflicted, and to call the comfortable, whom his prefigurer, St. John the Baptist, had called a “brood of vipers,” to repentance. Jesus did not come into the world to reaffirm in their fullest form the prevailing dispensations of the day. Instead, he came to upset the metaphorical applecart. He came to call the world to a new dispansation: a new commitment to love, a new preferential option for the poor, and a new commitment to works of charity and mercy.
For Jesus reminds us that he came not to bring peace, but a sword (Matt. 10:34). For it’s worth recalling, in these days of self-satisfied, pharisaical Christians, that if the world had not been utterly lost in sin in those days, it would not have been necessary for God to become Incarnate that we might be reconciled to him.
In these last days, about which Jesus warned us “there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders,” (Matt 24:24) we must unhesitatingly bear witness to the true God and the true Christ, Who came among us at Christmas time in great humility to lead all the world to that passionate God Whose passionate love for us is never more passionately on display than in this holy season of the Incarnation.
The Savior of the world is at hand! Come, let us adore him!
Thursday, December 8, 2016
PEARL HARBOR AT 75: WHO DARES TO CONTEMPLATE THE HORRORS TO COME?
I can run wild against the British and the Americans for six months, winning victory after victory, but after that, I have no expectation of success.
-Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku
Tora! Tora! Tora!
-Cdr. Fuchida Mitsuo , over Pearl Harbor, Sunday, December 7, 1941
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
-Attributed apocryphally to Adm. Yamamoto, ostensibly following the Pearl Harbor attack
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“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” These words, describing Japanese Combined Fleet commander Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku's feelings about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, are among the most quoted words the Admiral never actually said.
Yesterday marked three quarters of a century since the “unprovoked and dastardly attack” on Pearl Harbor by “naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” The numbers of those who were alive on that dreadful day continue to decrease. The “Greatest Generation” is passing into eternity at the rate of roughly 1100 per day. Soon Pearl Harbor will have passed out of living memory.
My generation, the much-maligned, much envied Baby Boomer generation, born between five and twenty-or-so years after the attack, has no direct memory of Pearl Harbor, only secondhand memories from our parents or grandparents who lived through that time. My late father used to share with me memories of how his eight-year-old self was munching peanuts and drinking an illegal beer at Patsy’s Bar in the Bronx when the news hit that Sunday afternoon. My mother remembers as a toddler the sudden, gravely preoccupied looks of the adults in her family.
By contrast, my own memories of Pearl Harbor were largely formed by Hollywood; my first understanding of the attack came from the movie Tora Tora Tora, the source of the apocryphal quotation about sleeping giants so commonly attributed to Admiral Yamamoto.
It’s no secret that Yamamoto, like many senior personages in the Japanese military and civilian elite, regarded war with Western powers, particularly with the United States, as a mistake. For Japan to have any hope of victory, Yamamoto noted pessimistically, they would have to overcome the United States to such an extent that they could dictate peace terms in the White House itself.
Yet Yamamoto knew the limitations of his country and of the military instrument he had in his hand to accomplish the Empire’s policy. In a conversation with Prime Minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro, Yamamoto told the Prime Minister that he could “run wild against the British and Americans for six months, winning victory after victory, but after that, [he had] no expectation of success.”
For Yamamoto, the Pearl Harbor attack, like the Japanese attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, was a strategic preemptive blow intended to knock the enemy off balance and keep them off balance long enough for Japan to win enough victories to be able to come to any peace negotiations occupying a position of unassailable diplomatic strength.
But the sudden, almost giddy pace of Japanese successes in the Pacific and East Asia at the end of 1941 and in the opening months of 1942 left the Japanese public vulnerable to what became known as the “victory disease.” To a Japanese public, fed on a steady diet of “Shō,” or “victory” propaganda, the Japanese successes, particularly the fall of Singapore and of the Philippines, seemed to be all the evidence that was required of Japanese invincibility.
At sea, and the Imperial Navy had carried all before it, while on land, the Imperial Army had won victory after victory against numerically superior foes. As Japan’s armed forces rolled ever forward the boundaries of the territories under Japanese occupation, the Japanese public could perhaps be excused for succumbing to the temptations of the Victory Disease.
But, among the managers, as it were, of the Imperial War Effort, there was a sense, similar to Yamamoto’s, of increasing disquiet. Yamamoto’s prophecy, of a six-month window in which he could run wild, proved eerily prescient. With the Japanese defeat at Midway, in June, 1942, Yamamoto’s window of opportunity slammed shut. The Japanese defensive perimeter, the de facto outer boundary of the Empire, had been pushed back to the Marshalls and to the Marianas. Though it would not fall for another two years, Saipan had become the outer bastion of the Empire, the next and inevitable target of the American offensive that would take them all the way to Tokyo.
As the Americans, and to a considerably lesser extent the British and other allies, rolled back the outer defensive perimeter of the Empire, the senior “management elite” of the Empire found themselves confronted with lowering and ominous indications that Japan could not hope to achieve against the United States and United Kingdom the same kind of unambiguous military victory she had gained against the Russian Empire in 1905. Over against the desires of the ultranationalists and hyper militarists in the armed forces, Japan’s civilian leadership realized that it would be necessary to seek some kind of negotiated resolution, preferably with Western powers alone, but if necessary, also including China, with which Japan had been involved in hostilities since 1937. As Professor Iriye Akira has suggested, the major emphasis of Japanese diplomacy from November of 1942 onward was to secure a termination of the war on the best possible terms Japan could obtain.
Unfortunately for the diplomats, their efforts were constrained by the same ultranationalists and hyper militarists whose ineptitude had gotten Japan into war in the first place, and also by the fact that as the war dragged on, and as “the general war situation ... developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage” to use the unforgettable words of the Shōwa Emperor’s surrender broadcast in August, 1945, Japan’s diplomatic options became narrower and narrower as she had less and less to negotiate with.
Finally, with Western allies and the Soviet Union having dispatched Nazi Germany in May, 1945, Japan found herself running out of options. The dropping of the atomic bomb, which was, and is, a morally defensible response to the irresponsible “100 million die together” rhetoric emerging from the Japanese high command during the summer of 1945, was not intended as some kind of geopolitical warning to the Soviet Union, but rather to administer a short, sharp shock to the Japanese system.
Japan’s path to war, which would had led from the Marco Polo Bridge in north China’s Hebei Province to Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Burma, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, now ineluctably led back to the homeland from whence it had come. The feared Bi Nijuku, the Boeing B-29 super fortresses, pouring forth from the Boeing plant on Puget Sound, were now masters of the Imperial skies, and the Japanese people found themselves face down on the ground in fearful adoration of their inexorable approach.
At sea, the Imperial waters where the happy hunting ground of American submarines enjoying a “Happy Time” that would have made German Großadmiral Karl Dönitz envious. And as much as the Imperial seas now belonged to America’s Silent Service, they also belonged to the American battle line, as American battleships steamed unmolested within cannon shot of the Japanese coast, bombarding onshore targets virtually at will.
For the Japanese government, the situation could not have become or been any worse. Who would have dared, in the euphoric days of the fall of 1941, when anything seemed possible, to contemplate the horrors to come? Who in the Japanese foreign office, or in the War or Navy ministries in Tokyo, would have given serious thought to the idea that an American invasion of the homeland was not only possible, but a real probability?
As Japan’s path to war circled back to the homeland, and as longtime opponents of the war must have been biting back hard on the temptation to say “I told you so,” who truly could have thought, just four years prior, the Japan would have been so comprehensively beaten?
75 years on, with Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force once again numbered among the top five of the world navies, once again deploying dedicated air capable ships, with Japan’s Land Self-Defense Force in every way emulating the battle worthiness of its Imperial predecessor, and with Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force capable in every way of holding its own against a Chinese, Korean, or Russian antagonist, it might be tempting for younger Americans or younger Japanese to forget how badly the path to war led to Pearl Harbor but also right back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
-Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku
Tora! Tora! Tora!
