Comments

Matt Taibii: hating Trump, but hating what the Deep State is doing to Trump more — 30 Comments

1. Most of the time Taibbi is plain awful; he wrote extensively about financial institution, but there’s no indication he actually knows the first thing about economics or finance.

   I think in the current vein, his long-held contempt for the establishment press is leading him in an intelligent direction. (When he resided in Moscow half-a-generation ago, it was his view that the western press there was generating fiction-for-publication back home. NB, the decay in professionalism among that set was far less pronounced then than now).

   Our real problem, and it’s one that the Manjus of this world refuse to acknowledge, is that without generally respected procedural principles, any tool will do. They think that asinine judicial decrees, malfeasance by administrative agencies, systematic and self-conscious mendacity in the media, and systematic vote fraud are just dandy. They’re not going to like it when someone else picks up a different set of tools to use against them, but they’re begging for it as we speak. If we’re lucky, they start to think better of it. If we’re less lucky, it’s the Year of Living Dangerously. If we’re really unlucky, it’s the Spanish Civil War.

2. The precedent of a successful coup against trump by the deep state and the intelligence agencies would be substantially the same as the murder of Caligula by the Praetorian Guard in January 41 AD, and their replacement of Caligula with Claudius.

3. They’re not going to like it when someone else picks up a different set of tools to use against them, but they’re begging for it as we speak.

   Why not use their own tools against them? not say that we shouldn’t devise new methods and tools of torment. It’s like the #cancel #culture thing: sure, I’d like to have a live and let live environment, but you made the new rules I’m just doing an Alinksy and making the #cancel #culture devotees live by their own rules.

4. If, and that’s a big if given Trump’s resilience, but if they are successful in ousting Trump, will they be able to mount a similar offense against Pence? Because only then will they actually succeed in getting the presidency back in the hands of the dems. And that is clearly what they long for.

   And if they do succeed at that, how will Nancy do as President?

   I really think they’d be better advised to put all this effort into winning in 2020.

5. “The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections.”

   This is what worries me so too. How can others not see this? How can they think that the ends justifies the means? Don’t they see how that whatever works to help them now will (note: I’m not saying could, but WILL) be used against them in the future.

   And what is especially scary to me is that people who I would otherwise have considered “smart” are falling for this get-rid-of-Trump at any price nonsense. Their hatred of trump is so strong that they don’t see how it has made them stupid!

6. For me, Trump got himself elected to a job he’s not best suited for and he doesnt help our cause, Having said that, he got elected in accordance with the Constitution and thats the way its supposed to work. Charles asks does the left think the ends justify the means? Hell yes they do. They have a near seperate view of what they think America should be. Everyone of them. They have their own town halls dealing with issues they care about: Getting rid of everyone else’s guns; Forcing socialism through the phantom menace of climate change; Forcing people to think nine year old kids can decide to be transgendered and punishing you severely for questioning that.

   I can see a few people on the left being “woke” as to how having a deep state network take down a President they dont like is a horrible idea but I think its like a snow fence holding off an avalanche.

   Welcome North Venezuela. I feel its on its way and there’s no stopping that without much violence.

7. Taibii wrote on Goldman Sachs and the financial world. It was entertaining, if a bit simple on the analysis. The Epicurean Dealmaker took him to task.

   Taibii seems to have some intellectual honesty. It’s all right to detest Trump. There’s a lot to detest, to be honest. Trump operates the white house like he’s still on the block. Problem with most liberals is that they utterly refuse to look at the evidence. They are in that way dishonest.

   Matt T is better than that.

   So, good for him.

8. Neo said:

   “The second is that Taibbi’s experience in Russia may have given him the perspective to understand what that sort of unbridled power means, and the peril in which it places this country.”

   I believe this to be pretty close to the mark. Having lived abroad myself, there is something about experiencing the culture of a country that genuinely fears that unbridled power because they have dealt with it in the very recent past.

9. I probably disagree with Taibbi on almost any policy question, but he’s absolutely right here. We cannot allow the “intelligence community” to destroy our constitutional order because we don’t like who won the election.

