No one should be shocked that a person who evidently believed Barack Obama was not born in Honolulu and was somehow, therefore, ineligible to be president, would also believe other idiotic conspiracy theories that don’t hold up to the barest scrutiny.
President Trump was repeatedly warned by his own staff that the Ukraine conspiracy theory that he and his lawyer were pursuing was “completely debunked” long before the president pressed Ukraine this summer to investigate his Democratic rivals, a former top adviser said on Sunday.
Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Mr. Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said he told the president there was no basis to the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and did so on behalf of the Democrats.
I thought about this over the weekend when I saw that Ambassador Joseph Wilson had died of organ failure. The loss felt a little personal to me because Wilson was perhaps my most famous fan. He reached out personally in 2006 to thank me for my dogged coverage of the Bush administration’s destruction of his wife Valerie Plame’s career as an undercover CIA operative.
He had been sent to Niger in 2002 by the CIA to check out a conspiracy theory that was being promulgated by warmongers who wanted a pretext to invade Iraq. Supposedly, Saddam Hussein had been surreptitiously purchasing yellowcake uranium for a secret nuclear weapons program despite being under international sanctions and suffering a permanent no-fly zone over half his country. Wilson quickly discovered that this story was highly implausible and he reported back his findings to Langley. Nonetheless, President Bush repeated the claim in his 2003 State of the Union address in what came to be known as the infamous “16 words.” That prompted Wilson to go public, as he knew very well that the public was being deceived. The Bush administration responded by revealing that his wife worked at the CIA and sought to discredit him by suggesting his trip to impoverished Niger had been little more than a taxpayer-funded luxury vacation.
Rudy Giuliani’s trips to Ukraine (and Paris and Madrid) were both similar and different. Like Wilson, he was working on a conspiracy theory. Unlike Wilson, he wasn’t sent to investigate the theory but to enlist people in promulgating it. Wilson was supposed to figure out if there was a real national security threat for our nation. Giuliani was supposed to bolster a bunch of fabricated claims to help the president damage a political opponent and rehabilitate Russia’s international image.
This would be cynical and unpatriotic in the best of scenarios, but it’s probably worse than that. Trump seems to believe these conspiracy theories. As Jackson Diehl reports in the Washington Post, Giuliani has been selling the president on them for months and months.
Though Trump never had a positive view of Ukraine, the trouble really started with Giuliani, who has a record of working for and with the very Ukrainian actors that U.S. policy has aimed to marginalize: shady business executives and corrupt politicians with ties to Russia, organized crime or both.
Beginning early this year Giuliani began gathering what the Russians call kompromat — dirt — on Trump’s present and potentially future political opponents. His prime sources were a pair of state prosecutors who were universally regarded by reform advocates in and outside Ukraine as corrupt.
This is what led Trump to unilaterally suspend military aid to Ukraine and to make its resumption contingent on getting confirmation of Giuliani’s ridiculous theories.
When Giuliani began spreading his poison to Trump and conservative media, U.S. officials were, as the whistleblower put it “deeply concerned.” At first, some were inclined to dismiss the former New York mayor as a sideshow. But by late May, they realized he had done real damage. When members of the U.S. delegation to Zelensky’s May 20 inauguration reported back to Trump at the White House and expressed enthusiasm about the new president, Trump launched into a tirade about Ukrainian corruption and a supposed Ukraine-based conspiracy to prevent his election. He then refused to schedule a meeting with Zelensky.
Again, this is criminal and impeachable behavior, but it’s probably most disconcerting that the president doesn’t seem to be doing this as some Machiavellian plot, but rather appears to buy into it as reality. Of all the myriad reasons that he should be removed from office, the most convincing is that he’s insane. This was on full display on Sunday as he took to the Twitter machine to unveil his innermost pathologies and insecurities.
So today Trump threatened a whistleblower, accused one or more of his top nat sec aides of being spies, demanded a House Chair be interrogated on suspicion of treason and threatened to foment a civil war if he is removed from office.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 30, 2019
There will probably always be people like Rudy Giuliani who are willing to bend every rule and promote every kind of misinformation in the pursuit of ideological ends and raw power. It’s not as certain that there will always be whistleblowers like Joe Wilson to combat them.
