Spy vs Spy: Bizarro Cold War, or Russians Am Coming

In am out. Wet am dry. Up am down in Bizarro America.

Billionaires iz Democratz. Republicanz iz Populisticals. Democratz am McCarthyites in Bizarro America. 

And in the kind of irony only lousy pulp authors usually dream up, a guy whose mentor was Roy Cohn is the target of that new Bizarro-McCarthyism.  

I realize this isn't an original metaphor but comics were my beat so I'm borrowing it. And it's the only thing that can explain the madhouse this country has become. But that's what happens at this stage in the timeline, or so I am told.

The fugue state I wrote about a few weeks back seems to be shifting, as the Democrats regroup and ready their response to a Trumpian future. Are they offering bold new leadership? Ambitious new proposals to reduce inequality and social stagnation? Brave gestures to unite a fragmented polity?

Not quite. 

Try the "Fake News" psy-op and McCarthyism 2.0. But I repeat myself.

There seems to be an attempt to upset the Electoral College as well, which meets on Dec. 19th to ratify the vote. One Republican elector, from Austin (of course), has declared his intention to vote for that hunk'a burning charisma and dynamism, Ohio Governor John Kasich (who may actually be the Bizarro Trump or the Reverse Trump), and claims other electors are secretly planning to join him.

There have been all kinds of stories about plans to sabotage the Electoral College- both by Democrats who support such a move and by Republicans, who obviously don't. It a tossup as to who's dreamed up the most florid conspiracy scenarios about it.

Of course, anything is possible, and we're well into Spy Agency vs Spy Agency blue water in this country, but any shenanigans by Electors would just throw the election into the House, which is still solidly under Republican control.

Getting to be what they call a "motif"

I LOVE A MAN IN A UNIFORM

Do timeline predictions allow for runaway militarism? Ronald Reagan was a downright hippy compared to Trump, who of course never served in the military himself. I've written about the rising militarism in his circle but even his civilian cronies give off a strongly Praetorian aura.

The media, who was so heavily invested into the notion that Trump was going to staff his Cabinet with has-beens and punchlines like Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie, finally seems to have woken up to the reality that I had sussed out quite soon after the election, and that's that Trump's going to be building his Cabinet out of brass:

How unusual is Trump's Cabinet of generals?

President-elect Donald Trump has been busy staffing his Cabinet and White House, and it’s been duly noted that many of the top positions have been filled by generals. 

Mr. Trump has nominated Gen. James Mattis (ret.) as defense secretary and retired Marine Gen. John Kelly (ret.) as homeland security secretary. He’s also picked Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.)to serve as his national security adviser. 

CBS News’ Major Garrett has reported that Mr. Trump is reluctant to have any more than three general occupying high cabinet and staff positions in his administration, so Gen. David Petraeus (ret.), who had been a top contender for secretary of state, may be the odd man out.

We're just looking at Secretaries here; I've no doubt that his Undersecretaries and Ass't Secretaries and on and on will look like George Patton's wetdreams.
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When I'm right, I'm right

The media is squealing like stuck pigs at John Podesta's house but I think for the wrong reasons. Trump is assembling a bunch of hardcases and Alpha's Alphas who just reek of that Deep State bouquet. And I don't think it's for the piquant conversation.

The latest example? Trump's tapped the CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex (Rex!) Tillerson, for State. Yeah, that ExxonMobil.* 

What I told Gordon I believe he's assembling is essentially a War Cabinet. This should be more worrisome than most people think, but maybe not for the reasons people might suspect.

It should be worrying because I think the war he has in mind is a secret war, a War in Heaven. Those never seem to work out that great for those of us on Earth.

NEVER GO FULL ALINSKY

We also saw a lot of doomsday scenarios arise from the recount efforts mounted by Jill Stein but that train seems to have run out of coal. Personally, I have serious doubts that Stein was ever actually trying to throw the election back to Hillary.

She clearly hates the woman and her policies and a Democratic Administration certainly does the Greens no good.

Stein's true agenda might be elucidated by the distinct lack of enthusiasm the Dems showed for her push, starting with President Obama and running down the totem pole. Was she really trying to expose Russian hacking or was there something else afoot?

The Michigan Supreme Court shut down the recount (which would have been a second recount, in point of fact) so we may never know. But there were irregularities in pro-Hillary districts that may have revealed why the Dems weren't looking forward to this recount at all:

One-third of precincts in Wayne County could be disqualified from an unprecedented statewide recount of presidential election results because of problems with ballots. 

Michigan’s largest county voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, but officials couldn’t reconcile vote totals for 610 of 1,680 precincts during a countywide canvass of vote results late last month. 

Most of those are in heavily Democratic Detroit, where the number of ballots in precinct poll books did not match those of voting machine printout reports in 59 percent of precincts, 392 of 662. 

