Flynn Update

Illustration by Simon Landrain/The New Yorker.

The biggest piece of evidence offered by rightwingers for the theory of Obama's conspiracy to do something dreadful to Trump's national security adviser Mike Flynn was the report of a meeting Obama called 5 January 2017, with FBI director Comey, deputy attorney general Sally Yates, vice president Biden, and national security adviser Susan Rice, which Rice memorialized in an email to herself on Inauguration Day two weeks later, released in a redacted version by Chuckles Grassley and Lindsey Graham in February 2018.

Rice's memo said the meeting was "following a briefing by IC leadership on Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election," but Obama already knew something about that—Washington Post reported 9 December that Obama had ordered an investigation following CIA conclusions on the hacking—and it seems in particular to have been the meeting where the leadership (Comey, John O. Brennan for CIA, Mike Rogers for NSA, and DNI Clapper) told Obama about the allegations in the Steele dossier, as evidence of how the Russian active measures seemed intended to favor Trump over Clinton in the election, and which Comey briefed Trump about the next day at Trump Tower (the dossier was published by BuzzFeed on the 10th), by way of warning him that the allegations were circulating;

The Mask of Sanity

"Any Rand Paul supporters out there in the audience? Please step over to the information desk after the show so the Deep State can take those masks off and mercilessly mock you on TV."

Harvey Cleckley's book The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality described the psychopath as

outwardly a perfect mimic of a normally functioning person, able to mask or disguise the fundamental lack of internal personality structure, an internal chaos that results in repeatedly purposeful destructive behavior, often more self-destructive than destructive to others. Despite the seemingly sincere, intelligent, even charming external presentation, internally the psychopathic person does not have the ability to experience genuine emotions. Cleckley questions whether this mask of sanity is voluntarily assumed to intentionally hide the lack of internal structure, but concludes it hides a serious, but yet imprecisely unidentified, semantic neuropsychiatric defect.

"Semantic neuropsychiatric defect" sounds like a plausible characterization of the logic used by the paranoid conservative trying to assemble a workable conspiracy story.

Chuck Ross in the Daily Caller a month or so ago:

According to Mensch, who has been criticized for spreading unfounded conspiracy theories about Trump on social media, the warrant was for communications from two Russian banks, Alfa Bank and SVB. While a warrant for the banks would not directly target American citizens, including any Trump associates, some have speculated that the FBI could have used a technique called “reverse targeting” in which a warrant is obtained for a foreign entity even though the goal is to surveil Americans.

There's that idea that since Louise Mensch has spread unfounded conspiracy theories about Trump, she'd be a really great person for Daily Caller to cite. "See, if we think everything she says about our Leader is a vicious fabrication, then if she says something we like it must be true!"

Sixteen scandals

Do not talk to this man unless a State Department lawyer is present. Jason Chaffetz, AP photo.

Thanks to Peggy Noonan, with her expert knowledge of how things work in a conspiratorial White House, I am starting at last to get a fix on what might have happened during the Benghazi incident in the alternate universe where Republicans are right about things.

I

President's private office, White House, 11 September 2012, 4:00 PM.

HENCHMAN: Mr. President? Bad news from Libya, I'm afraid.

OBAMA: Curses! Ex Africa semper aliquid novi! What is it this time?

With a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for Politics

1924 sheet music. From Wikipedia.

Collins said she was “very troubled by the fact that we seem not to have learned from the 1998 bombings of two of our embassies in Africa at the time when Ambassador Rice was the assistant secretary for African affairs. Those bombings in 1998 resulted in the loss of life of 12 Americans as well as many other foreign nationals.” 

She said, “What troubles me so much is the Benghazi attack in many ways echoes the attacks on those embassies in 1998, when Susan Rice was head of the African region for our State Department. In both cases the ambassadors begged for additional security” but she said, as with the Sept. 11 attack on the consulate in Benghazi, those requests were turned down by the State Department. (NBC News, 11/28/12)

In what sense, exactly, "troubled"? Is she blue?* Would she be in distress, affliction, difficulty, or need? Would she be exhibiting emotional or behavioral problems? Cold sweats, night fright, apparently unmotivated panic? Somehow I doubt it. Maybe troubled like a teenager, infected by all the bad faith around her and acting out.

