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The Final Countdown – 4/11/24 – GOP Donors Eye 3rd Party Candidates to Stifle Biden’s Presidential Hopes

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Ted Rall

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss the latest developments from around the world, including the GOP donors eyeing third-party presidential candidates. 

Tyler Nixon – Counselor-at-law
Scottie Nell Hughes – RT Host
Scott Stantis – Political cartoonist
Dr. Wilmer Leon – Political Scientist, Nationally Syndicated Columnist, Host of The Critical Hour
Andrew Arthur – Resident Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies
 
The show starts with counselor-at-law Tyler Nixon providing an analysis of the FISA bill, which crashed in the House amid former president Donald Trump’s push to kill the surveillance law.
 
Then, RT Host Scottie Nell Hughes discusses Uri Berliner’s critique of NPR’s coverage of several topics including Hunter Biden and Russiagate.
 
Political cartoonist and commentator Scott Stantis continues the conversation and also touches on a tragedy out of Chicago. 
 
The second hour begins with political scientist Dr. Wilmer Leon, who discusses Cornel West’s announcement of Dr. Milena Abdullah as his running mate. 
 
The show closes with Immigration expert Andrew Arthur analyzing the Biden administration’s shift toward policies reminiscent of those implemented by former President Trump at the U.S.-Mexico border.
 
 

How We Got Here: A Brief History of the Ukraine Conflict

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Ted Rall

The United States Is Reaping What It Sowed in Ukraine - Progressive.org           American media outlets characterize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as, variously and concurrently, the bloodthirsty act of a Hitlerian madman, part of an attempt to reconstitute the former Soviet Union and, predictably continuing the silently-debunked Russiagate narrative of the last six years, an assault on the concept of democracy motivated by President Vladimir Putin’s supposed fear that his own people might get jealous of the freedom next door. Senator Marco Rubio even implied that U.S. intelligence officials believe two years of COVID lockdown drove Putin nuts.

            Any, some or none of these explanations born of pure speculation may be accurate. None of them is as likely as something simpler. The fall of the Soviet Union was followed by three decades of nearly constant provocation and encirclement by the United States and its Western allies. Putin decided enough is enough; here’s where we draw a line on the steppe.

            Frenemies fighting the common threat of Nazi Germany, World War II concluded with Europe divided along the lines where the Allies and the Red Army met in 1945, with Germany divided between the two.

Proxy conflicts in which the Soviets took sides in Turkey, Greece and Czechoslovakia prompted Western European nations to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a U.S.-run collective-security arrangement formed in 1949 under President Harry Truman. Famously, an attack against one member is considered as an attack against all. Weirdly, no one was bothered by the fact that World War I began in large part because of a similar set of entangled alliances.

The USSR retaliated by grouping the Eastern European countries under its domination under the Warsaw Pact. This 1955 alliance was structured as a direct response to NATO and organized the same way except that all major decisions were controlled directly by Moscow, whereas NATO theoretically required unanimous consent by its members.

The Soviet Union was disbanded in 1991. Russia, economically devastated, politically demoralized and militarily emasculated under the incompetent and corrupt presidency of alcoholic pro-Western President Boris Yeltsin, became merely the largest of 15 now-independent former Soviet republics. Russia has three-quarters the land mass and half the population of the old USSR.

The Warsaw Pact went away. Yet NATO lived on.

NATO’s website explains: “NATO endured because while the Soviet Union was no more, the Alliance’s two other original if unspoken mandates still held: to deter the rise of militant nationalism and to provide the foundation of collective security that would encourage democratization and political integration in Europe. The definition of ‘Europe’ had merely expanded eastward.” Toward Russia.

Russia focused inward, transitioning into capitalism. Yet the West and NATO acted as though the Cold War had never ended.

In 1991 NATO was far away from Russia. The post-communist Russian Federation was separated from NATO territory by Eastern Europe plus the former Soviet republics of Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, also former republics of the USSR. That soon changed.

Over the next 20 years all of the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe joined NATO, shrinking an 800-mile buffer zone by half. The Baltics signed up in 2004.

Moldova’s constitution guarantees neutrality so it will never join NATO, but its geopolitical status as a buffer state is relatively inconsequential. Belarus remains a staunch Kremlin ally. Which brings us to Ukraine.

