Weaky Leaks. II: Interviews With a Vampire Squid

...Which was the detail emerging from the WikiLeaks dump if you happened to read it instead of screaming about it, on October 16.

I had no idea, but there actually is such a thing as a vampire squid, Vampiroteuthis infernalis. Not because it sucks blood, it doesn't, but because of its red eyes and the webbing on its tentacles, making it look as if it were wearing an opera cape. Threatened by predators, it "inverts its caped arms back over the body, presenting an ostensibly larger form covered in fearsome-looking though harmless spines" in what is known as a "pineapple" or "pumpkin" posture. So it's actually kind of cute! Image via Wikipedia.

Everybody knows Hillary Clinton refused to release the speech transcripts because she didn't want us to see her cozying up to those bankers (and cardiovascular researchers, Canadians, Jewish organizations, Silicon Valley women, and pro-camping lobbyists, among many others, who also paid her upwards of $200,000 a pop to address them in 2013-15, as we know thanks to the fact that she released complete tax returns in July 2015). But it's possible that she was really much more worried about somebody entirely different seeing the transcripts, like Xi Jinping, you know, or King Salman.

Or Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Donald Trump, who still wields real power in Italy as a news magnate and opposition politician. Speaking of that third Chelsea Manning dump of 250,000 diplomatic cables in late 2010, she told an audience of Goldman Sachs "builders and innovators" three years later,

Weaky Leaks

In the context of Politico, New York Times, and Washington Post being in receipt of what may be an Iran-hacked file of possibly derogatory information about Senator JD Vance and keeping it secret from the public, a lot of folks are finding themselves vaguely remembering the Russian-hacked file of possibly derogatory information on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stolen from campaign manager John Podesta in 2016, which WikiLeaks published on October 7 2016, shortly (I'm talking about minutes, at most a couple of hours) after the revelation of the Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape in which he revealed his penchant for grabbing pussy and how when you're a star they let you do it.

"What was in those emails?" somebody wondered, unable to come up with anything other than the idea of Podesta sharing a risotto recipe. "Was it really damaging?" I think it was, in fact, but in a very carefully targeted way, at students, through the Trump campaign's Facebook operation (whether or not it was helped out by the Russians, or Cambridge Analytica, or whatever), aimed especially at persuading students of a leftish persuasion in Michigan and Wisconsin not to vote.

Anyhow, I thought I'd re-up my piece, from October 10 2016, on how it went down.

The Lincoln cabinet as pictured by the pro-slavery press in 1864; drawing by John Cameron, via Wikipedia.

When WikiLeaks sends out a new document dump on a Friday evening, also known as the "death slot" because it's where you make a news release when you're hoping nobody will read it, that could be a sign that the organization doesn't have a lot of confidence in the news value of the material.

That seems to be the case with this latest dump released Friday night (shortly after the Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing video, I think), featuring emails presumably hacked by Russian intelligence personnel and associated with John Podesta, chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign (and not, contrary to Julian Assange, in "control" of the Podesta Group lobbying firm, which he co-founded with his brother Tony in 1988 but hasn't been involved in for years). There isn't a whole lot of thereness there.

The centerpiece of the thing is a document apparently collated by or under the direction of Tony Carrk, research director of Hillary For America, in 2015 during the Democratic primary campaign, consisting of passages from some of those 2013 paid speeches of which the transcripts have never been released, though the Sanders forces kept demanding it. The excerpts flag moments that might look to the left opposition like evidence that she's in cahoots with the forces of corporate evil: telling the banksters, in particular, what she really thinks while publicly telling all us liberals she's one of us, so it looks as if the campaign gathered them as part of the process, maybe, of deciding whether to release them or not—how damaging would it be? Or maybe of preparing for the storm that would follow after they were released; each passage contains some phrase or clause that could be pulled out of the context to make it seem as if she was revealing some horrible secret plan to her audience, and there's a helpful headline telling the reader how opponents will read it (could be the headlines were supplied by the hackers, though):

For the Record: The Rice and Fall

Updated

John Podesta's creamy risotto as reconstructed by Julian Assange and Food & Wine. No, Assange had nothing to do with the culinary part. To paraphrase Count Dracula, "I never cook... food." Photos by Tara Fisher and David Becker/Getty Images.

