Category Archives: 2016 presidential campaign
Deep State Is No Deep Throat
Deep Throat was the secret source who led Woodward and Bernstein to break the Watergate story that brought down Richard Nixon.
I never heard of Deep State until a few weeks ago. That’s when quotes from unnamed sources started turning up in news stories about alleged connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The anonymous sources came from intelligence in the permanent government known as the “Deep State.” That would be the state previously known as “the bureaucracy”.
The Resist Trump crowd is hoping Deep State will work some Deep Throat magic on Donald Trump
Deep State is no Deep Throat
Anyway, none of the Russian allegations were proven but they still managed to bring down National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Now the Deep State is following the same playbook to go after Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Rush Limbaugh thinks the Deep State is conspiring with the Mainstream Media to sabotage the Trump presidency. The muckraking investigative news website Consortiumnews.com seems to agree with Rush. Writing for Consortiumnews.com, Daniel Lazar quotes NYT reporters Glenn Thrush and Michale Grynbaum bragging that,”Trump is being force-fed lessons all presidents eventually learn – that the iron triangle of the Washington press corps, West Wing staff and federal bureaucracy is simply too powerful to bully.” Lazare – no fan of Trump – is skeptical:
Iron triangle? Permanent government? In its tale of how Trump went from being a favorite of the New York Post and Daily News to fodder for the big-time Washington news media, the Times seems to be going out of its way to confirm dark paranoid fears of a “deep state” lurking behind the scenes and dictating what political leaders can and cannot do.
…Entrenched interests are nothing new, of course. But a major news outlet bragging about collaborating with such elements in order to cripple a legally established government is.
…So if the conflict between president and the deep state ever comes down to a question of legitimacy, there is no doubt who will come out ahead: The Donald.
Trump Media Relations
Media relations with President Trump hit a new low when he dubbed the press the enemy of the American People. Last August The Atlantic compared Trump’s authoritarian tendencies to the rise of Mussolini. And two days after the election in November the New Republic claimed Trump was already acting like an authoritarian.
But National Review says he’s less authoritarian than Obama.
Media Relations
Vox says authoritarian states ain’t so bad.
Voter Fraud
Some Democrats insist there was no foreign voter fraud in the 2016 election. But they also insist the Russians got Trump elected. That, they claim, makes him an illegitimate president.
Holman Jenkins, writing in the WSJ, doesn’t buy it:
The idea of Mr. Trump as Russian agent is one more failure of imagination by the media—a striving to believe that some hidden, sinister logic explains his rise (and also excuses Robby Mook).
Robby Mook was Hillary’s campaign manager. He wants to pin his electoral failure on the Russians. “Incredibly scary,” says Mook.
Here’s what Jenkins has to say about intelligence leaks about links between Trump and Moscow:
All this smacks too much of the little Walter Mittys of our overfunded, underdelivering intelligence bureaucracy trying to punish Americans for how they voted.
Trump Swamp Drainage Project
Swamp drainage was at a standstill last week. The Washington wetlands are filled with protected species and the permitting process is more complicated than expected.
The Trump Media war ended the week in a standoff when the president took the offensive in an hour and fifteen minute press conference on Thursday.
Leaks and Lies
Eli Lake in Bloomberg View thinks people in the permanent government selectively leaked highly classified information to damage a political appointee. He calls what happened to Michael Flynn a “political assassination”.
Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do…
Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told me Monday that he saw the leaks about Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak as part of a pattern. “There does appear to be a well orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration,” he said. “From the leaking of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern.”
