Well, Mr./Mrs./Ms. Anonymous didn’t pull any punches. He/she/they/it took to the op ed pages of the NYT to announce that there is a coup underway in the White House – the kind of bald-faced election-tampering that our putative Russian meddlers could only drool about.
What we mean is that America knowingly elected – for better or worse – an unstable, impetuous, bombastic, megalomaniacal, trash-talking Great Disrupter. That’s what the endless GOP primary debates and Trumpian campaign oratory proved beyond a shadow of doubt.
Nevertheless, to insure the voters don’t get what they self-evidently voted for, a cabal of GOP Swamp Creatures inside the Trump Administration is actively colluding to sabotage the 45th President at every turn.
I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration…..many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
But 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.
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.
Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.
It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.
Needless to say, it didn’t take the Deep State shills in the MSM very long to disseminate their key talking point: Namely, that the above self-serving treachery is some kind of heroic cry for help.
No it isn’t!
This cabal of self-described "adults" in the figurative Cabinet Room, who claim to be thwarting, frustrating, containing, insulating and walking-back the Donald’s actions, are not heroes: They are Deep State Handmaids attempting to nullify the 2016 election.
The tip-off is their description of the late Senator John S. McWar as a "lodestar" of honor. We are supposed to "revere" him because he spent 56 years on Uncle Sam’s payroll, stalking the planet in search of nations to bomb, drone, invade, occupy and destroy whenever they failed to toe the Empire’s writ.
We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example – a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.
Actually, there is no real mystery about the identify of Anonymous. The text may have come from a single keyboard, but the substance bespeaks of a "they".
That is, the composite sentiment of the entire Washington-based GOP establishment which gives lip service to free markets and low taxes, but really cares about one thing above all else: Ruling the world from their self-perpetuating sinecures in the Imperial City.
Folks, that’s what John McCain was all about. He spent decades cavorting around Washington as a foreign policy expert and purported "war hero" by virtue of being shot-down when flying too low over a light bulb factory he was attempting to bomb in Hanoi.
Whatever personal courage he may – or may not have – exhibited during his long years of captivity at the Hanoi Hilton, it had nothing to do with heroism or policy wisdom. That’s because the only heroes in Vietnam were the millions of Vietnamese who were the victims of Washington’s genocidal onslaught and the hundreds of thousands of young stateside war resisters who said "hell no, we won’t go"!
Likewise, it didn’t take a great deal of wisdom and "honor" to realize that the Vietnam War was a cruel mistake and exercise in technological savagery against a backward peasant nation that never threatened the U.S. and couldn’t possibly have jeopardized the security and liberty of the American people.
Indeed, if there was ever an object lesson on the wrong-headedness of global interventionism and, conversely, the wisdom of an America First policy of building the nation’s defenses around its shorelines and air space, Vietnam was it.
But rather than atoning for the shame of Vietnam by keeping his "war record" interred in everlasting silence, McCain never stopped beating his chest about his military exploits or vilifying the "gooks" whose country Washington had so violently invaded, occupied and decimated.
Indeed, the Vietnam Fiasco actually became the template for McCain’s entire career as Washington’s roving viceroy of militarized hegemony. It is actually hard to recall a single country or regime that has even looked slightly squinty-eyed at Washington’s during recent decades that Senator McWar did not want to annul or annihilate.
So we understand why there is a cabal of McCain worshippers trying to take the Donald down. After all, if the unseen hand of the historical fates had infused any purpose in the election of Donald Trump, it was to destroy once and for all the corrupted malignancy of John McCain’s GOP.
And we are not talking just about Washington’s imperial foreign policy. For crying out loud, McCain actually voted for the TARP bailout of Wall Street and against the repeal of the disastrous Obamacare experiment in socialist medicine.
Likewise, Anonymous seems to think that a $2 trillion deficit-financed tax cut in the 10th year of an aging recovery was a swell "conservative" initiative; and that wasting another $100 billion per year on defense, intelligence and security assistance is making for a "more robust military" capability.
No, what it adds up to is a monumental Fiscal Debauch, and growing national economic turmoil and insecurity as far as the eye can see.
