Mr. Vindman

Rat with clusters ...

Spooks

Governments need to have spooks ... spies, counter spies, espionage agents and counter espionage  agents. That’s the nature of national security. And because of what these agents are charged to do ... unsavory stuff ... they are generally not Boy Scouts. If they are not nefarious when they are hired, they become nefarious in order to advance their careers.

So we should not be surprised when we find unsavory individuals like Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Strzok, Page, McCabe, etc. inside our intelligence operations. It comes with the territory ... like frogs in a frog pond.

Which is all the more reason why, if these intelligence officials turn rogue and use their powerful wiles and ways against their political adversaries, they should be severely punished. If they are given a pass, because they are spooks, then they effectively become like antibodies attacking their own tissue, they create a very dangerous precedent ... a precedent that might eventually kill their host ... i.e., bring down their country.

All the more reason that the FBI Inspector General Horowitz and Attorney General Barr should not pull their punches in their investigations into the alleged attempted coup by our intelligence community against a sitting president, Donald J. Trump. If our president cannot trust his spooks, it is very spooky!

Dissonance

President Trump’s stock-in-trade is dissonance. He seems to relish in keeping things all mixed up and then, in a feat of legerdemain, stepping back to display a masterpiece ... a hotel skyscraper, a shangrala resort, an international treaty, a booming economy, whatever. The majority of his critics seem to base their discomfort with this process by opposing him in the most bizarre ways imaginable. They create their own confusion with loopy statements. They call him a liar for his vagueness. They attack his family. They themselves tell the most outrageous half-truths and even bold-face whoppers. They work against his wishes by stealthy insubordination (and get sacked.) They leak anything even remotely damaging to a sympathetic media. They try to make him go away with an actual coup ... and, when that doesn’t work, with impeachment.

But this man is unfazed. He knows he can pull things off eventually ... and is gradually winning converts ... even among the swamp creatures. (He long ago convinced middle America that he knew what he was doing.)

Will this orange man survive the elite crazies who are still trying to destroy him so that their worlds will return to “normal” ... meaning the cushy life they had gotten used to? By all rights they should prevail. After all, how can one man stand up to all these powerful forces ... suburban women, Hollywood, academia, much of the media, the Deep State, the Davos crowd, many blowhard politicians, Omarosa and some international leaders? Matter of fact it is hard to find his consistently loyal friends. He doesn’t even have a dog.

I have a suspicion that, if he survives this balls-out impeachment attack by the Left, he may well carry the day in most other matters. If he doesn’t, yes the dissonance will go away, but America will be damaged almost beyond repair.

Headlines

Who will betray Trump?

Trump on Bloomberg: ‘He’s got some personal problems’

Dems want impeachment by Christmas ...

Elizabeth Warren confirms her Medicare for All plan will cover illegal aliens

Jim Jordan joins Intelligence Committee to boost Trump in public impeachment hearings

Alphabet’s self-driving car project Waymo is shuttering it’s Austin operation

Facebook removes news reports mentioning alleged whistleblowers identity ...

Sessions up 13 points in early Alabama U.S. Senate race poll

Trump says he hasn’t agreed to rolling back China tariffs

Trump’s ex-top Russian expert described frustration with Giuliani, according to testimony

Trump tax case should be an easy Supreme Court call ...

‘Whistleblower’ attorney Mark S. Zand tweeted ‘Coup has started’

Constitutional Crisis

Assuming the the primary purpose of the Mueller investigation is a slow-motion coup of Trump's presidency ... and the Rosenstein and Mueller blood lust seems to be going unsatisfied  ... and seeing that Trump seems to be winning the mud ball fight with this daring duo ... I can only conclude that a certain desperation is setting in over at the DOJ. A number of recent events I think telegraph this prosecuteral frustration:

- the unprecedented raids on Michael Cohen's home, office and hotel room

- the leaking of the 49 questions that Mueller wants to ask Trump

- Rod Rosenstein's fighting words that the DOJ will not be extorted

- Robert Mueller's recent suggestion that he is going to subpoena Trump in front of a grand jury

To me, these moves are specifically designed to annoy Trump enough to cause him to fire Rosenstein and/or Mueller ... and thus to lose the sympathy of the American public. ... and set things up for impeachment in the fall.

These tauntings seem very obviously designed to play to Trump's impulsiveness ... and, so far at least, have not triggered the desired result. Rosenstein and Mueller must hate Trump with a white-hot fury to be willing to fall on their swords to try to get this man out of office.

This, in and of itself, is a Constitutional crisis.

Headlines

.

These headlines are real ... they have all been discovered on Internet news sites:

Pakistani model killed [strangled by brother] after offending conservatives

Did Erdogan stage his own coup?

White House cuts economic growth forecast

Flashback Obama: 'If they bring a knife to a fight, we bring a gun'

Obama warns GOP: no inflammatory rhetoric

Remittances make up 2 percent of Mexico's GDP [equals about $23 billion]

Obama: Globalism will defeat terrorism

Iran conducts 4th missile test since signing nuke deal

Survey reveals that Germany's top companies employ just 54 refugees

U.S. navy banned from using sonar that could harm whales

Connecticut Gov: believing in two genders is 'genderism'

Judge: Instant jail time 'if you criticize migrants again'

Parallel Lines

Is there a parallel to be drawn between the current coup underway in Turkey and what happened in Egypt three years ago? To me, it appears so. Mohamed Morsi, with the tacit support of President Obummer, was elected President in Egypt in a supposedly free election. So was Recep Erdogan reelected in Turkey ... also with a nod from the current U.S. administration. Morsi rapidly began to consolidate his undemocratic control in Cairo by seeding secular Egyptian institutions with his Muslim Brotherhood cronies and fomenting radical unrest. Erdogan has clearly departed from General Mustafa Ataturk's secular vision for Turkish government and has more gradually reimposed autocratic Muslim strictures on the media and those who elected him. He has also been playing footsie with ISIS by allowing it to smuggle Syrian oil and refuges through his country ... and foreign fighters to join ISIS. Morsi clearly found the levers of power intoxicating and lined his and the Muslim Brotherhood's pockets. Erdogan recently built himself a super extravagant  $615 million royal palace ... see: Yahoo New Story ... and his son has been accused of benefiting from ISIS oil smuggling.

Morsi's excesses and attempts to crush Egypt's democracy finally inspired huge street riots and its military to stop this country's slide into a caliphate. General Abdel el-Sisi ousted Morsi who is now on trial with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood for murder and crimes against the state. Now, Turkey is going through a similarly coup to try to wrest Erdogan firmer grip on power. Whether this coup succeeds is still very much an open question. If it doesn't prevail, the Middle East will certainly experience a great deal more innocent bloodshed.

True to form, the Obummer administration is supporting Erdogan in this putsch attempt whereas I can't help but wonder if Russia's Putin might not be pulling some other strings in this puppet show ... and he doesn't like to lose.

We should know the results of this Turkey trot fairly soon. Is Erdogan gone? Let us hope so ...

Afterward: Bloody failure ... see: Daily Mail Story. Did Erdogan set this up to cleanse things?

More: And now others are speculating the same thing ... see: Daily Mail Story.