The Deep State

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Anger arises from the deepest part of me when I think about what is going on at our southern border.  I remember the day in April when Jeff Sessions stood on a beach in California and announced that children would be separated from their parents with the commencement of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy against refugees fleeing violence in Central America.  We all took notice of it, but didn’t really think about it for a few weeks until the pictures and audio recordings began to appear showing the horror of ripping children out of their parent’s arms.  Since then there is an increasing wave of disgust from all corners of our country as the evil-ness of this policy began to occupy more of our mindspace.

Now there is anger everywhere.  Finally, I think for the first time since he took office, Trump caved and retreated from his inexorable march toward autocracy, even for a moment…..and at the same time in his retreat he is trying to position himself as a benefactor in not continuing the policy.  What a craven man.  And his craven sycophant Stephen Miller is no better.

Over the past year the Trumpites have wailed about the “Deep State”, trying to persuade all of us that there are terrible conspiracies hidden in all parts of society that are trying to sabotage the Trump presidency.  They want us to believe they are being assailed by hidden coteries of elitist bureaucrats in government who nefariously attack the President and are trying to bring him down.

I have another definition for the “Deep State”. 

This new ‘zero tolerance’ policy is the epitome of the
“Deep State”.  Trump’s action to stop further separation of families does not really solve anything.  Aside from the fact that he and all his people lied to us incessantly that it was the Democrat’s law that was causing it and he couldn’t do anything, he wants us to accept that this suddenly miraculous executive order solution solves the problem.

No, the tragedy still remains.  What of the 2300 children that have already been torn from their parent’s arms?  Where are they?  What is the process for reconnecting parents to children?  Apparently there is no plan to do that!

Instead what we are discovering is that Trump’s executive order provides for the Justice Department to enlist the Defense Department to provide military housing for these children.  These places will not be properly licensed as appropriate facilities for toddlers and infants!  Who will care for them?

We are learning of a vast ad hoc mechanism the administration has created that is moving these children to foster homes and childcare centers all over the US.  Surreptitiously hiding their transfer on commercial airliners, they are being squirreled away in places that the government will not allow the press or legislators to visit to be certain they are being cared for.  We are seeing video and hearing stories of young kids in wire cages.

Now we discover that the DoJ has requested that the military send JAGs (Judge Advocate Generals—lawyers) to prosecute the government’s cases against the immigrants/refugees.  So we can expect JAG lawyers, inexperienced in immigration law, to prosecute refugees (probably without legal representation) and expeditiously deport them---without their children!  And you and I are paying for this with our tax dollars!

The cynicism of all this is overwhelming!  Guess what, folks, the Trump Administration is the “Deep State”!  Think about the breadth of this effort, absent of any compassion!

Here is the good news……the hue and cry from all corners of the country is hopeful.  This new immigration policy has shaken people’s faith that somehow our democracy will survive.  The cruelty apparent in this policy has roused many to condemn and oppose the administration:  Governors of at least a dozen states have called back their National Guard troops that were requested by the government to assist on the border, refusing to support the policy.  At least 5 airlines have refused to have anything to do with this policy and have demanded that the government not use commercial aviation to move refugee children around the country.  Even Republican congressmen  have actually stood up and rejected this policy. (only so they will be re-elected).

Let’s hope that this episode serves as a wake up call for all those who have complacently sat by and watched little pieces of our democratic republic get destroyed.

What, if anything, has Trump made better?  He has reneged on every major foreign policy agreement  

this country has made over the past 10 years, he has started a trade war with not only China, but with our allies in Europe and Canada; he has insulted and alienated all our allies and praises strongmen and dictators as effective leaders.

He is deconstructing our government piece by piece.  The EPA has rolled back regulations protecting our drinking water and our environment from polluters.  He has crippled the Consumer Protection Agency and increased our national debt in one broad stroke by 1.5 Trillion dollars, to the advantage of the wealthiest in our society.  He has done his best to crush the ACA and now health premiums are rising for everyone.  Trump has sown discord between ethnic groups and openly fomented violence.  Are you getting tired of ‘winning’??

Trump is the Deep State personified.

We will survive him and his time in office if we act.  If we oppose at every turn, if we resist, we can bring back our American ideals and return to a civil society.

We must not despair, we must persevere.  We must VOTE in November and return control of the government to rational humanistic people….Democrats.

Surveying the Landscape

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I’ve been trying to get a view of all this from 30,000 feet and here is what I am coming up with:

The concept of democracy is in retreat across the globe.  We know that human history is cyclical and that there are periods when civilization turns and follows sometimes unexpected paths as it moves through time.  It seems like the last 50-75 years have been a time of great upheaval and change across the globe. 

After WWII there was a great movement toward principles of democratic government, and then about 30 years ago, the trend reversed and autocracy and dictatorships began to gain the upper hand.  What we all hoped was going to be the 21^st Century of enlightenment is instead becoming a darkening period where human civilization is drifting toward demagoguery and autocracy. 

