Once again Donald Trump has been successful in clouding any issues that are not in his favor by creating a Trojan Horse of misinformation. This time it’s a Devin Nunes written, GOP inspired memo, that supposedly has to do with misdeeds by the FBI in their filing of a FISA warrant against Carter Page, a since dismissed, White House aide. This is the kind of garbage that would ordinarily be left in the trash can but this time it’s being used by Trump as a smoke screen to hide two things; the first being his complete inability to deal with any of the policy issues affecting our country that scream for leadership from the White House yet are going begging for said leadership because Trump just isn’t informed or competent enough to lead. The other is his need to throw a smoke screen over Bob Mueller’s investigation of his responsibility in the Russian’s involvement in our elections. It’s interesting that so far the only indication of Trump’s involvement or collusion seems to be his own actions to kill it or cover it up.
So who wrote this thing? Devin Nunes who has already disgraced himself during the phony accusations about Obama having bugged the Trump White House and Ron Johnson, who recently made himself look like a fool with his lies about secret societies in the FBI and other areas of the intelligence services and Trey Gowdy who has already said he is leaving congress. These are guys you wouldn’t let lead a donkey cart but there they are; out in front of this ridiculously obvious scam.
This is an obvious political ploy that should have been allowed to die quickly and without fanfare but the neither the liberal nor the moderate media could just let it go. Sensing a big story and feeling the need to decry the unfairness of the memo in question, they have picked up this nothing burger and are running with it, using the easy strategy that it’s just a phony ploy and not worthy of serious consideration, but in the process gave it far more space that it ever deserved, allowing Trump all the smoke and cover he needed. What the liberal media should be doing is taking a cue from Fox News and talk radio and creating some other phony story to draw readers & viewers. Of course, the problem there is that Trump has been such a font of obscene and devious behavior that nothing he does, no matter how despicable, is any longer news-worthy.
This writer is never against reacting to news, but this memo is not news. This is simply a creation of the White House, built specifically to take our attention away from what’s really important; Trump’s inability to negotiate an immigration bill because he doesn’t understand the problems inherent in it himself, his latest nuclear sabre rattling, his destructive trade policies and the investigation that will, most probably, eventually send him to jail.
A couple of sidelights that are really fascinating about Devin Nunes the idiot slime who wrote this memo include the fact that he is the very one who has backed these FISA warrants when liberals opposed them. In fact he fought for the avoidance of the use of warrants altogether. It’s always been the Democrats who have been against the unlimited use of FISA Warrants. What’s even more interesting is that Nunes never read the background material for the memo. He sloughed that off to Trey Gowdy and then wrote the memo without the benefit of knowing what he was writing about.
The Trump argument about why the memo is significant is; it was a put up job by the FBI because it was based on the dossier that was assembled by Christopher Steele, a British MI6 agent, who was, according to the GOP, being paid by he DNC. But Steele had been a reliable source for the FBI for many years and the dossier, which came on the scene much later, had first been assembled under the direction of anti-Trump forces in the GOP, not by the Democrats. The Democrats only picked it up when Trump won the primary and the rest of the GOP fell in line behind him. There is also the fact that the dossier was not the reason for looking at Carter Page. The FBI had been looking at him back in 2013, years before the dossier was even complied. When the FBI got the FISA Warrant renewed, an act which caused this whole mess to come to the fore, it was only because they had acquired enough damaging information on Page during the second and third renewals of the initial FISA Warrant to warrant a fourth renewal. None of that information had any relationship to the dossier because it was accumulated before the dossier existed. Okay? Convinced? At least that the pushing forth of this piece of inept garbage is an idiotic move by the White House and only in a chaotic environment like the one that Trump had encouraged would such a leaky boat ever be put in the water.
And of course it must first and foremost be understood that this memo was not something that the GOP uncovered. They created it. What you didn’t know that? Of course you didn’t. You didn’t because it is a “minor” fact that has very carefully been overlooked and covered up by those who have brought it to the fore. You didn’t pay attention. That’s how Trump got in the White House in the first place.