LEAKED: Wikileaks hack reveals John Podesta's secret to creamy Risotto pic.twitter.com/A5dW4mG9c6

— Allan Smith (@akarl_smith) October 11, 2016

Sour, sour day. I see Podesta doesn't know the difference between "its" and "it's", but I can assure you he's right about the risotto. I find it's also necessary to add grated cheese, even if it means contradicting the laws of Italian cooking by combining cheese with mushrooms or seafood, to endow the creaminess with body.

Democrat logic right now:

1) Hillary Clinton deletes thousands of emails from a private server.
- Dems: “Nothing to see here!”

2) AG Barr releases an entire 488-page Special Counsel report with only light redactions.
- Dems: “It’s a cover up!”

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) May 5, 2019

link for FBI judgment on email deletions: https://t.co/ocfK5penRs
link for FBI judgment on Trump obstruction: https://t.co/3sUTI2AmY8 pic.twitter.com/7QM9COhENn

— See Pinned Tweet (@Yastreblyansky) May 5, 2019

House of Cards

From Veep, I guess 3rd season, via.

I don't know if I've made a point of how deprived I've been, in recent years, of contact with popular entertainment culture, as the old lady has dropped herself into an insane work routine and the kids have gotten old and don't need to be monitored any more and I'm left to live the non-work half of my life in the blog world and not getting much conventional entertainment of any kind, and, long story short, one of the things in contemporary cultural life I'm most ignorant of is the artistically ambitious TV series from The Sopranos and Game of Thrones onward, but yesterday we wound up watching the first episodes of House of Cards, so that I got to notice something for the first time two years after the election that everybody else saw three years before, with the effect that I saw it, I think, in a quite different way.

Namely, the story of the Conservative politician Francis and his lady Claire Urquhart, originally written by Michael Dobbs, now Lord Dobbs of Wylye, translated to some kind of America where the protagonists are Frank and Claire Underwood, vaguely evokes Bill and Hillary Clinton, as everybody must know: he's a politician from the South, with a very shallowly liberal kind of perspective, and she has short blonde hair, and their connection seems not sexual, or with a sexiness that's not based on sex but the deployment of power, or mind-fucking, like the relationship between the ex-lovers Valmont and Mme de Merteuil as they seduce other victims and brag to each other in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. And I have to say we all thought it was kind of crude, at least at the beginning, with the characters' villainy being so undisguised in the Dallas-style dialogue, though also very exciting and dramaturgically effective, I'm not gonna lie.

Insult to Injury

Via Dreamstime.

15 months into Mueller, I'm utterly certain Mike Schmidt doesn't understand the breadth and depth of the conspiracy investigation, the threat it poses to his credibility as a journo writing only about obstruction over and over. https://t.co/41CEmv60jP

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) August 12, 2018

One of my pet peeves is people saying, "It's not the crime, it's the coverup," with the general Watergate reference, as if to suggest committing primary crimes isn't as reprehensible as hiding them, when that's not what they mean, I assume, to say: they mean, I assume, that the coverup is where the detective or the prosecutor is going to catch them, in the part of the crime that's necessarily partly in public—desperate work to conceal the crimes of the Nixon administration is what ended up laying the crimes open to discovery.

