Had The Electoral College Done Its Job The "Anonymous Resistance" Thwarting Dotard Would Not Be Needed Now

One of the Deplorable mutts that helped shoe horn the misfit  traitor Trump into power. Right: Alexander Hamilton who held that the Electoral College had responsibility to ensure integrity of the office, and that may have been at odds with what a minority voted for. 

"This is where we stand right now, as we've come closer and closer to seeing the brain and belly of this administration - and we've come upon what Donald Trump has wrought. An American government forged of resentment, Driven by a child-like hunger for attention. Ignorant of important American history, incompetently and meanly led. Bereft of those values that - at our best - have taken us forward."  - Chris Matthews on 'Hardball' last night.

"The people closest to the president of the United States are sending flashing red warning signals to the American people about the danger this man poses to the nation." - Chris Hayes, on 'All In' last night.

Chris Matthews on his 'Hardball' show last night didn't mince words in asserting we now know the current occupant of the White House "lacks the basic competence and basic morality to run the country."  Prior to that, quoting an anonymous op-ed writer in the Times, who asserted:

"We believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.  That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office."

This WH insider (described as a senior official) also repeatedly refers to "we" and then details how he and other associates in an inner White House "resistance"  have sought to protect the nation from the Swine-in-chief's worst inclinations and vile nature.  See e.g. the whole Times op-ed here:

Opinion | I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration ...

After the op-ed appeared,  the  infernal maggot  masquerading as a president actually had the nerve to bark: "Treason?" and demand the Times turn over the anonymous writer to his Gestapo.   The asswipe failed to note that making known the means by which a tyrant is thwarted in his dereliction of duty constitutes  patriotism of the highest order.  And he - like Bob Woodward-  author of  Fear: Trump in the White House ,  merits a medal of honor for exposing this malignancy on the presidency.  As I've made it clear before,  this POS fouling the highest office ought to have been hung or discharged from office long ago. He is a blight on the nation and the world at large - more so with every breath he takes, and every expulsion of verbal sewage he emits via Twitter.  He is an unstable megalomaniac no less smitten now with his power, holding the nuclear codes, than Stalin at the height of his power before unleashing the Gulag and mass slaughter.

Having said that, I do acknowledge that many - even of the more or less liberal persuasion (e.g. Ben Wittes of 'Lawfare') - have referred to Mr. Anonymous  as "gutless"  or lacking in his own moral principles for not just signing off and allowing his op-ed to be a kind of final resignation missive.  Were that so easy ! But we know Donnie Dotard is a malignantly evil fuck who bullies relentlessly and subjects his targets to vicious retribution. So as guest Maya Wiley put it on 'All In' : Why subject yourself to that, or worse? Given Trump's trained rats in the media (FOX) and GOP will come after you, smear you.  And indeed, it is easy for those of us watching from the sidelines to mutate into self-righteous high dudgeon and become judgmental - assuming that we would have been more forthright. But it still took a degree of courage to pen that op-ed, knowing the scumball -in- chief is now turning over every corner of the White House to ferret him (and his associates) out. .

Further, before we pile on Mr. Anonymous as gutless,  let's take a step back and grasp WHO the real gutless people were that unleashed this over-ripe orange human fungus upon us all. The ones charged with protecting the country from mischief of faction, defined in Federalist  #10  by James Madison as that condition whereby:

"citizens - whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole - are united and actuated by a common impulse of passion (to cast their votes) adverse to the rights of other citizens or the permanent and aggregate interests of the community".  

This is exactly what the Trump voters ('the minority")  did, motivated by passion and recklessness via Trump's often violent rallies to give a middle finger salute to the rest of the country - thereby militating against the majority's interests.  They knew just as well as anyone  the degenerate and destructive nature of this filth, but cast ballots for him anyway. Enough, namely 77,000 in three key states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan) , to put him over the top in electoral votes.  

But it then fell to the state  Electors to correct the anomaly. To do their sworn duty, i.e. not to rubber stamp a malicious choice, but to set it right and prevent an unhinged, authoritarian demagogue from attaining the highest office.  Alexander Hamilton, for his part,   held that the same electors could ensure the integrity of the office through their own discretion which may diverge from what the people themselves voted for (particularly if motivated by passion as opposed to reason). 

Thus we read in Federalist # 78:

"The process of election (by state electors) affords a moral certainty that the office of President shall never fall to the lot of any man who is not to an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications...."

Read that last sentence again:   The office of the President shall never fall to the lot of any man who is not to an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.

And no one on God's green Earth can tell me with a straight face that Trump, aka Dotard, is "endowed with the requisite qualifications". No, this malignant menace isn't qualified to be a dog catcher in Gaskin Switch, Arkansas. His display of rank passion alone - as in his unhinged tweets-  would disqualify him. His very campaigning mode in encouraging violence ("punch 'em  in the face"), would leave all the Founders gasping for air, foundering at the spectacle of a madman's approach to power -  as well as the very passions inflamed in his followers to push him there-- that they so feared.  