-Cdr. Fuchida Mitsuo , over Pearl Harbor, Sunday, December 7, 1941
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
-Attributed apocryphally to Adm. Yamamoto, ostensibly following the Pearl Harbor attack
--------------------------------------------------------------
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” These words, describing Japanese Combined Fleet commander Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku's feelings about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, are among the most quoted words the Admiral never actually said.
Yesterday marked three quarters of a century since the “unprovoked and dastardly attack” on Pearl Harbor by “naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” The numbers of those who were alive on that dreadful day continue to decrease. The “Greatest Generation” is passing into eternity at the rate of roughly 1100 per day. Soon Pearl Harbor will have passed out of living memory.
My generation, the much-maligned, much envied Baby Boomer generation, born between five and twenty-or-so years after the attack, has no direct memory of Pearl Harbor, only secondhand memories from our parents or grandparents who lived through that time. My late father used to share with me memories of how his eight-year-old self was munching peanuts and drinking an illegal beer at Patsy’s Bar in the Bronx when the news hit that Sunday afternoon. My mother remembers as a toddler the sudden, gravely preoccupied looks of the adults in her family.
By contrast, my own memories of Pearl Harbor were largely formed by Hollywood; my first understanding of the attack came from the movie Tora Tora Tora, the source of the apocryphal quotation about sleeping giants so commonly attributed to Admiral Yamamoto.
It’s no secret that Yamamoto, like many senior personages in the Japanese military and civilian elite, regarded war with Western powers, particularly with the United States, as a mistake. For Japan to have any hope of victory, Yamamoto noted pessimistically, they would have to overcome the United States to such an extent that they could dictate peace terms in the White House itself.
Yet Yamamoto knew the limitations of his country and of the military instrument he had in his hand to accomplish the Empire’s policy. In a conversation with Prime Minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro, Yamamoto told the Prime Minister that he could “run wild against the British and Americans for six months, winning victory after victory, but after that, [he had] no expectation of success.”
For Yamamoto, the Pearl Harbor attack, like the Japanese attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, was a strategic preemptive blow intended to knock the enemy off balance and keep them off balance long enough for Japan to win enough victories to be able to come to any peace negotiations occupying a position of unassailable diplomatic strength.
But the sudden, almost giddy pace of Japanese successes in the Pacific and East Asia at the end of 1941 and in the opening months of 1942 left the Japanese public vulnerable to what became known as the “victory disease.” To a Japanese public, fed on a steady diet of “Shō,” or “victory” propaganda, the Japanese successes, particularly the fall of Singapore and of the Philippines, seemed to be all the evidence that was required of Japanese invincibility.
At sea, and the Imperial Navy had carried all before it, while on land, the Imperial Army had won victory after victory against numerically superior foes. As Japan’s armed forces rolled ever forward the boundaries of the territories under Japanese occupation, the Japanese public could perhaps be excused for succumbing to the temptations of the Victory Disease.
But, among the managers, as it were, of the Imperial War Effort, there was a sense, similar to Yamamoto’s, of increasing disquiet. Yamamoto’s prophecy, of a six-month window in which he could run wild, proved eerily prescient. With the Japanese defeat at Midway, in June, 1942, Yamamoto’s window of opportunity slammed shut. The Japanese defensive perimeter, the de facto outer boundary of the Empire, had been pushed back to the Marshalls and to the Marianas. Though it would not fall for another two years, Saipan had become the outer bastion of the Empire, the next and inevitable target of the American offensive that would take them all the way to Tokyo.
As the Americans, and to a considerably lesser extent the British and other allies, rolled back the outer defensive perimeter of the Empire, the senior “management elite” of the Empire found themselves confronted with lowering and ominous indications that Japan could not hope to achieve against the United States and United Kingdom the same kind of unambiguous military victory she had gained against the Russian Empire in 1905. Over against the desires of the ultranationalists and hyper militarists in the armed forces, Japan’s civilian leadership realized that it would be necessary to seek some kind of negotiated resolution, preferably with Western powers alone, but if necessary, also including China, with which Japan had been involved in hostilities since 1937. As Professor Iriye Akira has suggested, the major emphasis of Japanese diplomacy from November of 1942 onward was to secure a termination of the war on the best possible terms Japan could obtain.
Unfortunately for the diplomats, their efforts were constrained by the same ultranationalists and hyper militarists whose ineptitude had gotten Japan into war in the first place, and also by the fact that as the war dragged on, and as “the general war situation ... developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage” to use the unforgettable words of the Shōwa Emperor’s surrender broadcast in August, 1945, Japan’s diplomatic options became narrower and narrower as she had less and less to negotiate with.
Finally, with Western allies and the Soviet Union having dispatched Nazi Germany in May, 1945, Japan found herself running out of options. The dropping of the atomic bomb, which was, and is, a morally defensible response to the irresponsible “100 million die together” rhetoric emerging from the Japanese high command during the summer of 1945, was not intended as some kind of geopolitical warning to the Soviet Union, but rather to administer a short, sharp shock to the Japanese system.
Japan’s path to war, which would had led from the Marco Polo Bridge in north China’s Hebei Province to Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Burma, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, now ineluctably led back to the homeland from whence it had come. The feared Bi Nijuku, the Boeing B-29 super fortresses, pouring forth from the Boeing plant on Puget Sound, were now masters of the Imperial skies, and the Japanese people found themselves face down on the ground in fearful adoration of their inexorable approach.
At sea, the Imperial waters where the happy hunting ground of American submarines enjoying a “Happy Time” that would have made German Großadmiral Karl Dönitz envious. And as much as the Imperial seas now belonged to America’s Silent Service, they also belonged to the American battle line, as American battleships steamed unmolested within cannon shot of the Japanese coast, bombarding onshore targets virtually at will.
For the Japanese government, the situation could not have become or been any worse. Who would have dared, in the euphoric days of the fall of 1941, when anything seemed possible, to contemplate the horrors to come? Who in the Japanese foreign office, or in the War or Navy ministries in Tokyo, would have given serious thought to the idea that an American invasion of the homeland was not only possible, but a real probability?
As Japan’s path to war circled back to the homeland, and as longtime opponents of the war must have been biting back hard on the temptation to say “I told you so,” who truly could have thought, just four years prior, the Japan would have been so comprehensively beaten?
75 years on, with Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force once again numbered among the top five of the world navies, once again deploying dedicated air capable ships, with Japan’s Land Self-Defense Force in every way emulating the battle worthiness of its Imperial predecessor, and with Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force capable in every way of holding its own against a Chinese, Korean, or Russian antagonist, it might be tempting for younger Americans or younger Japanese to forget how badly the path to war led to Pearl Harbor but also right back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Saturday, November 5, 2016
RATFUCKING REDUX: A POLICE COUP, PART II
Summary: Has America been sold out at the highest levels?
Has the FBI betrayed us?
Have the protectors of the rule of law become the enemies of liberty?
Has the FBI decided that next Tuesday’s election might not produce its desired result, and stepped in to substitute its judgment for that of an American public the Bureau has decided cannot be trusted to make the “correct” decision?
Is a police coup, or worse, a Russian takeover, underway?
Either FBI Director James Comey has some sort of death wish/thanatos urge, or he has been irredeemably tainted with righteous actor/noble cause or Russian agent corruption. Either way, it’s time for him to get the hell out. Assuming Hillary Clinton wins the election next Tuesday, Barack Obama should ask for his resignation next Wednesday, with immediate effect.
Indeed, Comey’s unsuccessful effort to ratfuck the Clinton campaign last week not only places own reputation at risk, but it wrought havoc within the Bureau itself. Now, not content with simultaneously shooting himself in one foot and putting the other foot in his mouth, Comey has attempted to take his ratfucking to a new level, releasing a leak to the New York Times that the FBI sees “nothing, nothing at all” to any relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin about which the American public ought to worry its pretty little head, but also dredging up decade-and-a-half old documents relating to Bill Clinton’s controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.