The United States is not immune to this drift.  The time of Trump is a manifestation of this new direction.  Trump is not an aberration of politics, he is the result of the decaying of belief in truth and rule of law.  So what we see every day in his actions and the actions of his minions is the growth (like bacteria in a petri dish) of lies, misdirection, and foul behavior based on greed, money and power.

I watched the coverage of Trump’s meeting with the ‘spymaster of North Korea’ last week and marveled at the change in direction of the erstwhile Summit meeting plans.  It became clear to me that the motives of these two men were completely different from what we all HOPED the motives were. 

It has become clear that Trump is a mob boss.  He only cares about what he can acquire and corrupt in the service of his own aggrandizement.  There are no limits to his boundaries with regard to right and wrong.  His counterpart from North Korea has the same motives.  What all of us hoped motivated these cockroaches was the reduction of terror and nuclear danger in the service of uplifting human beings.  Not so, everyone….these guys are only interested in finding a path that will reduce possible warfare so they can continue to oppress and take personal advantage of humanity.  Trump and Kim want to neutralize what appears to be a threat to their continued march toward autocracy, corruption and tyranny.

Who are Trump’s heroes?  Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.  He talks about them as ‘strong leaders’.  He wants to emulate them. He praises them in terms that we have not heard about these people in decades.  He wants to show off his military hardware in a big parade; he wants to investigate all his adversaries and throw them in jail, starting with Hillary Clinton; he wants to muzzle the free press; now he threatens to pardon all the bad actors, including himself!  He is patterning himself after his heroes.

To try to get a measure of just how far we have fallen, imagine Barak Obama doing all the things that President Trump is doing.  How long would it be before impeachment proceedings would begin?  Nanoseconds.

So where does this lead us?  My fear is that Trump and all his tyrant role models are going to carve up the riches of the planet for their own gain.  Just look on a macro level at all the parts of our society that have been compromised and destroyed.  Everything from the rule of law to the end of myriad regulations put in place to serve the needs of the people is in jeopardy. 

Trump’s concept of Article 2 of the Constitution is that he has unlimited power, including the right to assassinate an FBI Director and not fear indictment!  The recent 20 page ‘letter/memo’ that Trump’s lawyers sent to the special prosecutor outline all kinds of situations where the Executive is untouchable: from subpoena to criminal action to unrestricted pardoning.  Trump is attempting to re-write the Constitution.

I guess the real question is whether he will succeed…..

If we don’t, as a nation, come together to preserve the ideals that our founders tried to imbue in the Constitution, then our drift over the edge will continue.  I cannot say it loudly or often enough….our moment of clarity is approaching in November.  Vote the bums out!

Beware Misdirection

There is a dawning awareness in the mainstream media that the midterm elections are closer than most actually realize. The importance of the consequences of what we do as a nation seem to have more definition as the clock ticks down to November.

Tom Friedman will have a column this week with a new and more robust warning about how crucial these election decisions will be.  His admonition is simple…..you must vote for Democrats.  Friedman is a conservative Democrat in many ways, but his reasoning is sound.  All the Republicans, save those who are retiring, have surrendered their moral selves to a corrupt leader who is bent on destroying our fundamental institutions regarding the rule of law.  There is no hope that those Republicans currently in Congress will stand up to the conspiracy theories being fostered by a man whose arsenal of arguments is all based on lies.

Now Trump is accusing Democrats of meddling with the midterm elections!  His modus operandi is to accuse without evidence….we’ve seen it all before.  The problem, of course, is that his base and other unengaged citizens simply listen to this mendacious drivel and accept it as fact.  Trump’s malevolent brilliance is that he understands this and is going to be ‘warning’ us from now until November that the election is rigged by the Democrats. 

In his new book, Messing With the Enemy, Clint Watts, senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University and a Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow, says Trump’s base ‘believes the impossible and overlooks the obvious’.  For those who get their news from social media or Fox News, these false conspiracies take on the mantle of truth.

Trump continues to incite his base, calling for investigations into red herrings:  Hillary Clinton, the Mueller probe, the FBI, the Justice Department, the deep state, spies in his campaign put there by Obama, etc.  He will continually distract the body politic’s attention toward these canards.  Be ready!

In the meantime there will be a constant harangue against the 'witch hunt'.   Now the arguments are changing.  According to Trump, the collusion is on the part of the Democrats and Clinton’s campaign.  If he repeats this over and over, as he most assuredly will over the next 5 months, many will simply accept these lies as truth.

How do you compete against this nefarious, dark force?

