Forget
about sharks. In their Valentine’s Day editorial: Why Does Trump Ignore Top
Officials’ Warnings on Russia?, The New York Times jumped
several blue whales (all the ones left on earth), a cruise ship, a subtropical
archipelago, a giant vortex of plastic bottles, and the Sport’s Illustrated swimsuit
shoot. The lede said:
The phalanx of intelligence
chiefs who testified on Capitol Hill delivered a chilling message: Not only did
Russia interfere in the 2016 election, it is already meddling in the 2018
election by using a digital strategy to exacerbate the country’s political and
social divisions.
Hmmm…. After almost two years of relentless public paranoia
about Russia and US elections, don’t you suppose these Ruskie gremlins would
find some other way to make mischief in our world — maybe meddle in the NHL
playoffs, or hack WalMart’s bookkeeping department, or covertly switch out the
real Dwayne Johnson with a robot? I kind of completely and absolutely doubt
that they’ll bother with our elections.
Let’s face it, the United
States is doing a stellar job of destroying itself with bad ideas, foolish ideologies,
and pervasive self-deceit. If I was running the Russian intel services, I’d
just pay to send a few Nebraska county commissioners to Disneyland — that would
keep our seventeen US intel agencies busy until kingdom come trying to figure
out the angle. And it would cheaper than spending a hundred grand to (expletive
deleted) with Facebook.
Actually the Times’s editorial seems to have CIA / NSA
fingerprints all over it, or at least Deep State paw prints. By stating that
the Russians are already “meddling” in 2018 elections that haven’t happened
yet, aren’t our own security agencies setting up the public to lose faith in
the electoral process and fight over election results? Oh, by the way,
the Times presented
no evidence whatsoever that this alleged “meddling” is taking place. They just
assert it, as if it were already adjudicated.
But then they take it another step, making the case that because
Mr. Trump does not go along with the Russian Meddling story, he is obstructing
efforts to prevent Russian interference in the elections that haven’t happened
yet, and is therefore by implication guilty of treason. A fine piece of
casuistry.
The longer this fantasy about Russia continues from the Left
side of the political transect, the deeper the nation sinks into a dangerous
collective psychosis. After all this time, the only known instances of American
political figures “colluding” with Russians involve the shenanigans between the
DNC, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and US intel services including the FBI and
CIA, in paying for the “Steele Dossier” and the activities of the Fusion GPS
company that claimed Russia hacked Hillary’s and John Podesta’s email.
There is now a ton of
evidence about all this monkey business, and no sign (yet) that Special Prosecutor
Robert Mueller may be taking a good hard look at it, not to mention the
professional misconduct of a half dozen senior FBI, NSA, and CIA officials,
especially former CIA chief John Brennan, who has now morphed into a CNN
“analyst,” taking an active role in what amounts to a psy-ops campaign to shove
the public toward war.
The “resistance” may think it is getting some mileage out of this
interminable narrative, but its arrant inconsistencies only undermine faith in
all our political institutions, and that is really playing with fire.
We are already choking this polity to death by endlessly litigating
the past, insuring that the country doesn’t have the time or the fortitude to
deal with much more important quandaries of the present — especially a financial
system that is speeding into the most colossal train wreck in history. That
will de-rail Mr. Trump soon enough, and then all the rest of us will have
enough to do to keep our lives together or to refashion them in some that will
work in a very different economy.
PS: Readers may wonder why I did not
devote this space to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. It is exactly
what you get in a society that wants to erase behavioral boundaries. It is
especially dangerous where adolescent boys are concerned. The country has a
gigantic boundary problem.
We have also created
perfect conditions — between the anomie of suburbia and the dreariness of our
school systems — to induce explosions of violent despair. That’s why these
things happen.
Until we change these
conditions, expect ever more of it.
Reprinted from Kunstler.com.