One, two, three strikes, you’re out. Comey’s ham-fisted effort to deliver the election to the head of his own Republican Party represents not only treachery, but a horrible disservice to what was once considered one of the finest, most impartial, crime-fighting operations in the world. Sadly, the FBI has now descended to the level of Russia’s FSB or Augusto Pinochet’s DINA.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Three developments that have occurred in the week since James Comey’s less-than-successful attempt, last Friday afternoon, to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign have disclosed two things beyond reasonable doubt. The first is that it was in fact an attempted ratfucking, a deliberate and carefully planned political dirty trick designed to cause as much damage to the Hillary Clinton campaign as possible, and second, that James Comey himself either has some sort of death wish/thanatos urge, or that he, like WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, is in fact irredeemably tainted with righteous actor/noble cause or Russian agent corruption. Either way, the time has come for James Comey to leave the FBI posthaste before he does the Bureau any more damage than he has already contrived to do.
Friday afternoon, when FBI Director James Comey released his innuendo-heavy, fact-light letter to eight Republican Committee Chairman implying (Nudge nudge!wink wink!) that there might possibly be some email in Huma Abedin’s laptop that might possibly lead to some potentially possible evidence of something on the part of Hillary Clinton that might possibly support some vague inference of possible wrongdoing by the quondam Secretary of State, it was possible, though difficult, for Comey’s defenders to say, in effect, that the director had merely exercised questionable judgment.
Yet, as I noted in my previous post on the subject, the Hillary campaign push back hard against Comey’s dirty trick and within two hours what had appeared to be another Hillary Clinton scandal had become what it really was, a scandal involving James Comey and his misuse of the FBI as what one observer of the situation called “an outpost of the Trump campaign.” By the end of the day on Friday, the FBI was in full crisis mode.
In full crisis mode, the Bureau responded much as it was accustomed to respond under the Directorship of J. Edgar Hoover; a push back against the pushback with its own series of links and information releases designed to damage the Clinton campaign further while exonerating Donald Trump of any suspicion that might come his way from his relationship to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.
First, the Bureau leaked a story to the New York Times that the FBI had seen “no evidence” of anything untoward in the relationship between Donald Trump and the Moskovskiy Kremlin. This leak, plainly intended as a preemptive strike against the Clinton campaign’s evidence-supported narrative of Trump as being tainted by his close associations with the Kremlin, was belied by numerous investigative reports from such sources as Newsweek, Politico, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, all of which contained more than enough evidence to support a probable cause determination that The Donald had indeed been both metaphorically and physically in bed with the Kremlin, and that he had been badly compromised.
The FBI leaks would not have been released without Comey’s direct approval, either by way of an order from the Director himself, or by way of what Vladimir Putin biographer Masha Gessen has called an “emanation;” not in order as such, so much as a “vague signal [pointing] in the direction in which they should be working.” Either way, whether the directive took the form of an order or an “emanation,” the intent was clear, the Bureau should be unofficially officially on record as believing that there was “nothing, nothing to see here,” on the subject of Donald Trump’s dangerously close relationship with the Kremlin. The clear intent of the directive and the leak it engendered was to represent to the public that the FBI had exonerated Donald Trump of any improper entanglements with an unfriendly foreign power seeking to influence the outcome of the American elections.
We may envisage four hypotheses to account for Director Comey’s piss poor judgment in this matter.
The Overworked Director Needs a Break: this hypothesis, which seems to be the one most favored by both Republican and Democratic observers at the moment, is that Comey is simply so overworked that he fell into a pattern of repeated errors in judgment. In this narrative, Comey’s blunt effort to place his thumb and the Bureau’s thumb in the electoral scales is the result of sheer overwork. This narrative postulates that since July, when Comey came under sustained Republican attack for recommending against prosecution of Hillary Clinton, he has been internalizing and personalizing those attacks. These attacks, in theory, caused the director to doubt his own judgment and to lack confidence in his own ability to command the Bureau.
Supporters of this hypothesis cite his extraordinary memo to the members of the Bureau whereby he attempted to explain his conduct of the other week. However, as evidence has emerged that the Director was very much “on a frolic of his own” when he disclosed the existence of the possibly, perhaps, maybe, significant unreviewed emails, this hypothesis fails of its own frailty and inconsistency. Even if it is true, Mr. Comey should still be asked to resign at once. If Hillary is the President-elect on November 9, outgoing president Barack Obama should request James Comey’s immediate resignation as FBI Director with immediate effect. The penalty in most public and private sector entities for the kinds of errors in judgment of which Comey has obviously been guilty is termination. As I suggested in my previous blog on the subject, James Comey has managed to shatter the FBI’s mystique and to set at naught the trust the public had had in it.
The Righteous Actor in a Noble Cause: if the hypothesis of the stressed out Director making bad decisions is not ominous, the “righteous actor/noble cause” hypothesis is very much so. In this scenario, given credence by the fact that Comey opted to make his announcement over the objections of higher-ups in the Justice Department and senior members of his own Bureau, it becomes fairly clear that the Director has succumbed to the blandishments of the same disease that afflicts Julian Assange, that is, righteous actor/noble cause corruption.
Righteous actor/noble cause corruption occurs when a single individual forms an opinion of his or her cause or conduct that it is, if anything, hyper-righteous, and is noble to the extent that the truly believing warrior in the cause is somehow above any form of scrutiny or criticism, and is beyond the need for critical self-awareness. Knowing Comey’s somewhat self-righteous schoolmarmish demeanor as it has been revealed in numerous media outlets, both traditional and digital, we must acknowledge the possibility that he most definitely suffers from this particular pathology. Like Julian Assange, whose self-righteousness manifests itself in a conviction that he, and he alone, has the moral right to act as judge, jury, and, indeed, executioner, Comey, a self-described “Boy Scout,” seems to delight in setting standards for others that are well-nigh impossible to meet, and up to which he himself might find difficulty living.
For the greatest single downfall of righteous actor/noble cause corruption is that it lends itself so easily and readily to charges of hypocrisy. Knowing what we do about James Comey’s partisan Republican history, it appears safe to hypothesize that in James Comey’s world, the Republicans are necessarily the party of virtue, while the Democrats, particularly their presidential candidate, are the party of vice. And were virtue and vice confront one another, the righteous actor/noble cause actor inevitably begins to see himself as the righteous judge laying down the law and smiting evildoers. If this is how Comey sees himself, and by extension, the Bureau, he needs to be terminated at once. The Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot hope to remain a credible, morally authoritative, incorruptible, incorrupt, federal law enforcement agency if it, itself, is tainted at its highest levels by noble cause/righteous actor corruption.
Because righteous actor/noble cause corruption leads inevitably to the dangerous conclusion that the means employed by the righteous actor in a noble cause are legitimate because justified by their ends. It is a teleological argument which must be carefully weighed on the particular facts of any given case. The ends may justify the means, but to say that the ends always justify the means, and that only the righteous actor in the noble cause is the judge of whether the ends justify the means is, in our American constitutional system, unacceptable. If this is the corruption into which Comey has fallen, the Attorney General should show his ass the door posthaste.
The Cynical Partisan Agent: Still more ominous is the hypothesis that James Comey was acting out of old-fashioned political corruption, not as a righteous actor in a noble cause. In this narrative, which appears to be supported by the facts that have become known since Friday afternoon, James Comey was simply out to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign in the service of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Certainly, the timing of the event is highly suspicious, and indeed raises probable cause to believe that a ratfucking was intended, and that James Comey, himself, personally, carried it out. Coming as it did eleven days out from the election, well within the sixty day window within which such pronouncements are not supposed to be made, per clear Department of Justice policy, there is certainly evidence to believe that Comey was acting deliberately to use the Bureau to serve the purposes of the Trump campaign. If this is indeed the case, not only should Comey be terminated as FBI director posthaste, he could also be the subject of a criminal investigation carried out by and resident in some other agency than in the Federal Bureau of investigation.
Let the Secret Service do the looking; let the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office do the looking –- LASO will be motivated to look very carefully at the conduct of a Bureau responsible for the chaos which is overtaken the Department. If the investigations turn up the evidence that may very well exist to support the view that Comey was acting on behalf of the RNC or the Trump campaign, a true bill should issue from the federal grand jury having jurisdiction of the matter, and instead of being merely terminated, James Comey should be facing extensive federal exposure as a criminal.