On querying wifey, however, she still reserves her greatest animus (indeed hatred) for the species known as the Trump voter.  As she framed it: "If not for these vermin the vote in those key states wouldn't have been so close or given the electoral votes to Trump. The electors then wouldn't have had to have made that choice to rescind those electoral votes."

Yes, true, but they did face that choice - to  trump the minority's misguided votes OR to put a scumbag into office, thereby  allowing a minority faction to give a middle finger to the rest of us. So ultimately, given all other impediments to a Trump reign crashed and burned, they blew it.  They did not fulfill the Founders' original intent for the electors' responsibility.

She also had misgivings about an "unelected clique" de facto running things in the People's house.  But I told her I am quite ok with any such folks, so long as they keep the Orange Turd's mitts off the nuclear codes.  Eliciting also the usual question: What in hell were the Trumpies thinking putting such a buffoon and deranged ignoramus in office?

In this respect, I must say I have had to generally concur with a recent writer ("beerfinger") who expressed the following sentiments (in The Daily Kos)  regarding why he reviles Trump voters:

"It’s obvious that for most Trump voters he‘s a reflection of themselves. His narcissism, his entitlement, his resentment, his intransigence, and the juvenile way in which he conveys all of that. These human traits which are typically reviled, for a Trump voter are his assets because in him they see themselves and they get a kick out of imposing themselves on the rest of the world, regardless of the consequences to themselves or anyone else. In other words, it’s not just that they have no compunction pulling the lever for a supremely unqualified and undeserving con man, it’s the fact that this is precisely WHY they pulled the lever in the first place. History and future be damned. Like some pre-pubescent way at getting back at everyone else who dares to try to make the world a better place.

The satisfaction they obviously get out of burning it all to the ground. The glee with which they’re perfectly willing to set a match to something that millions of people died building and protecting. The ease with which they’re willing to betray their fellow citizens without a shred of self-reflection and then turn around and question the patriotism of others. That’s what gets to me.

My 2-year old behaves this way sometimes. The only difference is I expect he will grow out of it one day and develop some emotional maturity, something which I have no hope for when it comes to an adult-in-size-only wearing a MAGA hat."\

But maybe this is a tad too harsh, e.g. wifey's "I HATE them all!" - and instead we the sentient and sane citizens must look at Trump voters as having a strain of mental illness that requires treatment. Why else extol a certified lunatic, traitor and Russkie stooge who in fact mocks their Southern accents when he sees fit?. See e.g.

Coastal Snob Trump Mocks Sessions' Alabama Accent, Degree

The most generous interpretation is the Trump supporters suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, that is the mental dysfunction where a kidnapped victim suddenly becomes submissive and servile to his/her captors.   But this is likely only the tip of the iceberg and the truth is that many of them suffer from schizotypal personalities - leaving them with psychological illnesses that involve paranoia and delusions. In other words, as I tried to explain to Janice, if they are deplorable they are this way for a reason, maybe beyond their control.

"I don't give a damn what the reason is! I hate all of these vermin that put this trash into the White House!"

Ouch.  But consider, the diagnosis (ok, admittedly distal) from one neuorologist that these forlorn souls suffer from social-emotional and cognitive deficits that pale beside most of our temporary issues  - say like mild depression after a loved one's death.   The link between schizotypy and belief in conspiracy ideation is  also well-established, and has been since Pat Bannister's previously cited work.  But a recent study published in the journal Psychiatry Research has demonstrated that it is still very prevalent in the population. The researchers found that those who were more likely to believe in outlandish conspiracies, such as the idea that the U.S. government created the AIDs epidemic, consistently scored high on measures of “odd beliefs and magical thinking.” (One feature of magical thinking is a tendency to make connections between things that are actually unrelated in reality.)

While it is estimated that over one percent of the United States population has clinical schizophrenia, many times that have schizotypy or similar psychological profiles that involve difficulty distinguishing between delusion and reality. To further complicate things, there is a thriving subculture that has emerged on the Internet in recent years composed of people calling themselves “Targeted Individuals,” who believe they are the targets of a complex harassment campaign by people who want to ruin their lives and drive them insane.  These people also believe that they are the victims of mind control and mental attacks from secret government technologies. Granted this might sound amusing on the surface but one must not forget that these folks are struggling with nightmarish delusions and intense paranoia.