10. At least 40% of “we”, the US voters, are oblivious to the threat — actually thinking Trump is the greater threat.

    We desperately need indictments and crimes exposed in courts.

    Not sure we’ll get them.

11. But my experience of the left is that all principles are fungible

    I would agree, although I would change it to be that my experience of humanity is that all principles are fungible.

    I’d like to have a live and let live environment, but you made the new rules I’m just doing an Alinksy and making the #cancel #culture devotees live by their own rules.

    I’ll tell you what the real strategy is. It is not for Leftists to follow rules because they don’t have rules. These Alinsky Rules are there to make you react to it by adopting it. The whole strategic end game is that you use Satan’s tools against Satan. Having created these weapons, Satan knows what will happen if you use it.

12. charles:
    I think they believe the right isn’t ruthless enough to use those tools against them, and they think the left will never turn on them because they’re on the left’s side. In that latter assumption I believe they’re wrong. They may be correct in the first assumption, however.

13. Neo, I think “an usual position” is a typo. Didn’t you mean “an unusual position”?

14. “I’d like to have a live and let live environment, but you made the new rules I’m just doing an Alinksy and making the #cancel #culture devotees live by their own rules.” I R A Darth Aggie

    As neo points out; the only principle ie. rule that the Left embraces is… “the principle that the end justifies the means if the end is to increase the Party’s power.”

    How do you ‘Alinsky’ that? And, if we fight fire with fire, we complete the destruction of the Constitution. But when only one side is accountable to the rule of law then the Constitution has already become a “dead letter”. Kept alive only in the imaginations of its adherents.

    It’s almost certainly going to come down to “politics by other means” and in the aftermath perhaps circumstance will allow an Article V Convention in which the Constitution can reemerge like the mythical phoenix. But given the external forces we will still face, like Rome, Empire may be the only path forward out of the aftermath’s chaos.

15. “Taibii seems to have some intellectual honesty. It’s all right to detest Trump. There’s a lot to detest, to be honest. Trump operates the white house like he’s still on the block. Problem with most liberals is that they utterly refuse to look at the evidence.” titan28

    Other than an outsized ego (not at all uncommon) and an unwillingness to put lipstick on a pig, i.e. democrats… what flaws are so egregious that detesting Trump is justified? Never mind “high crimes” what ‘misdemeanors’ is the man guilty of that warrant such contempt?

    And, what evidence do you offer that Trump is running the WH like “he’s still on the block”?

16. It’s been going on for a while now — conservative publisher Henry Regnery at the time of Watergate:

    “The most ominous thing about Watergate . . . is that it clearly demonstrates that the press and the bureaucracy, working together, can destroy the president, and from now on, every president is going to have to take this fact into account.”

17. It is worth about five minutes of your time to listen to Scott Adams describe what he labels a Coup-By-Hypnosis.

    “you’re watching a coup by hypnosis [which is] the more provacative word for persuasion and influence and dirty tricks… but quite literally… all evidence suggests that the media and the intelligence folks, the Democrats, the people who were loosely affiliated in the anti-Trump world are running a coup that is made partially invisible through psychological tricks.”

    What is at stake is the form of government we live under.

18. Hypnosis coup update. (It’s encouraging) 🙂

19. I recently had an exchange with a leftist who explicitly rejected the significance of plain facts to the debate. For him the only *fact* that mattered was that his cause was morally right. It dawned on me that principle in the sense that I or most people here would understand the term simply wasn’t part of his equipment. What he had was a very high level of moral outrage, which he kept referring to: “I don’t care about the factual details of this thing, I just know what’s morally right.” I know some very intelligent leftists who are very decent well-meaning people, and have had similar exchanges with several of them.

    It dawned on me that when they use the word “principle” they mean commitment and zeal for the cause of equality, etc. To deviate in that support by acknowledging something that works against the cause is what they mean when they speak of betraying a principle. This particular conversation had to do with LGBT activism, and the person was quite willing to simply defy certain facts that didn’t fit the paradigm in his mind–and thought of that as sticking to principle. He didn’t necessarily even deny the facts. He just refused to let them affect the greater truth to which he was committed. The Covington thing brought that out in several people: It didn’t matter what the video showed, what mattered was that white people were on one side and an oh-so-spiritual native American was on the other.