If Ukraine were admitted to NATO, Russia’s buffer zone would vanish. In its place would appear a vast open corridor between Russia and Europe. Ukraine, the same route Nazi Germany used to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, resulting in the deaths of 27 million Soviet citizens — the same place where many Ukrainian locals greeted advancing German forces as liberators — would fall under the control of the NATO alliance. Russia’s enemy would be at its border.

The current Ukrainian government wants to join NATO. It came to power as the result of a U.S.-backed coup d’état. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, democratically-elected and pro-Russian, was deposed in a 2014 covert operation carefully orchestrated by the Obama Administration. “The United States had no right to try to orchestrate political outcomes in another country—especially one on the border of another great power,” Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute commented in 2017.

Adding to Russian anxiety, right-wing extremists, including neo-Nazis, played an outsized role in the 2014 Maidan uprising.

Now notorious anti-Semitic paramilitary groups like the swastika-wearing Azov Battalion have become an important component of the official Ukrainian military. As the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting notes, however, American media consumers are not being told about this. FAIR reports that a “crucial case of propaganda by omission relates to the integration of neo-Nazis into the Ukrainian armed forces. If the corporate media reported more critically about Western support for the neo-Nazi-infested Ukrainian security services, and how these forces function as a front-line proxy of U.S. foreign policy, public support for war might be reduced and military budgets called into greater question.”

The BBC reported back in 2014 that “ultra-nationalists, and their extreme right fringe, are a small part of the overall campaign — a subgroup of a minority.” But the leaders of the new government “have at various points seemed unable, unwilling or even afraid to rein in the radical right, who are mostly concentrated in an umbrella organization called Right Sector.”

Azov has grown since 2014. It has now become a movement with its own politicians, newspaper, even children’s camps.

Another far-right extremist group, C14, now controls Ukraine’s police and National Guard, according to Reuters. The Trump Administration considered declaring Azov and the Ukrainian National Guard a terrorist organization. Now, The New York Times reports, alt-right militants from France, Finland and other European nations are flocking to fight Russia alongside the Azov Battalion, whose ranks include soldiers wearing Nazi insignia.

Though Jewish himself, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has turned a blind eye to the neo-Nazis within his own government. So have his American allies. Sam Biddle of the Intercept reported last week that “Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy.”

For Americans, an enemy of an enemy is always a friend. Unlike Russia, Americans don’t live next door to a country that welcomes Nazis into its military.

NATO repeatedly provoked Russia over the past few decades, most notably planning to place ballistic missiles in the former Warsaw Pact nation of Poland. “From what we have seen in recent years—the creation of a missile defense system, the encirclement of Russia with military bases, the relentless expansion of NATO—we have gotten the clear impression that they are testing our strength,” then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev observed in 2008.

Until last August, NATO and the U.S. had fully occupied Afghanistan—which borders the former USSR—for 20 years.

The United States portrays itself as a critic of aggressive militarism carried out by Russia. At this writing, however, Russia has one military base outside the former Soviet Union, in Syria. The United States has over 800 around the world. After the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the Bush Administration rented military airbases from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia along Russia’s southern border, which it claimed it needed in order to wage airstrikes and deliver materiel inside U.S.-occupied Afghanistan.

The U.S. took over the Khanabad base in three former Soviet republics bordering and near Russia: Uzbekistan, Bishkek airport in Kyrgyzstan, and the airfield in Kulob, Tajikistan. NATO forces set up a base at Termiz, Uzbekistan, and outside the Tajik capital, Dushanbe.

The U.S. troop presence in former-Soviet Central Asia ended in 2014. But maintaining American military forces within striking distance of southern Russia is clearly still on American officials’ minds. In April 2021 the new Biden Administration reached out to the governments of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan about using bases there.

