Tuesday, July 17, 2018

How The Vlad and Donald Show Got Gaskets Popping All Over the Imperial City



By David Stockman

The Vlad and Donald show in Helsinki yesterday was simply brilliant and breathtaking---
we'd say even a beautiful thing to behold.

Between them, they left CNN's nattering nabobs of neocon nonsense sounding like the
shrieking monkeys they actually are. And that's to say nothing of the fools they made out
of the newly minted liberal and progressive war-mongers on the Dem side of the aisle in
Washington or the so-called journalists who fill 90% of the space in the so-called
mainstream media with endless pro-war propaganda.

But most of all it was the single greatest blow to the War Party since it turned
Imperial Washington into a colossal menace bent on global hegemony when the Soviet Union
slithered off the pages of history in 1991.

We have said all along that Putin and Russia have been demonized because the Warfare
State desperately needs an "enemy" to justify its $800 billion annual mugging of
America's taxpayers. Yet today's spontaneous chorus by the two leaders in behalf of
détente, dialogue and diplomacy puts the kibosh on that Big Lie more completely than
could 100 Ted Talks or a year's worth of pro-peace op eds in the Washington Post.
So Flyover America will have no trouble seeing the good of the Helsinki Summit. Trump
and Putin just killed it on every topic where the War Party and its shills in the press
wanted to drive a wedge.

That is to say, cooperation on Syria, arms control, terrorism, North Korea, Ukraine;
friendly competition on supplying natural gas to Europe; an invitation to Mueller to
send his legal sleuths to Russia to participate in the interrogation of the 12 GRU ham
sandwiches named in the indictment; and best of all, a reciprocal notion that Russian
prosecutors come here to question Deep State operatives about how they helped one of
the greatest scoundrels of modern times, Bill Browder, abscond from Russia with almost

$1.5 billion skimmed from its people and on which he and his posse paid zero taxes
both there and here.

Indeed, the debunking of the false mainstream narrative about Russia's nefarious
intentions and doings was so complete that the Deep State apparatchiks were reduced to
sputtering hysterically. For instance, here is the bile issued by the central architect of the
Russian collusion lie, former CIA director John Brennan:

Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the
threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not
only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican atriots: Where are you???

Then again, when you actually read the transcript of the joint press conference, you will
find the very words, phrases and tonalities that harken back to the courageous efforts of
liberal democrats like Senators George McGovern and Frank Church and even President
Jimmy Carter to promote diplomacy and detente during the height of the Cold War
confrontation when each side had 9,000 nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert.

And exactly what was John Brennan doing circa 1976?

Why, he voted for the communist candidate for President, Gus Hall, because he thought
Jimmy Carter was too much of a cold warrior!

In other words, the guy is a demented partisan hack who arose to power during a 25
year career in the CIA that began in 1980, and during which he sold his soul to the
Warfare State in pursuit of position, power and pelf.

But beyond our joy in hearing the gaskets popping all over the Imperial City we can say
this: In the course of that press conference the Donald threw down the gauntlet to the
Deep State in a manner so explicit and unequivocal that there is now no turning back.
Either he will rally the undoubtedly dazed GOP troops on Capitol Hill and his base in
behalf of rapprochement with Russia and an end Washington's arrogant Imperial
hegemony---or they will indeed put him on the Dick Nixon Memorial Helicopter for a
final ride to Gonesville.

At this point we are at a loss---50 years of studying the Imperial City notwithstanding---
to know which way it will go.

But we have no doubt that the Deep State and its shills, assigns and
nomenklatura throughout the Imperial City will now escalate their war against the
Donald to red hot intensity. The signal for that was in the very first words that came
off Anderson Cooper's viperous tongue the instant the press conference was finished:
“You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an
American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader, that I have ever seen”.

But just call it fever pitch on steroids. That's the condition that CNN had already worked
itself into after a full weekend of near-hysterical gumming about Robert Mueller's latest
gambit.

We are referring, of course, to his Friday indictment of 12 alleged election meddlers
slathered in Russian dressing.