    Maybe this all sounds obvious, but the recent exchange was kind of a light-bulb moment for me. I’d never seen it quite that clearly. Suddenly their behavior and rhetoric made sense in a squirrely sort of way–it wasn’t simple stupidity or dishonesty, it was quasi-religious zeal.

20. “. . . it was quasi-religious zeal.”

    I think it’s possible at this late date to leave aside our “quasi” qualifications to merely say we are confronted with a new piety, perhaps not fully formalized, nor named, yet quite recognizable as a worship in its kind, albeit a worship not our own. Because not our own, still mystifying in some respects.

    On those grounds, we may behold a three hour long ritual ceremony performed last night on national television (called “CNN”, no less), hosting twelve celebrants vying for highest honors as “most likely to succeed”, “most devout”, “most militant”, “most possessed of the spirit”, “most zealous”, “most wounded”, “most otherized”, “greatest victim in service to the cause”, and so on.

    I link here then an extended thread of running commentary by an interested observer and commentator known as Shem Horne (He’s an infinite devil, just beware.)

21. Interesting article but I think you are correct that the Right would never do to a Democrat POTUS what the Left is doing to Trump. I’ll be shocked if anyone on the Left that participated in this attempted coup (IG report on 2016 due soon) ever pays a price for their criminal behavior.

22. It dawned on me that when they use the word “principle” they mean commitment and zeal for the cause of equality, etc. To deviate in that support by acknowledging something that works against the cause is what they mean when they speak of betraying a principle. This particular conversation had to do with LGBT activism,

    If you read about the radicals of the 60s, a basic cause for them was black liberation. The Symbionese Liberation Army was organized by women who had been teaching literacy to black prison inmates. The LGBTQ thing is similar. It is a vague cause that is used to incite rage. The “activists” want something to be angry about. Climate “activism” is similar. They don’t know anything about atmospheric science, just as the transgender activists don’t understand psychology. They don’t care. These people are unhappy and seek a cause.

    As for the intelligence “community,” this began under Bush. They got too much power as a result of 9/11 and the Valerie Plame affair showed how it could be used against the president. Remember the “B team” report that Iran was not trying to develop nuclear weapons ? That was to give aid to those resisting Bush,

    It didn’t begin with Trump but he set off a firestorm by beating Hillary.

23. sdferr: “I think it’s possible at this late date to leave aside our “quasi” qualifications…”

    Quite right, I don’t know why I threw in the “quasi.”

24. Mac, et al: There is no doubt that leftism, as practiced in the United States in 2019, is a religion and I’ve said so for a while.

    As I’ve mentioned, I am not a christian but was born into a family with people who are; in some cases, hard-core fundamentalist zealots who absolutely believe that the earth is 6,000 years old.

    Faith in the Word, absent any actual facts, is a feature, not a bug, to the devout. It doesn’t take any special strength or faith to believe in something which is demonstrably true. I doubt my relatives would like it put this way, but true faith is centered on things which become true to the faithful through the act of believing them, and that act of belief elevates the believer to a plane of higher goodness where mundane facts don’t matter. You can’t reason with religious faith by the introduction and discussion of concrete facts.

    As a STEM-path kid from a family with some members that still hold old-school religious beliefs, let’s just say that I’ve seen first hand what happens when you question religious belief with facts, even innocently intended. When I started seeing that same response – with all the dangerous brew of emotions that goes along with it – from mainstream lefties about real-world topics where facts matter, I realized that leftism was, fully, a religion. It may not have a central god figure and it changes too quickly to have an ancient set of written beliefs to which one can refer, but it is no less a religion to its adherents.

    Just remember how often and how easily people kill others over religion, and not just do so but feel that they are morally good for doing it, and be very afraid of the left.

25. “I think you are correct that the Right would never do to a Democrat POTUS what the Left is doing to Trump.”

    Well, the Right wouldn’t but look at the reaction to Donald Trump trying to remove troops from Syria. The Deep State would destroy a Democrat like Tulsi Gabbard who tried to withdraw troops entirely from the Middle East and the Right would cheer them on.

