Trump über alles
Max Boot at Foreign Policy also lines up the sinister portents hinting at a near future in which a criminal overturns the US government and takes dictatorial power.
There is the claim that Mueller is biased because he is friends with fired FBI Director James Comey, who is anti-Trump even though Comey did as much as anyone to elect Trump. That members of Mueller’s staff have made campaign donations to Democrats. That the FBI erred in showing interest in the dossier on Kremlin-Trump links compiled by a respected former MI6 officer. That FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s wife received money from Hillary Clinton (in fact, she received campaign funds from the Democratic Party of Virginia and a political action committee associated with Virginia’s Democratic governor when she ran for a state Senate seat in 2015).
Based on such flimsy reasoning, Trump besmirches not just Mueller’s team but the whole FBI, tweeting: “After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters – worst in History!” At his Pensacola rally on Friday, held to promote the Senate candidacy of an accused child molester, Trump decried the entire American government for being biased against him: “This is a rigged system,” he said. “This is a sick system from the inside. And you know there’s no country like our country but we have a lot of sickness in some of our institutions.” It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out which “institutions” he is talking about.
Naturally, the most fervent Trumpkins have gone even farther than Trump himself; in fact, they are said to be frustrated by the “restraint” he has shown in his war against Mueller. Listen to what the talking heads at state TV, aka Fox News, are saying. Sean Hannity calls Mueller “a disgrace to the American justice system” and “the head of the snake.” Jeanine Piro, sounding very much like a budding commissar, claims: “There is a cleansing needed in the FBI and the Department of Justice. It needs to be cleansed of individuals who should not just be fired, but who need to be taken out in handcuffs.” Greg Jarrett compares the FBI to the KGB, as if the G-men were running gulags in Alaska: “I think we now know that the Mueller investigation is illegitimate and corrupt,” he says . “And Mueller has been using the FBI as a political weapon. And the FBI has become America’s secret police. Secret surveillance, wiretapping, intimidation, harassment and threats. It’s like the old KGB that comes for you in the dark of the night banging through your door.”
Republicans and the far-right trashing the FBI in order to protect the power of a dimwitted corrupt real estate tycoon with a habit of insulting women. Republicanism has morphed into nihilism as if overnight.
[G]iven how unfounded and outrageous the attacks are, it is striking and dismaying how few Republicans are rushing to defend Mueller and his team. That is an ominous sign of what will happen if and when Trump tries to fire the special counsel. The GOP has made clear that it is committed not to the rule of law but to the rule of Trump.
Indeed it has, so what do we do next? What do we do when Trump does fire Mueller and Rosenstein and replaces them with Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow while the Republicans in Congress applaud? What do we do then?
I would love to be able to think that’s far-fetched but I’m not.
I think it actually began about twenty five years ago, but now it is blindingly overt.
I am not either. I actually see this as the most likely course.
I think it was more like 35 years ago – the ascent of Reagan was a reaction by the greatest generation to what they perceived as the “liberal” takeover by the Baby Boomer generation and their fellow travelers (Greatest generation academics etc that joined in sit-ins and so forth). I remember the triumph when Reagan won. Now we were going to get back to sanity and undo all that liberal nonsense…
In short, Reagan, who was an unqualified B-movie actor who lacked curiosity about most things opened the way to the ascension of an unqualified reality TV sort-of actor who lacked curiosity about everything.
The Republicans have long been a fascist party in need of a dictator willing to take the reigns. Each one of the last three federal elections they’ve won have been stolen, more-or-less brazenly; the Supreme Court handed Bush his first (s)election, Diebold the second, and Russia and the FBI and a population soaked in greed and indifference and rank conspiracy gave us the latest atrocity. The naked rigging of the states’ elections in the last seven years has been done out in the open with the explicit aim of enacting Newt Gingrich’s vision of a ‘permanent Republican majority’. They have nearly enough states signed on for a Constitutional Convention, at which the founding document and framework for the entire country would be up for grabs, no matter how ‘limited in scope’ the callers of the Convention would try to claim for it.
The political (not to mention legal) blowback for these actions and for these explicit intentions has been largely nonexistent. It took Bush wrecking (and I mean *wrecking*) the economy and showing imperial mismanagement to make Commodus blush in order to give Democrats a chance, and it took the Republican establishment making bets on reasonable people (for certain values of ‘reasonable’) for Obama to win. And now that they’ve embraced a criminal, and not a high-minded war criminal but a could-show-up-on-Law-and-Order thug, they’re mortgaging the country’s present and the world’s future on treating him as a regular politician even as he (and they) take open, obvious, undeniable steps toward autocracy.
What consoles me, perhaps the only thing, is that these people aren’t Machiavellian tricksters; they’re largely rubes and hucksters themselves, drunk on power and sheltered by assumed entitlement. There isn’t a central, shadowy conspiracy orchestrating them, but rather an organic and obvious thirst for power and essentially quotidian corruption. They will fire Mueller, and they’ll try to justify it, and if we’re lucky their ineptitude will keep them from stealing the 2018 midterms. But their ineptitude hasn’t stopped them from getting this far, so that’s not a lot to bank on.
From where I sit, it looks like it was their ineptitude that enabled them to get this far, since so many people now distrust competency and expertise. And it isn’t really because competency and expertise fail so often; it’s because the experts get blamed when something goes wrong (like FEMA and Katrina, for instance), when it is the incompetents running the show.
Anti-intellectualism and anti-expertise has always played a major role in American politics, but now it is playing the leading role, and partially because both sides have bought in. The far-right wants theocracy and fascism, the far-left wants a woo-world run by gurus and jade-egg peddlers.
Politico:
Kaine’s bid for Senate harassment data rejected
By ELANA SCHOR . 12/18/2017 11:59 PM EST . Updated 12/19/2017 12:18 AM EST