But wasn't that just another Deep State "insurance policy"?

Wasn't that a desperate, bald-faced effort to sabotage yesterday's summit in Helsinki?

After all, why did these indictments come down on Friday afternoon July 13?

Did Mueller and Rosenstein need to hurry-up their indictments and make lightening
perp-walk style arrests so that their targets wouldn't flee the country in the dead of
night?

Not at all. The 12 indictees were already long gone. In fact, these particular Russians
were never here, if they actually exist at all.

So let's call a spade a spade. Friday afternoon's action by his own Justice
Department was a brazen shot across Donald Trump's bow by the Deep State the likes of
which we have never before seen; and which after today's rebuke of its entire false
RussiaGate narrative will undoubtedly prove to be a mere token of the pounding attacks
yet to come.

Even then, Friday's bald-faced attempt to sabotage the summit in itself raises deeply
troubling questions about whether even the veneer of democratic self-government has
much shelf-life left in America.

That's because Friday's theatrics amounted to a frontal attempt to nullify the 2016
election. If the Donald said anything about his agenda during the 2016 campaign that
was remotely coherent (besides building the Mexican Wall) it was that he would seek a
rapprochement deal with Putin.

Needless to say, the War Party is dead set against constructive engagement with
Russia because the Fake Enemy represented by its risible demonization of Putin is
literally its authorization to continue squandering $800 billion per year on "national
security"; and that, in turn, is the very life-blood of Imperial Washington's malodorous
prosperity.

So what happened even before today's press conference demarche was a profoundly
anti-democratic and unconstitutional attempt by the permanent government to thwart
Trump's effort to pursue his self-evident mandate from the US electorate.

But for crying out loud. Friday's indictment of 12 ham sandwiches from the GRU
(Russian military security agency) had nothing to do with justice or Mueller's mandate;
and even less so with genuine national security.

As to the former, there will never be any arrests, let alone a trial or conviction. That's
because the source of the purported "evidence", memorialized in the indictment's 29
pages of spurious exactitude, is presumably classified and would never be presented in
open court.

Indeed, the CNN bobbleheads are always remonstrating about the sanctity of the rule of
law, but exactly what do they think Mueller's grandstanding stunt was other than
an insult to exactly that?

They surely can't claim that Mueller's hired political assassins were faithfully
administering regular-way justice when the guilt or innocence of the charged cannot
possibly ever be adjudicated. How could it be when there can never be a legitimate trial
with empty defendants' chairs and no admissible evidence that the government is
willing to present in a public proceeding?

In fact, the despicable Rod Rosenstein made absolutely clear that the indictment is
going directly into the dead letter file, with nary a passing swipe by Robert Mueller's
vaunted prosecutors:

“The special counsel’s investigation is ongoing and there will be no comments by the
special counsel at this time ... we intend to transition responsibility for this indictment
to the Justice Department’s National Security Division (NSD) while we await the
apprehension of the defendants.”

Really?

Either the DOJ is fixing to send Seal Team Six into Moscow to snatch the 12 GRU
operatives or it expects the Kremlin to dispatch them to Washington handcuffed to their
seats on a Russian air force jet at the very next opportunity.

As it happened at the press conference, both the Donald and Vlad put the fork in even
that absurdly improbable prospect.

That is, Putin referenced a 1999 cooperation agreement between the two countries on
criminal matters and welcomed Mueller's grand inquisitors to come to Moscow to
participate in an interrogation of the defendants; and the Donald welcomed it as a
creative approach on the matter.

Likewise, the timing of Friday's action had no national security purpose whatsoever. If
the Deep State apparatchiks really wanted Putin confronted on the matter---then in any
rational universe they would have armed the Donald with the indictment's particulars
and sent him into the meeting to confront Putin before it became public.

Either that, or the Donald was briefed but un-persuaded and therefore refused to do
their bidding. So Mueller and the DOJ simply "leaked" the charges via the clownish
device of an un-implementable indictment in order to blow-up the summit.

