21st Century Wire says…

With every passing day, it gets worse. A new psychological disorder has swept through the halls of mainstream media, think tanks and academia. It’s called Putin-Trump Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTTSD), and it is spreading rapidly across every inch of the American political landscape.

As with any disorder or impairment, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. In the case of PTTSD, that hasn’t happened yet. As a result, many formerly well-qualified journalists and academics have fallen off the deep end, and joined-in the hysteria.

The latest member of this unfortunate club is Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award winner, Tim Weiner, who in his recent Reuters piece, figures that because Donald Trump has questioned the official US Intelligence community (IC) conspiracy theory on Russian meddling in US politics, that the President is inviting their revenge. It’s almost as if Weiner and other IC court scribes are foreshadowing something similar to that whole “Bay of Pigs Thing” which is said to have befallen another US President many decades ago. Make no mistake, between then and now, this is the very same Establishment, or Deep State speaking to us, and it’s not a political admonishment – it’s a threat.

According to Weiner, by not accepting the biased opinion (not based on actual findings, but on opaque sources and methods) and official conspiracy theories that the claim the Russian government played some role in the US 2016 Presidential Election, the President is guilty of treason for what CNN and other media outlets have described this past week as, “throwing the US Intel and LEO agencies under the bus”.

Granted, it’s not such a big surprise to see this piece by Weiner after reading his short bio at the footer of this Reuters article which says that all of Weiner’s establishment awards have been “for reporting and writing on American intelligence.” Translated: the establishment are happy with Weiner’s depiction of their shady and highly illegal operations ‘to protect America’ and therefore he’s been rewarded by being granted ‘access’ to the dark clandestine corridors of power. Can a functionary of the establishment really call himself a journalist if his main concern to preserving the image of that institution? Weiner is not alone. Today the TV and airwaves are full of intelligence experts whose main purpose is to make the agencies look good, or at least not too bad. Maybe Weiner could call himself a real journalist, he’d be attacking the US Intelligence monolith right now for their role in helping to launder a fictional defamation dossier on the current US President, as well as making-up a series of lies about imaginary ‘Russian plots’, or for lying about NSA Spying, or illegal US torture policy, and not to mention a slew of fabricated intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction – all of which have been promulgated by many of the leading partisan US Intel voices currently shrieking about Trump-Russia collusion, namely James Clapper and John Brennan, not to mention the other disgraced mandarins like FBI Director James Comey, who used informants to gather information on the Trump campaign and who presided over federal surveillance of a US presidential campaign, as well as Clinton-linked FBI deputy head Andrew McCabe, and partisan FBI operative Peter Strzok, along with the insane rhetoric of other ‘intelligence’ persons like the war-mongering lunatic Mike Morrel, and so many others. Rather than to “protect and serve” the American people, these men instead decided to serve themselves and protect their own political interests. Like so many others in their privileged positions, if Weiner really did the job of a journalist, he would no longer be granted the prized ‘access’ required to maintain his own inflated position in the government-military-media complex. But play the role of court scribe, and you will be rewarded – with a job for life.

Here is Tim Weiner’s desperate lunge at Donald Trump, a veritable festival of Deep State virtue-signalling to the establishment on whom he depends on to maintain his own lofty status within the Washington’s keep:

Trump has attacked U.S. intel agencies. Expect them to strike back.

The foundations of American national security are under assault. The battle lines are drawn. On one side stand the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency. On the other: the commander-in-chief of the United States.

Donald Trump’s appalling performance in Helsinki was a subversive act. He rejected the conclusion of American intelligence that his election was aided by a hydra-headed act of political warfare controlled by the Kremlin. He did so with a wink and a smile for the smirking autocrat who led the attack.

Trump called the investigation of the Russian operation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller “a disaster for our country.” He accepted Vladimir Putin’s denial that anything of the kind ever happened. Trump likewise leapt at and embraced Putin’s cynical and empty proposal to cooperate with Mueller – “an incredible offer,” he said. The likelihood of Moscow’s spies willingly sharing secrets with the FBI is nil.

The display of fealty to Moscow was indelible. Then Trump tried to erase it. Back in the White House on Tuesday, he said he didn’t say what he meant or mean what he said.

In Helsinki it was “President Putin… said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Disavowing himself, reading from a script the day after, Trump demurred: “I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t.’” Rather like a groom at the altar saying: “I don’t.”

It was an utterly unconvincing excuse. Trump consistently has denied everything about the “Russia hoax” and attacked the institutions and individuals investigating the conspiracy to subvert American democracy – in particular, the American intelligence community. He has compared intelligence officers to Nazis and derided FBI agents as corrupt.

Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017

But they have the power to strike back. For two years now, high-ranking veterans of American intelligence have sounded the alarm about Trump in the starkest language possible.

In August 2016 the former acting CIA director Mike Morell wrote this in a New York Times op-ed: “In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” Five days before the election, writing in the Washington Post, former CIA and NSA chief Mike Hayden used a Russian term: polezni durak, a useful fool, “manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.” Hours after Helsinki, former CIA director John Brennan described Trump’s performance as “nothing short of treasonous.” Former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired in May 2017, tweeted: “All who believe in this country’s values must vote for Democrats this fall.”  

Here, Weiner makes two fatal assumptions:

I’ve been reporting and writing about intelligence and national security for three decades. I’m convinced that the threat of an American “deep state” died with J. Edgar Hoover. The former FBI director died six weeks before the June 1972 Watergate break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters – the 20th-century precursor of the Russia hack.

Educated readers will have already picked these up, but in case you missed it, his two fatal assumptions (or obfuscations) are:

1. There is no Deep State


2. Russia hacked the DNC

Despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary, both of these two talking points keep getting passed around and recycled ad nauseam. The second point is backed-up by the long-debunked establishment lie that “all 17 Intelligence Agencies agree” that Russia hacked/influenced the outcome of the US election. Like so many like him, instead of calling out the lie, Weiner leans on it. 

Rather than acknowledge why so many Americans (and the world) have lost all faith in the so-called “intelligence community,” establishment stenographers are instead doubling-down by crowing about the IC’s impeccable credentials and patriotic virtues. This is just one example of many throughout history, of institutional depravity brought on by decades of denial and corruption. Even when caught red-handed, gatekeepers will still cry and invoke victim status, in this case blaming Trump and ‘the Russians’ for their own sordid and well-earned reputation.

Concerned with their own social desirability and career access, Weiner joins in the huddle, feigning the victimization of the poor “Intelligence Community” and thus, dutifully defending the establishment line.

You can read the rest of Weiner’s Deep State soliloquy here.

Like Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen and others, what Weiner has done here is not just declaring political war on the President of the United States, these operatives are using they are using their privileged access to the corporate media airwaves to openly call for a sedition against a sitting US President.

Where are our military folks ? The Commander in Chief is in the hands of our enemy! https://t.co/3eF7OLKEdN

— Steve Cohen (@RepCohen) July 16, 2018

So after two long years of conspiracy theorizing about Russian plots and sinister capers, it’s easy to see how on a domestic political level this culture of hysteria is mostly motivated by partisan politics; one faction lost their access to power and opportunities to another rival faction. On a wider systematic level however, this fissure has revealed the existence of a bona fide Deep State whose thread is woven right through the civil service, intelligence agencies and corporate media, and whose paid functionaries have clearly demonstrated a rigid propensity for group think. Call it what you like; ‘closing ranks’, or a collective survival reflex, but it is an undeclared entity that moves in unison, and with a clarity of purpose – which seems to be self-preservation.

But what should really worry onlookers is the level of desperation and pure lunacy we are seeing at present. Here’s a perfect example which is by no means an isolated one – where former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks went so far as to compared the recent Trump-Putin Summit as the equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Sept 11th Attacks. Watch:

“His performance today will live in infamy as much as the Pearl Harbor attack or Kristallnacht.”

– Fmr. Watergate Prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks on Trump’s comments at the Helsinki summit pic.twitter.com/pp5YuNw1pi

— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) July 17, 2018

This is way beyond unhinged, with the problem now being that one cannot simply ‘walk-back’ this level of debased discourse. Rather than face the truth of the situation, the legions of dishonest and self-serving plutocratic are showing their true faces.

Where can American politics go from here? There’s really only one answer: into the ground.

What we are witnessing is a political rapture in the US, and one which may result in a more unstable, rather than stable political landscape moving forward in the short-term. It’s possible that what will emerge afterwards will not be the same establishment it was prior to 2016, and where power may be dispersed rather than consolidated – and this means there will be an intense scramble for power over key nodes of the political economy, especially in government agencies, and of course in the area media and communication. That scramble for the spoils of political warfare could easily leave America worse off than it was before the current crisis. As things become uglier and more disjointed, the vaunted “intelligence community” and their loyal lap-dogs, the “free press”, will only have themselves to blame for that.

Perhaps America’s only chance for salvation is to overcome its self-induced PTTSD.

Maybe Eli Lilly or Bayer can make us a pill for that.

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