Kunster on RussiaGate: it’s an empire of bs

Summary: How best to respond to the post-Mueller RussiaGate festivities, after two years of this mad circus? James Howard Kunstler chooses insightful mockery, producing something better than anything I could do with my dry analytical style. As usual, the epilogue is the key.

It’s RussiaGate!

An Empire of Bullshit

James Howard Kunstler at his website.
Reposted with his generous permission.

After two years of gaslighting the public while it blew smoke up America’s ass, the Jacobin news media enjoyed its final feeding frenzy with the release of the 400-page Mueller report. They expected 1000 pounds of raw filet mignon, but it turned out to be tofu fried in olestra. The ensuing fugue of hyperventilating hysteria was also duly expected and William Barr stoically endured their hebephrenic peevings at the release ceremony – a press conference which itself offended the media.

The threats and raving continued all the livelong day and far into the peeper-filled night with CNN’s Chris Cuomo blustering “It’s time to rumble,” and the lugubrious hack David Gergen muttering soulfully, “This was not fake news,” and The Times’ Maggie Haberman fuming that the White House had played the “Nazi anthem” Edelweiss – very fake news, it turned out, since the tune was written for Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s 1959 Broadway show, The Sound of Music (and sung by the anti-Nazi hero Baron von Trapp; see it here).

Does…anyone at that White House understand the significance of that song? https://t.co/IK9h8fOwNj

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 18, 2019

Meanwhile Rachel Maddow had the balls to confab in prime time with disgraced former FBI mandarin Andy McCabe, officially identified as a liar by his own colleagues at the agency. What a circus of perfidious freakery! {See the video.}

Understand that the Mueller Report itself was the mendacious conclusion to a deceitful investigation, the purpose of which was to conceal the criminal conduct of US government officials meddling in the 2016 election, in collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign, to derail Mr. Trump’s campaign, and then disable him when he managed to win the election. Mr. Mueller was theoretically trying to save the FBI’s reputation, but he may have only succeeded in injuring it more gravely.

The whole wicked business began as a (failed) entrapment scheme using shadowy US Intel “assets” Stefan Halper and Joseph Mifsud to con small fish George Papadopoulos and Carter Page into incriminating themselves (they declined to be conned) and moved on to ploys like the much-touted Trump Tower meeting to ensnare Trump Junior and then to several efforts (also failed) to flip Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen – the final product of which was an epic failure to find one instance of real chargeable criminal collusion between anyone connected to Mr. Trump and Russia.

By the way, the Mueller Report failed to mention that the two Russians present in that August 2016 Trump Tower meeting, lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, were on the payroll of Hillary Clinton’s oppo research contractor Fusion GPS, and met with that company’s principal, Glenn Simpson, both before and after the meeting {e.g., see here and here} – just one example among many of the Mueller Team’s shifty tactics, but a move that speaks volumes about Mr. Mueller’s actual intent, which was to keep his prosecutorial circus going as long as possible to interfere with Mr. Trump carrying out his own duties.

The Special Prosecutor’s main bit of mischief, of course, was his refusal to reach a conclusion on the obstruction of justice charge. What the media refuses to accept and make clear is that a prosecutor’s failure to reach a conclusion is exactly the same thing as an inability to make a case, and it was a breach of Mr. Mueller’s duty to dishonestly present that failure as anything but that in his report – and possibly an act of criminal prosecutorial misconduct.

Like any tantrum, the media’s frenzy will run out of steam (and credibility) and now they will be whipped like dogs for betraying their public trust. There is a counter-narrative to the “Resistance” narrative, and it is a true crime story. That suppressed story is finally going to roll out in the implacable workings of actual (not fake) justice and it is going to crush a lot of people who concocted this epic political hoax, including some members of the press who knowingly and dishonestly abetted it.

Many criminal referrals have already been made on the likes of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr, and a big net has been cast to pull in the figures who have been hiding in the thickets lo these two-and-a-half-years of smoke and gaslight: Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, William Brennan, James Clapper, Nellie Ohr, Samantha Power, Bill Priestap, Jim Rybicki, James Baker, Mike Kortan, John Carlin, Mary McCord, Josh Campbell and more. Some of these are going to jail and some have already flipped. The fetchings should reach the Obama White House. Mr. Mueller himself, even in his majestic granitic silence, will be liable for failing to inform his boss, the Attorney General, that the predicate document for his witch hunt was known to be a fraud back in 2016, and was used anyway to spy on a presidential candidate.

