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September
25
2019

The Odor of Desperation
James Howard Kunstler

The swamp abides. The latest news media dumpster fire over President Trump’s phone conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is a three-way ruse. Ruse 1: deflect attention from the main issue, which is Joe Biden’s trolling for payoffs on his missions to foreign lands as vice-president, first Ukraine, where son Hunter was gifted a board of director’s chair and $50K-a-month salary with Ukrainian gas company Burisma, and then a $1.5 billion “private equity investment” to Hunter Biden’s wealth management fund from the state-owned Bank of China. Ruse 2: to deflect attention from the damage soon to be inflicted on the Deep State by the forthcoming DOJ Inspector General’s report on FISA court abuses. Ruse 3. To set in motion yet another obstruction of justice trap for Mr. Trump on the basis of false charges.

This comes at the instigation of Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who was formerly senior legal counsel to John Carlin head of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice, deeply implicated in the FISA court matters of 2016 under investigation by federal prosecutor John Durham.  Mr. Atkinson cited a complaint by an unnamed whistleblower who claims to have heard from a source that the President offered a quid pro quo to Ukrainian President Zelensky for reopening the Burisma case. The “whistleblower” may be Mr. Atkinson himself.

Of course, gaffe-prone Joe Biden spilled the beans on video earlier this year, when he bragged about shaking down Ukraine’s then-president Petro Poroshenko over a billion-dollar loan guarantee unless he fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma, which he did. Is there any ambiguity here?

The coordination between the news media and the Deep State is impressively blatant in this new gambit, with former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe (dismissed for cause in 2018), in his new position as a CNN “contributor” (while awaiting prosecution) teeing up a new “Trump collusion” narrative with The New York Times, WashPost, and NBC marching in step. In this new age of disinformation, narratives are the political weapon of choice in the campaign to harass and disable the winner of the 2016 election. The big play of RussiaGate failed, the play of “racism” is failing, so UkraineGate is next up.

It’s also obviously an effort to reenergize the impeachment operation in congress, badly botched so far by Jerold Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee. But it’s hard to imagine a better entertainment than an impeachment of Donald Trump in congress. Unless the Deep State wants to throw former President Obama under the bus, along with dozens of his associates (including Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Biden), they might be advised to call off that circus. A trial in the Senate, where the GOP runs the proceedings, would be an even better table-turner than the rousing climax of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

I have a new theory about where the 2020 election is heading: if the Democratic Party candidate happens to lose, the party’s lawyers will unleash a blizzard of litigation in every voting district where the outcome was a couple of thousand ballots against them. It will be the 2000 “hanging chad” fracas on steroids and they will go so far as render the election inconclusive, therefore provoking the most parlous constitutional crisis since the start of the Civil War. In other words, they will dare to disable the republic.

Something or somebody will have to put a stop to these seditious turpitudes. The machinery of the law must be turned on the “resistance” and its operatives in the Deep State. Mr. Barr has the opportunity to do that. A globe of silence has enclosed his doings for many months. Impatient observers jump to the conclusion that the silence means he is doing nothing. I am not so sure of that. Given the purposeful hysteria ginned up so dishonestly in the press — and so injuriously to the actual public interest — don’t you suppose he would want to avoid tossing dynamite into that dumpster fire? By the same token, those actively stoking the dumpster fire are revealing their utter desperation. The unexpected consequence will be the suicide of the Democratic Party. But then people don’t necessarily get what they expect, they get what they deserve.

 

 

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

 

kunstler.com