That is, their purpose was to countermand the decision of the US president to pursue
the very objectives he promised the American electorate. And since Brennan and his
Deep State ilk have brought up the "treason" word, we leave it to Justin Raimondo to
appropriately turn the tables:
Yet the brazenness of this borderline treason is what makes it so ineffective.
The American people aren’t stupid: to the extent that they’re paying attention to this
Beltway comic opera they can figure out the motives and meaning of Mueller’s
accusations without too much difficulty.
The indictment reads like a fourth-rate spy thriller: we are treated to alleged “real
time” transcripts of Boris and Natasha in action, draining the DNC’s email system as
well as our precious bodily fluids. This material, perhaps supplied by the National

Security Agency, contains no evidence that links either Russia or the named
individuals to the actions depicted in the transcripts. We just have to take Mueller’s
word for it.

After today's post-press conference hail of calumny at the Donald by a endless line of
Dem pols it is perfectly clear that the alleged Russian election meddling is a sideshow. In
fact, the Dems are so distraught and un-reconciled to their loss to surely the
weakest presidential candidate ever fielded by the GOP (including Alf Landon and Barry
Goldwater) that they have subordinated rationality itself to their pursuit of vendetta.
So doing, they have made the Democratic party the new handmaids of the Warfare
State, as Justin Raimondo further aptly observed:

The disgusting – and depressing – response of the Democrats to the Helsinki summit
has been a concerted campaign to ... cancel it. Yes, that’s how myopic and in thrall to
the Deep State these flunkies are: world peace, who cares? Never mind that we’re still
on hair-trigger alert, with our nukes aimed at their cities and their nukes targeting
ours. The slightest anomaly could spark a nuclear exchange – the end of the world, the
extinction of human life, and probably of most life, for quite some time to come.
And yet — what does the survival of the human race matter next to the question of how
and why Hillary Clinton was denied her rightful place in history? I mean, really!
After the announcement on Friday, John Podesta smirked "they caught the witches".
But as George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley observed,
In other words, if there were a real hunt for election witches, we (the US and its
intelligence apparatus) would find ourselves at the head of the line to the pillory.
At the end of the day, this is not about a national security threat at all because Russia
isn't one. Let us again observe that even in its current state of alleged disrepair and
under-spending that the NATO-29 (including the US) have a combined GDP of $36
trillion and military budget of $1 trillion.

Those figures are 24X Russia's GDP of $1.4 trillion and 16X its military budget of
$61 billion. Accordingly, there is not a snow balls' chance in the hot place that the
perfectly rational leader of what is actually a pint-seized nation who stood alongside the

Donald at today's press conference has any illusions (or intentions) whatsoever about
military aggression.

But now that he has thrown the gauntlet at the Deep State, we can hope that the Donald
will reclaim his powers as the dully elected President of the United States and order an
examination of the DNC computer that has been AWOL during this entire witchunt;
and, even more to the point, declassify every single NSA intercept on which Mueller's
comic book indictment was based.

We are perfectly willing to believe that operatives in the GRU went spear-phishing at the
DNCC and DNC, and that like millions of everyday folks who fall for these gambits daily
on the global internet that some naïve or stupid DNC staffers, as the case may be,
opened their digital kimono's to the intruders.

But so what?

None of the shenanigans and skull-doggery inside the Dem apparatus that were revealed
to the American electorate were untrue. So how did the truth of the matter undermine
America's democratic process of selecting a leader?

The only thing the indictment proves---even if it is accurate to the chapter and verse
cited----is that if you live in a glass house, don't start throwing stones.

The US spends $75 billion per year on a colossal globe-spanning surveillance, hacking
and internet intruding operation that makes the indictment's alleged GRU tom foolery
look trite by comparison.

The recently renamed TAO (tailored access operations) alone consists of a

dozen sprawling buildings in Maryland, Texas, Hawaii, Georgia and Colorado chock-a-
block with a veritable army of military and civilian computer hackers, intelligence
analysts, targeting specialists, computer hardware and software designers, and electrical
engineers. And their job is to do a thousand times over to foreign governments, elections
and political processes exactly what the Mueller indictment charges against the GRU.
Indeed, TAO is the Typhoid Mary of the global internet, infecting systems
of friend and foe alike with a continuous tsunami of implanted

malware. While originally chartered as an eavesdropping agency, the NSA has
embraced hacking as an especially nifty way to spy on foreign targets.

