Everybody loves the deep state

I would bore you by recapping the maddening rounds of bullshit I went with people on the Parallel Internet last night.  Suffice to say it's pretty amazing what all these enlightened believers in liberal democracy who swear up and down how much they hate "fake news" are willing to take at face value from "a person who has claimed to be a former British intelligence official" so long as it fits their immediate political objective.

As far as I can tell that immediate political objective isn't about actually opposing Trump. Instead it's more a desperation on the part of Democratic Party elites to avoid responsibility for their own failures combined with an even more desperate display of virtue signaling from the sort of people to whom "America has always been great" appealed most. Sure it's bad to them that Trump is going to privatize the VA and kill Medicare and do away with public education as we know it. But it's far more important to them that we all be told that Trump is "Not My President," that they as individuals do not see their norms and values reflected in the person who happens to have been elected President.  Politics for so many Americans... particularly of the social climbing liberal variety... is mostly about narcissistic bullshit like this.  "Look at me. I am on the good and smart team."

Anyway, I said I wouldn't bore you with the re-cap.  In short, liberal America is never going to be ready to deal with Trump until it is willing to grapple with some fundamental truths about itself and the corrupt degrading empire it functions within. One of these fundamental truths is that the CIA is actually, you know, bad. The consequences of allowing it to wreak havoc on the rest of the world have been dire enough. Let's not cheerily welcome it into our domestic battles as well.  Here's Greenwald making precisely this point.

The serious dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and manifest. There are a wide array of legitimate and effective tactics for combatting those threats: from bipartisan congressional coalitions and constitutional legal challenges to citizen uprisings and sustained and aggressive civil disobedience. All of those strategies have periodically proven themselves effective in times of political crisis or authoritarian overreach.

But cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president is both warped and self-destructive. Empowering the very entities that have produced the most shameful atrocities and systemic deceit over the last six decades is desperation of the worst kind. Demanding that evidence-free, anonymous assertions be instantly venerated as Truth — despite emanating from the very precincts designed to propagandize and lie — is an assault on journalism, democracy, and basic human rationality. And casually branding domestic adversaries who refuse to go along as traitors and disloyal foreign operatives is morally bankrupt and certain to backfire on those doing it.

Beyond all that, there is no bigger favor that Trump opponents can do for him than attacking him with such lowly, shabby, obvious shams, recruiting large media outlets to lead the way. When it comes time to expose actual Trump corruption and criminality, who is going to believe the people and institutions who have demonstrated they are willing to endorse any assertions no matter how factually baseless, who deploy any journalistic tactic no matter how unreliable and removed from basic means of ensuring accuracy?