Trump Unleashing His Inner Nixon

Filing Cabinet of Dr. Lewis Fielding, with markings where Hunt, Liddy, Martinez. and the others broke into it in the hopes of finding out something nasty about Daniel Ellsberg, a patient of Dr. Fielding's, in 1971; Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, via Wikipedia.

Progressives who'd rather we stop talking about Russia Russia Russia and Trump's criminality might take a look at this story, just out in The Guardian, which has nothing to do with Russia: It seems that a year ago, just after Trump's visit to Tel Aviv (when he promised Netanyahu that he would ensure "Iran would never have nuclear weapons"), his people hired a private Israeli intelligence agency to "get dirt" on the personal and political lives of Ben Rhodes, President Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Colin Kahl, former national security adviser to Vice President Biden, which they hoped "would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it."

Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.

Investigators were also apparently told to contact prominent Iranian Americans as well as pro-deal journalists – from the New York Times, MSNBC television, the Atlantic, Vox website and Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper among others – who had frequent contact with Rhodes and Kahl in an attempt to establish whether they had violated any protocols by sharing sensitive intelligence. They are believed to have looked at comments made by Rhodes in a 2016 New York Times profile in which he admitted relying on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to secure the deal. It is also understood that the smear campaign wanted to establish if Rhodes was among those who backed a request by Susan Rice, Obama’s final national security adviser, to unmask the identities of Trump transition officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.

This is pretty clearly Nixon-level skullduggery, reminiscent of the original Plumbers burglary when they attacked Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, with the added weirdness of using a foreign agency, and similar to what the Trump people are alleged to have done with Russian agents and a British firm trying to "get dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the campaign period. It's also similar in the tie-in of allowing foreign leaders to dictate US policy—Netanyahu for the Iran deal, Putin for the Ukrainian and Syrian issues, not to mention old Flynn offering US cooperation to the Turkish authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Parry and thrust

Update 3/2023: A little discouraged to see how much Russian propaganda I could take seriously at this point almost nine years ago... I still think Obama would have been right to try negotiating if that's what he was doing.

FDR found it helpful to negotiate with the lunatic Great Helmsman too. Image by Reuters via LatitudeNews.

I've been reading and rereading a remarkable piece by Robert Parry, who I think of as a kind of Seymour Hersh [update: LOL] of the blogosphere, and I mean that in a good way, for his extraordinary stories of October surprises in the 1968 and 1980 elections suggesting that your worst fantasies of Nixon's and Reagan's dirty tricks are probably true—this post, though, is about Ukraine, and President Obama's behind-the-scenes struggles with his most implacable enemies, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

Well, maybe not exactly, but close: it really is about power issues inside the US foreign policy establishment and limits on presidential power, especially as applied in the [jump]

How do you ask a man...

...to be the last man to die for a "completely trumped up pretext"?

Via Ghosts of Tom Joad.

Secretary Kerry Facing the Nation, via Tengrain:

[I]t is an incredible act of aggression … really a stunning, willful choice by president Putin to invade another country. Russia is in violation of the [jump]

The world is flex

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Mystax Maleficarum, increasingly resembles one of those computers beloved in commercial science fiction that have achieved consciousness but are broken by cognitive dissonance—"Does not compute!" Having somehow managed to learn that Palestinian people are a distinct population of human beings who like the idea of having their own state but not that Binyamin Netanyahu could be mistaken about anything, he has tipped over from the usual psychotic, but interpretable pontification into literal senselessness, a verbal hornblende from which no actual metal can be extracted.

I’ve written a series of columns from Israel in the past two weeks

Ya big bully!

Darrin Klimek/Digital Vision/Getty Images

The president was a little rough on sensitive Governor Jindal:

"Even if you don't support the overall plan, let's at least go ahead and make sure that the folks who don't have health insurance right now and can get it through an expanded Medicaid, let's make sure we do that," Obama said.

That opened the door for Jindal to accuse Obama of trying to "bully" the state. "We will not allow President Obama to bully Louisiana into accepting an expansion of Obamacare," Jindal said in a statement, saying the expansion would cost the state too much. (Fox News)

Later, Secretary Kerry was caught knocking over an entire Middle Eastern country for its lunch:

Consistent with the Obama Administration’s first term bullying of Israel, Secretary of State John Kerry has been issuing veiled threats in the past few days, including this invitation to Palestinian violence. This is not moral equivalence, this is adopting the Arafat-style of “negotiation,” namely, do as I say or I will launch terror again. (National Review)

Perhaps  the Obama administration is just applying the standards set forth in Michigan's new anti-bullying law, designed by Republicans to make sure it's OK for schoolchildren to bully classmates for being gay if they believe it's bad to be gay, because then it's not bullying, just

a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil’s parents or guardian.

Like, the president might have a sincerely held moral conviction that it would be a good thing for the federal government to get health insurance to more than 200,000 Louisiana citizens who are too poor to get it for themselves. Also if you think Kerry was threatening to start a third Intifada, you have a somewhat inflated opinion of his powers.

Ya think so?

In other news, the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist.

The article by Jodi Rudoren, who did not write this sublimely idiotic headline, is actually of some interest, but not perfectly lucid: it's about a debate over the Palestinian assertion that [more]

West of Eden: Washington

Image from Greenmarc Farms.

Why we hate the New York Times:

Article by Michael Gordon and Isabel Kershner with the headline,

Talks Begin on Mideast, to Doubts on All Sides

and then the doubts, for the first 16 paragraphs, are represented by a single source, convicted criminal Elliott Abrams. After which some other voices from "all sides" are heard, but none of them quite as doubtful as that. Abrams seems to think the purpose of the negotiations is [jump]

Memorial Day

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake.

Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first President to lose a war.'

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?... (John Kerry, in testimony before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 23, 1971)

From Southern Foodways.