The Russian Agent: the most ominous hypothesis, of course, is that the Bureau has been infiltrated and compromised by one or more agencies of the Russian State. The possibility that Comey’s revelations, so-called, were part of a Russian Kriegßpiel against the West in general and the United States in particular cannot be discounted.
At the acknowledged risk of being dismissed as a conspiracist, I will point out that I have been warning of the dangers of the Russian kriegßpiel against the West for more than a year now. During the run-up to the unsuccessful Scottish independence referendum, I noted the Kremlin’s maladroit attempts to manufacture sentiment for disunion in the Northern Kingdom. During the run-up to Brexit, I noted Moscow’s “emanations” in favor of Brexit, as I also noted what amounted to the treasonable, pro-Muscovite leanings of such Brexit advocates as Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Donald Trump himself.
I also noted The Donald’s very public embrace of Brexit, and embrace which very much mirrors the Kremlin’s favored policy posture, i.e., a weak, disunited Europe at odds with itself and lacking the resolve to resist Russian blandishments. I suggested then, and I suggest again, that the Brexiteers and Donald Trump shared with the Kremlin a common set of anti-Western, pro-Russian policy preferences. It’s also worth recalling how Donald Trump invited UKIP’s Nigel Farage to campaign with him in Mississippi, ignoring the long tradition of not dragging foreigners into American presidential campaigns.
Of course, if it’s contrary to American tradition to drag foreigners into our presidential contests, it was, until last Friday, equally contrary to American tradition for the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country to run what amounts to a police coup, attempting to put its thumb on the scales of the presidential election. But as the evidence has accumulated, implicating rogue agents in the FBI’s New York field office, we can no longer afford to give the Director or even the Bureau the benefit of even slight doubt. According to a recent article in the Guardian, the FBI in general and the New York field office in particular are commonly referred to as “Trumpland,” and Hillary Clinton is viewed by numerous agents in both Washington City and New York City as an incarnation of Antichrist.
Given the clear proclivity of the FBI for attempting to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign by any means available, it doesn’t take a lot to connect the dots to lead from the New York field office to the J. Edgar Hoover building, back to the Kremlin itself. A bunch of Hillary-hating rogue agents in New York tried to throw the election to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin’s BFF. They are assisted in that regard by the Director himself, apparently motivated by partisan considerations.
The director himself apparently gave an “emanation” to rogue agents in Washington and in New York City to leak information harmful to the Clinton campaign and also information suggesting that the FBI can find no evidence at all of any connection between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Now, it’s worth recalling that America’s other sixteen intelligence and counterintelligence agencies all share a consensus that the Russian government is actively attempting either to directly influence the outcome of the American election, or to cause the American public to entertain grave doubts about that election’s legitimacy, all with a view to destabilizing the United States.
Sixteen of seventeen American intelligence or counterintelligence agencies share this consensus. But not James Comey’s FBI. Instead, the FBI has made a virtual cottage industry of leaks to the media intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the consensus of the rest of the intelligence/ counterintelligence community, and, by extension, on the tradecraft capacities of the other sixteen American intelligence and counterintelligence agencies that have been investigating the extent of Russia’s penetration of our electoral process.
Given the FBI’s curiously pro-Russian posture, which dovetails well and ominously with its apparent pro-Trump posture, we may legitimately ask whether that curious coincidence of interest has left the FBI wide-open to plundering Russian forays. We may also reasonably ask whether the FBI’s vulnerability to Russian intrusion, presumably by the FSB or by Russian military intelligence, GRU, has resulted in the Director himself having been turned or compromised in some way by Russian operatives concealed or embedded within the Bureau.
Certainly, if Director Comey entertains a strong anti-Clinton proclivity, if he holds both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the same obvious disdain that Louis Freeh, a previous FBI director, clearly held for both Bill and Hillary Clinton, it would go a long way toward explaining his, and the Bureau’s, apparent hostility toward Hillary’s campaign. And when a highly placed senior official entertains such antipathies and animosities, it enables rogue agents throughout the Bureau. Moreover, a calculus of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” leads by sickening, yet inevitable, degrees to the making of common cause with all manner of enemies national.
In short, Comey’s disdain and antipathy toward Hillary Clinton, and his consequent ill-concealed embrace of Donald Trump, may well have led him, and the Bureau, to make common cause with the Kremlin, whose disdain and antipathy toward Hillary Clinton parallels that of Donald Trump and James Comey himself. Are we seeing an alliance of secret policemen trying to mount a hostile takeover of the United States Government, to run a police coup?
Because, whether Comey’s attempted police coup was the result of noble cause/righteous actor corruption, or whether he was acting out of crassly cynical partisan motivations, is certainly reasonable to hypothesize that either of these two possible motivations could, and did, cause him, and the Bureau, to make common cause with the Russian State, to embrace and adopt the same means and methodologies that characterized Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina, the tsarist Okhrana, Ilyich’s Cheka, or the Cheka’s successors, the KGB and the FSB.
If Comey and the rogue agents of “Trumpland” have in fact adopted the means and methodologies of the historic Russian secret police services, then the Federal Bureau of Investigation may well have outlived its usefulness, and may well have become not a protector of the American rule of law but a positive threat to the American love of liberty. The ultimate casualty of James Comey’s attempted police coup may be the FBI itself, which an increasing number of skeptical Americans are beginning to say should either be disbanded altogether or subject to a thorough housecleaning from the Director down to the janitors who clean the bathrooms in the sub-basements of the Hoover building.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
Has the FBI betrayed us?
Have the protectors of the rule of law become the enemies of liberty?
Has the FBI decided that next Tuesday’s election might not produce its desired result, and stepped in to substitute its judgment for that of an American public the Bureau has decided cannot be trusted to make the “correct” decision?
Is a police coup, or worse, a Russian takeover, underway?
Either FBI Director James Comey has some sort of death wish/thanatos urge, or he has been irredeemably tainted with righteous actor/noble cause or Russian agent corruption. Either way, it’s time for him to get the hell out. Assuming Hillary Clinton wins the election next Tuesday, Barack Obama should ask for his resignation next Wednesday, with immediate effect.
Indeed, Comey’s unsuccessful effort to ratfuck the Clinton campaign last week not only places own reputation at risk, but it wrought havoc within the Bureau itself. Now, not content with simultaneously shooting himself in one foot and putting the other foot in his mouth, Comey has attempted to take his ratfucking to a new level, releasing a leak to the New York Times that the FBI sees “nothing, nothing at all” to any relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin about which the American public ought to worry its pretty little head, but also dredging up decade-and-a-half old documents relating to Bill Clinton’s controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.
One, two, three strikes, you’re out. Comey’s ham-fisted effort to deliver the election to the head of his own Republican Party represents not only treachery, but a horrible disservice to what was once considered one of the finest, most impartial, crime-fighting operations in the world. Sadly, the FBI has now descended to the level of Russia’s FSB or Augusto Pinochet’s DINA.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Three developments that have occurred in the week since James Comey’s less-than-successful attempt, last Friday afternoon, to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign have disclosed two things beyond reasonable doubt. The first is that it was in fact an attempted ratfucking, a deliberate and carefully planned political dirty trick designed to cause as much damage to the Hillary Clinton campaign as possible, and second, that James Comey himself either has some sort of death wish/thanatos urge, or that he, like WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, is in fact irredeemably tainted with righteous actor/noble cause or Russian agent corruption. Either way, the time has come for James Comey to leave the FBI posthaste before he does the Bureau any more damage than he has already contrived to do.
Friday afternoon, when FBI Director James Comey released his innuendo-heavy, fact-light letter to eight Republican Committee Chairman implying (Nudge nudge!wink wink!) that there might possibly be some email in Huma Abedin’s laptop that might possibly lead to some potentially possible evidence of something on the part of Hillary Clinton that might possibly support some vague inference of possible wrongdoing by the quondam Secretary of State, it was possible, though difficult, for Comey’s defenders to say, in effect, that the director had merely exercised questionable judgment.