We may not know the identify of the person who came forward to blow the whistle on Trump and Giuliani, but we should celebrate them. And we should take a moment to celebrate Joe Wilson, too, on the occasion of his passing.
Ah, the remembrance of “conservative” scandals past! We can always look back with Proustian nostalgia, knowing that if there’s a Repub prez, he’s gonna engage in massive lawbreaking and willful deception. And that “conservative” imbeciles will happily devour whatever reeking dog shit they’re told to eat.
The (unacknowledged) American Empire requires high degrees of secrecy to engage in its various misdeeds, machinations and misdirections around the globe, mostly undertaken for the defense of multinational corporations’ balance sheets and American fossil fuel addiction. Since the enthusiastic militarism and perverted idea of “defense” in the minds of the propagandized populace is irreversible, the national security whisteblowers become ever more essential. They are all quite brave.
Der Trumper has just about reached the final stage of spittle-flecked derangement and is one step away from openly inciting a hot “civil war”, calling forth his mentally unbalanced “patriots” to shoot unarmed protesters, no doubt. Presumably this means he will call for it at some stage of the impeachment process. In some ways, at least, the attitudes of the competing forces in the US Civil War was mentally healthy—the two regions, North and South, could openly express their hatred of each other’s “way of life”, and the phony facade of some national “unity” could be dispensed with. With the addition of at least two more regions of the country since 1865, things have become a bit more, um, complicated, shall we say. And of course the great divide is now not so much “regional” as Urban v. Rural. On what side would the US forces fight in your imagined “civil war”, Generalissimo Trumper? We know where our militarized “law enforcement” would stand….
But it is true, the “conservative” Noise Machine will drive The 46% (with their 98%(?) of American gun nuts) into a murderous rage upon the impeachment of their poor man’s Fuhrer. Hell, the idiotic corporate media will probably do the same, although somewhat more cluelessly!
Who knows that goes through the mind of a deranged person. Still he had a chance to start a hot war with Iran and backed away from it. Could it be he is all talk? We can only hope. Either that or join up with Canada. Then again I’ve got some hot head cousins in some rural counties here about and they all got them guns.
Despite the mumbo-jumbo of Bush on Iraq, there is a sense in which it was somehow still within the parameters of normal partisan jib-jab. In addition to remembering Joe Wilson, we should remember the days of normal BS in government, in contrast to these days of insanity. I hate to say I miss the days of Dick Cheney et al., but I guess I do.
No.
You’ve allowed the unprecedented insanity of the Trumpers to distract you from the equally unprecedented use of the Supreme Court to steal an election, which led directly to where we are now. Bush v Gore was NOT “normal partisan jib-jab”.
Yes, all hail the whistleblowers! Say their names, tell their stories, so that potential whistleblowers can take heart that they’re not alone and their actions matter. Here are a few notable whistleblowers (source: Wikipedia “List of whistleblowers” page):
*Edmund Morel – shipping clerk who exposed King Leopold’s enslavement of Africans in the Orwellian-named “Congo Free State”;
*Daniel Ellsberg – smuggled out and exposed the Pentagon Papers;
*Mark Felt – FBI associate director was Woodward & Bernstein’s source, “Deep Throat” during Watergate;
*Karen Silkwood – chemical technician who exposed widespread health & safety issues at Kerr-McGee’s nuclear power plants;
*Marsha Coleman-Adebayo – exposed unlawful gender & racial discrimination within the EPA, and hazardous mining conditions for South African workers at an American-owned company.
The wonderfully-named Reality Winner who leaked intelligence about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and in 2017 got a severe sentence. She should be given a full pardon as a true patriot by the next Democratic president..
So sorry to hear about Joe Wilson. Did not know he was sick. Meanwhile his wife, Valerie Plame is running for Congress in New Mexico. I hope she is successful.