The only way is to call it out.  The Democrats must find the right voice and tactic to call attention to the lies at every turn.  The problem is that there is almost enough in the Republican ‘bin’ of things they have seemingly accomplished to persuade an uninformed voter that they have made real progress.  The only thing positive the Trump administration has achieved was the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as a Supreme Court Justice.  Republicans will point to their recently passed tax bill; removal of regulations; great ‘trade deals’; ending engagement on the TPP, NAFTA, the Iran Nuclear deal, the Paris Accords on Climate Change, all as major accomplishments.  Rubbish!  All those actions have caused only anger and consternation with our allies and disengagement with the rest of the world; the prospect of huge new national debt projections, not to mention the reversal of regulations protecting our air and water; the emasculation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency spearheaded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren; and the deconstruction of the State Department.  I could go on, but you get the point.

The Democrats running for office this November must take a more aggressive posture to counter the lies being told by administration and sycophantic Republicans.  The truth must be repeated over and over to dispel the blizzard of false conspiracy theories and misleading statements made by Trump and his minions.

If there is no change in the power structure this fall, then there will be no credible force to oppose the continuation of our downward slide to autocracy and destruction of the rule of law.

A Clarion Call

We have arrived at the brink of the constitutional crisis we had feared.  With Trump’s move to use the Justice Department and the FBI to discredit the Mueller Probe, we have crossed the final line separating us from the Rule of Law.  The President is demanding to investigate and discredit the investigation into his own criminal activity.  There is no precedent for that action.

In James Clapper’s newly released analysis of what happened in the 2016 election cycle, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence , Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, comes to the conclusion that Russia did successfully influence the election.  In fact it influenced it so well that Trump won the election.  Clapper is convinced that if they had not interfered with our process, Clinton would be President.  There is no ambiguity in his conclusion.

Apparently there was a joint task force formed in early 2016 by the CIA and FBI to investigate what was happening.  They saw the Russian interference unfolding and used an informer’s information to learn how it originated and was proceeding.  That informer (who was not spying as Trump falsely insists) was the early warning we had as to the onset of the attack by the Russians.

However, the Russian attack was enough to swing 88,000 votes in three states to give Trump the electoral victory.  Both the Russian effort and the coordinated Trump Campaign effort, working together, hijacked our election in 2016.  That is the consensus of all our intelligence agencies.

This interference is not a new phenomena.  In 1960, Mikhail Menshikov, the Russian ambassador, approached Adlai Stevenson offering to help him attain the nomination  for President because the Kremlin believed he would be the ‘right’ kind of President to foster peace with Nikita Krushchev.  Stevenson rejected Menshikov's offer and then turned to the Republican incumbent Dwight Eisenhower and informed him of the attempt to influence our election.  The same thing happened in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson was President and was running for re-election.  He also rejected the attempt, made by then ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to ‘assist’ with the election.  All the Russians needed was a willing collusionist, and it looks like they finally found one in Trump.  They successfully spread chaos in our politics and are seriously damaging our democracy.

In the meantime, we have a President who has done more to destroy our fundamental institutions than any past President.  He is at war with the Judiciary and the Rule of Law; he accuses the FBI and the DOJ of malfeasance and conspiracy to remove him.  He lies constantly and sows seed of doubt in the body politic by attacking anyone who criticizes him.  He calls the Press the ‘enemy of the people’.

He incessantly calls the Mueller probe a ‘witch hunt and fraud’ even though, unlike any previous investigations conducted by Republicans over the last decade or two, Mueller has had a fruitful harvest of indictments from people all around Trump who have repeatedly lied to investigators and the Press about their meetings and collusion with a foreign government. Trump’s entourage during the campaign were criminals:  Flynn, Page, Papadapolous, Manafort, Gates, Pinedo, Van der Zwaan, and 13 Russian nationals.  That is not a witch hunt!  And there are more indictments  coming: probably Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Wikileaks, Kuschner, Trump Jr., maybe others.

Trump has now ‘demanded’ that the DOJ share confidential information about the investigation into his collusion with the Russians with him and his allies in the Congress.  That is unheard of and probably illegal.  And yet no one stands up to him.  The Republicans in Congress are mute.  They have sold their souls to the devil and are complicit in the abuse and destruction of the Constitution.

Trump has no respect or allegiance to the Rule of Law, one of the fundamental tenets of our democracy.  He is intent on persecuting and prosecuting anyone or anything that opposes him.  His legions of lackeys are sycophants to his motives and actions.

Consequently we now have a Constitutional crisis on our hands that pits the branches of our government against each other.  Led by a racist, narcissistic, mendacious, foul-mouthed excuse for a human being, the United States of America is in jeopardy of becoming an autocracy with a demagogue at the helm.  Unless we get rid of all these bums, you can look forward to more stringent immigration regulations, more relaxation of protective regulations for the common middle class citizen, and false accusations and intimidation to anyone appearing to oppose the administration.

I am doing my best to alert you to what is going on and to try to make you aware of what we are losing.

What are YOU going to do to stop this assault on our democracy?