According to state law, precincts whose poll books don’t match with ballots can’t be recounted. If that happens, original election results stand.

Stein also cited "75,000 ballots cast without also making a choice in the presidential race," but didn't specify what counties those ballots were found in. She also may have had a personal bone to pick (California's fraudy primary continues to be a source of contention with Sanders supporters), and as Gordon White explained in his newsletter:

Another Deep State faction provided the money so that the recount shows up the millions of dead and double voters who stumped for Hillary and the persistent and widespread voting fraud perpetuated by the DNC that the Greens called out in their letter to Dr Stein. It's the open secret that led to Trump's ill-advised tweet about illegal voting. 

(He should just re-banner his twitter page as "Trump's ill-advised tweets" at this point. It's its own parody account.) 

This is why the Dems -right up to Obama- are against the recount. They know there is widespread and systemic fraud for the Hillary camp stretching right back to the California primaries race against Bernie. 

Questioning voter irregularities is now apparently the province of fake news, and all the (nakedly partisan) sources the MSM cite says it simply does not exist. But this is utter nonsense and they know it.

Both parties engage in election shenanigans, even if their tactics differ (GOP tend towards suppression, Dems toward fraud).

That hive of fanatical Trumpism, er...CBS News, reported that "hundreds of deceased voters in Los Angeles County were still on voter rolls and voting. This discrepancy should have been corrected by the 2002 Help America Vote Act, but California is the only state yet to comply."

That's just "deceased" voters in one county in one state. Trump also cited Virginia; the Public Interest Legal Group says of the Commonwealth:

In our small sample of just eight Virginia counties who responded to our public inspection requests, we found 1046 aliens who registered to vote illegally. The problem is most certainly exponentially worse because we have no data regarding aliens on the registration rolls for the other 125 Virginia localities. 

My strong suspicion is that Trump believes that he has no choice but to expose all of this. The Democrats are going full Alinsky and are clearly not going to let up on the popular vote issue and will use it to try to delegitimize his Administration.

I don't think that's a good idea, seeing that they're dealing with Donald Trump, a man who's proven himself to be not only extremely vindictive and vengeful, but not half-bad at payback. And is going to have a lot of really fucking dangerous people in his pocket.

But do I really give a damn either way? I have my own problems.

Oh yeah, they're getting skittish in Washington.

THE RUSSIANS AM COMING!

The Washington Post- aka DNC News and Views Today-- made a fool of itself trying to push the "fake news" psy-op along by pimping a ridiculous shill factory called PropOrNot, who will viciously attack anyone on the Left, Right or Center who fails to toe the DNC line.

The Post have since attempted to walk back their endorsement of the fake political think-tank (predictably a product of CIAlicon Valley) but not before the damage was done.

I realize the newly-Bizarro McCarthy party and their propaganda outlets are fully onboard with this fake news psy-op here but I don't get the sense it's being very well run.

I think that fact might be concerning. Or should be.

That raging foundry of Trumpery, uh, The New Yorker, spoke for most observers (those who aren't embarrassing shills, I mean) when it observed that:

To PropOrNot, simply exhibiting a pattern of beliefs outside the political mainstream is enough to risk being labelled a Russian propagandist. 

Indeed, the list of “propaganda outlets” has included respected left-leaning publications like CounterPunch and Truthdig, as well as the right-wing behemoth Drudge Report. The list is so broad that it can reveal absolutely nothing about the structure or pervasiveness of Russian propaganda.

 In a scathing takedown on The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald and Ben Norton wrote that PropOrNot “embodies the toxic essence of Joseph McCarthy, but without the courage to attach individual names to the blacklist.”

Confirming the observation made by Obama adviser Ben Rhodes that most reporters are "27 year-olds" who "literally know nothing," the Post leaped onto PropOrNot's rickety jalopy apparently without even reading the fucking thing:

But a close look at the report showed that it was a mess. “To be honest, it looks like a pretty amateur attempt,” Eliot Higgins, a well-respected researcher who has investigated Russian fake-news stories on his Web site, Bellingcat, for years, told me. “I think it should have never been an article on any news site of any note.”

That persnickety Putin, jamming our wires with his rascally "fake news" monkeyshines! Why, we oughta bomb him back to the Yeltsin Era if he keeps it up! Listen here, you no-goodnik Russkies, we're on to your Jedi mind-tricks!

We're going to outlaw every damn news outlet that don't keep their damn noses clean! We're going to bring the blacklists and the internment camps and give every Russkie-lover a knuckle-sandwich just to show how much we love our freedom!

 That'll learn ya, Boris! Had enough or do ya want some more?

Because every legitimate thinktank uses emoticons

Let me be frank here: all news is "fake news," if you really want to get down to brass tacks. All news is packaged. Every major news outlet is terminally biased, every news outlet buries stories and mainstream journalists conspire- as a matter of course- with other journalists as well as with the political parties of their choice to manage and shape what people see, hear and read.