            None of this is to justify all of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Still, it is impossible to accurately assess the current crisis in the far reaches of Eastern Europe without considering Russia’s motivations. After years of encirclement in a one-sided Cold War directed at Russia, a Ukraine that is anything less than at least neutral (or ideally an ally) is simply too close for Moscow’s comfort.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

America’s Long History of Meddling in Russia

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Ted Rall

            Russia — OK, not the actual Russian government but a private click-farm company located in Russia — bought $100,000 worth of political ads on Facebook designed to change the outcome of the 2016 election. Except that only a small fraction of those ads were political. Also except that that small fraction was divvied up between pro-Hillary Clinton and pro-Donald Trump ads. And especially except that $100,000 in Facebook ads can’t affect the outcome of a $6.8 billion election.

            Now the same media outlets who touted Robert Mueller’s fizzled Russiagate investigation daily for three years is warning that Russia is planning to do the same thing in 2020.

            Be slightly afraid. Very slightly afraid.

            “Our adversaries want to undermine our democratic institutions, influence public sentiment and affect government policies,” read a statement from top Trump Administration security officials issued in November. “Russia, China, Iran, and other foreign malicious actors all will seek to interfere in the voting process or influence voter perceptions.”

            Setting aside the question of whether it’s smart to take the U.S. government at its word — it isn’t — if Russia were to meddle in our domestic politics, we would have it coming.

            To say the least.

            Throughout its history the United States repeatedly attacked, sabotaged and undermined the Soviet Union. U.S. interference was one of the major contributors to the collapse of that country in 1991. So the Russian government that followed — the Russian system now in place — might not even exist if not for the United States.

            Imagine being one of the freshly-minted leaders of Russia in the months following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. You have a lot on your plate. The last thing you need is a U.S.-led invasion force of tens of thousands of troops invading your chaotic new country, most of which is primitive and dirt-poor. But that’s what they got. It took three years to kick out our troops.

            That’s a little more interferency than Facebook ads.

            During World War II the U.S. and the USSR were allies against Nazi Germany — enemy of my enemy and all that — but even after promising to jump in the feckless Americans dragged their feet for three years before getting into the war, content to stand down as tens of millions of Soviet citizens died. FDR “deliberately made the Soviet people shoulder the hardships of war and hoped to see the Soviet Union bled white,” a wartime commander named Ivan Kuzovkov told Tass news service in 1984.

            In 1962 JFK took the world to the brink of World War III because the Soviet Union had placed missiles in Cuba, 90 miles away from Florida. Yet two years earlier the Soviets shot down American spy pilot Gary Powers in what became known as the U-2 incident. There’s no question that the plane was over Soviet airspace. It was an act of war. But even at the height of the Cold War the Soviets chose to look the other way. Can you imagine what would happen if Russia had done the same thing to us?

            In 1982 President Ronald Reagan approved an ingenious CIA operation to blow up a huge natural gas pipeline running across Siberia. “In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds,” recalled a former member of Reagan’s national security council. The result was economic disruption, environmental catastrophe and “the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space.”

            Blowing up the equivalent of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was a tad more dramatic than releasing DNC emails. Not that there’s any evidence that Russia was behind that.

            In 1983 Korean Airlines flight 007 — gotta love the subtlety of the number — was shot down over northeastern Russia after its pilot turned off the plane’s transponder and ignored orders to withdraw from militarily-sensitive Soviet airspace. KAL flight 007 had penetrated 587 km into the USSR, a world record for “off course” aerial navigation. It’s impossible to know for sure but given the close ties between South Korea and the U.S. at the time it’s likely that the airline allowed the CIA to affix high-resolution spy cameras to the plane. They gambled the lives of the passengers on the assumption that the Russians wouldn’t fire on a civilian airliner.

            Another Reagan-era project involved economic sabotage. Because oil and gas were major Soviet exports, the U.S. convinced Saudi Arabia to ramp up production of its own energy reserves. Oil and gas prices fell globally, the Soviet economy went into a tailspin and U.S. taxpayers compensated the Saudis for doing them a favor. If Russia had purposefully caused the 2008-09 financial meltdown just to mess with us we would view it as an act of war.

            In 1991 the U.S. got its way, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Russia transitioned to free-market capitalism. You’d think that the Americans would reach out to help. They did send money: bribes for the tiny clique of corrupt former bureaucrats surrounding Russia’s first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin, from whom soon emerged a new class of violent oligarchs. Ordinary Russians got nothing. It is estimated that between 2.5 and 3 million Russian citizens died of hunger and other causes as a result of the collapse of communism and the refusal of the international community to step up.

