Government Smoke and Mirrors

The news has reached new heights of absurdity as once again the Establishment media fails to report or contextualise the following recent stories.

Doesn't anyone find it ironic, even absurd that now the Republicans are pretending to champion civil rights and are suddenly concerned about FBI and intelligence agency abuses of power? I laughed out loud when I caught a clip on the radio of Paul Ryan expressing these sentiments.

For over sixteen years since the passage of the cynically named Patriot Act (and even long before that) they have championed state secrecy, the surveillance state, the imperial presidency and the utter decimation of the Bill of Rights.

And now, because it's politically expedient to do so they are suddenly concerned that the FBI has abused its power? Suddenly in light of the Nunes Memo, they're concerned that the FBI misled the FISA court? The rights of citizens might have been abused!

The FISA court is a joke. It's a rubber-stamp exercise in window dressing and always has been since it was created in the 1970s. It has only turned down a tiny fraction of the requests brought before it.

While the pro-Trump faction of the GOP pretends to care about Civil Rights, the Anti-Russian elements of the GOP and the DNC have come across as schizophrenic and desperate.

They didn't want the memo released and repeatedly warned that it would reveal classified information and harm national security. They were having fits about it being made public.

The real reason is that it reveals the hand of the Deep State working against Trump. Additionally it shows that while we all know Trump is dirty and corrupt, the Clinton campaign is revealed to be just as conniving and their fingerprints are all over this. It destroys the credibility of the 'dossier' and in many ways removes the legitimacy of the investigation. In fact I think a case could be made for an investigation of the Clintons.

But now that the memo has been revealed they have attempted to deflect from it by two means.

Either they insist that it's 'nothing' and desperately 'flawed'. In other words the document they were so afraid of being made public is suddenly worthless and less than credible. The document that was going to harm national security by its revelations is suddenly not worth the paper it's printed on. There's nothing to see here, it shouldn't even be covered or considered.

That's more than a little suspicious.

Or, other figures like Victoria Nuland and John McCain use smoke and mirrors to distract from the issues at stake and argue that any questioning of US institutions is helping Putin. In other words, if you read the memo and ask any questions... you're a traitor who is aiding and abetting the enemy.

These people are scoundrels, pure and simple. Their power rests in two basic realities. Their constituents are ignorant and the media does not practice journalism but collaboration... often by means of distraction.

There was some noise this week about the revelations regarding the Hawaii ballistic missile warning. The original story was revealed to be a lie and apparently this was known at the time. It was not an accident. The mobile-phone alert was not a mistake made during a shift change. It was a deliberate act by an apparently deranged state employee. Why aren't more people in trouble over this? People could have died from panic on the streets, heart attacks etc... There doesn't seem to be a lot of accountability, let alone from the state officials who initially lied about what happened. If the man wasn't deranged and mentally unstable as the state has now claimed, then someone is lying about that aspect of the story. Why?

This should be a headline story but it's been mentioned only in passing. One would think there would be a congressional investigation, something more than the state house and the FCC. Not to denigrate Hawaii but what if this had happened in New York City, Washington or some location where the US has its own nuclear missiles positioned? The full story has not been told and the media is assisting the cover-up. There's a lot more that could be said about the incident but the actual chain of events are at this point still unclear. One cannot help but wonder if it wasn't some kind of deliberate test both on the domestic audience and the response systems of China, Russia and of course North Korea.

Finally I think one of the most shocking stories to be downplayed was that in the wake of the Nunes Memo, the intelligence agencies lashed out at Congress and told them that in the future they would be more restrictive with their information. They would limit the sharing of data.

Why isn't this a major headline story? It ran on the politics page of the New York Times but that's about it. Why isn't Congress calling hearings? Where are the ad hoc committees set up to investigate this insubordination and contempt? The CIA/FBI/NSA answer to the executive but Congress holds the purse strings and has the ability to enable or shut down these institutions. There are also connected military and constitutional issues. These agencies cannot just wave the hand and dismiss congress.

But they often do. They have a long track record in this regard. Congress has only intervened on a couple of occasions. They did so in the 1970's and tried to shake things up. They did again in light of Iran-Contra but in the end those inquiries proved to be even less effective than the efforts of Frank Church and others in the 1970's. The Iran-Contra hearings revealed much, often inadvertently, but congress all but helped in the cover-up.

Today, it's very clear who really runs the country, who controls its foreign policy and whose fingers (or tentacles) have reached into influence almost every aspect of government. One is reminded of the story from a couple of years ago of the CIA caught spying on Congress. What was done? Nothing.

This story should be sending out shockwaves but instead it's buried on an inside page and within a couple more days will be flushed down the memory hole.

The US system is fraudulent and farcical and I pity those who still believe in it, who send their children to die for it. I pity those Christians who flourish within this sick travesty and think they do God service.