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Robert S. Mueller III, a career prosecutor and secret police boss, belatedly and unwillingly appeared before two committees in the Democratic Party-controlled House of Representatives on July 24; the Judiciary Committee in the morning and the "Intelligence" Committee in the afternoon. He stubbornly refused to answer maybe 40% of the questions put to him. (I'll have to analyze a transcript for a more exact figure.)
It should be noted that Mueller showed clear signs of senility. He frequently asked for questions to be repeated, spoke in a shaky voice, and had obvious memory trouble. (I was surprised since he's 74, not so old.)
The two committees are chaired by Democratic Party partisan fanatics, both dishonest apparatchiks of that machine: Jerrold Nadler of New York City chairs Judiciary, and Adam Schiff of California chairs Intelligence. Schiff is one of the most dishonest poltiical mountebanks in the U.S., a topic worthy of an essay in its own right. Nadler insists the Russian "attack on the election" is the same thing as the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
What is clear, again, is what is going on in this long-running political drama, is a fierce power struggle between factions inside the U.S. power structure. On one side is the Democratic Party, its corporate media allies, and portions of the Deep State (secret police agencies), and on the other side is the Republican Party, its corporate media allies, and also some in the secret police organs. This sharp conflict began even more the November 2016 election, when elements of the FBI and other secretive state organs began conspiring against Donald Trump and organized various operations against him.
Mueller's behavior is best understood as that of a political weathervane. His actions and attitude are the result of the political pressures from these two opposing sides. Thus he failed to do his job and state in his long-awaited report whether Trump was criminally liable for obstruction of justice. His excuse was that under Department of Justice rules, a president cannot be indicted. (Who gave the DOJ, under the control of the president, the right to by edict declare this, is never explained. Nothing in the Constitution or actual U.S. LAW says a president cannot be criminally indicted.) As an excuse for not simply SAYING if Trump broke the law, it is disingenuous. Yet on the other hand, he seeded the report with all the breadcrumbs the Democrats need to say Trump DID commit obstruction of justice.
It should be noted that Mueller showed clear signs of senility. He frequently asked for questions to be repeated, spoke in a shaky voice, and had obvious memory trouble. (I was surprised since he's 74, not so old.)
The two committees are chaired by Democratic Party partisan fanatics, both dishonest apparatchiks of that machine: Jerrold Nadler of New York City chairs Judiciary, and Adam Schiff of California chairs Intelligence. Schiff is one of the most dishonest poltiical mountebanks in the U.S., a topic worthy of an essay in its own right. Nadler insists the Russian "attack on the election" is the same thing as the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
What is clear, again, is what is going on in this long-running political drama, is a fierce power struggle between factions inside the U.S. power structure. On one side is the Democratic Party, its corporate media allies, and portions of the Deep State (secret police agencies), and on the other side is the Republican Party, its corporate media allies, and also some in the secret police organs. This sharp conflict began even more the November 2016 election, when elements of the FBI and other secretive state organs began conspiring against Donald Trump and organized various operations against him.
Mueller's behavior is best understood as that of a political weathervane. His actions and attitude are the result of the political pressures from these two opposing sides. Thus he failed to do his job and state in his long-awaited report whether Trump was criminally liable for obstruction of justice. His excuse was that under Department of Justice rules, a president cannot be indicted. (Who gave the DOJ, under the control of the president, the right to by edict declare this, is never explained. Nothing in the Constitution or actual U.S. LAW says a president cannot be criminally indicted.) As an excuse for not simply SAYING if Trump broke the law, it is disingenuous. Yet on the other hand, he seeded the report with all the breadcrumbs the Democrats need to say Trump DID commit obstruction of justice.
Another example. He resisted testifying to Congress, but acceded under a subpoena. Then he refused to answer numerous questions put to him, even ones simply asking him to affirm what is in his report. He also refused to read aloud from the report, depriving the Democrats of video clips that could run on Democratic Party-aligned tv channels like CNN and MSNBC, and in propaganda advertising. Yet he gave some damning (to Trump) answers.
He also gave and withheld from the Republican Representatives some of what they wanted.
A perfect political weathervane.