            Talk about interference! The Americans worked hard to destroy the USSR. After they succeeded, when interference would have been welcome and appropriate, they left Russia to die.

            When the U.S. worries about Russia messing with its internal politics it sounds a lot like psychological projection.

            Or just desserts.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

The Media Is down in the Gutter with Trump

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Ted Rall

Image result for Trump vs press

            How you respond to an attack defines you. Keep your cool, remain civil and others will respect the way you handle yourself, even if they disagree with you. Lower yourself to your assailant’s level and—at best—spectators will dismiss your dispute as a he-said-she-said between two jerks.

            So much has been written about Donald Trump’s debasement of rhetorical norms and his gleeful contempt for truth that there is no need to cite examples or quote studies that count the prolificacy of his lies. Trump’s attacks on journalists—“fake news,” mocking a disabled reporter’s body movements—are contemptible. They undermine citizens’ trust in news media, a serious menace to democracy and civil society.

            Less noticed is how major news organizations, incensed by the president’s trolling, have debased themselves to Trump’s moral level.

            American journalism used to adhere to strict standards. Though impossible to achieve, objectivity was paramount. At bare minimum, reporters were expected to project an appearance of political neutrality.

            Truth only derived from facts—verifiable facts. Not conjecture and never wishful thinking. Sources who wanted to be quoted had to go on the record. Anonymous sources could flesh out background but could not be the entire basis for a story.

            From the start of Trump’s run for president—before the start—Democratic-leaning media outlets abandoned their own long-cherished standards to declare war on him. Every day during the 2016 campaign The New York Times led its coverage with its forecast of Hillary Clinton’s supposed odds of defeating Trump. Setting aside the fact of the Times’ embarrassing wrongness—the day before Election Day they gave Clinton an 85% chance of winning—it cited odds rather than polls. Maximizing a sense of Clintonian inevitability was intended to demoralize Republicans so they wouldn’t turn out to vote. The two figures might suggest the same thing. But 85-15 odds look worse than a 51-49 poll.

            It’s downright truthy. And when truthiness goes sideways it makes you look really, really dumb. 51-49 could go either way. 85-15, not so much.

            The impeachment battle marks a new low in partisanship among media outlets.

            After Trump’s surprise-to-those-who’d-never-been-to-the-Rust-Belt win, outlets like the Times declared themselves members of a so-called “Resistance.” Opinion columnists like Charles M. Blow pledged never to “normalize” Trumpism; what this has meant, ironically, is that Blow’s essays amount to rote recitations on the same topic: normally, about the argument that Trump sucks. Which he does. There are, however, other issues to write about, such as the fact that we are all doomed. It would be nice to hear Blow’s opinions about taxes, militarism and abortion.

            Next came years—years!—of Robert Muellerpalooza. Russia, corporate media outlets said repeatedly, had “meddled” in the 2016 election. Vladimir Putin installed Trump; Hillary Clinton’s snubbing of her party’s 72%-progressive base had nothing to do with the loss of the most qualified person blah blah blah to an inductee in the WWE Hall of Fame.

            Whatever happened to the journalistic chestnut: if your mother says she loves you, check it out? Russiagate wasn’t a news report. It was religious faith. Russia fixed the election because we, the media, say so, we say so because we were told to say so by politicians, who were told to say so by CIA people, whose job is to lie and keep secrets. No one checked out anything.

            What we knew and still know is that a Russia-based troll farm spent either $100,000 or $200,000 on Facebook ads to generate clickbait. Most of those ads were apolitical. Many were pro-Clinton. The company has no ties to the Russian government. It was a $6.8 billion election; $200,000 couldn’t have and didn’t move the needle.

            Anonymous Congressional sources told reporters that anonymous intelligence agents told them that there was more. The Mueller Report implies as much. But no one went on the record. No original or verifiable copies of documentary evidence has been leaked. The report’s numerous citations are devoid of supporting material. By pre-Trump journalistic standards Russiagate wasn’t a story any experienced editor would print.

            It was barely an idea for a story.

            Russiagate fell apart so decisively that Democratic impeachers now act like the Mueller Report—a media obsession for three years—never even happened.

