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“If I hear ‘not allowed’ much oftener,” said Sam, “I’m going to get angry.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, from Lord of the Rings

Sunday, January 13, 2019

Today's Must-Read: "This Challenges Benedict Arnold"

I'm sure you've seen the reports on the story in NYT about the FBI opening a counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump after he fired James Comey. This is major:

On Saturday, former Naval intelligence offer Malcolm Nance explained the potential gravity of the situation to MSNBC’s Richard Lui.

“This is the single greatest scandal in the history of the United States,” he said. “I personally think that this challenges Benedict Arnold’s treason in the American revolution. If this is true, if Donald Trump was working for either money, influence, his own personal ego or being co-opted by Vladimir Putin, the ex-former director of Russian intelligence, and he went in there and he was doing this and that his favor is toward Russia and not the United States, well, it should take years.”

“This is a serious — as serious as it gets,” Nance said.

And it would be entirely in character for Trump, given that he has the moral foundation of a scavenger and no loyalty to anyone or anything but himself. Nance goes on to make an important point about how deep the rot has gone:

What will make the situation bad, Nance said, is that “one-third of this nation will not believe a word we say” about Trump’s possible treason, “because Donald Trump said so and because Russian information operations have corrupted them so that the FBI is considered the enemy.”

This is, in my estimation, the result of years of "dumbing down" in America. Television and radio are pervasive, and the programming, at least for the mainstream sources, is geared to reach the broadest possible audience, which is not necessarily the best-educated or most thoughtful audience. (It's worth noting that PBS was envisioned as a means to bring "quality" programming to a broad audience; the Republicans have been trying to kill it for years.) And the special interest groups can target their audiences, even to the point of having their own networks -- take CBN as an example, the "Christian Broadcasting Network", which bills itself as a "ministry" and brings us such serious thinkers as Pat Robertson, whose specialty is preaching to the choir. Add in the Internet, which is completely censorship free, except for a few sites that do keep an eye on their content: it's the world's best source for disinformation and outright lies. (Yes, I support letting the Internet remain uncensored, but given the fact that most Americans, and probably most people in general, lack critical thinking skills and the impulse to verify information -- well, we're seeing the downside. Another gift from the Republicans, who once again are trying to torpedo public education and secular school curricula.)

But back to Trump and the Russians. The Russians just took advantage of the intellectual laxity in American public discourse and installed their own tool in the White House as part of what is obviously a larger program of destabilizing the West. Don't tell me the newly energized far-right parties in Germany, France, Austria don't have Russian backing. It starts to look more and more that Putin is trying to set up a set of tame dictatorships in Europe, a la Hungary, and maybe even the Middle East -- he's very cozy with Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan, especially now that Trump has pulled us out of Syria. (Although I have to confess, I can't understand why anyone wants to get involved in the Middle East. Oil? Russia has huge reserves of oil and natural gas. Maybe at this point it's just habit.)

At any rate, read the article -- it's not that long -- and more important, watch the video (which I can't embed because the "share" link is wonky).

Thanks to commenter HZ81 at Joe.My.God.

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