Let Congress put on a carnival of its own now. It will be greeted like a TV commercial for a hemorrhoid remedy while the real national psychodrama plays out in grand juries and courtrooms, demonstrating what a grievous injury was done to this republic by its own vested authorities.

—————- End of Kunstler’s post —————-

Editor’s epilogue

I believe that Kunstler is far too optimistic about the next phase of the RussiaGate hysteria. Justice is the least likely outcome. But more important is to see that RussiaGate is just another symptom of an underlying illness. We’re in a process of broad institutional decay. That’s the core insight – my small satori – that led to A new, dark picture of America’s future. Unfortunately, we don’t see the process.

We are like primitive people looking at an epidemic of syphilis.  So many diseases! In fact there is only one. As was nicely said in The Exorcist (1973) …

Father Karras: “It might help if I gave you some background on the different personalities Regan has manifested. So far, I’d say there seem to be three.”

Father Merrin: “There is only one.”

When we identify the underlying cause of our problems, we will have taken a giant step towards reforming America. Until then we can connect the dots. and learn.

About James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler (Wikipedia) worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, before working as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he began writing books on a full-time basis. Kunstler is the author of 12 novels and has been a regular contributor to many major media, writing about environmental and economic issues. He is a leading supporter of the movement known as “New Urbanism.”

He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, and many other colleges. He has written five non-fiction books. See more about the most recent one below.

• The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (1993),
• Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century (1996),
• The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition (2001),
• The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Cent (2005),
• Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation (2012).

See some of his recent posts about America. They’re all well worth reading!

• Oscar Bytes – About the Oscar ceremonies.
• Marching to Gilead – About our detente with North Korea.
• Sunset Boulevard with Chimp – About Michael Jackson.
• The Blind Leading the Deaf and Dumb – about the resistance.

For More Information

Ideas! For some shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.

Please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more information see all posts about RussiaGate, about propaganda, about ways to reform America’s politics, and especially these …

1. A review of Russiagate, its propaganda and hysteria.
2. Secrets untold about the DNC hack, the core of RussiaGate.
3. Debunking RussiaGate, attempts to stop the new Cold War.
4. RussiaGate: fragments of a story large beyond imagining.
5. The RussiaGate story implodes. The Left burns with it – by Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report.
6. Peter van Buren shows the path to RussiaGate.

About Kunstler’s most recent book

Too Much Magic.
Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation.

From the publisher …

“Kunstler’s critically acclaimed and best-selling The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (2005) quickly became a grassroots hit, going into nine printings in hardcover. Kunstler’s shocking vision of our post-oil future caught the attention of environmentalists and business leaders alike, and stimulated widespread discussion about our dependence on fossil fuels and our dysfunctional financial and government institutions. Kunstler has since become a key commentator on the future, profiled in The New Yorker and invited to speak at TED and other events.

In Too Much Magic, Kunstler evaluates what has changed in the last seven years and shows us that in a post-financial-crisis world, his ideas are more relevant than ever.

“‘Too Much Magic’ is what Kunstler sees in the bright visions of a future world dreamed up by overly optimistic souls who believe technology will solve all our problems. Their visions remind him of the flying cars and robot maids that were the dominant images of the future in the 1950s. Kunstler’s idea of the future is much more sober: he analyzes the various technologies (vertical farms, fracking, corn ethanol) suggested as overnight solutions to the energy crisis and finds none that he thinks will work long-term to cure a society dependent on gas-guzzling cars, in love with an inefficient ideal of suburbia, and unwilling to fundamentally change its high-energy lifestyle. Kunstler also offers concrete ideas as to how we can help ourselves adjust to a society where the oil tap is running dry.

“With vision, clarity of thought, and a pragmatic worldview, Kunstler argues that the time for magical thinking and hoping for miracles is over and that the time to begin preparing for the long emergency has begun.”