Trump is terrified. We understand this and agree that he should be. The question is why so many members of the Republican Party are willing to make themselves party to all the quasi-legal moves he is encouraging them to make. It should be fairly obvious, even to the most intellectually challenged members of the GOP like Nunes, Gowdy and Johnson that Trump is a sinking ship. What’s bizarre is that he is not being sunk by anyone but himself, that he is the perpetrator of his own demise. What’s really weird is that Trump is not stupid. He’s just so lazy and self- indulgent that he is unable to do what is necessary to fulfill the obligations of even that which he actually wants. He could probably fake his way through the whole four years if he could just get out of his own way. That he can’t is tragic- for him and for the country. But we cannot let Trump’s tragedy mask the fact that he is doing great harm to this country. That almost everything he does has such negative consequences that it will take decades to overcome their effects.
Forget that he is dividing this country in ways it has not faced since the civil war. What he is doing to it in the international sphere is frightening? His inept, uninformed trade ideas are killing us with the nations that we have built up as markets for our products. These trade deals that Trump, in his uninformed opinions calls terrible have, over the last seventy years, been successful in building a whole series of markets for our exports from what had been demolished nations. The foreign aide that he attacks has created good will and understanding of our thinking in nations that would otherwise be easy prey for the enticements of Russia and China.
None of this is stated in an effort to create new policy but to point out that Trump’s just not cognizant enough, nor interested enough in learning what is going on outside his own investments and golf courses to be allowed to make economic policy in a sphere as complicated as the world markets. It’s not hat he’s stupid; it’s that he is constitutionally incapable of doing the work. And that continues to raise the question; why are these fools supporting him in his sociopathic rush to destruction?
Okay, why is all this nonsense happening? Because the President thinks if he can stop the Mueller investigation into the Russian intervention into our elections it will all go away and maybe he can get away with all the stuff he’s done so far , which could get him impeached. What he thinks this memo can achieve is to somehow show that Rod Rosenstein is associated with it, thereby giving him an excuse to fire Rosenstein. Once he’s done that he can appoint a replacement for Rosenstein that will fire Mueller or impede Mueller’s investigation to the point where it comes to a standstill. It’s as simple as that. Trump’s twisted mind thinks that he will get away with this. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that in doing this he is proving all the accusations of obstructing justice so far aimed at him. He will be helping the Russians with their attack on all future elections, helping them in their attempts to destroy our democratic government. He will actually be attacking our democratic system and in so doing will be committing treason.
What he doesn’t see is that if he gets to the point of firing Mueller there is a better than 50-50 chance that his grip on the GOP will disintegrate. Ryan, Johnson, Gowdy, Nunes, Cotton and the slime like them, will probably still back him, but there are so many more who have not abandoned their moral values completely, who will fall away. Even Mitch McConnell will probably discard the President and when that happens in the Senate, it will count enough votes in the House to impeach. Trump will be giving his opponents exactly what they want.
The problem with this memo deal was that it showed all involved as willing to throw the FBI counter-terrorism methodology under the bus just to protect a seemingly guilty Donald Trump. The promise of the memo was that it would show corruption in the FBI and make their pursuit of Trump appear to be motivated by self-serving goals. The fact of the memo, which should be obvious to anyone who has followed the actions of the FBI through the Hillary Clinton email mess, is that it shows nothing
The behavior exhibited by the criminals currently infecting the White House and GOP is truly amazing. Ever since he entered the primary, Trump has been attacking Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. The whole Republican Party and all their followers have gone mad over this problem and spent far too much time screaming to the heavens about how Hillary was endangering the security of the nation. This, despite the fact that not one single security leak has ever been traced back to those emails or that server. Now, in a fit of pique, the Liar-in-Chief and all his little sycophants have rushed to publish a memo from inside the FBI that they say will reveal improper actions taken by FBI agents trying to attack the President. This despite the fact that the FBI and the Justice Department have classified the materials in these documents and notified all parties involved that they should not be revealed. Just to prove that the toadies are all lined up behind Trump the GOP majority of the Senate voted to expose these documents even as they voted to repress a Democratic memo, exposing the politicization of these materials.
Now however; with a weekend and a Super Bowl behind us, a look at what the White House has wanted revealed, shows it to be much ado about nothing. Even clear minded GOP members are stating that it says nothing about any conspiracy by anyone to get the President but once again Trump has been successful in diverting attention from his inability to do the business of the nation to some nasty but insignificant scandal. It’s obvious that the GOP isn’t up to its duty of controlling the White House so the only solution will happen on November 8, 2018 when the nation get’s a chance o elect a real congress tat has some desire to respond to its wants. Let’s hope we’re up to it.