Yet, as I noted in my previous post on the subject, the Hillary campaign push back hard against Comey’s dirty trick and within two hours what had appeared to be another Hillary Clinton scandal had become what it really was, a scandal involving James Comey and his misuse of the FBI as what one observer of the situation called “an outpost of the Trump campaign.” By the end of the day on Friday, the FBI was in full crisis mode.
In full crisis mode, the Bureau responded much as it was accustomed to respond under the Directorship of J. Edgar Hoover; a push back against the pushback with its own series of links and information releases designed to damage the Clinton campaign further while exonerating Donald Trump of any suspicion that might come his way from his relationship to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.
First, the Bureau leaked a story to the New York Times that the FBI had seen “no evidence” of anything untoward in the relationship between Donald Trump and the Moskovskiy Kremlin. This leak, plainly intended as a preemptive strike against the Clinton campaign’s evidence-supported narrative of Trump as being tainted by his close associations with the Kremlin, was belied by numerous investigative reports from such sources as Newsweek, Politico, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, all of which contained more than enough evidence to support a probable cause determination that The Donald had indeed been both metaphorically and physically in bed with the Kremlin, and that he had been badly compromised.
The FBI leaks would not have been released without Comey’s direct approval, either by way of an order from the Director himself, or by way of what Vladimir Putin biographer Masha Gessen has called an “emanation;” not in order as such, so much as a “vague signal [pointing] in the direction in which they should be working.” Either way, whether the directive took the form of an order or an “emanation,” the intent was clear, the Bureau should be unofficially officially on record as believing that there was “nothing, nothing to see here,” on the subject of Donald Trump’s dangerously close relationship with the Kremlin. The clear intent of the directive and the leak it engendered was to represent to the public that the FBI had exonerated Donald Trump of any improper entanglements with an unfriendly foreign power seeking to influence the outcome of the American elections.
We may envisage four hypotheses to account for Director Comey’s piss poor judgment in this matter.
The Overworked Director Needs a Break: this hypothesis, which seems to be the one most favored by both Republican and Democratic observers at the moment, is that Comey is simply so overworked that he fell into a pattern of repeated errors in judgment. In this narrative, Comey’s blunt effort to place his thumb and the Bureau’s thumb in the electoral scales is the result of sheer overwork. This narrative postulates that since July, when Comey came under sustained Republican attack for recommending against prosecution of Hillary Clinton, he has been internalizing and personalizing those attacks. These attacks, in theory, caused the director to doubt his own judgment and to lack confidence in his own ability to command the Bureau.
Supporters of this hypothesis cite his extraordinary memo to the members of the Bureau whereby he attempted to explain his conduct of the other week. However, as evidence has emerged that the Director was very much “on a frolic of his own” when he disclosed the existence of the possibly, perhaps, maybe, significant unreviewed emails, this hypothesis fails of its own frailty and inconsistency. Even if it is true, Mr. Comey should still be asked to resign at once. If Hillary is the President-elect on November 9, outgoing president Barack Obama should request James Comey’s immediate resignation as FBI Director with immediate effect. The penalty in most public and private sector entities for the kinds of errors in judgment of which Comey has obviously been guilty is termination. As I suggested in my previous blog on the subject, James Comey has managed to shatter the FBI’s mystique and to set at naught the trust the public had had in it.
The Righteous Actor in a Noble Cause: if the hypothesis of the stressed out Director making bad decisions is not ominous, the “righteous actor/noble cause” hypothesis is very much so. In this scenario, given credence by the fact that Comey opted to make his announcement over the objections of higher-ups in the Justice Department and senior members of his own Bureau, it becomes fairly clear that the Director has succumbed to the blandishments of the same disease that afflicts Julian Assange, that is, righteous actor/noble cause corruption.
Righteous actor/noble cause corruption occurs when a single individual forms an opinion of his or her cause or conduct that it is, if anything, hyper-righteous, and is noble to the extent that the truly believing warrior in the cause is somehow above any form of scrutiny or criticism, and is beyond the need for critical self-awareness. Knowing Comey’s somewhat self-righteous schoolmarmish demeanor as it has been revealed in numerous media outlets, both traditional and digital, we must acknowledge the possibility that he most definitely suffers from this particular pathology. Like Julian Assange, whose self-righteousness manifests itself in a conviction that he, and he alone, has the moral right to act as judge, jury, and, indeed, executioner, Comey, a self-described “Boy Scout,” seems to delight in setting standards for others that are well-nigh impossible to meet, and up to which he himself might find difficulty living.
For the greatest single downfall of righteous actor/noble cause corruption is that it lends itself so easily and readily to charges of hypocrisy. Knowing what we do about James Comey’s partisan Republican history, it appears safe to hypothesize that in James Comey’s world, the Republicans are necessarily the party of virtue, while the Democrats, particularly their presidential candidate, are the party of vice. And were virtue and vice confront one another, the righteous actor/noble cause actor inevitably begins to see himself as the righteous judge laying down the law and smiting evildoers. If this is how Comey sees himself, and by extension, the Bureau, he needs to be terminated at once. The Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot hope to remain a credible, morally authoritative, incorruptible, incorrupt, federal law enforcement agency if it, itself, is tainted at its highest levels by noble cause/righteous actor corruption.
Because righteous actor/noble cause corruption leads inevitably to the dangerous conclusion that the means employed by the righteous actor in a noble cause are legitimate because justified by their ends. It is a teleological argument which must be carefully weighed on the particular facts of any given case. The ends may justify the means, but to say that the ends always justify the means, and that only the righteous actor in the noble cause is the judge of whether the ends justify the means is, in our American constitutional system, unacceptable. If this is the corruption into which Comey has fallen, the Attorney General should show his ass the door posthaste.
The Cynical Partisan Agent: Still more ominous is the hypothesis that James Comey was acting out of old-fashioned political corruption, not as a righteous actor in a noble cause. In this narrative, which appears to be supported by the facts that have become known since Friday afternoon, James Comey was simply out to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign in the service of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Certainly, the timing of the event is highly suspicious, and indeed raises probable cause to believe that a ratfucking was intended, and that James Comey, himself, personally, carried it out. Coming as it did eleven days out from the election, well within the sixty day window within which such pronouncements are not supposed to be made, per clear Department of Justice policy, there is certainly evidence to believe that Comey was acting deliberately to use the Bureau to serve the purposes of the Trump campaign. If this is indeed the case, not only should Comey be terminated as FBI director posthaste, he could also be the subject of a criminal investigation carried out by and resident in some other agency than in the Federal Bureau of investigation.
Let the Secret Service do the looking; let the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office do the looking –- LASO will be motivated to look very carefully at the conduct of a Bureau responsible for the chaos which is overtaken the Department. If the investigations turn up the evidence that may very well exist to support the view that Comey was acting on behalf of the RNC or the Trump campaign, a true bill should issue from the federal grand jury having jurisdiction of the matter, and instead of being merely terminated, James Comey should be facing extensive federal exposure as a criminal.
The Russian Agent: the most ominous hypothesis, of course, is that the Bureau has been infiltrated and compromised by one or more agencies of the Russian State. The possibility that Comey’s revelations, so-called, were part of a Russian Kriegßpiel against the West in general and the United States in particular cannot be discounted.
At the acknowledged risk of being dismissed as a conspiracist, I will point out that I have been warning of the dangers of the Russian kriegßpiel against the West for more than a year now. During the run-up to the unsuccessful Scottish independence referendum, I noted the Kremlin’s maladroit attempts to manufacture sentiment for disunion in the Northern Kingdom. During the run-up to Brexit, I noted Moscow’s “emanations” in favor of Brexit, as I also noted what amounted to the treasonable, pro-Muscovite leanings of such Brexit advocates as Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Donald Trump himself.
I also noted The Donald’s very public embrace of Brexit, and embrace which very much mirrors the Kremlin’s favored policy posture, i.e., a weak, disunited Europe at odds with itself and lacking the resolve to resist Russian blandishments. I suggested then, and I suggest again, that the Brexiteers and Donald Trump shared with the Kremlin a common set of anti-Western, pro-Russian policy preferences. It’s also worth recalling how Donald Trump invited UKIP’s Nigel Farage to campaign with him in Mississippi, ignoring the long tradition of not dragging foreigners into American presidential campaigns.
