Day 952 Who You Gonna Believe?

When I was coming of age during the Iran Hostage crisis of 1980 there was a fella on TeeVee by the name of Ted Koppel who would kindly mark each passing day that our diplomatic staff in Tehran was being held hostage. I have yet to see anyone do this for Russiagate (or 'L'affaire de Russe' for those preferring a more refined neoliberal term) but I think this can be very easily done as Bob Dylan would put it in "Highway 61". It would help to keep track after now 2.5 years and counting of this and I'm hating on myself for not running a calendar/clock on my blog from the beginning. So we can update a count easily by using the starting point of July 24, 2016, the eve of the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia as the launch point for the narrative that Putin and the Kremlin were hacking the DNC, DCCC in cahoots with Wikileaks to elect Donald Trump. That puts us at Day 952.

Why the Democratic Convention Eve start point? That's the day HRC campaign manager Robbie Mook took an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper above the DNC convention floor and laid out the Russia/Trump/Wikileaks connection as a defense to Jake's original question of why the DNC fucked over Bernie Sanders. This was a seminal moment of the narrative and I do mean seminal:


 

Two days earlier Wikileaks dropped the first batch of DNC documents that explicitly showed how the DNC principals had planned to drag down the Sanders campaign during the primaries. See this WaPo summary of that timeline:


The Russian interference fight was encapsulated in one CNN show in July 2016 

Also over a month earlier on 6/14/16 the WaPo broke the story of the DNC hack itself but the effort to tie Trump or Wikileaks to the alleged hack was not made at that point. Here is that story:


Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump 


So Robbie Mook and his homespun Crowd Strike Putin/Trump/Wikileaks narrative found its stride right as the DNC was imploding over Wikileaks gutting the DNC like a landed shark with the milky stench of its treatment of Bernie Sanders and his voters during the primaries three days before the opening of the DNC convention. "Experts" had all concluded it was RUSSIANS! that hacked the DNC and the background on Mook's and Crowd Strike's  involvement in the narrative early that spring/summer was left unchallenged by Tapper in this explosive charge. Mook repeatedly sloughs off Tapper's questions with his coy "experts say" deployment of RUSSIANS! as if butter wouldn't melt in his scheming mouth - because the scheme of the Steele Dossier was in its mature stage by Perkins Coie, Wendy Ohr and Christopher Steele with the over $9 million Perkins Coie got paid for Russigate by Hillary Clinton Forward. opposition research for that insurance Peter Strzok would later text his FBI lover about.


But that brings us to timeline discrepancies and the factually challenged Michael Cohen, TIME Magazine's Man of the Week.

So deeper down the rabbit hole we go wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

The Democrats launched RUSSIANS!2.0 (Day 948) this past week in the House Cummings Hearing and Michael Cohen, Trump's convicted tax evader, porn queen hustler and sad sack fixer used most of his mea culpa time on Russiagate TeeVee revealing all the finer details of his confidences with Orange Hairball con artist cum President. One item he tantalized the rogues gallery of Russiagate mavens on the committee was the Roger Stone conference call eaves dropping bit.

As Cohen tells it:

"As I earlier stated, Mr. Trump knew from Roger Stone in advance about the WikiLeaks drop of emails. In July 2016, days before the Democratic convention, I was in Mr. Trump’s office when his secretary announced that Roger Stone was on the phone. Mr. Trump put Mr. Stone on the speakerphone. Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Mr. Trump responded by stating to the effect of ‘wouldn’t that be great.’"

Of course we were told beforehand by the preening Democrat majority that RussiaGate wasn't going to be on the menu during this hearing. That farce was quickly dispensed with by the Committee chair and Cohen himself. But I digress which with RUSSIANS and rabbit holes is an occupational hazard.

Cohen attempted to pass this story off as some kind of "BOOM!" revelation or smoking gun. Too bad Cohen didn't go online and check the timeline of Wikileaks' statements online and in the press earlier that summer:

WikiLeaks to publish more Hillary Clinton emails - Julian Assange JUNE 12, 2016

This was over a month before said conference call. The whole world knew Assange and Wikileaks had the goods on Clinton emails by that point because Assange had aleady intimated as much to the Guardian in early June. Once a grifter, always a grifter especially to grovel for public approval after being dragged so badly by Mueller, Trump and that creepy porn lawyer Avenatti for so long Cohen didn't know what side was up or down anymore his public nervous breakdown has been so embarrassing to watch.

Of course every Trump toady online and on talk radio were discussing the matter of Guciffer2.0, DCLeaks and Wikileaks at this point in mid July of 2016. Roger Stone being merely top toady on twitter stirring the pot attempting to ingratiate himself with bluster and con tricks with the Orange Toad that now have him in a shit load of legal troubles with the FEDs and Mueller. Even so, Stone broke his court gag briefly enough to claim he never participated in such a conference call and of course Wikileaks is sticking to its long standing statement that Stone and Assange never had communications about Wikileaks email dumps after Cohen's statements on Wednesday. As this weekend's Politico piece states: "Somebody's lying here. But who"?