But it just occurred to me that for somebody in Michael Schmidt's position—

(he's the Times reporter who broke the story in 2015 that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton had improperly used a private server for her unclassified email when she was in the Obama administration and followed through with an astonishing relentlessness while policy went undiscussed in his paper's coverage of the campaign,

The New York Times coverage of the email controversy was notoriously extensive; according to a Columbia Journalism Review analysis, "in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton's emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta)." (Wikipedia)

focusing a national frenzy over an imaginable coverup for which there was no imaginable underlying crime at all)

—maybe the coverup really is literally worse than the initial crime, in that crimes merely injure society, whereas coverups are aimed at insulting the august media, a case of contempt of press.

Act of Contrition

Courtesan Confessional by Aurora Maryte/Deviant Art.

Amy Chozick of The New York Times promoting her about-to-appear memoir of life on the Hillary Clinton beat since 2008 (WSJ, and the Times from 2013), Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling, with a book excerpt that includes an unexpected confession:

The Bernie Bros and Mr. Trump’s Twitter trolls had called me a donkey-faced whore and a Hillary shill, but nothing hurt worse than my own colleagues calling me a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence. The worst part was, they were right.

Note the trivial inaccuracy (it was "donkey-faced cunt") and slipped-in bothsiderism (suggesting her reporting must have been fair, since Hillary had some opponents who hated it as much as her supporters did). Still and all, she seems to be the first reporter from the big show to acknowledge playing a role in electing Donald Trump to the presidency through a series of journalistic failures, and that's pretty brave, right?

Nah. The only thing she pleads guilty to is spending too much time writing stories about pirated emails in the Trump-Clinton campaign, in which, as she carefully points out, she was not alone: "Every publication," she says, quoting Eric Lipton, David Sanger, and Scott Shane in the December postmortem, "including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence." Though her own contribution (six stories and a blog post) to the stampede was not exactly small.

Hillary and Libya: Update

That's "Aidez-moi!" on his fingers. Image via Freaking News.

The extremely remarkable news coming out of France this week about ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, under arrest in a grotesque illegal campaign financing case, sheds unexpected light on a question we were working on two years ago, as the presidential campaign and the calumny campaign against Hillary Clinton were intensifying, and one of the angles of the latter was the portrayal of Clinton as a bloodthirsty warmonger against peace-loving Donald J. Trump, as in this example featuring a strange pro-Trump alliance among Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, Green candidate Jill Stein, The New York Times, and young Conor:

What do we talk about when we talk about spreading distrust?

"I said NO PEPPERONI!"

Sometime in the fall of 2017, Russian television picked up an Onion-style story from a French satirical website according to which the Danish government had legalized animal brothels, that there was a place you could go in Copenhagen and pay to have sex with an animal, with a picture of a dog dressed as a prostitute, only in the Russian media it was presented as a true story, pingponging ultimately outside the country to Belarus and Georgia, according to my source, Putin's Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security, a report from the minority staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, issued January 10.

That story doesn't seem to have gone too far, but you never know. On November 2 2016, the equally Onion-esque story of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta running a child prostitution ring out of a DC pizzeria, piggybacked onto the FBI's startling announcement of State Department emails on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, which had blown up out of almost nowhere with a Facebook post not even mentioning pizza from one Carmen Katz—

"My NYPD source said its much more vile and serious than classified material on Weiner's device. The email DETAIL the trips made by Weiner, Bill and Hillary on their pedophile billionaire friend's plane, the Lolita Express. Yup, Hillary has a well documented predilection for underage girls. . . . We're talking an international child enslavement and sex ring."

—and through thousands of Twitter accounts, made it onto Alex Jones's Infowars show.

The folks from Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, as recounted by Amanda Robb in Rolling Stone, which you totally have to read,

Or did Steele fire the FBI?

Image via Graeme Shimmin.

According to the Nunes memo, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, hired in summer 2016 to help Fusion GPS out in its (now Democrat-funded) investigation of Trump's Russia connections, after taking his findings to the FBI, lost the Bureau's confidence when he went to various journalistic outlets as well, and they "terminated" him, which sounded pretty odd, because I hadn't heard any suggestion that they'd given him a job in the first place.

