Peak Pretending?

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Re: Peak Pretending?

Postby Rory » Mon May 07, 2018 4:49 pm

Elvis » Mon May 07, 2018 12:18 pm wrote:At this stage, I find the nitty-gritty of the special prosecutor's workings to be worthy of some study. The rubber is starting to hit the road, the legal challenges and how this unfolds will afford some insight.

I'm a longtime admirer of Kunstler but I don't quite agree with him here. I'm for sweeping up whatever crimes emerge from the investigation; there will be all sorts of political motives for that, but the main thing is prosecuting crooks and criminals.


I think JHK is pointing towards legitimate rationales for questioning the framework this investigation moves under. In a simplistic sense, bent cops breaking the law to jail hoodlums.

At what point does the end justify the means. Once you set the precedent then it's hard to go back.

Fwiw - I don't always agree with JHK either. His writing about Israel, for example. But his Trump stuff recently (well, last 18 months) is better a body of work than most have provided. Certainly thought provoking, and definitely not afraid of putting wildly accepted mainstream narratives under the microscope.
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Re: Peak Pretending?

Postby Rory » Fri May 18, 2018 10:37 am

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/gate-of-gates/

JH's latest instalment.

When historians of the future finish their meal of rat à la moutarde at the campfire, and pass around the battered plastic jug of wild raisin wine, they will kick back and hear the griot sing of John Brennan, the fabled chief of an ancient order called the CIA, and how he started the monkey business aimed at bringing down the wicked Golden Golem of Greatness, chief of chiefs in the land once known as America. Alas, the hero’s journey of Brennan, ends in a jail cell at the storied Allenwood Federal Penitentiary, where he slowly pined away between games of ping-pong and knock-hockey, dreaming of a cable network retirement package that never was….

One gets the feeling more and more that Mr. Brennan is at the center of this ever-mushrooming matrix of scandals around the 2016 election. “Bigger Than Watergate?” the headline in today’s New York Times asks? The mendacity of this once-proud newspaper is really something to behold. Take the following paragraph, for instance:

“Depending on what is eventually proven, the core scandal could rival Watergate, in which a “third-rate burglary” of Democratic National Committee headquarters ultimately revealed a wide-ranging campaign of political sabotage and spying to influence the 1972 presidential election and undercut perceived rivals. In the current case, a hostile foreign power sought to sway the 2016 election and there is evidence that at least some people in Mr. Trump’s circle were willing to collaborate with it to do so.”

You have to really wonder how the Times editors overlooked the other relevant details in the current case pertaining to goings-on initiated by Mr. Brennan and involving obviously criminal misbehavior among the US Intelligence services, and especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in their effort to un-do the election that put the Trump creature in the White House instead of the enchantress known as Hillary. I did like the trope “a hostile foreign power.” Apparently they were too embarrassed to just say “Russia,” since by now it has become the most threadbare hobgoblin in all of US political history. :D

Rumors are flying that the long-awaited (so long it is nearly forgotten) Department of Justice Inspector General’s report contains a rather severe interpretation of what actually has been going on for the last couple of years in this farrago of charge and countercharge that the legacy news media has been doing its best to garble and deflect — namely, that the highest officers of the government conspired to tamper with the 2016 election. The latest twist is news — actually reported by the Times Thursday — that the FBI placed a “mole” inside the Trump campaign. If the mole discovered anything, then it is the only morsel of information that hasn’t been leaked in two years, which leads the casual observer to infer that the mole found really nothing.

On the other hand, a great deal is already known about the misdeeds surrounding Hillary and her supporters, including Mr. Obama and his inner circle, and some of those incriminating particulars have been officially certified — for example, the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on recommendations of the Agency’s own ethics committee, with overtones of criminal culpability. There is also little ambiguity left about the origin of the infamous Steele Dossier. It’s an established fact that it was bought-and-paid-for by the Democratic National Committee, which is to say the Hillary campaign, and that many of the dramatis personae involved lied about it under oath. Many other suspicious loose ends remain to be tied. Those not driven insane by Trumpophobia are probably unsatisfied with the story of what Attorney General Loretta Lynch was doing, exactly, with former President Bill Clinton during that Phoenix airport tête-à-tête a few days before FBI Director Jim Comey exonerated Mr. Clinton’s wife in the email server “matter.”

One can see where this tangled tale is tending: to the sacred chamber known as the grand jury. Probably several grand juries. That will lead to years of entertaining courtroom antics at the same time that the USA’s financial condition fatefully unravels. That event might finally produce the effect that all the exertions of the so-called Deep State have failed to achieve so far: the discrediting of Donald Trump. Alas, the literal discrediting of the USA and its hallowed institutions — including the US dollar — may be a much more momentous thing than the fall of Trump.

Personally, I won’t be completely satisfied until the editors of The New York Times have to answer to charges of sedition in a court of law.
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Re: Peak Pretending?