    Mike

26. The Deep State would destroy a Democrat like Tulsi Gabbard who tried to withdraw troops entirely from the Middle East and the Right would cheer them on.

    I agree about the Deep State but the Right is more libertarian these days.

    Read this.

    But the apparent allure of anti-Trump praetorianism can be traced back to the beginning of his presidency. The most extreme example was articulated by the well-respected Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, a senior Pentagon appointee during the Obama presidency and author of “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything.”

    Commenting in Foreign Policy, she wrote that Trump’s “first week as president has made it all too clear” that “he is as crazy as everyone feared” and that one “possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.”

    She continued that, for the first time, she could “imagine plausible scenarios in which senior military officials might simply tell the president: ‘No, sir. We’re not doing that.’” This is not only praetorianism but an invitation to a military coup, something that should shock anyone who defends republican government.

    That was an Obama DOD official.

27. sdferr on October 16, 2019 at 6:38 am said:

    ” ‘. . . it was quasi-religious zeal.’

    I think it’s possible at this late date to leave aside our “quasi” qualifications to merely say we are confronted with a new piety, perhaps not fully formalized, nor named, yet quite recognizable as a worship in its kind, albeit a worship not our own. Because not our own, still mystifying in some respects.”

    You’re being too modest. There’s no doubt about it as it applies to the generality of modern progressives who have not yet taken the full leap into values nihilism.

    For lack of a better term I’ve been referring to “it” as a secular mystery religion. But there are all sorts of better or more precise terms, often invented by the high priests of these faiths themselves: “The Religion of Humanity” for example, or the explicit religion of the first “Humanist Manifesto”.

    But whatever these doctrines are called by the hierophants of the creeds, they generally rely on the notion that “evolution” is progressive and tending toward some grand edifice erected to power and pleasure; at the apex of which will ultimately rest members of the present vanguard class or their descendants. Or possibly, all – of those who survive the great sorting – will become powerful little godlets, floating eternally on a warm gelatinous sea of bliss.

    Now is there something more, some motive, be it mechanistically generated or in the form of some kind of submerged consciousness, lurking behind that assumed by the progressive to be brute-fact-veil of evolutionary power and appetite? I don’t know.

    But there are some obvious problems with the humanist or transhumanist eschatology; such as the problem of explaining what purpose or end this achievement of bliss and power serves, that is not perfectly circular. But of course that is only a problem for those with minds tainted by Aristotelian logic … namely, those like yourself.

    Incoherence never troubles those appetite entities who actually dream these dreams, nor do they stop to ponder the point of their own desires … That would be against the rules in questioning all that is holy … by interrogating mutating desire itself.

28. Mike K,

    Re: “Commenting in Foreign Policy, (Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, a senior Pentagon appointee during the Obama presidency) wrote that Trump’s “first week as president has made it all too clear” that “he is as crazy as everyone feared” and that one “possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.”

    That she asserts that Trump is crazy completely destroys her credibility. Not that anyone who worked for and agreed with Obama has any credibility…

    Plus, at least half the senior military leadership are those remaining after Obama’s purge of senior military leadership, as well as those who got with Obama’s ‘program’.

29. “It dawned on me that when they use the word “principle” they mean commitment and zeal for the cause of equality, etc. To deviate in that support by acknowledging something that works against the cause is what they mean when they speak of betraying a principle. …

    Maybe this all sounds obvious, but the recent exchange was kind of a light-bulb moment for me. “

    No, that’s a pretty interesting way of formulating the matter: as a redefinition by progressives of the meaning of the word “principle” as an unconditional commitment to a specific values-cause, the “truth” of which was arrived at through intuition, rather than deduction.

    It’s somewhat different than the self-evidence of a proposition; and more akin to keeping faith with or fidelity to, a revelation which need not be critically examined.

    It deserves some consideration.

30. It’s been forty five years since I read Der Zauberberg. I wasn’t equipped then, and doubt my condition has much improved today. Still, now with the sneaking suspicion Mann was trolling us all, I may give it another go.

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>