But a new story by Tom Hamburger and Rosalind Helderman in the Washington Post quotes Steele as saying he was in fact in "talks" with the FBI about doing some contract work with them, but broke off at the end of October 2016, when James Comey announced on the 28th that he was reviving the investigation of the private email server Hillary Clinton had used as secretary of state, which he had seemed to be publicly ending the previous July, after giving him the impression that every detail of their ongoing investigation of the Trump campaign must be concealed from the public, because

Bureau officials repeatedly told him they were extremely cautious about taking actions that could be viewed publicly as influencing an election, associates said.

In other words, he began thinking, as many of us out here in the audience began thinking, that forces within the FBI might be acting to take it in a pro-Trump direction, as we've already heard from the House Intelligence Committee hearing with Glenn Simpson—

Correspondence: About those emails

Martyr Procopius, Sinai, 12th century, via IconReader.

Procopius wrote, re yesterday's post:

"Those would be the 20,000 emails from the Clinton campaign from John Podesta's personal Gmail account, which was hacked in March 2016." Wait a minute -- where did this interpretation come from? I thought they were supposed to be part of the 30,000 emails Hillary supposedly deleted? Why would anybody get excited about Podesta's emails which were already open to the public? I thought the reason to be angry about the proposal was because it showed that the FSA, the Russian intelligence agency, had been spying on Hillary's emails and stole them before she deleted them so able to expose her illegal behavior.

Also, "... (though they knew that the meeting itself, entertaining an offer of campaign assistance from a foreign governments, was unlawful) ." Wow. You're able to read minds! That must be fun. I think most people knew that campaign contributions in the form of money was illegal, but I don't think that many people realized that providing opposition research was also illegal. Has that actually been tested in court?

I spent so much time answering that I might as well just post it here:

Poddy looks into the Kristol Ball of Counterfactuals

A-and socialism, kids! Just across the horizon! Well, maybe not quite. Image, late 19th–early 20th c., via Wikipedia.

Shorter John Podhoretz, "Hillary's White House would be no different from Trump's", New York Post, July 15 2017:

Trump hasn't done anything in office, other than nominating a Supreme Court justice and sending a raid to Syria, and Clinton wouldn't have been able to do anything either, with both Houses of Congress run by Republicans. Of course she would be more boring than Trump, since she is evil but not a sower of chaos, but we wouldn't know what we were missing. The Clinton family melodrama would resemble that of the Trumps in its ethical compromises, with Clinton Foundation donors hovering around the White House, which is identical to President Trump spending every weekend hovering around the golfers and hotel guests filling his personal coffers.

And the wealthiest appointments list in US history with a web of conflicts of interest that The New York Times and Pro Publica are as yet nowhere near finished covering? J-Pod is pretty clearly confusing the reality with the noise that Republicans would undoubtedly be accompanying a Clinton presidency with, as he sort of acknowledges:

Witch hunts

Hand to God I was just thinking it's been a long time since I've had to correct a dolt who doesn't know the Salem witches were hanged. pic.twitter.com/t9b8dvMUlW

— Benjamin Dreyer (@BCDreyer) June 17, 2017

Indeed. Although I think the deplorable Posobiec has more of an idea than he realizes there.

The updated staging thing with an open metahistorical reference—Richard Wagner's Ring, say, where the god Wotan is dressed as Wagner himself—is an iffy proposition (as opposed to the general update as when you stage Macbeth in World War I costume to underline the pointlessness of the conflicts) and I personally think the Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar in which Caesar is made to look like Donald Trump was a terrible, incoherent idea, Shakespeare's Caesar being as unlike Trump as a historical character could well be—profoundly educated, physically brave, deeply attached to his friends (you see him losing the will to live when he realizes Brutus has betrayed him), and really a minor character after all, dying before the play is halfway over—Brutus and Cassius and Antony are the principals.