Of course, if it’s contrary to American tradition to drag foreigners into our presidential contests, it was, until last Friday, equally contrary to American tradition for the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country to run what amounts to a police coup, attempting to put its thumb on the scales of the presidential election. But as the evidence has accumulated, implicating rogue agents in the FBI’s New York field office, we can no longer afford to give the Director or even the Bureau the benefit of even slight doubt. According to a recent article in the Guardian, the FBI in general and the New York field office in particular are commonly referred to as “Trumpland,” and Hillary Clinton is viewed by numerous agents in both Washington City and New York City as an incarnation of Antichrist.
Given the clear proclivity of the FBI for attempting to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign by any means available, it doesn’t take a lot to connect the dots to lead from the New York field office to the J. Edgar Hoover building, back to the Kremlin itself. A bunch of Hillary-hating rogue agents in New York tried to throw the election to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin’s BFF. They are assisted in that regard by the Director himself, apparently motivated by partisan considerations.
The director himself apparently gave an “emanation” to rogue agents in Washington and in New York City to leak information harmful to the Clinton campaign and also information suggesting that the FBI can find no evidence at all of any connection between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Now, it’s worth recalling that America’s other sixteen intelligence and counterintelligence agencies all share a consensus that the Russian government is actively attempting either to directly influence the outcome of the American election, or to cause the American public to entertain grave doubts about that election’s legitimacy, all with a view to destabilizing the United States.
Sixteen of seventeen American intelligence or counterintelligence agencies share this consensus. But not James Comey’s FBI. Instead, the FBI has made a virtual cottage industry of leaks to the media intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the consensus of the rest of the intelligence/ counterintelligence community, and, by extension, on the tradecraft capacities of the other sixteen American intelligence and counterintelligence agencies that have been investigating the extent of Russia’s penetration of our electoral process.
Given the FBI’s curiously pro-Russian posture, which dovetails well and ominously with its apparent pro-Trump posture, we may legitimately ask whether that curious coincidence of interest has left the FBI wide-open to plundering Russian forays. We may also reasonably ask whether the FBI’s vulnerability to Russian intrusion, presumably by the FSB or by Russian military intelligence, GRU, has resulted in the Director himself having been turned or compromised in some way by Russian operatives concealed or embedded within the Bureau.
Certainly, if Director Comey entertains a strong anti-Clinton proclivity, if he holds both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the same obvious disdain that Louis Freeh, a previous FBI director, clearly held for both Bill and Hillary Clinton, it would go a long way toward explaining his, and the Bureau’s, apparent hostility toward Hillary’s campaign. And when a highly placed senior official entertains such antipathies and animosities, it enables rogue agents throughout the Bureau. Moreover, a calculus of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” leads by sickening, yet inevitable, degrees to the making of common cause with all manner of enemies national.
In short, Comey’s disdain and antipathy toward Hillary Clinton, and his consequent ill-concealed embrace of Donald Trump, may well have led him, and the Bureau, to make common cause with the Kremlin, whose disdain and antipathy toward Hillary Clinton parallels that of Donald Trump and James Comey himself. Are we seeing an alliance of secret policemen trying to mount a hostile takeover of the United States Government, to run a police coup?
Because, whether Comey’s attempted police coup was the result of noble cause/righteous actor corruption, or whether he was acting out of crassly cynical partisan motivations, is certainly reasonable to hypothesize that either of these two possible motivations could, and did, cause him, and the Bureau, to make common cause with the Russian State, to embrace and adopt the same means and methodologies that characterized Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina, the tsarist Okhrana, Ilyich’s Cheka, or the Cheka’s successors, the KGB and the FSB.
If Comey and the rogue agents of “Trumpland” have in fact adopted the means and methodologies of the historic Russian secret police services, then the Federal Bureau of Investigation may well have outlived its usefulness, and may well have become not a protector of the American rule of law but a positive threat to the American love of liberty. The ultimate casualty of James Comey’s attempted police coup may be the FBI itself, which an increasing number of skeptical Americans are beginning to say should either be disbanded altogether or subject to a thorough housecleaning from the Director down to the janitors who clean the bathrooms in the sub-basements of the Hoover building.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
A MASTER CLASS IN ATTEMPTED RATFUCKING
Summary: Embattled Republican FBI director James Comey tried to reclaim some of his street cred with his fellow Republicans last Friday by trying to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign and the national media were having none of it. Comey’s announcement, strategically timed to “put out the garbage” on a Friday afternoon, had been mercilessly dissected within hours.
In fact, Comey’s error in judgment, and indeed, the embattled FBI director himself, had himself largely become the scandal by the close of business Friday. Though it is not in Hillary Clinton’s nature to invoke victim status, her surrogates have done remarkably effective job of political jujitsu by turning the tables on James Comey and raising some issues concerning him that ought to be deeply troubling to the American public.
Those issues include, among others, the extent to which Comey and the Bureau had treated Donald Trump and his Russian associates with kid gloves while holding Hillary Clinton to unreasonable and impossibly high standards. There is also a real question of whether Comey himself has succumbed to noble cause/righteous actor corruption in believing himself and himself alone to be, in effect, judge, jury, and executioner. For Comey’s sake, it were best if he had succumbed to such corruption, rather than that he had succumbed to the corruption of having been turned or compromised by the Russians.
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Embattled Republican FBI Director James Comey tried to reclaim some of the Republican street cred he had lost in July when the much-vaunted FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server wound up going nowhere. Having disappointed his party by having found nothing to justify prosecuting the Democratic candidate for President, and having been raked over the coals for it by banana Republicans, Comey knew that his personal political viability in any future Republican administration was in serious jeopardy.
So, last Friday, in an apparent effort to save his own political skin, James Comey tried to ratfuck Hillary Clinton and her campaign by releasing a bureaucratically worded letter to Congress in which he implied that there might be additional documentation that was “pertinent” to the investigation he had led the American people in July to believe was closed.
Within hours, the new alleged Clinton “scandal” had melted away to nothing, withering under the bright light of unremitting scrutiny. The emails in question were emails on a laptop belonging to Clinton staffer Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, disgraced former Congressman Anthony “dick pic” Weiner. The emails in question were neither sent to, nor received by, Hillary Clinton. In short, the whole thing appeared to be another phony Clinton scandal ginned up by James Comey and by deplorable Utah Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz.
Yet, not only was the “scandal” debunked within a matter of hours, but Comey and Chaffetz themselves had also become the center of a broadening scandal which neither of them had foreseen. Worse for Comey, the scandal involving him appears to have done nothing but metastasize since Friday afternoon. Information now available as of Tuesday, November 1, indicates a pattern of conduct which causes us to entertain doubts not only about Comey’s judgment, but also about his basic loyalty to the United States.
We know, in limine, that Comey opted to make his announcement over the objections of Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch and other senior officials at the Department of Justice. In short, Comey decided to go on what the Common Law charmingly calls “a frolic of his own.” Despite the existence of stated DOJ policy discountenancing making announcements concerning investigations closely prior to an election, Comey essentially told his boss to fuck herself, that he was going to make the announcement anyway.
By doing so, by engaging in a fairly obvious ratfuck for transparently political reasons, James Comey has managed, in one foolish and incontinent maneuver, to tarnish not only his own reputation, but also that of the entire Bureau. It is more than forty years now since J. Edgar Hoover, whose misconduct as Bureau director sullied the agency he headed, died a death unmourned outside the circle of a few FBI apparatchiks.
Since Hoover’s death, the Bureau had heretofore done a fairly decent job reclaiming its reputation. Until Friday afternoon, the Bureau had managed to cultivate for itself a reputation for integrity. It was no longer viewed, as it had been viewed in the Hoover time, as being of vehicle of political retribution, or as a platform from which a politically motivated Bureau director could ratfuck his real or imagined political enemies. The integrity of the Bureau had indeed become something of a byword since Hoover’s death.
Until Friday afternoon.
