Senator Cornyn, Senator Cruz, Representative Williams,
Respected and sober voices in the diplomatic and natsec communities are sounding the alarm and even using the words treason and traitor. Such words are merited when a request to turn over private citizens, including ethical patriots like Bill Browder, is greeted as an “incredible offer”.
For the last ten years, I’ve been trying to avoid getting killed by Putin’s regime, and there already exists a trail of dead bodies connected to its desire to see me dead. Amazingly, Trump stood next to him, appearing to nod approvingly. He even later said that he considered it “an incredible offer.”
Source: I’m Bill Browder. Putin Made a Mistake When Talking About Me | Time
This moment is striking in both its ineptitude and its thoughtless treachery.
It should be noted that not only did Trump fail to recognize the request to interrogate Browder & Amb. McFaul as outrageous, it seems not to have occurred to him that a president has no power to order a private citizen to submit to interrogation by foreign agents.
So basically: Putin makes a completely disingenuous proposal to “trade” interrogations, knowing the U.S. won’t & probably can’t meet his conditions. Trump cluelessly takes the bait & fawns all over the “incredible offer” Putin has made.
Note this is a direct result of Trump’s bizarre insistence on meeting with Putin alone. Any minimally competent diplomat would have recognized the “offer” as bogus and prevented Trump from embarrassing himself. Or tried to, anyway.
Source: Julian Sanchez on Twitter
“From the start, Trump has muddied a clear message: Putin interfered.” “In January 2017, Donald Trump was shown evidence that Vladimir Putin personally ordered pre-election hacking. He has since publicly questioned it.” Natsec folks are discussing how many sources POTUS possibly has burned. “Trump, who was briefed in Jan 2017, burned the source to Russia just like he burned Israeli intelligence.” “Did Trump tell Putin the name of CIA source close to Putin?” “I’d speculate the intel sources here reasonably concluded that Trump has already burned their sources and methods to Putin.” “This sensitive intelligence didn’t leak in this kind of detail through all the sturm and drang of the last year and a half. Trump’s fawning behavior in Helsinki shook this loose and into public view.”
How many of the “trail of dead bodies” were burned by the Trump administration? The operational reality we live and work in is that we must assume POTUS has burned sources and methods. The EU is now treating the US as an adversary. So too are the many professionals tasked with protecting our systems.
The sitting President and the party in the power are gaslighting us, telling us that what we witness every day isn’t true. Jeff Flake spoke to this today in a speech I’m glad he delivered. I have no faith he will vote in accordance with his words, but hearing a Republican MoC acknowledge the mentally abusive mass gaslighting of a nation going on right now was a needed affirmation of objective reality.
Mr. President, in his dystopian novel ‘1984,’ George Orwell wrote, ‘A party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’ Well, we saw earlier this week in Helsinki what was truly an Orwellian moment. What we saw earlier this week in Helsinki is what happens when you wage war on objective reality for nearly two solid years, calling real things fake and fake things real, as if conditioning others to embrace the same confusion. Ultimately you’re rendered unable to tell the difference between the two and are at critical times seemingly rendered incapable of thinking clearly. Your mind, a hash of conspiracy theory and fragments of old talking points, deployed in response to a question no one even asked. Ultimately you fail to summon reality in the face of a despot in defense of your country. It wasn’t a hard question, Mr. President.
In Chapter 10, “Believe In Truth”, of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”, historian Timothy Snyder writes:
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism. As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.
Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.
Post-truth is pre-fascism.
You, Senator Cornyn, ”blocked the passage of a resolution from Flake and Sen. Christopher Coons (D-Del.) that would have given Senate support to the intelligence community’s finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election”. You blocked acknowledgment of an obvious and true thing. You have abandoned facts and freedom. “Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason.” The endless repetition that Russia did not interfere in the election despite all evidence to the otherwise is “shamanistic incantation”. “The fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable.”
Meanwhile, you, Representative Williams, and the rest of the Republican House voted down election security spending.
And voted down a motion to subpoena the interpreter for the Trump-Russia summit.