What's the value to the play of making Caesar a Trump figure? Really, it just ennobles Trump in an absurd way. I don't see that it does anything for the play at all.

But I can definitely see parts for Hillary Clinton in a revival of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. She could be Martha Corey, for instance, who was basically hanged for refusing to believe in witchcraft—isn't that parallel to the way Clinton's insistence on calm rationality and wonkery led to her defeat in an atmosphere that preferred to reduce everything to a pure emotive shout of "It's a disaster! They're killing us!" Or 71-year-old Rebecca Nurse, accused of "tempting and torturing" children, hanged in spite of being found innocent by the jury—there was no evidence against her—when the child accusers went hysterical in the courtroom, claiming she was attacking them there and then, and the jury decided to re-deliberate; doesn't that remind you of the Pizzagate "scandal"—the story of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta running a child sex ring/Satanic coven out of a D.C. pizzeria—breaking out the week before the election?

Hi, Jack Posobiec, there's a part for you there! You could be one of the screaming fit-throwing girls who gets the jury to change their minds!

Or she could be the protagonist of the play's central tragedy, Elizabeth Proctor, whose husband John once had an affair with a servant girl. The affair is long over, but its memory and the couple's unresolved conflict over it brings on the plot twists that lead to the dénouement, in which she doesn't die in the end, but he does, and the two of them come off as the most decent people in the wretched town. That was a true witch hunt.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Is Hillary Clinton the Worst Human Being in the Universe? Redux

Steve was wondering, on the tale of how Bill and Hillary Clinton used to run a slave plantation on the grounds of the governor's mansion in Little Rock:

So who in Russia unearthed this nugget from a years-old book and made it Topic A in the Hillary-is-Hitler wing of the left? https://t.co/VihJ0fOQ86

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) June 7, 2017

I think I've got part of an answer to that. The person in Russia isn't Russian but British, I believe, and not in Russia, but in Singapore, where he goes (or they go) by @JeanetteJing with the computer-generated composite face of an Asian girl, but he's been annoying me since last May, and also annoying somebody called T. Fisher King, who did the research to put his identity together: a vicious botfeeder pretending to be a legitimate Sanders supporter.

It was Jeanette, anyway (formerly "Jeanette Sandernista", now calling himself "Jeanette Corbynista", I'm sorry to say, but still working for Putin) who started tweeting the slavery story at 6:00 in the morning New York time yesterday and kept retweeting it throughout the day, which is what made it trend. The material was lifted without credit from a quasi-legitimate American source, Superpredator: Bill Clinton's Use and Abuse of Black America (July 2016), by Nathan J. Robinson, a Harvard grad student in political science and the editor in chief of Current Affairs, which is coincidentally the publisher of his book, but when Robinson found out about it later yesterday rather than complain about the plagiarism he decided to go for the free publicity, and threw together his own online article on the subject, also presumably cribbed from his book.

Fish in the Ocean of Story

Julia Zanes, Fish in the Ocean of Story II, 2008.

The way things have been going this week, anything anybody says is likely to be outdated about five minutes after you hit "publish", but I have a couple of things that might work out, riffing off Marcy Wheeler/Emptywheel—first, a post on Rep. Adam Schiff's remarkable narrative which impressed me so much on Monday—maybe I'll get to Rep. Devin Nunes later on.

On Schiff, she's skeptical about what she calls a "temporal feint" in the story, or "fudging the timeline". Respectfully—I think she's the smartest person over there on the edges of the Forest of Greenwald, and she certainly knows many things I don't, but this is narratology—she's poking at holes that really aren't there in the

passage which — if it were accurate — would be a tight little presentation of quid pro quo tied to the change of platform at the July 18-21, 2016 RNC. But it’s not.

This is the central sequence of July:

Tirade on blame

Buster Keaton in The Playhouse (1921), I think, via.

As far as recriminations go over what happened in November, I liked Thers's idea (welcome back to Cyberspace, Andrew!) a lot:

As to who on the Democratic side, or the Left, is to blame, I'm only going to say this once, and then we're going to just let it go.