The only thing you can do is pick and choose from several sources and weigh the evidence until you come to a version of the truth you can live with.

Which may become more difficult with the bipartisan "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act", an Orwellian title if ever there was one.

Or a Bizarro one. Ministry of Truth, here we come! 

Gordon digs to the roots of all this chicanery:

Probably everyone who reads this newsletter is aware that the term ‘conspiracy theory’ was created and deployed by the CIA in 1967. In April of that year, the CIA wrote a dispatch which coined the term “conspiracy theories”  -and recommended methods for discrediting such theories.  The dispatch was marked “psych” -short for “psychological operations”-  and “CS” for the CIA’s “Clandestine Services” unit. 

The dispatch was produced in responses to a Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times in 1976.

Say this for the term "conspiracy theory." At least it is elegant. "Fake news" is just so… ugly. Ugly, clumsy, monosyllabic words. it is a sad indictment of just how stupid and lazy the West has become that the official update of the Deep State’s witches mark is just so primitive. You would say fake news if you were trying to explain conspiracy theory to a four year old whose first language wasn't English.

BIZARRO SPOOKS

In the normal world, the CIA destabilizes foreign countries and manipulates their elections.

In Bizarro World, Bizarro CIA am destabilizers U.S. with States of Americanz. 

Bizarro CIA am manipulating U.S. with States of Americanz electionz.

Is good! Am fun! Me cry!

Just in time for the Electoral College, the CIA is accusing Trump of conspiring with Russia to manipulate the election. Glenn Greenwald, no fan of Trump, writes:

Without a shred of evidence provided, and despite Wikileaks' own on the record denial that the source of the emails was Russian, the WaPo attack piece claims the email messages were steadily leaked out via WikiLeaks in the months before the election, damaging Clinton’s White House run. Essentially, according to the WaPo, the Russians’ aim was to help Donald Trump win and not just undermine the U.S. electoral process, hinting at a counter-Hillary intent on the side of Putin. 

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” the newspaper quoted a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation last week to key senators as saying. “That’s the consensus view.” 

CIA agents told the lawmakers it was “quite clear” - although it was not reported exactly what made it "clear" - that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, according to officials who spoke to the Post, citing growing evidence from multiple sources.

And The Washington Post had to admit the evidence was thin:

The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered. 

Minor? Oh surely, that's no big deal, right?

For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said.  

Well, maybe not so minor. I mean, we don't have specific intelligence, no. But we got a hunch, Buster. Boy, do we got a hunch!

Let's also remember the mind-numbing stupidity of the Russians electing the candidate whose nascent Administration has more brass around than an all-tuba orchestra.
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Wow, those Russkies have been busy!

I don't think for a minute anyone with a triple-digit IQ actually believes any of this. If the Russians did the hacking the material would have gotten pulled off the Web before you could say "Spirit Cooking."

We have enough evidence this was all an inside job, but to admit to that is to admit that you have major agencies- far, far bigger than the CIA-- who want you out of town.

No one wants to admit that because the day they do they're over. This is all just face-saving on the part of the Rockefeller Republican Democratic Party, who, lest we forget, are still in control of the CIA.

But for the rest of us, this isn't about us. This isn't about party or ideology or any of those things people without power believe in. This is about major power blocs at war, fighting over turf and control over the idiots and deviants in Washington.

But stay tuned: this may yet end with tanks in the streets and a ruling council of generals and admirals constituting an "emergency provisional government."

It can happen here. Or is that actually the point to all of this?


POSTSCRIPT: This is absolutely extraordinary-

Trump dismissed the reports as an attempt by Democrats to excuse their embarrassing election loss, asserting that US spy agencies were fighting among themselves and there is "great confusion" over the issue. 

"Nobody really knows," he said. "They have no idea if it's Russia or China or somebody. It could be somebody sitting in a bed some place. They have no idea." 

Trump suggested he had little confidence in the US intelligence agencies and would clean house once in office. 

"We're going to have different people coming in because we have our people, they have their people. And I have great respect for them. But if you read the stories, the various stories, they're disputing. And certain groups don't necessarily agree."  

His people. When - and how - did a reality TV star get a foothold in the intelligence community, do you think?

There can no doubt that the Soros/Democrat-controlled CIA are playing their part in this Deep State drama and that the real target of this "Putin and his Russian Hackers" psy-op are wavering Electors. Trump obviously knows for a fact who is really behind the hacks, everyone in Washington does.

Trump seems confident he'll beat back this latest ratfucking but maybe he's just being Trump. But if he does, it's going to be a hot time in the old town.

UPDATE: Yes, this is a full-bore assault by the Democratic Party on the Electoral College.  

*However, proving Trump really doesn't care about social issues, Tillerson was instrumental in opening the Boy Scouts up for gay kids, which is probably confusing a lot of Daily Kos readers tonight.