Because, again, with one ill-considered, incontinent, letter, sent to Congress in a way that was sure to place it in Donald Trump’s hands immediately, James Comey managed to revive the FBI’s prior reputation as being an essentially corrupt tool of the Republican Party, using its investigative resources to give whatever support it could to a Republican candidate.
Indeed, that was the narrative that had very much clamped itself upon the American public’s consciousness by Monday morning. Moreover, during Monday, the situation metastasized further. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) sent a blistering, pugnacious letter to the FBI director taking him, and the Bureau, to task for their astonishing failure to pursue an investigation of Donald Trump’s clear ties to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
While the Republicans were quick to denounce Harry Reid’s letter as a mere stunt, the information that has become available in the twenty-four hour since then suggest that the minority leader’s letter was anything but a political stunt: “in my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government.... The public has a right to know this information.”
Yet, Comey, hypocritically invoking the sixty day rule (!) to protect his chosen candidate, has been curiously unwilling to level with the American public about whether the FBI is even investigating the mounting evidence that Donald Trump is indeed a Manchurian candidate. Even though we are becoming aware of the existence of “an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit,” the FBI Director has seemed curiously reluctant to investigate.
Yet the director seems willing to commit a great deal of Bureau resources pursuing Huma Abedin on the off chance that some small number of emails on the Abedin/Weiner joint laptop might possibly contain some vaguely incriminating data that might in some vague way, point in the general direction of the quondam Secretary of State. In other words, Comey appears willing to ignore the Russian wolf at the door while sending all his agents to look for an imaginary bogeyman under the bed.
Given the fraught political nature of this election season, when Donald Trump has openly invited the Russian intelligence apparat to hack the Democratic Party, and when just about everybody and his brother seems to have set their moral scruples aside to eagerly traffic in the stolen property WikiLeaks has been peddling, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether we are not being betrayed at the highest political level. If Donald Trump is willing to open the door and let the Russians ransack America’s living room, why shouldn’t James Comey do the same thing?
If, on Friday morning, you had suggested to me that James Comey might either have been compromised by the Russians or have actually been turned by them, I would have fed you your tongue for telling impossible lies. But now, with Halloween behind us and The Day of the Dead before us, I can no longer be sure. Given James Comey’s kid glove treatment of Donald Trump and Trump’s evident willingness to traffic with enemies national, I think patriotic Americans must dare to envisage the hypothesis of the basic disloyalty of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of his willingness to promote a candidate favorable to, and controlled by, the Moskovskiy Kremlin.
As happened with Brexit, we must now begin to entertain again an hypothesis that the West is under serious and concerted attack at the hands of James Comey and Donald Trump, and that a Russian Kriegßpiel is very much underway against the United States in particular and the West in general. We are indeed betrayed at the highest political levels. The Republic is in grave danger, and a comprehensive prophylaxis of Donald Trump, James Comey, and the numerous Russian embeds in the Trump campaign, together with a like prophylaxis of Trump supporters is in order. We have spies, saboteurs, and wreckers among us, all of whose activities must be inhibited by any means necessary.
-XXX-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he spent eight years on the city Council. The views set forth herein are his own and should not be construed as constituting any form of legal advice.
In fact, Comey’s error in judgment, and indeed, the embattled FBI director himself, had himself largely become the scandal by the close of business Friday. Though it is not in Hillary Clinton’s nature to invoke victim status, her surrogates have done remarkably effective job of political jujitsu by turning the tables on James Comey and raising some issues concerning him that ought to be deeply troubling to the American public.
Those issues include, among others, the extent to which Comey and the Bureau had treated Donald Trump and his Russian associates with kid gloves while holding Hillary Clinton to unreasonable and impossibly high standards. There is also a real question of whether Comey himself has succumbed to noble cause/righteous actor corruption in believing himself and himself alone to be, in effect, judge, jury, and executioner. For Comey’s sake, it were best if he had succumbed to such corruption, rather than that he had succumbed to the corruption of having been turned or compromised by the Russians.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Embattled Republican FBI Director James Comey tried to reclaim some of the Republican street cred he had lost in July when the much-vaunted FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server wound up going nowhere. Having disappointed his party by having found nothing to justify prosecuting the Democratic candidate for President, and having been raked over the coals for it by banana Republicans, Comey knew that his personal political viability in any future Republican administration was in serious jeopardy.
So, last Friday, in an apparent effort to save his own political skin, James Comey tried to ratfuck Hillary Clinton and her campaign by releasing a bureaucratically worded letter to Congress in which he implied that there might be additional documentation that was “pertinent” to the investigation he had led the American people in July to believe was closed.
Within hours, the new alleged Clinton “scandal” had melted away to nothing, withering under the bright light of unremitting scrutiny. The emails in question were emails on a laptop belonging to Clinton staffer Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, disgraced former Congressman Anthony “dick pic” Weiner. The emails in question were neither sent to, nor received by, Hillary Clinton. In short, the whole thing appeared to be another phony Clinton scandal ginned up by James Comey and by deplorable Utah Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz.
Yet, not only was the “scandal” debunked within a matter of hours, but Comey and Chaffetz themselves had also become the center of a broadening scandal which neither of them had foreseen. Worse for Comey, the scandal involving him appears to have done nothing but metastasize since Friday afternoon. Information now available as of Tuesday, November 1, indicates a pattern of conduct which causes us to entertain doubts not only about Comey’s judgment, but also about his basic loyalty to the United States.
We know, in limine, that Comey opted to make his announcement over the objections of Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch and other senior officials at the Department of Justice. In short, Comey decided to go on what the Common Law charmingly calls “a frolic of his own.” Despite the existence of stated DOJ policy discountenancing making announcements concerning investigations closely prior to an election, Comey essentially told his boss to fuck herself, that he was going to make the announcement anyway.
By doing so, by engaging in a fairly obvious ratfuck for transparently political reasons, James Comey has managed, in one foolish and incontinent maneuver, to tarnish not only his own reputation, but also that of the entire Bureau. It is more than forty years now since J. Edgar Hoover, whose misconduct as Bureau director sullied the agency he headed, died a death unmourned outside the circle of a few FBI apparatchiks.
Since Hoover’s death, the Bureau had heretofore done a fairly decent job reclaiming its reputation. Until Friday afternoon, the Bureau had managed to cultivate for itself a reputation for integrity. It was no longer viewed, as it had been viewed in the Hoover time, as being of vehicle of political retribution, or as a platform from which a politically motivated Bureau director could ratfuck his real or imagined political enemies. The integrity of the Bureau had indeed become something of a byword since Hoover’s death.
Until Friday afternoon.
Because, again, with one ill-considered, incontinent, letter, sent to Congress in a way that was sure to place it in Donald Trump’s hands immediately, James Comey managed to revive the FBI’s prior reputation as being an essentially corrupt tool of the Republican Party, using its investigative resources to give whatever support it could to a Republican candidate.
Indeed, that was the narrative that had very much clamped itself upon the American public’s consciousness by Monday morning. Moreover, during Monday, the situation metastasized further. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) sent a blistering, pugnacious letter to the FBI director taking him, and the Bureau, to task for their astonishing failure to pursue an investigation of Donald Trump’s clear ties to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
While the Republicans were quick to denounce Harry Reid’s letter as a mere stunt, the information that has become available in the twenty-four hour since then suggest that the minority leader’s letter was anything but a political stunt: “in my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government.... The public has a right to know this information.”
Yet, Comey, hypocritically invoking the sixty day rule (!) to protect his chosen candidate, has been curiously unwilling to level with the American public about whether the FBI is even investigating the mounting evidence that Donald Trump is indeed a Manchurian candidate. Even though we are becoming aware of the existence of “an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit,” the FBI Director has seemed curiously reluctant to investigate.
Yet the director seems willing to commit a great deal of Bureau resources pursuing Huma Abedin on the off chance that some small number of emails on the Abedin/Weiner joint laptop might possibly contain some vaguely incriminating data that might in some vague way, point in the general direction of the quondam Secretary of State. In other words, Comey appears willing to ignore the Russian wolf at the door while sending all his agents to look for an imaginary bogeyman under the bed.