Both sides have some truth on their side, and also blatant dishonesty. Terribly, both sides agree on a Big Lie, namely that Russia "massively interfered in Our Election," "attacked the election and is going to do it again," "threatens Our Democracy." (The Russian "interference" was minimal to point of risibility, as explained in footnote [1] below.)
Their motives for agreement on this Big Lie differ. For the Democrats, it is a way to try and discredit Trump as a puppet of a foreign power, in classic McCarthy era fashion, instead of going after him for his actual destructive policies- deregulation, slashing taxes on the rich, endlessly-increasing military spending, which they either are for or only tepidly bothered by. They also avoid the thorough self-examination of their own corruption and venality, which any honest analysis of what went wrong with Clinton's campaign would lead to, And they can bury the content of those damning emails by constantly shrieking about Russian wickedness for allegedly purloining the emails, the actual contents and significance of which are oddly irrelevant.
The Republicans for their part must be relieved and smugly delighted that no attention is paid to their election-stealing shenanigans, the massive voter disenfranchisement and ballot invalidation of many Democratic voters, the sneaky vote-shifting by software implants in the machines (all made by companies controlled by fanatically-partisan Republicans) and so on. It's a gift the Democrats, who are fundamentally gutless, insist on handing to the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers).
The reason I can be objective is that I am not in either camp. Whereas just about all media figures, including "alternative" ones, are partisans of one power faction or the other. And the majority of the U.S. population, sadly, is so brainwashed that they also identify strongly with one of the two oppressive imperialist corporate oligarchic parties of the political cartel. This makes fundamental reform in the U.S. impossible. Until the populace breaks out of its mental cage, there is no hope for the U.S, to improve. It will instead slowly decay, as all empires do over time.
The media alliances on the two sides break down thusly: the Democrats have most of the television networks to varying degrees (but especially NBC and its MSNBC unit, and CNN), and the "prestige" print media (including the Big Two, the New York Times and Washington Post). The Republicans have Murdoch's propaganda empire (including Fox "News,") and the vast network of "talk radio," the stations that blanket the entire nation with rightwing agitpropaganda 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The Deep State, in this case primarily the FBI, with some CIA and NSA involvement, has been mostly operating against Trump. In cahoots with the Clinton campaign, they brought us the absurd Steele Dossier, which they weaponized politically, operationally, and legally. It was used as an excuse to obtain a FISA warrant against Carter Page, a Trump stooge they picked as a vulnerable target of entry. But since the cadres of the secret police are hard core reactionaries with natural Republican sympathies and many ties to GOP operatives, the secret police anti-Trump ops have prompted a bit of an ongoing food fight, parts of which have broken into public view. Trump's second Attorney General William Barr is now apparently going after the elements that concocted the anti-Trump conspiracies such as the Page FISA warrant.
There was more skullduggery afoot by the Deep State which I will get into in a future essay. Some of the Republican Committee members brought up some of it, which was by far the most interesting parts of the day's proceedings. From the Democrats, we got their usual talking points, and the Slogan Of The Day, which most of them worked into their 5 minutes of "question" time: "No One Is Above The Law," intoned with all the faux moral seriousness of a well-trained apple-polishing teacher's pet or a dutiful choirboy, or a Boy Scout looking to move up the ranks.
The Democrats are right in that Trump tried to obstruct the investigation, which even though he failed, is criminal under repressive U.S. law. The Republicans deny that. The Republicans are right that their has been a massive anti-Trump conspiracy by elements of the secret police apparatus and "Justice" Department working hand-in-glove with the Democratic Party and aided and abetted by large swaths of the media. The Democrats of course pretend this is an absurd conspiracy theory, if they even acknowledge it at all.
Both camps, as I pointed out, are united in one of the Biggest Lies of all time, that Russia "massive interfered" in the 2016 election and even know if plotting to do it again in 2020. Russian involvement was extremely minimal, unless you could the email revelations, and that had no effect on the outcome. WikiLeaks published the emails in July 2016, Clinton was ahead by 14% in October, and it was the late October revelation by then-FBI boss James Comey that more Clinton emails from her private server scandal were discovered on a device owned by disgraced laughingstock and former Congressman Anthony Wiener (just more copies of already discovered emails, it turned out) which caused her plunge in the polls. Trump ultimately "won" with 2.9 FEWER votes than Clinton, thanks to that archaic relic, the Electoral College, something the Democrats never mention, instead blaming everything on RUSSIA! THEY ATTACKED US! THIS MUST NOT BE TOLERATED!