It was your fault.

You fucker.

It was my fault.

Me fucker.

FUCK ME. This was our job, and whatever it is we tried to do, we fucked it up, even if most Americans broadly agree with us.

Nevertheless there's something about BooMan's non-apology FUCK ME that I can't let go of:

One thing I know I really didn’t do in this campaign was to defend Clinton. It was difficult for me to accept that she would be our party’s nominee, although I accepted it fully even though I didn’t vote for her. Spending my energy defending her was generally just too much for me, however. I thought she could pull off a victory because I gave the public too much credit for being able to see through Trump. Nonetheless, I saw the main threat as the possibility that they wouldn’t. Trump was getting a lot of press coverage, and I thought it was most important to counter the positive attributes and narratives he was receiving.

The last thing I felt like doing was writing about Benghazi or her email server or (especially) the Clinton Foundation. That appears to have been a mistake on my part. The real threat was that Clinton would be brought down to Trump’s level and seen as equally unacceptable.

Speaking as one who did try to make the positive case for Clinton, ad nauseam (52 posts from March through November under the label "Is Hillary Clinton the Worst Human Being in the Universe?" and I'm sure there were many more without the label), including on the damn emails and Benghazi and the Clinton Foundation (and its ruthlessly corrupt acceptance of money from Norway, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and, yes, Algeria and Saudi Arabia and some other excessively foreign countries), I'd take it back a step and argue that you didn't try to find out whether there was a possible defense of Clinton. You swallowed a bunch of idées reçues from the self-denominated left (including such notable social democrats as Glenn Greenwald and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin) and never asked yourself whether they were even true.

One more 2016 rant

Buster Keaton in The Scarecrow (1920). Via somebody's Pinterest.

The Guardian website keeps front-paged article links in the "More on this Story" spot for months, and I just ran into this infuriating election post-mortem by Thomas Frank ("Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there", Guardian, November 9, 2016) and got angry all over again:

She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.

And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.

In other words, Donald Trump won the presidency because Hillary Clinton is evil. Why being evil didn't hurt Trump is not explained.

The reference to Joe Biden (god love him!) is the tell that this furious post-election rant in the guise of a fancy political analysis is really just the Big White Man Will Save Us story sure as if it had been told by Joseph Manchin or Jim Webb.

Outmatch them at every pass: Postscript

By the way, I'd like to make just one protest against the meme going around according to which President Obama himself is actively working to beef up the US nuclear deterrent force even as he keeps talking about bringing it down:

Contrary to Mr. Obama’s own conciliatory nuclear posture, and concrete steps in that direction, his administration has also embarked on a sweeping modernization of the American nuclear arsenal that may cost up to $1 trillion over three decades. It features new factories, refurbished nuclear arms and a new generation of weapon carriers, including bombers, missiles and submarines. The bombers are to carry a new super-stealthy cruise missile meant to slip through enemy air defenses.

It's not a great idea, but it doesn't really affect the MAD balance of power (the way George W. Bush's dreadful decision to abrogate the ABM treaty in 2001 did, maybe the single most damaging US action in US-Russia relations since the end of the Cold War).

More importantly, this story skips a really important step. It wasn't the administration that did the embarking, in 2010, but Congress, and specifically 13 Republican Senators, who forced the modernization on Obama as their bribe for providing the necessary two thirds majority for ratifying the New START Treaty, the most significant step in US nuclear weapons policy in 30 years:

Let's not have this fight

Kitty Dewall and Harry Liedtke in Ernst Lubitsch's Das Fidele Gefängnis (The Merry Jail, 1917).