            Speaking of impeachment, mainstream media gatekeepers are so eager to see Trump removed from office that they’re violating another cardinal rule of journalism: if it’s news, print it. The identity of the CIA “whistleblower” (scare quotes because actual whistleblowers reveal truths that hurt their bosses) who triggered impeachment over Trump’s menacing phone call to the president of Ukraine has been known in Washington, and elsewhere if you know where to look, for months.

            Federal law prohibits the government from revealing his identity, and rightly so. But it has leaked. It’s out. It’s news. Nothing in the law or journalistic custom prevents a media organization from publishing it. News outlets felt no compulsion to similarly protect the identity of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden. So why aren’t newspapers and broadcast networks talking about it?

            “I’m not convinced his identity is important at this point, or at least important enough to put him at any risk, or to unmask someone who doesn’t want to be identified,” New York Times editor Dean Baquet said. So much for the people’s right to know. Why should subscribers buy a newspaper that doesn’t print the news?

            There is a because-Trump change in media ethics that I welcome. What’s suspect is the timing.

            Trump is the first president to get called out for his lies right in the news section. Great! Imagine how many lives could have been saved by a headline like “Bush Repeats Debunked Falsehood That Iraq Has WMDs.” A headline like “Slurring Sanders’ Numerous Female Supporters as ‘Bros,’ Hillary Clinton Lies About Medicare-for-All” could have nominated and elected Bernie and saved many Americans from medical bankruptcy.

            But all presidents lie. Why pick on Trump? His lies are (perhaps) more numerous. But they’re no bigger than his predecessors (see Iraq WMDs, above). Yet discussion of former presidents remains respectful and slavish as ever.

            I say, give coverage of Obama and other ex-presidents the same tone and treatment as the current occupant of the White House gets from the news media:

            “Wallowing in Corrupt Wall Street Cash, Obama Drops $11.75 Million on Gaudy Martha’s Vineyard Mansion Estate”

            “Ellen DeGeneres Sucks Up to Mass Murderer George W. Bush”

            “Jimmy Carter, First Democratic President to Not Even Bother to Propose an Anti-Poverty Program, Dead at TK”

            (Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

I Told You So: Only Idiots Believed in Russiagate

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Ted Rall

Image result for russiagate

There they go again.

In 2002 and 2003 corporate media idiots speculated that secular socialist Saddam Hussein might give nukes that he didn’t and couldn’t have to radical Islamists who wanted to kill him. That story wasn’t true. Worse than that, it couldn’t have been true. I said it over and over and over. So did others.

But we skeptics were outsiders. Corporate media’s strict idiots-only hiring policy keeps journalists-as-stenographers, propagandists and broken-brain logic-haters employed by censoring those of us who are always right. The idiots’ idiotic lies about WMDs justified a war that left more than a million Iraqis dead.

Corporate media didn’t fire their idiots after the WMD fiasco. Why would they? They were in the war business and the suck-up-to-government business. Had they been in the truth business, losing their credibility might have mattered.

Idiots gonna idiot. So it’s no surprise that in 2016 the same corporate media morons fabricated another conspiracy theory so outlandish that not only was it obviously untrue, it could not possibly have been true—and that it would again have devastating real-world consequences.

Russiagate was a propaganda campaign waged by the Democratic Party and its media allies with a daily blizzard of overheated speculation that Russia installed Donald Trump as its stooge by hacking the 2016 presidential election. Several years and millions of dollars later, special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded that it didn’t happen.

Of course it didn’t happen. It couldn’t have happened.

As I wrote last year: “You’re asking us to believe that Trump’s people met with Putin’s people, not to discuss Trump’s sleazy real estate developments in the former Soviet Union, but to encourage Russian hackers to break into the DNC, steal Hillary’s emails and funnel them to WikiLeaks with a view toward angering enough voters to change the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor. Trump doesn’t even read one-page memos. Yet we’re being asked to believe that he supervised a ridiculously complex Machiavellian conspiracy?

“WikiLeaks didn’t get the DNC documents from Russia or any other state actor. They got them from a disgruntled pro-Bernie Sanders staffer at the DNC. Anyway, the intelligence community — you know, the friendly folks at the CIA, FBI and NSA whom Democrats worship the way Republicans revered firefighters after 9/11 — says whatever Russian hacking occurred did not affect the outcome of the election.

