President Trump has credibly accused Obama of wire-tapping the Trump Tower phones during the 2016 campaign.
Whether the tapping of Trump Tower phones can be traced to Obama; whether it's true or false—consider the counter-accusations floated by President Donald Trump about Barack Obama as part of a strategy.
The president is in survival mode. He's backed into a corner and is fighting back with brio, counter-punching at the Machine intent on unseating him. The Donald is destabilizing the destabilizers.
The opinion makers were incensed. "He had no evidence when he smeared his predecessor. Just contemplate the recklessness—the sheer indifference to truth," yelped the New York Times. "The administration can't substantiate the wire-tapping claim," screeched the MSNBC collective. On CNN it's been incontinent outrage, every hour of each day, since president Trump shot across the bow at Obama.
Marching in lockstep, media have ruled that Trump's wire-tapping taunt is unworthy of investigation. At the same time, the RussiaGate conspiracy with which media are hobbling the Trump presidency, and for which no credible proof exists—that's beyond reproach as a news story.
Fake News' fantastical idée fixe is that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to rob their "beloved" Hillary Clinton of her presidential birthright. To them, that's what you'd call a perfectly legitimate and logical line of inquiry!
A CORRUPT NEWBORN? COME AGAIN?
Pursuing an investigation of the Trump Administration on the grounds that it's deeply corrupt is like accusing a newborn baby of stealing a sibling's toys. Trump's policy making "past" is a few weeks old; Trump’s political record a few months old. Donald Trump is a political newborn.
In the language of law, President Trump has no political criminal record.
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If anything, the counterclaim against Obama is much more intuitive. Obama has a long, checkered political past, having passed the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional surveillance, first revealed by The New York Times in 2005, and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their cooperation in these acts." (The assessment excerpted is courtesy of Bill Moyers, considered an august force on the Left.)
If a veteran political operative like Obama is considered beyond reproach, incapable of abusing power—all the more so is it irrational, irresponsible and in Third-World style to hound an administration not yet fully assembled or ensconced, for a political past it lacks.
Sane people must walk away from Fake News' Russia Ruse.
Like nobody before, President Trump has threatened the existence of the unelected, extra-constitutional Deep State—the intelligence community included. This fire-breathing monster has taken its first victim (Gen. Michael Flynn). And it plans to take Trump down.
WIKILEAKS VS. THE DEEP STATE
The greatest libertarian alive, a martyr for truth like no other, is Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Whether fighting visible government or the Deep State; Bush or Obama, Mr. Assange is a hero.
Right now, Assange is in the process of blowing the lid off the CIA. Assange's latest data dump has exposed the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for the habitual hacker it is. Revealed, too, is the CIA's modus operandi: For their own cyber-infractions, the agency is, allegedly, in the habit of forensically framing other actors (like Russia?).
"I think the president is absolutely right. His phone calls, everything he did electronically, were being monitored," ventured Bill Binney, a 36-year veteran of the National Security Agency. Binney, who resigned in protest from the NSA in 2001, told Fox Business that "everyone's conversations are being monitored and stored."
During the Bush era, the mantra of DC operatives like Karl Rove was, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."
Not much has changed.
THEY CREATE YOUR REALITY
A reality not of the making of America's entrenched punditocracy, its self-anointed intelligentsia, slick Big Media, slimy politicians, Democrat and Republican, spooks and bureaucrats—will be rejected as rogue. Or, dubbed as conspiracy.
But the Deep State is not a conspiracy; it's a term. The term has long since been deployed on the Left and by libertarians alike to denote the state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally.
The term was explained nicely by an expert solicited by the Public Broadcasting Service's Bill Moyers. "The Anatomy of the Deep State" inveighed against the Bush-era Deep State apparatus. These observations obtain across party-lines:
"All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude."
Washington Post writers Dana Priest and William K. Arkin ought to be the first to acknowledge that the use of the concept is perfectly proper. In their special series, “Top Secret America,” the two chronicled "the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it had metastasized after the September 11 attacks."
The "deconstruction of the administrative state," attested Stephen Bannon, assistant to the president and White House chief strategist, is President Trump's goal. Bannon said so at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Similarly, my June 2016 book, "The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed," made the case for "The Donald's Creative Destruction." I argued that what you're witnessing in media and among national and transnational elites is one colossal, ongoing, political grand mal, in response to Trump.
Trump is rocking their world. And not in a good way. The sprawling political apparatus that makes up the D.C. Deep State is now writhing like a fire-breathing mythical monster in the throes of death. Or, so we hope.
Alas, the president is behind enemy lines. A Congress, to whose members he handed victories, in 2016, has reverted to siding with the Democrats and the Deep State against Donald Trump. An FBI riddled with partisan operatives has joined the House and Senate intelligence committees to "investigate" Trump on trumped-up political chargers. One month into Trump’s presidency, and the treasonous Left is calling for his impeachment. Their darling, lifelong megalomaniac John McCain, has dared to call Trump a dictator. On and on.
In this constitutional Mad Max, the post-constitutional candidate is doing what the Forgotten Man had hoped President Trump would do: punch back. Hard.
Understanding President Donald Trump, then, means shifting to process mode. It means jumping a level of abstraction to look, not at a particular Trump tweet, claim, or verbal thrust and parry. Rather, you must consider their combined, devastating effects on oft-subversive, extra-constitutional, Deep State structures.
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