David Atkins at the Political Animal informs us that

a war of words and ideas still rages on the left between the Sanders-leaning economic populists and the more establishment defenders of the Clinton campaign. Broadly speaking, the contours of the argument center around whether Clinton could have done more from a populist messaging standpoint to appeal to white working class Rust Belt voters and to disaffected voters who stayed home, or whether Clinton’s overall approach was good, but that she was overwhelmed by the prejudices of white voters and stabbed in the back by Comey, Russia, and various parts of the progressive left.

You know, no.

For one thing, if by "various parts of the progressive left" he means the tiny knot of irredentists who refused to follow Bernie into the Democratic embrace and the construction of the most "economic populist" campaign platform in American history, I can't believe anyone really thinks they played a significant role with their retweets of Breitbart and otherwise Russian/Republican talking points. They were extremely annoying, especially with their insistence on kidnaping the term "progressive" for their own stupid purposes,  but they were not in any way an important part of what happened on November 8. Those who actually are progressive in orientation (like Atkins himself) voted for Clinton and urged their friends and admirers to do the same. Unfortunately there aren't that many of them either, as we learned during the Democratic primary, when Bernie's political revolution turned out not to exist.

Deep in the weeds with John Bolton

James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd in Henry Koster's Harvey (1950). Via.

Everybody needs to take a deep breath & reread the John Bolton remarks. He did not in fact accuse the Obama administration of hacking.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) December 12, 2016

Uh, OK, let's see...

BOLTON: It's not at all clear to me just viewing this from the outside that this hacking into the DNC and the RNC computers was not a false flag operation.

Quite right in the first place, it's not the case that he accused anybody of mounting a false flag operation (stealing the parties' emails to make it look as if Russians had been stealing the emails, apparently, with no theories on why they would want to do that). He merely didn't not accuse them. It isn't clear to him that they didn't do it, but he isn't saying they did, he's just sayin. The Douthat technique of making you think a potentially slanderous thought without taking responsibility for it.

And then,

Are you actually accusing someone here in this administration of trying -- in the intelligence community of trying to throw something?

BOLTON: We just don't know, but I believe that intelligence has been politicized in the Obama administration to a very significant degree.

Quite right in the second place. He couldn't be accusing anybody of doing something when he couldn't say whether it had been done or not, but he fingers the guilty party just in case. Can't say if there was any false flag operation but knows who did it.

And thus Frum is absolutely right: Bolton did not say that the administration had carried out a false flag maneuver, but he made sure that's what we heard all the same. He didn't say it with the most exquisite care you could well apply to not saying something, the insinuating scum.

The other really weird thing Bolton did that hasn't caught so much attention was his explanation of why he thinks it might have been a false flag operation, which is worth looking at in some analytic detail.

I look forward to your apology, @jasoninthehouse, please RT

"But hey kids, we did have fun, didn't we?" Jason Chaffez, photo by Kristin Murphy/Deseret News. 

Well, what do we have here, Mr. Director?

The FBI has determined that a new batch of emails apparently related to Hillary Clinton’s private email server “have not changed our conclusion” that she committed no criminal wrongdoing, FBI director James Comey told congressional leaders in a letter on Sunday.

As campaigning continued ahead of Tuesday’s presidential election, a Clinton spokeswoman said the candidate was “glad this matter is resolved”. (Via Guardian)

Or as I put it over on the Twitter machine,

Looks like Director Comey has finished his inquiry into those emails. No smoking Weiner. https://t.co/5DL32ebzxp

— NASTYeblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) November 6, 2016

Human weasel Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah, shiftiest eyes in Congress) was quick to put out an acknowledgment that he and his friends in the FBI Rogue Agent division have been misleading the public for the past nine days, immediately before a presidential election, with their hints of massive Clintonian illegalities to be discovered on the Weiner laptop. Hahaha, I kid of course. He sent a weasel Tweet designed to cover his ass without acknowledging anything:

.@jasoninthehouse Thanks. I look forward to your apology for the harm you have done with these baseless calumnies.

— NASTYeblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) November 6, 2016

Par for the course.

"We'll always have Benghazi!"