A summit that the DNI hasn’t been briefed on.
You too have abandoned facts and freedom.
Election and information security professionals have been calling for an overhaul of our election security and voting machines for years. Our infrastructure is a shambles. Our machines are trivially compromised and untrustable. When we don’t spend on security, we get hacked.
You, my reps, are denying Russia interfered in our elections and refusing to invest in badly needed election security. What would you call Democrats who did this given all else going on? Would you hesitate to call them traitors? I don’t think you would.
My very first paper on fascism (grade 12 poli-sci!) I called it radical, and got scolded for that, because … received wisdom demands … fascism is conservative. /*shrug*/ I figure not worth a stuggle.
I used “radical” to indicate “leaning towards extreme while stressing fundamentals” (which I think is more meaningful than conservative).
That said, what I really dug into was the relattionship to fact (logic) and truth (reasoning). Just think how often Hitler demanded that his version of reality dominate! (If he hadn’t pulled his Army Center away from Moscow, Stalin’s goose would have been cooked. They got within 15 miles.)
So that’s perhaps the most dramatic. But other instances. If he had not delayed the attack on Russia (Barbarossa?), if he had not dragged his feet with the attack against the Kursk salient … and then decisions about priorities for armaments and development, with limited resources. I swear, sometimes it’s very as though there’s some benevolent extrernal agency at work.
But then there’s the lies / fictions / fantasies / fables about existentials in society at large. Group-think / lock-step on “pseudo-events” ** was absolutely fundamental. #CultDynamics
An interesting parallel of some sort is how Stalin managed things. in “the terror” (late 1930s) he purged the majority of his high command and his most capable managers. And? Many of those executed though innocent had gone along with the false confessions that doomed them, expressing loyalty to Stalin to the end. And those who squeaked through? the same. Right into the 1960s they expressed nothing like condemnation. (Stalin had his secretary’s wife sent to a gulag on false charges, where she was executed. He stayed loyal. Another man at some high level in Stalin’s staff … his wife was executed on false charges. He too stayed loyal.
So we’re talking about some very deep psychological processes here.
Group membership … self-identifying as this or that, as going along with this or that … avoiding loyalty … perhaps experience even slight acclaim … potent stuff! Plus: the operative fables are usually self-validating (Those that are not simply fall away … like adaptive selection.) so difficult thinking is avoided. Mindless loyalty => mindless obedience.
* “The Image; a guide to pseudo-events in America”; D.J. Boorstein [whose other books are absolutely fabulous] (1961) Boorstin pointed out that we cannot combat pseudo-events with facts.
Interestingly, 2 years later … knowing nothing about the book … in the schoolyard I realized / accepted / concluded that liars and cheats had every advantage, so bullies really did have some sort of high ground! That gave me a sense of life mission statement: To interdict cheat, liars, and bullies … villains. Oh BTW 1963 I was 9 … but a lot had happened … Hungary, Cuba, space race, RFK etc etc.
Addendum: This happened to come up on GPlus where folk were using WMD/Iraq to bash CIA. My reply:
==
On the subject of WMD that dragged US into the catastrophe of war in Iraq …
Intelligence community was shocked to see how Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rove (and other vampires) cherry-picked and distorted.
“U.S. intelligence assessment, bluntly: “We’ve struggled to estimate the unknowns. … We range from 0% to about 75% knowledge on various aspects of their program.”
New to me:
^ “Dick Cheney’s Biggest Lie”
^^ newsweek.com – Dick Cheney’s biggest lie
Also:
^ “The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality”
^^ https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14rich.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=CFEA62457564822DBED45F87026EE901
Sorry there’s no “Edit” … stupid GPlus destroyed the URL
^ “Dick Cheney’s Biggest Lie”
^^ https://www.newsweek.com/2015/05/29/dick-cheneys-biggest-lie-333097.html
/bdt
p.s. Painful … 2018 and our platforms are at best 80/20. (I always feel that reddit was designed to alienate as many people as possible.)