Week 93: Cohen Reveals Russia Scandal Gems Amid the Mudslinging 

(Notice they're using 93 weeks instead of the 136 weeks I'm counting by. Politico must be starting at an arbitrary point of Bob Mueller's appointment as special prosecutor)

So somebody's lying here but who, eh? This obvious statement is part of the ploy to confuse anyone casually paying attention. Read the Politico hack job I link to and understand how much the reporting on Russiagate itself has degraded public discourse:

A "jamboree of 'silliness'" indeed. And 'who do you want to believe' at this point in #RUSSIANS!? We started Russiagate when Robbie Mook above wanted us to take it as an article of faith the Russians were behind the DNC hack (or 'break-in' as he refers to it in that video - slying conjuring up Watergate) and that Wikileaks, who revealed DNC corrupting democracy in America, was in league with the Kremlin. Then we quickly went from that foundation myth to accepting the intelligence "community" and its assessment that the Steele Dossier represented verifiable facts about Trump/Putin collusion then BEFORE the election through David Corn and Mother Jones' scoop on Christopher Steele and his explosive intelligence memorandum in late October 2016. Then we devolved into "The Pee Tape is Real" meme and the laughing off on how Carter Page got snared by a FISA warrant, George Papadopolous and his hilariously comic travails with Mueller as a person of interest then an indicted "co-conspirator" in the fake news media etc. etc. etc.

And now flash forward through 2.5 gleeful and affirming years that Donald Trump is a Kremlin plant in the White House and we get "who do you want to believe?" as the output existential question that answers itself for any Russiagate mavens of mass media conspiracy theory. One result of this is that as of this past week, February 24, 2019, 65% of Democrats believe that Russia tampered with our voting tallies to get Trump elected in 2016:


The Economist/YouGov Poll pdf


 

And also this week it has also led 46% of Democrats to believe that Russia is America's greatest enemy:


 

 Majority of Americans Now Consider Russia a Critical Threat


Under the spell of this kind of massive propaganda the question "who do you want to believe?" as the sum total of Russiagate hysteria leads to another disturbing answer: Your government. Which of course this narrative has conveniently promoted as a government in exile. That's the hidden redacted part of the narrative subtly woven into it but just as powerful as the collusion part: That Hillary Clinton never lost the election in 2016 and is the deposed and exiled queen. We are living in a "fake" timeline of sorts as its told where ex-Obama administration officials and embedded intelligence and DoJ bureaucrats are operating a shadow government in the wings of a Deep State. Much of that operation has been rooted out by the IG of late and the revelations of the Strzok/Page affair along with Comey and McCabe and the debunking of the HRC opposition research smear Steele Dossier but the powerful scent of it still very much drives mainstream media centers and Deep State's hold on positions of power inside the SEC industry in DC.
Who are you gonna believe? Them or your own damn eyes?

So the Mueller investigation keeps firing blanks and is near to releasing its report. And the Beltway MSM, just like they did in the aftermath of NO WMD in Iraq, is in full court press to push back on the psyche of the American public and spin the release and its pending but obvious conclusion that there was no apparent collusion with Russia by Trump officials during the 2016 election. But who are you gonna believe? We've gone from slam dunk from "the experts" to a full fledged investigation by the Justice Department and Congress for 2.5 years to a conclusion that Trump will not be connected to a Putin operation to meddle with American Exceptionalism and demockracy. 

Most if not all Democrats will never accept that they've been duped on such an epic scale by the likes of Robbie Mook all the way through Michael Cohen and Robert Mueller. I'll write more about this phenomenon of late stage American democracy and the collapse of the liberal intellect soon. That post mortem will have to wait for now.

To take an extended examination of events of the collapse of our politics might seem to be an obsession for some. To unwind a conspiracy theory like '9/11 Truth', a project to drive a media narrative like the push for war in Iraq or the mass hysteria that our elections are controlled by foreign adversaries (who also happen to be nuclear armed adversaries) is a complex and exhausting task as probably Glenn Greenwald can attest to. Many detractors of those who dissent to the conventional wisdom that Trump colluded with Putin to get elected actually project their conspiracy theory ways onto those who debunk them. We play the record backwards so to speak and find mysterious intuitions on why Trump isn't a Russian plant when concluding there is no evidence of the main thread of collusion. This is an occupational hazard dealing with those online fervently wedded to one result: Trump must go. We must rid ourselves of Trump By Any Means Necessary BAMN and if that's a well framed conspiracy theory by Deep State so be it.

Others just want to move on. Just like when it became politically expedient to complain about the Bill Clinton impeachment over twenty years ago (MoveOn.org anybody?) or when the country needed to "move on" from the devastating historic and criminal foreign policy debacle of the Iraq War we still live with today. Obama anybody? "Nobody cares" others say about the bailout of Wall Street now that the economy is booming...under Trump?... Nobody cares about Russiagate, now that the narrative is tanking under the preponderance of NOTHING. The goal posts shift quickly when the jig is up. Should we just move on to Trumps financial fraud like the whole Russiagate thing was just to prime the outrage for Hillary losing? Or should we just move on into another electoral cycle and do this all over again?

But the fact is we never move on. We never resolve our crisis when we pretend we move on but don't self-examine as a nation what we've done or where we truly are on a civilization scale. All these major events of the past twenty years are interrelated including how America as a security state was foisted with a massive conspiracy theory casting Russia as the bogeyman. One inflection point was the Iraq War but an equally impactful one was the financial crisis of 2007-09. That is where domestic politics inside the US fell apart. So much since has drawn from those events and not all bad but still we never assessed the impact upon our system of self-government. That has led us here with the election of a the orange clown and Michael Moore exclaiming in his latest movie: "How the Fuck Did This Happen?"

It's a very hard but simple question to answer and it doesn't involve "Who you gonna believe?" jazz from hucksters who have skin in this game at the likes of Politico.

I might even make a case that since we cannot face a conclusion of the Mueller Investigation that results in two more years of the Orange Hairball we will never resolve this in a way that might reform our system to get us back to a normal electoral cycle again. We might be looking at the end of American politics as a rational exercise of democracy. A permanent 2016 if you need a scary bed time story. That does not bode well for the election of someone like Bernie or a chance at stemming climate change or even a sane alternative to Trump and the Republicans if America is permanently jacked-up on conspiracy theories.