In that case, maybe instead of our vitriol they need our compassion and care. They certainly do not need to be strategically manipulated with propaganda that further deteriorates their mental health.  But that is what Trump, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Q Anon et al  have been doing - relentlessly.  Indeed, let's be clear this  kind of targeting is what Steve Bannon and the Trump campaign did when they used data from Cambridge Analytica, which the company had gotten from Facebook, to create psychographic profiles of vulnerable voters. And all one has to do is visit alt-right media outlets and discussion boards to see that such manipulation is still going on and is worse than ever.

The effect of this targeted psychological manipulation has been a colossal mind fuck on a subset of voters, the 'minority pro-Trump faction".   To them,  Trump has manifested as their latter day saint and savior, e.g.

Thereby, these forlorn fools now see their whole existence as a battle between good and evil, with  Trump in the former category and his political opponents ensconced in the latter.  As evidence, like the Q followers and pizzagate crazies,  they cite  involvement of assorted left figures in insidious affairs like pedophilia rings and the “deep state.” These political flat earthers  have essentially become “radicalized,” and hence spend much of their time spreading the gospel of Trump and Q to anyone in cyberspace who will pay attention.  This is also why Janice detests them with a passion. Indeed, she explodes if even a tiny (3 second) clip of them appears in a Trump rally. Special venom is reserved for any blacks or women spotted attending such rallies who should "damned well know better!"  ("What's with these stupid  white women? They enjoy having their pussies grabbed?")

So maybe, just maybe, we need to back away from  outrage about Mr. Anonymous  and his resistance fifth column in the Trump White House. Also, tone down the furious Trump reactions - at least until we control one House of congress and can achieve concrete actions, like multiple investigations.  Instead we ought to consider the plight of the collapsing mental health  of Trumpsters.  Given poor mental health  is already a major problem in America (5% of people are psychotic or schizoid) and  1 in 10 suffer from some form of depression   we clearly don't need politicians and their media allies stirring up the paranoid ideations of those who are mentally at risk. 

So perhaps we need to extend some compassion to our fellow citizens who've taken the Trump kool aid.

Janice: "No way! All the bastards can rot in hell"

See also:

'The Call Is Coming from Inside the House': White House Aides Are Reportedly Fearful that Anyone Could Be Secret Op-Ed Writer

And:

Paul Street

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Donald Trump

Creeping Fascism No Problem for Trump’s Durable Base

Citizens - Regarded As Too Dumb Or Dangerous To Read Full CIA Torture Report

Douglas Rushkoff, in Chapter Four ('Individually Wrapped').  of his  book, Life Inc. - How Corporations Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back, singles out the arena of public relations (PR)  and its perverse uses to bamboozle citizens. The essential thesis is that properly applied, PR divides each citizen from every other - each accepting his or her own version of political and economic truth.  The outcome is that the citizenry is disarmed from opposing the excesses of the state or corporations, because they are instead fighting each other.

Rushkoff singles out the immediate era after Edward Bernays - the author of 'Propaganda' - signed on with the corporate state, to promote fascism. As he observes (p. 109):

"American corporatists saw in fascism a counterbalance to FDR's strong-handed tactics and aggressive social welfare programs.....Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME magazine, put Mussolini on the cover five times and traveled the country arguing that corporations - not government - were really in charge of America.  Luce convinced many business people that fascism might be corporatism's best hope for organizing and influencing people."

Rushkoff goes on to note that by the end of World War II fascism had revealed itself as "ruthlessly dehumanizing" so  American industry had to take a different tack known as "Americanism. This approach used advertising PR to turn citizens into consumers - driven by spending on all manner of fluff and nonsense- to take their minds off serious politics and economic issues. Combined with this the media empire developed to the point it was able to frame issues, events, ideas to shape the minds of the masses.   This followed Edward Bernays' PR description in his work, 'Propaganda':

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country."

If then this power is wielded to split consumers into "brand" factions along with their political affiliations and beliefs, the effect is polarizing and also dissolves any united citizens' front, i.e. to hold the Deep State or corporations to account.  It additionally is designed to keep citizens at the infantile level of "consumers" who shy away from examining what their government is up to. If a person then refuses to venture outside this compromised matrix of PR he remains a mental invalid and automaton run by the Deep State. Believing whatever it spouts, or what its talking heads blab, or distort.

It is no accident that Bernays' use of the term 'invisible government'  equates to 'the true ruling power of the country'.  Today, this ruling power inheres in a military-corporate- security state nexus called the  Deep State, and it requires deep politics - not its superficial media counterpart-  to plumb its depths. This is irrespective of  examining the Ukraine crisis, the JFK assassination, the yen for pretext "wars" as in Iraq, the related monstrous Pentagon budget, or the growing inequality in the country.

It also pertains to the examination of the CIA torture program which went on for years, and which report - of 6,300 pages- will now likely never be seen by the American people. As a Senate committee moves to declassify a landmark report about the Central Intelligence Agency’s descent into torture, among the only certainties is that the public won’t see the vast majority of it. Instead we will be told by PR talking  media heads what they want us to think about it, and only dribbles released concerning what we can actually  be allowed to know.