Given the fraught political nature of this election season, when Donald Trump has openly invited the Russian intelligence apparat to hack the Democratic Party, and when just about everybody and his brother seems to have set their moral scruples aside to eagerly traffic in the stolen property WikiLeaks has been peddling, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether we are not being betrayed at the highest political level. If Donald Trump is willing to open the door and let the Russians ransack America’s living room, why shouldn’t James Comey do the same thing?
If, on Friday morning, you had suggested to me that James Comey might either have been compromised by the Russians or have actually been turned by them, I would have fed you your tongue for telling impossible lies. But now, with Halloween behind us and The Day of the Dead before us, I can no longer be sure. Given James Comey’s kid glove treatment of Donald Trump and Trump’s evident willingness to traffic with enemies national, I think patriotic Americans must dare to envisage the hypothesis of the basic disloyalty of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of his willingness to promote a candidate favorable to, and controlled by, the Moskovskiy Kremlin.
As happened with Brexit, we must now begin to entertain again an hypothesis that the West is under serious and concerted attack at the hands of James Comey and Donald Trump, and that a Russian Kriegßpiel is very much underway against the United States in particular and the West in general. We are indeed betrayed at the highest political levels. The Republic is in grave danger, and a comprehensive prophylaxis of Donald Trump, James Comey, and the numerous Russian embeds in the Trump campaign, together with a like prophylaxis of Trump supporters is in order. We have spies, saboteurs, and wreckers among us, all of whose activities must be inhibited by any means necessary.
-XXX-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he spent eight years on the city Council. The views set forth herein are his own and should not be construed as constituting any form of legal advice.
Monday, October 24, 2016
Tom Hayden, An Appreciation
Summary: We lost one of a generation of passionate activists last night. Tom Hayden entered into eternity at the age of 76. For those of us who were old enough to remember Tom in real time, he was that paradoxical figure; the insufferable bombthrower and the principled voice of conscience. With Tom’s death, we bid farewell to another of the great personages of a time we shall not see again. As the 60s fade out of living memory, to be replaced by sepia-toned nostalgia and treacly Hollywood biopics, there is something almost elegiac in the news of Tom Hayden’s passing.
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Tom Hayden died last night. He was 76 years old and he had suffered a serious stroke roughly a year and a half ago. His death appears to be from complications thereof. As I look out at the overcast sky today I feel a profoundly elegiac mood, as if something unrecoverable had slipped into eternity, and I’m reminded of a haiku from Bashō:
All along this road
not a single soul – only
autumn evening comes.
A decade ago, we all observed with regret how the so-called Greatest Generation, the men and women who made possible our victory in World War II, had been slipping into eternity at the rate of something approaching 1100 per day. In 2009, we bade farewell to Harry Patch, the last living British veteran of The Great War. Now, we must gird ourselves for a new tranche of departures.
Tom’s death was not exactly unexpected. Eighteen months is a fairly long time to survive after a serious stroke. It gave him, and to some extent, us, time to prepare, for in the words of the Great Litany, we all seek deliverance from “dying suddenly and unprepared.”
And so Tom’s death should be an occasion for us of the mourning that comes naturally on such an occasion; but it should also be a time of remembrance and a time for drawing lessons from a life filled with occasion and consequence.
I don’t propose to recapitulate here the details of Tom Hayden’s biography. That work has been done, and done more ably than I could do, by journalists and obit writers. My purpose is appreciation. My political life and Tom’s both occurred within the large, often fractious, circuit of the Californian Left.
To be a Democrat in California was to confront, and even to embrace, Will Rogers’ timeless paradox: “I’m not a member of an organized political party; I’m a Democrat.” To be a Democrat in California during the latter years of the 20th century meant walking a fine line between what was politically pragmatic and doable and pursuing quixotic and frankly unattainable causes because it was the ideologically pure thing to do.
As the late Coachella Valley queer and democratic activist George Zander used to note, any political party, but particularly the Democratic Party, is made up of an unstable coalition of what George used to call “movement people” and “campaign people.” “Movement people,” or as they sometimes like to call themselves “transformational” people, tend to see politics as an enterprise for the ideologically pure. Such people tend to see themselves as more idealistic, and are more prone to see their politics in binary, black and white, frames.S
“Campaign people,” by contrast tend to be scorned by movement people as excessively “transactional.” Transactional campaign people tend to ask questions like: what is an election calculus for a particular race? How many swing voters do we need to bring into our camp? What will it cost to mount a successful campaign for a given constituency?
Movement people and campaign people are often separated by a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. The movement people tend to be ideologically pure; the campaign people tend to ask, pragmatically, “what works?” To apply an analogy from the history of the People’s Republic of China, movement people tend to be more Maoist in their approach, while campaign people tend to gravitate toward the more pragmatic teachings of Deng Xiaoping, who was reputed to have said “Socialism is what works.” Where movement people have often been willing to sacrifice the good on the altar of the perfect, campaign people have tended to be guided more by the philosophy of Adm. of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergei G. Gorshkov, whose favorite motto, apropos of procurement, was “‘good enough’ is best.”
I make no bones about being a campaign person. I’m interested in transformation, but I’m also interested in what we need to do to accomplish the transformation. I saw something similar from Tom Hayden during the years he served in the California Legislature. It would have been easy for Tom to take an uncompromising, bomb throwing, “transformational,” mindset into the Capitol building in Sacramento, and to become a prima donna among the Democratic caucus.
But, the Legislature is not a place for prima donnas. Any Assemblymember is just one of 80, and any Senator is one of 40. In order to get things done in the Assembly, you have to be able to count to 41, as it were, or, in the Other House, to 21. If you can’t muster a majority, you cannot function effectively as a legislator. Yet Tom managed to function effectively in the Legislature, in both the Assembly and in the Other House.
In short, the bomb throwing, Judge Julius Hoffman-baiting transformational activist was able to make perhaps the most important political transformation there is, transitioning from a movement person to a campaign person.
In a very real sense, that is the core of democracy. Our public institutions of self-government cannot function if they are staffed exclusively by “transformational,” movement people. Indeed, much of the long-term success of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s altogether promising campaign for the Presidency of the United States – and, conversely, much of the failure of Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for President–- can be accounted for by the difference between movement people and campaign people.
The Sanders campaign was always about movement people. It billed itself as being a transformational campaign, a “political revolution,” and it attracted movement people to it. In that regard, it has been somewhat like the snakebit campaign of Donald Trump, which has tried to appeal to so-called movement conservatives, albeit with limited success. Hillary, on the other hand, has been careful, methodical, and in many ways classically feminine in her campaigning. The Clinton campaign has been nothing if not careful and exquisitely transactional.
Indeed, the success of the Clinton campaign has mirrored, to a large degree, the success of the Obama campaign of 2008. Barack managed, in 2008, to balance and reconcile the demands of both movement people and campaign people, to be brilliantly transformational while also pulling off a coldly transactional defeat of John McCain.
Tom Hayden managed to balance transformational ardor and transactional pragmatism. His early embrace of Bernie Sanders reflected, I think, his own early transformational proclivities; while his later coming round to Hillary Clinton reflected a transactional view of what was attainable in our politics in 2016. That may be a skill set we are in danger of losing.
The great ones, the old ones, are slipping into eternity. With each obituary we read, we are reminded that those exciting times are passing out of living memory. In 1938, with war looming, Nagai Kafū, the great Japanese novelist of the city of Tokyo, wrote a haiku that is almost untranslatable, but renders approximately as
Falling snow
And Meiji is far away.
Looking out into the pluvial October weather, in a world incrementally impoverished because it no longer has Tom Hayden in it, I think
Falling rain
And Woodstock is far away.
It is to be regretted the Tom Hayden did not survive long enough to witness what the tea leaves now suggest is the well-nigh unstoppable momentum of of Hillary Clinton to the White House. Like Moses, he was allowed to reach the mountaintop, but not to go into the promised land. We can do his memory no greater service than to elect that “nasty woman” President of the United States in 15 days’ time.
May his memory be a blessing; requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat super eis. Amen.
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