Oh shut the fuck up already.
The other thing both sides did was heap boilerplate praise on Mueller for his "lifetime of service" to the power structure. Some explicitly mentioned his "service" in the Vietnam war as a Marine officer, killing Vietnamese. After that he pursued a career in domestic repression as a prosecutor and for more than a decade, secret police chief of the FBI. (9/4/01- 9/4/13.) In that role he oversaw the post 9/11/01 increase in secret police state powers, the increased persecution of dissidents (Green Party members put on no-fly list, FBI raiding homes of socialist peace activists and stealing their personal mementos and photos, assassinating activists like the Puerto Rican independista Filiberto Ojeda Rios in his home, vacuuming up the data on political targets with "National Security Letters," 50,000 bank, medical, telephone, credit card, library, you name it, records a year secretly taken under the PATRIOT ACT, which require no court order or review and are kept secret from the victims, with criminal penalties for anyone who tells the victims or anyone else, and on and on.)
As FBI director, Mueller participated in the disinformation propaganda campaign "justifying" the invasion of Iraq, falsely testifying to Congress about Iraqi WMD and Al-Qaeda ties.
The result of that was somewhere between 500,000 and one million Iraqi deaths. The exact number, as in the Vietnam War, will never be known.
In other words, this creature was feted and honored for his life of crime against humanity.
Such is the moral degeneracy, the inversion of normal human morality, by the members of the U.S. power structure.
Now we watch fiercely competing factions battle to impose their conflicting narratives on the public mind: Trump as criminal obstructor of justice (now that the Russian collaborator story is dead in the water) vs. Trump as victim of political witchhunt and Democratic Party hoax.
It's a show that allows the Trump regime to commit its real crimes, murdering more people from cancer under the cover of "deregulation," selling arms to the murderous Saudi regime, trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government (a project enthusiastically supported by the Democratic Party).
And torturing migrant children and adults, and killing some of them.
Don't let them distract you with their intra-ruling class power struggle from their real crimes.
The secret policeman in winter.
1] Facebook traced $40,000 in campaign-related spending too Russia. This number is commonly inflated to $100,000 by including money spent AFTER the election (!). Google determined Russians spent $4,700 "on all Google platforms" (which includes youtube) during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Google's CEO testified directly to Jerrold Nadler himself, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, about this. You can watch it on video. Didn't make a dent in Nadler's position. Nadler insists Russia's "attack on Our Democracy" was the equivalent of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. You know someone is a fanatic (or cynic) spewing propaganda when facts that explode their myths have no apparent effect.
Finally there's the Democratic Party emails released by WikiLeaks, falsely attributed to Russia. That myth was debunked by retired NSA veterans William Binney and Kurt Wiebe. But let's say Russia did it. The exposure of those emails was a PUBLIC SERVICE! It made the electorate BETTER INFORMED! It revealed pertinent, significant information about candidate Hillary Clinton and the dishonesty of the campaign being run on her behalf by the Democratic National Committee. Far from being an "attack on democracy," it was a BOON to democracy.
But notice, the Democrats and their media parrots never say "attack on democracy." They always say "attack on our democracy." Like Cosa Nostra, Our Thing, "Our Democracy" is code for their system of bourgeois class rule with its fraudulent electoral trappings. (And how rotten their elections are. They put the Green Party presidential candidate, Jill Stein, in handcuffs for 8 hours to prevent her from trying to participate in one of their Democrat-Republican "debates.")
The "threat" to the two-party political cartel is a wised up populace. They well understand that. That is also why they demonize RT and other alternative media that exposes their lies and propaganda. Of course, RT et al have their own biases. But for progressive/left American dissidents, there is no space allowed in "official" media of the corporate oligarchy.
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