The intelligence collection is often automated, with malware implants — computer code
designed to find material of interest — left sitting on the targeted system for months or
even years, sending files back to the NSA.

According to the diligent 2013 investigation published by a leading German news site,
Hamburg based Spiegel ONLINE, and based on leaked NSA documents, the US engages
in massive malware implanting activities which are far more menacing than the
primitive "phishing" operations described by Mueller's latest comic book:

One of the hackers' key tasks is the offensive infiltration of target computers with so-
called implants or with large numbers of Trojans. They've bestowed their spying tools
with illustrious monikers like "ANGRY NEIGHBOR," "HOWLERMONKEY" or
"WATERWITCH." These names may sound cute, but the tools they describe are both
aggressive and effective.
According to details in Washington's current budget plan for the US intelligence
services, around 85,000 computers worldwide are projected to be infiltrated by the
NSA specialists by the end of this year. By far the majority of these "implants" are
conducted by TAO teams via the Internet.

Nevertheless, TAO has dramatically improved the tools at its disposal. It maintains a
sophisticated toolbox known internally by the name "QUANTUMTHEORY." "Certain
QUANTUM missions have a success rate of as high as 80%, where spam is less than
1%," one internal NSA presentation states.

A comprehensive internal presentation titled "QUANTUM CAPABILITIES," which
SPIEGEL has viewed, lists virtually every popular Internet service provider as a
target, including Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and YouTube.
Finally, why do we think these indictments were an utterly desperate move by Mueller?

Because the indictments go out of their way to preclude any Americans having any
involvement in these ‘hacking events’ at all.

As Tom Luongo cogently observed:
Now with Trump prepared to sit down with Putin and potentially hammer out a major
agreement on many outstanding issues like Syria, arms control, NATO’s purpose,
energy policy and terrorism the Deep State/Globalist/Davos Crowd needed something
to saddle him with to prevent this from happening.
The reasoning will be (if not already out there as I write this) that Trump would be a
traitor for sitting down with Putin after these indictments.
Tom Luongo could not have been more clairvoyant. The wolf-pack is out howling
already---dripping with blood in tooth and claw.

In that context, we never thought we'd see the occasion when the Donald was actually
lyrical, but he sure was today. Shame on Imperial Washington for its shrill attacks on a
President who is actually seeking peace with a rival who has done us no harm.

Said the Donald
I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than risk peace in
pursuit of politics.
Truer words were never spoken.

David Stockman served as the Director of the Office Management and Budget (1981-1985) under President Ronald Reagan. The above originally appeared at David Stockman's Contra Corner.

6 comments:

  1. Yes, I love the way DJ continues to play the media for the fools they always are every day and especially since he won the presidential election.

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  2. --- Said the Donald: I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than risk peace in pursuit of politics. ---

    Yeah. Besides starting an unnecessary trade war with everyone else, that is. The peace achieved through trade is worth risking for the few moments of applause from his adoring fans within the Rust Belt.

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    Replies
    1. I do not believe in tariffs, but Donald Trump always has, as a tool to renegotiate deals. He said that during the campaign and in fact has done so since the Japanese paranoia in the 80s.

      What worries me is if the tariffs work, and we get better trade deals, and leaders further on down the road start willy nilly using the strategy.

      His tariffs are not like those of the 30s in which it was pure protectionism, where as future leftist will see it as a great way toward just that aim

      Delete
  3. Today was good Donald, always fun to see the left and the neocons go crazy, he should do it more often like this where he rises above the fray instead of being a muckraking circus act on Twitter.

    ReplyDelete
  4. So can we reverse the increase in “defense” spending now?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Just finished your Deformation, brilliant, though difficult it was worth the struggle! Also, great article!

    ReplyDelete