What it also signifies is that the establishment GOP has abandoned its historic principles of sound money, free markets, fiscal rectitude, minimalist central government at home and nonintervention abroad in favor of a militarized Leviathan on the Potomac aiming to rule the world.
The rest of the Anonymous screed leaves little doubt that the piece was commissioned by neocon central. Because if there is anything more unhinged and disconnected from reality in the Imperial City than the impetuous maneuvers and rantings of the Donald, it’s the neocon/Dem/Deep State/MSM fatwa against Russia and Vlad Putin.
It is plain as day that the pipsqueak $1.4 trillion Russian economy of aging hydrocarbon fields, endless wheat fields, played out nickel mines and Vodka-favoring industrial workers is no threat to the $37 trillion GDP and $1 trillion military establishment of the US/NATO complex.
For crying out loud, the most important geo-strategic development of our times is that 27 years ago the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of socialist bureaucracy and a garrison state economy. So naturally there were loose ends and unresolved borders when the Soviet behemoth unraveled.
Yet the entirety of the case against Putin is that he did not cotton to Washington’s meddling on his doorstep. That is, the incorporation of the ex-Warsaw Pact nations into NATO for no earthly reason of US security; or Washington’s arrogant insistence that smalltime border quarrels along the old Soviet frontiers needed be resolved only as it saw fit.
Thus, partition was apparently fine for the Czech Republic and Slovakia and also for the parts and pieces of Yugoslavia rent asunder by NATO’s interventions in the 1990s.
But when the Russian-speaking populations of the Donbas and Crimea wished to disassociate themselves from Ukrainian nationalists and crypto-Nazi who illegally seized power in Kiev with Washington money and help in February 2014, it was an altogether different matter.
Washington screamed of Russian aggression – when the only thing these breakaway peoples wanted was self-rule; and when absolutely nothing was at stake that impinged on America’s national security.
And the same is true of Georgia’s quarrel with Russian-speaking South Ossetia. In fact, 80% of the Ossetian population lives in Russia in the province of North Ossetia.
That the remaining 20% of their kinsman are artificially bordered in South Ossetia is owing to some long-forgotten Soviet-era ethnic engineering maneuver which created the latter from wholecloth. But however the chips fell off the old Soviet empire, the South Ossetians apparently did not wish to be ruled by their historic ethnic enemies in Georgia.
So when Putin intervened in 2008 to thwart the invasion of South Ossetia by a Washington installed puppet and empire builder in Tbilisi, this reasonable exercise in border security was labeled as a threat to global peace by Deep State operators in Washington desperate for an enemy to justify the massive waste of their $700 billion budget.
So we know where Anonymous is coming from. However, awkward and halting, the Donald’s efforts to normalize relations with North Korea and Russia are exactly what the doctor ordered, and the most hopeful initiatives toward world peace in the decades since the Cold War ended.
Yet the so-called Resistance has the nerve to dismiss these welcome efforts as evidence of a Trumpian preference for autocrats and dictators.
Now that’s "half-baked, ill-informed and reckless" if there every was such.
In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.
Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
So there you have it. The highest purpose of government under the McCainified GOP is to punish other nation’s for meddling in their own affairs (Syria) or safeguarding national interests along their freshly separated borders (Russia).
Yet, what is a Trumpian rant compared to the absolutely absurd claim that the Donald is guilty of being soft on Russia for not wanting to sanction its leading citizens for a crime – poisoning the Skripals – the Russian state most self-evidently did not commit.
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better – such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
Indeed, there can be nothing more absurd than the UK government’s new claim that the deadly Novichok poisoning was done by two alleged Russians, who disembarked in civilian clothes at Heathrow Airport, and then passed through the same space at precisely the same time to the second.
In short, the Great Disrupter has threatened the Deep State to the quick. And the pathetic collaborator it recruited to pen this call to insurrection makes the supine ladies of the Handmaid’s Tale seem courageous by comparison.
So at this point, we don’t think it matters whether the Donald survives until January 2021 or not.
The die is cast. Political chaos is coming – just the kind of thing that says this dip’s for you…..to avoid like the plague!
Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until – one way or another – it’s over.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