“Then there’s this: Trump didn’t actually want to win. Why would he go to such lengths to steal something he didn’t want?”

As Chris Christie pointed out January 28th, how the hell could a shoestring operation like the Trump campaign, which was “just trying to figure out how to get field people hired in places like Pennsylvania” be so internationally sophisticated as to “run some sort of Tom Clancy operation”?

My colleague Matt Taibbi writes, and he’s right: “Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.” Whatever credibility U.S. media still had after pimping those imaginary Iraqi WMDs, The Los Angeles Times allowing its stock to be sold to the LAPD and then taking orders from the police, and “experts” repeatedly reporting that Donald Trump had no chance of winning, lies in tatters.

The media idiots’ WMD BS cost a million-plus Iraqis their lives. Their Russiagate crap has vastly increased the chances that Trump will win reelection. Russiagate will make it all but impossible to impeach the bastard as he deserves and as the country desperately needs.

As I said on the radio after the Mueller news broke: “Business corruption would have been, should have been the focus of Democrats looking for legal means to remove this president. That’s the low-hanging fruit; that’s where something actually happened. Instead, they went after the president for something he didn’t actually do, and so they look really foolish, and Trump is going to beat the Mueller report over the heads of the Democrats all through next year, and it’s going to be hard for the Democrats to put this behind them.”

Trump is a corrupt real estate magnate with ties to the mafia and sleazy autocrats around the world. Anyone out to get him should have started by following his misbegotten money. Instead Democrats tried to do three things at once: get Trump, destroy U.S.-Russia relations to provoke a new Cold War that would profit the military-industrial complex and explain away the bankruptcy of Hillary Clinton’s brand of centrist corporatism.

Democrats are now turning their attention to the New York-based investigations of Trump and his business affairs by U.S. Attorneys. The president faces significant legal jeopardy on several fronts, including abusing a charitable organization to evade taxes and the likelihood that his hush-money payoffs to Stormy Daniels violated federal campaign finance laws. When he leaves office, Trump might even face jail time.

But none of that matters. Trump is so old and fat he’ll probably die before facing prosecution. The real threat to Trump from New York is current and political. Thanks to Mueller’s exoneration on Russiagate, Trump is largely politically inoculated from the New York stuff even if the Department of Justice files major charges. “Just another witch hunt,” he’ll say—and voters—not just his base—will nod their heads. The media will go on and on about wrongdoing that under normal circumstances would amount to one hell of a scandal—but who will listen other than partisan Democrats?

The second Trump Administration that just became likelier will hasten the destruction of the planet by pollution and climate change, widen income and wealth disparity and gut the Affordable Care Act. The U.S. system may never recover. All because the corporate media idiots went after a serial criminal for the one crime he didn’t commit.

Wanna know the richest irony? Trump knew how this would turn out. He knew what the Mueller Report would say. For two years he’s been watching DNC mouthpieces like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow rant about Russiagate. He knew he’d use those clips for one attack ad after another.

Actual collusion! Democrats and their media outlets conspired to install Donald Trump as president in 2020.

(Ted Rall, the cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

SYNDICATED COLUMN: If I Were Trump, I’d Totally Fire Robert Mueller

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Ted Rall

Image result for robert mueller

If I were Trump, I’d fire Robert Mueller.

If I were advising Trump, I’d tell him he should fire Mueller.

I know: this directly contradicts conventional wisdom. Which is fine. If I’ve learned anything from this life, it’s that if you don’t have a clue about anything, do exactly the opposite of what the crowd does and you’ll come out ahead in the end.

If you follow the pseudo-liberal opinion writers at corporate media outlets who dictate conventional wisdom in American electoral political commentary, you know that the one thing that they are confident the president wouldn’t dare do is fire the former FBI director/special counsel.

Trump may be enough of a wild card to describe neo-Nazis as very fine people.

Trump might use his Twitter account to provoke a nuclear war with North Korea.

But fire Mueller? That would be crossing a very russet line.