I mean, I'm not saying she's a liar or anything like that, just that it's really interesting, if you will, how all the words that spill out of her mouth, one or two syllables at a time, in that des-olate croak, seem to be sug-gesting this re-mark-able story about how every time you give Susan Rice a job, someone seems to blow up the em-bassy or murder the am-bass-ador. Doesn't it look, on the face of it, a little careless? I mean, nothing like that ever happens in the Collins family.

She's that girl, in seventh grade, who likes to see a fight. She's poison.

*But she won't be blue always, 'cause that sun gonna shine in her back door one day, eh, Suse?

Ricist insinuations

At some point early in their lives, white kids often become concerned about racism in ways that don't quite get it:

"Who's your friend?"
"You mean Kyle?"
"No, the black kid."
"Shh, Dad, that's racist!"

Eliana Johnson over at the so-called Corner has gotten herself into that kind of difficulty over Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's first National Security Advisor and second Secretary of State, and her treatment by "liberals", as in a Ted Rall cartoon of 2004 in which he depicted crime-fitting punishments for George W. Bush and his enablers after they leave office:

From here, via John Mitchell.org. 

Rice's punishment is that she is forced to learn how to be black, and to use such ghastly expressions as "house nigga". Rall explained it pretty carefully—

The broad important point here is that she's an African-American who works for an administration whose policies hurt blacks.

—but it has served conservatives for all these years as an example of how "you guys are the real racists, so nyah nya-nya nyah-nyah!" and now it is back, in the context of the existence of a new African-American female potential secretary of state, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, whose conservative detractors are being accused of showing racial bias: "At least nobody called her a house nigga!"

Johnson argues that C. Rice was the real victim, as in these comments from Democratic senators:

Senator Barbara Boxer charged that Rice “frightened the American people” into supporting the Iraq War; Senator Jim Jeffords accused her of being part of an effort to “distort information” in the service of “political objectives”; and Senator Pat Leahy, who voted in her favor, endorsed her by saying that her tenure as national-security adviser lacked “strong leadership, openness, and sound judgment.”  

Nevertheless, Boxer's and Jeffords's objections are not innuendo but concrete interpretations of historical fact (you can disagree if you want, just bring the evidence), and in any case these criticisms have nothing to do with race—there's no stereotype accusing African-Americans in general of deceptive warmongering or lacking leadership. Contrast what is now being said about S. Rice, as Johnson quotes it:

Senator John McCain described her as “not being very bright,” and stated that, “if she didn’t know better, she’s not qualified” to be secretary of state. Senator Lindsey Graham noted, “I don’t trust her,” and that “if she didn’t know better, she shouldn’t be the voice of America.”...

These allegations are purely subjective, snotty, and larded with innuendo; and the innuendo is certainly that she's not one of Us, inadequately evolved, and unrepresentative.

Much more interesting to my mind is the campaign against S. Rice into which poor Dana Milbank has been inveigled, which says she must not become America's chief diplomat because she isn't diplomatic. That is, nobody (nobody in Cokie's beauty saloon? nobody at Sally Quinn's conversazione?) likes her. She is too rough.

when she was an assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration, she appalled colleagues by flipping her middle finger at Richard Holbrooke during a meeting with senior staff at the State Department, according to witnesses. 

My stars, Mabel, did you ever hear the like? And poor Mr. Holbrooke (aka "the Bulldozer" and "Raging Bull") such a gentleman, too!

Rice was one of the first former Clinton administration officials to defect to Obama’s primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. Rice condemned Clinton’s Iraq and Iran positions, asking for an “explanation of how and why she got those critical judgments wrong.”

And did she get one? Because I'm still wondering myself.

Rice’s put-down of Clinton was tame compared with her portrayal of McCain during 2008, which no doubt contributes to McCain’s hostility toward her today. She mocked McCain’s trip to Iraq (“strolling around the market in a flak jacket”), called his policies “reckless” and said “his tendency is to shoot first and ask questions later. It’s dangerous.”

Ah, now we're getting somewhere.  Milbank's the self-denominated "original McCainiac" after all, suppose he's still in touch with the old duffer? Or is that a racist question?

From Ask Mr. William T. Collins.

And so, to paraphrase Mr. Bennett, an unhappy alternative is before you, Mr. President; Mr. Milbank will never see you again if you nominate Ms. Rice for secretary of state, and I will never see you again if you don't. Just kidding, it's really up to you, but Milbank makes her sound like a little of what you need. And I'll bet old Holbrooke would have backed me up on that.