It seems to me that the Trump administration is at war with the Deep State. Nobody really knows the entirety of what's going on. America is so polarised right now and the situation is becoming more and more volatile. It's pretty scary, to be honest. I can't see any good outcomes.
A fight is on between what Kristol called the "deep state" and "the Trump state". It marks an escalation between the incoming Trump crew and the coalition consisting of establishment Republicans, Democrats, media and intelligence bureaucrats. It's a poorly lit scene, like the
Alien vs Predator or
Godzilla vs Muto movies which it resembles, and its hard to see where the borders of the action begin and end. It could be big; it could be little, but all you care about is staying away from the trampling feet and slashing blades.
Michael Walsh suggests the whole federal bureaucracy has been booby-trapped by an outgoing administration that never conceded the election but only went underground. "This story, from the Jan. 12, 2017, edition of the
New York Times, was little-remarked upon at the time, but suddenly has taken on far greater significance in light of current events:"
In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.
The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.
The suggestion is the Deep State was given a last-minute grant of authority to wait until the incoming administration walked in the door before blowing the political Claymores. So poisonous is the atmosphere that there are even more incredible allegations, which were it not for the times, would sound absurd.
Stuart Winer of the Times of Israel says a source informs him that the CIA is vaccinating America against Russian blackmail by doing it first. "The CIA has reportedly been working to prevent the possibility of the Kremlin blackmailing US President Donald Trump by deliberately making public everything regarding the president’s ties with Russia."
A report Wednesday by Israeli website Walla news’s veteran diplomatic correspondent Oren Nahari cited an Israeli official, who said a senior member of the US intelligence community told him the agency suspects that Russia has information on Trump that can be used to pressure the US leader. As a countermeasure, US intelligence operatives are quickly leaking everything they learn about ties between Russia and the Trump administration so that the information can’t be used as leverage against the president.
The danger of America dividing in the face of an opportunistic enemy should be obvious to the combatants. But the factions of American politics may be too enraged to stop out of fear of a common threat. Noooo! echoes like a howl through the woods. Suicidal factionalism has torn apart famous nations before.
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century being the most famous example. "The crisis began with the assassination of Emperor Severus Alexander by his own troops in 235, initiating a 50-year period in which there were at least 26 claimants to the title of Emperor, mostly prominent Roman army generals, who assumed imperial power over all or part of the Empire. The same number of men became accepted by the Roman Senate as emperor during this period and so became legitimate emperors."
If Trump is overthrown by the Deep State in a year, he's unlikely to be the last. If neither faction will suffer itself to be governed by the other, whoever succeeds Trump can expect his term to be short. America could have its own period of the 26 presidents. That will be good news for the Barbarians, waiting at the edge of Baltics, in the South China Sea and on Europe's borders, ready to move in.
Rome's Third Century crisis did not end well. The new normal was not a return to the Golden Age, but the end of it. It resulted in a landscape with a broken internal trade network and a patchwork of locality. America's own Third Century, which began so hopefully in 1976, is now heading to a place no one could have forseen. There is no road back to the past; there never is. All that is on offer is a choice of murky futures.
RTWT
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2017/02/15/the-fight-for-washington/
In these times I think of the words of Brecht -
“Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government's confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be simpler, if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?”
