See our strange politics. It’s the first step to change.

Larry Kummer, Editor

7 years ago

Night street circus performance with two clowns juggling.

Summary: Here is a powerful summary of the current state of American politics, to the extent that can be done in a thousand words. Feel the strangeness; that is a key aspect of the situation. We are in the midst of a process generating revelations that blow our minds. We can come out of this stronger!

ID 128496492 © Aleksii Sidorov | Dreamstime.

It becomes increasingly obvious that the Democrats seek to impeach Trump for purely political reasons. Obama committed far greater breaches of the Constitution – blatantly, but our rulers did not care because he increased State power. But more interesting is that other elements of America’s elites have allied with the Democrats: the “Deep State.” This might be the most significant aspect of Trump’s time in the White House.

See this as a process. A year ago the great and wise mocked the idea of a “Deep State.” In September, the NYT published “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” by a “senior official in the Trump administration.” It was a coy but open admission of the Deep State’s power.

“…many of the senior officials in his own (President Trump’s) administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda. …I would know. I am one of them.”

Now David Stockman explains how Trump has earned its enmity by taking actions (nothing so coherent as policies) that are contrary to the wishes of the Deep State {gated copy, open copy}. This is by now so obvious that even the New York Times admits it, although they still believe it is proper that the Deep State should have primacy over elected officials: “Trump’s War on the ‘Deep State’ Turns Against Him” – “The impeachment inquiry is in some ways the culmination of a battle between the president and the government institutions he distrusted and disparaged.”

These revelations blow the minds of most people who confront this evidence. It’s too strange to easily describe, and that strangeness is part of the pattern. There are few people who can explain it briefly and clearly. Asking for them to be objective is asking too much. Here is one such man’s summary of today’s situation in the impeachment games. It might not make sense, but we should expect that. We are in ClownWorld.

“The Fumes of Fanaticism“

By James Howard Kunstler at his website.
Reposted with his generous permission, 28 October 2019.

Judging by the volume of intemperate emails and angry social media blasts that come my way, the party of impeachment seems to be inhaling way too much gas from the smoking guns it keeps finding in the various star chambers of its inquisition against you-know-who. You’d think that the failure of Mr. Mueller’s extravaganza might have chastened them just a little – a $32 million-dollar effort starring the most vicious partisan lawyers inside-the-Beltway, 2,800 subpoenas issued over two years, 500 search warrants exercised, and finally nothing whatever to pin on Mr. Trump – except the contra-legal assertion that now he must prove his innocence.

When you state just that, these frothing hysterics reply that many background figures – if not the Golden Golem of Greatness himself – were indicted and convicted of crimes by Mr. Mueller’s crew. Oh yes!

The Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency was indicted for spending $400,000 on Facebook ads (and never extradited or tried in a court-of-law). Pretty impressive victory there!
The hacking of Hillary Clinton’s emails by “Russia”? Still just alleged, never proven, with plenty of shady business around the search for evidence.
Paul Manafort, on tax evasion of money earned in Ukraine, 2014? We’ll see about that as the whole filthy business of the 2014 Ukraine regime change op under Mr. Obama gets reviewed in the months ahead.
George Papadopoulos for lying to the FBI? Stand by on that one, too; still a developing story. {He’s also running for Congress.}
General Michael Flynn, for ditto? You may have noticed that General Flynn’s case is shaping up to be the biggest instance of prosecutorial misconduct since the Dreyfus affair (France, 1894-1906, which badly-educated Americans most certainly know nothing about). {See the prosecutor’s version; see the defense’s version.}

To set the record straight I’m forced to repeat something that these New Age Jacobins seem unable to process: You don’t have to be a Trump cheerleader to be revolted by the behavior of his antagonists, which is a stunning spectacle of bad faith, dishonesty, incompetence, and malice – and is surely way more toxic to the American project than anything the president has done. Every time I entertain the complaints of these angry auditors, I’m forced to remind myself that these are the same people who think that “inclusion” means shutting down free speech, who believe that the US should not have borders, who promote transsexual reading hours in the grammar schools, and who fiercely desire to start a war with Russia.

That’s not a polity I want to be associated with and until it screws its head back on, I will remain the enemy of it. In fact, in early November I’m traveling to New York City, where the Jacobin city council has just made it a crime to utter the phrase illegal alien in a public place, with a $250,000 penalty attached {see CNN}. I challenge their agents to meet me in Penn Station and arrest me when I go to the information kiosk and inquire if they know what is the best place in midtown Manhattan to meet illegal aliens.

The volume of Jacobin hysteria ratcheted up to “11” late last week when the news broke that the Attorney General’s study of RussiaGate’s origins was upgraded to a criminal investigation {see the NYT’s spin on this}, and that a voluminous report from the DOJ Inspector General is also about to be released. What do you suppose they’re worried about? Naturally the Jacobins’ bulletin board, a.k.a The New York Times, fired a salvo denouncing William Barr – so expect his reputation to be the next battle zone for these ever more desperate fanatics. Talk of preemptively impeaching him is already crackling through the Twitter channels. That will be an excellent sideshow.

Meanwhile, how is Rep, Adam Schiff’s secret proceeding going? Last week he put out a narrative that US Chargé d’Affaires to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, fired a gun-that-smoked fer sure in testimony. Except, of course, as per Mr. Schiff’s usual practice, he refused to issue any actual transcript of the interview in evidence, while there are plenty of indications that Mr. Taylor’s second-hand gossip was roundly refuted under counter-questioning by the non-Jacobin minority members of the House Intel Committee.

Editor’s note – My favorite headline from the “fair and neutral” press about this: “Diplomat Bill Taylor receives rock star reception in Ukraine after House testimony” by Anna Schecter at NBC – “In an interview with NBC News, Taylor declined to answer questions about the impeachment inquiry but praised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.” No discussion of the many oddities and ironies in this.

Mr. Schiff’s pattern lo these many months of strife has been to claim ultimate proof of wrongdoing only to have it blow up in his face. It’s a face that many Americans are sick of seeing and hearing from, and I am serenely confident that before this colossal scandal is resolved, the Congressman from Hollywood will be fatally disgraced, as was his role-model, Senator Joseph McCarthy, before him.

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About Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler (Wikipedia) worked as a reporter and feature writer for several 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.