At this writing, Trump says he has no plan to can the investigator. But that official White House line comes straight out of the CEO propaganda playbook: “has no plan” (present tense) isn’t the same thing as “will not decide to” (future tense). Future tense might be never, might be next week, might be tomorrow morning. The one thing we can all be sure of is that very few things would make Trump happier than ridding himself of this particular meddlesome priest.

The self-declared Democratic “Resistance” to Trump is warning that playing the Archibald Cox card would take the president and his administration a bridge too far, past his Rubicon, beyond the Pale, into unchartered territory that would provoke so much rage that it would mark the beginning of the end of his unlikely reign.

“ABSOLUTE RED LINE: the firing of Bob Mueller or crippling the special counsel’s office. If removed or meaningfully tampered with, there must be mass, popular, peaceful support of both. The American people must be seen and heard – they will ultimately be determinative,” tweeted Obama attorney general Eric Holder.

Bullshit.

First let’s remember what happened to Nixon in the aftermath of the Saturday Night Massacre. Cox complained, the media freaked out, Congress was outraged, and for the first time since the Watergate break-in a plurality of Americans told pollsters they favored impeachment. But Nixon survived another year, and no student of history believes the outcome would have been much different had he not fired Cox. Firing Cox turned out to be just one of a series of drip-drip-drip outrages that ultimately led to the president’s resignation.

Besides, there’s a huge difference between that Republican president and this Republican president. In 1973, Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. Now it’s the opposite.

Look, I think it’s really cute that Eric Holder (who, if I could get past his failure to resign over Obama’s refusal to close Guantánamo, I might kinda respect) thinks the streets are going to fill up with angry mobs if and when Trump dumps Mueller. But here’s a reality check for his ABSOLUTE RED LINE: there was an actual radical left in 1973, the antiwar movement was a serious force in politics, both houses of Congress were controlled by Democrats, yet the only thing affected by getting rid of Archibald Cox was the size of the next morning’s newspaper headlines. If no one protested then, you can be damn sure no one will take a day off work to attend a Mueller-themed Day of Rage.

Never mind Holder’s fantasies. There is no Resistance.

What there is instead is a lot of self-delusion.

For example, progressive writers point to the Trump Administration’s inability to repeal Obamacare as a key victory attributable to this so-called resistance. Yet Republicans “essentially repealed” the ACA by eliminating the individual mandate in their tax bill — just as Trump is gloating. Anyway, wholesale ACA repeal failed due to John McCain…not the Resistance. Some win.

After the Women’s March on January 21st, there was just one more major street protest against in Trump, a spontaneous uprising at airports that helped slow the implementation of Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban in February. But that was pretty much it for the Resistance. And on December 4th, the Supreme Court upheld the travel ban. Another defeat.

No protests then.

Actual resistance requires actual organization. It requires actual people getting off their actual butts into the actual streets every actual day and occasionally throwing actual rocks at actual policemen. Revolution isn’t a dinner party and Resistance doesn’t spring up spontaneously like a weed in the crack between two slabs of sidewalk. We don’t have actual organizations ready, willing, or able to organize actual resistance; without those there can only be sporadic, unfocused political tantrums, like the Occupy and anti-WTO protests and the Women’s March, that fizzle out in the face of police brutality or the passage of time. We haven’t even begun to think about what a real resistance movement would look like, much less build one.

That’s why, if I were advising President Trump, I would tell him he has little to nothing to fear by firing that annoying special counsel.

Nothing would happen.

Post-Mueller, people would simply shrug their shoulders and go to work. Maybe there’d be a march — but only one march. Not two. And it would be 100% guaranteed peaceful — and thus 0% threat to the powers that be.

And the president and his corrupt cronies could go back to the nation’s their business: lining their own pockets.

Tell me: why wouldn’t Trump fire Mueller?

(Ted Rall’s (Twitter: @tedrall) brand-new book is “Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America,” co-written with Harmon Leon. His next book will be “Francis: The People’s Pope,” the latest in his series of graphic novel-format biographies. Publication date is March 13, 2018. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

How the Press Leads “The Resistance”

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Ted Rall

The Trump Administration is guilty of countless wrongdoing, including monstrous acts that no one cares about, at least not in the press. In the meantime, the media is obsessing over a meeting between a 2016 Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, Donald Trump, Jr. and a number of other attendees.

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