Postby 82_28 » Mon May 21, 2018 5:24 am

For a man such as JHK to have made a name for himself in identifying eyesores as a calling card, he sure seems unable to recognize a major eyesore catalyst when he chooses not to see one. How's his scrappy "world made by hand" going to work out when this hesmisphere is partitioned by the decrees of a racist, totalitarian idiot? I forget where it was along the line I quit religiously reading him, but it was probably when I decided he was more attuned to cruelty than he was kindness. I also met him once when I liked him but thought he was also a dick. It could be a NY thing actually. Dump and Kunstler both being from there, I guess there remain thresholds between the east and the west.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Peak Pretending?

Postby Rory » Mon Dec 10, 2018 6:16 pm

IMG_20181210_141418.jpg


http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/not-so-fast/

The media branch of “the Resistance” wet its pantsuits last Friday when Robert Mueller released sentencing memos on Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, the human keys to the dungeon they would like to toss Mr. Trump into. Over in the House of Representatives, incoming Judiciary Committee chair Jerrold Nadler spooged himself into a rapture as visions of impeachment lap-danced in his head. Their victory orgasms may prove premature.

The memos themselves were not all they were cracked up to be. Despite Mr. Mueller turning the screws of federal prosecution on them for months on end, neither Manafort or Cohen has composed the narrative the Special Counsel wants, so the memos were, in effect, an attempt to run some high voltage through the screws, to goose out a last-minute change-of-heart in the two patsies. Manafort has been stuffed into solitary confinement and Cohen threatened with forty years of jail time, Their stoicism so far suggests this is not the triumphal climax that the spinners of RussiaGate seek.

Mr. Trump’s response to all this has seemed, at best, retiring and ineffectual. He’s actually done next to nothing to fight back, besides some juvenile tweets, issued perhaps to alert his antagonists that he’s paying attention. Given the lack of evidence for the basic predicate of RussiaGate — that the Trump election campaign “colluded” with Russia — and the abundant evidence of crimes against Mr. Trump by his adversaries in prosecuting this fraud, and the legal machinery silently in motion backstage of RussiaGate — there’s a lot of room for the story to flip upside down.

For instance: the matter of General Flynn, the sacked National Security Advisor, who got his charging memo the week before last. The terms were surprisingly lenient: no jail time. The public, egged-on by the Resistance media, is led to believe that Gen. Flynn handed Mr. Mueller a wooden stake to drive through the Golden Golem’s wicked heart and was aptly rewarded. Gen. Flynn has said almost nothing for more than year and the impression of him in the media is of a completely beaten-down, broken man. I’m sure the ordeal has been grotesque for this once-powerful warrior. But his breakers forget that Gen. Flynn himself was an experienced spook who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, an outfit possibly more secretive and potent than the CIA and the FBI. We might assume that he still has friends and supporters there, and that Gen. Flynn may be sitting on interesting intel of his own on his inquisitors, ranging from the election misdeeds of the FBI and DOJ in 2016 all the way back to the Chief Inquisitor’s (RM’s) actions in the Uranium One scheme that funneled over $150 million into the Clinton Foundation, and also to manifold irregularities in the Obama White House around these matters.

Gen. Flynn may actually have the goods on the fraud behind his own prosecution — namely, proof of exactly how he was set up by Mr. Obama, in particular his own tapes of conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that would show something different than the transcripts Mr. Mueller used to entrap him on Lying-to-Federal-Prosecutors rap. That theory raises the question: why did he not use it in his own defense. The answer may simply be that he didn’t want to rack up $2.5 million in billable hours for defense attorneys and chose instead to tough it out for nearly two years until he could use the information he has. And that means he must wait until final sentencing when his case is complete.

That appears in the offing, perhaps even before Mr. Mueller releases his much panted-over final report. Of course, Mr. Mueller may have absolutely no idea what Gen. Flynn has got on him — hence the speculation about why the charging memo was so lenient. But that line of reasoning suggests that Gen. Flynn will just forget about the disgrace Mr. Mueller put him through and let bygones be bygones. That’s not how warriors roll. More likely, Gen. Flynn has something more severe in mind. For all of his horse-faced gravitas in the photos of his fleeting sightings, Mr. Mueller does not look to me like a man in a comfortable situation.

Mr. Comey will be making a return visit to the House committee where, last week, he weaseled his way through seven hours of forgetfulness, and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch will make her long-overdue first appearance to do some ‘splainin’ about the fishy confab she held with Bill Clinton on the Tarmac in Phoenix around the time that Mr. Comey was preparing to drop the “matter” involving Mrs. Clinton in July of 2016.

Backstage for the moment, there are two other vectors in motion: whatever Mr. Huber is up to in his mission to examine all those FBI / DOJ ? CIA operations against Mr. Trump, and the parallel inquiry of Mr. Horowitz, the DOJ Inspector general. Mr. Huber will be heard from for the first time this week, and Mr. Horowitz’s report is expected soon, too. Finally, there is the Trump card, so to speak: the president’s power to declassify reams of documents that will shed light in all of the dark chambers of this fairy-tale castle. Wait for it….
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