True,  the Senate select committee on intelligence has waged an unprecedented and acrimonious public battle with the CIA over the secret 6,300-page investigation  known as the "Panetta Report", concluding torture  is an ineffective intelligence-gathering technique and that the CIA lied about its value. But now they ought to release it in full to citizens wanting to know - so we can at least see what the spook degenerates did in our name. Instead, we're told to expect a similar micro-managing of files as was done  previously with the  HSCA Investigation of the JFK assassination back in 1978. So the Senate  vote has allowed only  a slice of the CIA Torture report to be made public. Worse,  the CIA will have a significant degree of influence over how large and how public that slice will be. Of course, this is reminiscent of the perverse manner in which information was controlled with the files released by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, once the CIA got control of it, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/frequently-asked-questions-on-jfk_19.html

 

Thus, the committee is not going to release the 6,300-page report. Its chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein of California, said on the Senate floor three weeks ago that only the “findings, conclusions and the executive summary of the report” were the subject of the committee’s declassification efforts. The vast majority of the Senate report – effectively, an alternative post-9/11 history detailing of years’ worth of CIA torture and cover-up – will remain shielded from public view.

So what gives? Why prevent us from accessing a report we paid for with our tax dollars?  The short answer is that part of the Deep State's PR conditioning process - to dissuade any remaining citizens (who haven't mutated into totally infantilized consumers) from pressing the national security state to back off - is framing and omission.  Both techniques were first noted by Michael Parenti in his 'Dirty Truths', to do with how the media manipulates the public mind.  Omission here serves the same purpose it does with the National Archives refusing to release all the files on the JFK assassination. If we are then prevented from knowing the dark aspects of our history, and the extent of our own government's complicity in it-  i.e. in having Kennedy assassinated- then we can't break out of the realm of false tropes and American goody-goody exceptionalism. Hence, it dovetails precisely with the post-WWII corporatists embrace of "Americanism" as a practical substitute for fascism.

 

The problem with that is that it's still leading us down a path of fascism, which in its most fundamental definition means the control of a nation's destiny by the wealthiest using corporate power. It is also a feature of fascism that it extols expanded military power - because for every dollar wasted in unprovoked conflicts or insinuating American power where it doesn't belong, there is less available for the public commons or the general welfare. It's a 'win-win' for the Deep State because with military expansionism more money is pumped into pockets of defense contractors, corporations while more is taken out of struggling citizens' hides. Thus, everything from the dramatic increase in student college debt to our crumbling infrastructure and the stagnation of middle class wages can be laid at the door of creeping fascism.

 

Meanwhile, Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, considers the CIA's  role in managing the Torture Report file release a conflict of interest.  He stated in an interview with the UK Guardian:

 

" They functionally control the declassification process, and they have an interest in how they as an agency are portrayed in the final product.  They’re not an impartial party, and that’s a flaw in the process.”

 

Of course, neither were they an "impartial party" in the case of the JFK assassination files released by the HSCA.  In the latter case, none other than CIA Information and Privacy Coordinator  Jim Lawderman – on July 27, 1977- wrote out the terms of the CIA’s control of  HSCA head Robert Blakey’s investigation. (Mellen, J., ‘Farewell to Justice’, p. 345).  One of the terms cited was (ibid.):

 

“ Certain areas relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy should be entirely disregarded based upon our contention they are without merit or corroboration” (ibid.)

 

Thus, the CIA was effectively judging the evidence even before there was any. This statement in many ways is as glaring and outrageous as the terms of the document NSC-68 paving the way for perpetual war.

 

In this way  practical citizenship can be kept at bay in the Deep State, and citizens (actually mostly consumers) can be set against each other because each will have different purviews of knowledge, media exposure and extent of research into what's really going on.  The Deep State has nothing, nada to worry itself over, since those of us who DO this digging into its nefarious backgrounds will often be dismissed as "tin foil hats" or "conspiracy theorists" or some such misbegotten term. Each of which betrays the inner fear the infantilized citizen has for facing the unsavory truth. That he really inhabits a gangster corporate-militarist state which doesn't have his best interests at heart.

 

The refusal of the Senate committee to release the full CIA Torture report is in line with all of the above and Feinstein et al regard their decision as justified because  they see American citizens are either too dumb or dangerous to place the full report in their hands.   Thus, we will likely never know the extent to which we, as citizens, supported a horrific policy of torture done in our name.

 

Welcome to Americanism V. 2.0 and the Deep State!

 

See also:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/medea-benjamin/55186/the-cia-whistleblower-and-the-torture-report

 

and:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/bob-burnett/54660/the-war-on-democracy-the-deep-state