The Media and the Deep State Have Gone to War With the Duly-Elected Commander-in-Chief To Be

The "deep state" is a term borrowed from the Turks, who used it to describe the permanent government embedded within the bureaucracy and military that wields power no matter who is nominally the President.

Gleen Greenwald says the American Deep State has gone to war with Trump:

This is the faction that is now engaged in open warfare against the duly elected and already widely disliked president-elect, Donald Trump. They are using classic Cold War dirty tactics and the defining ingredients of what has until recently been denounced as "Fake News."

Their most valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing -- eager -- to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging those behaviors might be.

The serious dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and manifest...

But cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president is both warped and self-destructive. Empowering the very entities that have produced the most shameful atrocities and systemic deceit over the last six decades is desperation of the worst kind. Demanding that evidence-free, anonymous assertions be instantly venerated as Truth -- despite emanating from the very precincts designed to propagandize and lie -- is an assault on journalism, democracy, and basic human rationality. And casually branding domestic adversaries who refuse to go along as traitors and disloyal foreign operatives is morally bankrupt and certain to backfire on those doing it.

...

All of these toxic ingredients were on full display yesterday as the Deep State unleashed its tawdriest and most aggressive assault yet on Trump: vesting credibility in and then causing the public disclosure of a completely unvetted and unverified document, compiled by a paid, anonymous operative while he was working for both GOP and Democratic opponents of Trump, accusing Trump of a wide range of crimes, corrupt acts and salacious private conduct. The reaction to all of this illustrates that while the Trump presidency poses grave dangers, so, too, do those who are increasingly unhinged in their flailing, slapdash, and destructive attempts to undermine it.

FOR MONTHS, the CIA, with unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton's candidacy and sought to defeat Donald Trump.

...

In general, Clinton defended and intended to extend the decadeslong international military order on which the CIA and Pentagon’s preeminence depends, while Trump --- through a still-uncertain mix of instability and extremist conviction -- posed a threat to it.

Whatever one’s views are on those debates, it is the democratic framework -- the presidential election, the confirmation process, congressional leaders, judicial proceedings, citizen activism and protest, civil disobedience -- that should determine how they are resolved. All of those policy disputes were debated out in the open; the public heard them; and Trump won. Nobody should crave the rule of Deep State overlords.

Yet craving Deep State rule is exactly what prominent Democratic operatives and media figures are doing. Any doubt about that is now dispelled.

Gleen's formulation -- that the CIA/Deep State "caused" the scurrilous, evidence-free oppo dump to be published by whatever Useful Idiot too stupid to know he was being played -- was my suspicion as well.

NBC is now reporting that the factual predicate upon which CNN relied to justify its own reporting on the non-event -- that the CIA had "briefed" Trump about these allegations -- was in fact false from the start:

In other words, the CIA and FBI weren't presenting these to Trump as Real Allegations they were investigating, but as a cautionary tale about Fake News that Trump would have to be cautious about spreading himself. (And, implicitly, they were trying to say: "So you have to Trust Us about everything.)

So CNN's report, per NBC, was itself fatally flawed and based on Fake News, despite CNN's and Jake Tapper's protestations to the contrary.

However, it doesn't take a suspicious mind (though it helps to have one) to imagine this was all deliberately engineered by the Deep State, by a deliberate Telephone Game in which one claim gets intentionally distorted each step along the relay that ultimately put in on CNN and then Buzzfeed.

Step One: The CIA contrives a reason to present a brief mention of this oppo dump on Trump, with the cover story that they're presenting it as a Morality Tale about Trusting the Infallible CIA and not the Internet.

Step Two: CIA operatives familiar with the game plan now contact CNN and whatever other outlets are willing to listen and misreport the oppo dump not as a cautionary tale presented to Trump, but as Real Allegations by Credible Sources the CIA is Vigorously Investigating.

Step Three: Now the story cooked up by Oppo Dump researchers six months ago-- which no one could ever confirm, and which all media outlets refused to publish (though the leftwing hackshop Mother Jones did sketch out the basics) -- has a pretext of newsworthiness attached to it, and finally, after anti-Trump forces in political parties and government have tried to get it out for half a year, finally someone is willing to bite into this shitburger.

You asked for a miracle? I give you CNN.

Step Four: CNN, having now legitimized which never had any legitimacy from the beginning, is taken as encouragement for Buzzfeed to publish a defamatory document which they themselves admit cannot be verified and in fact is erroneous in the few areas where they can attempt to verify it.

I should say that Step Three and Step Four might be in reverse order -- I don't know which Useful Idiot went first here. Either CNN went first vaguely and then Buzzfeed clowned itself to death, or Buzzfeed published the stupid, barely-literate "report" and that got CNN to say, "Wow, Buzzfeed published this. So it must be true!!11!!eleventy!!"

Call it Information Laundering: Each step along the way, the dirty, unverifiable information is cleaned up just slightly enough to get the next laundromat in line to pretend to clean it up just a little bit more.

Easy-peasy: If you can't verify the story itself, report the rumors of the story -- see, the part that this is "rumored" is verifiable. If you've heard it, it is, inarguably, a rumor that's going around.

So just shift the narrative frame of the story from "These are the facts" to "The fact is, people are spreading this rumor, which is very important, if true."

Always throw that rhetorical hedge in there: if true. You can add a smiley-face-wink emoji to indicate "And man, you better believe this is true, baby!!!"

Accident? Happenstance? Coincidence?

Or a fairly simple plan?

Bear in mind, this is how the game is played and how it has always been played. When someone wants to get dirt out on someone, first they contact major media outlets. If those won't publish, they then push the story to lesser outlets and even bloggers, the hope being that if bloggers break the story, then at least the media will have to report that bloggers are reporting on a story which can't be verified.

And thus the story is injected into the national bloodstream, even though the media passed on reporting the story qua the story itself -- they are now just reporting on the story of the story being reported. Either way, though, it's now out there.

I know whereof I speak on this; Oppo Dump people tried to get me interested in two anti-Obama stories in 2008.

I was not, of course, the first person they thought of when they had national news to break: they'd shopped the story to virtually everyone else (they told me so) but no one else would publish it because no one could verify the claims.

I did actual digging and tried to verify the stories, but I came up empty, just as the media did. The stories were compelling and plausible and newsworthy if true; it's just that there was no live witness willing to say they were true.

So I don't think this is wheels-within-wheels conspiracy mongering; this is a classic method of getting a dodgy story national media attention. If the national media itself still clings to the tattered shreds of its reputation, just put out the story that people are talking about the story and then get the media to report not on the story itself -- not quite; they won't vouch for its credence -- but instead get them to report on the fact that people are talking about the story.

Obviously, my own Oppo Dump guys did not have lifelong dreams of having their stories published on the very prestigious Ace of Spades HQ blog. The plan was to get me to publish it, and hopefully then to get someone higher on the food chain to bite on it, and then maybe a Fox Opinion guy to comment on it vaguely, and then Drudge to do a headline, and then, finally, for the media to note "Online Chatter about Obama Scandal." I was just supposed to be the first chain of the chain of fools that would hoist the story up to the top of Drudge.*

Frankly, I think everyone involved in the media side of this should be reprimanded or fired, and I'm sure that all the "officials" who injected deliberate black-bag psyops disinformation to CNN should be straight-up fired for cause, national security clearances stripped away from them forever.

* Matter of fact, I think I was explicitly told that a guy from ABC was working on the story and close to publishing -- needing just the key witness to verify -- and if I could push the story it could encourage that witness to come forward, and then it would get on ABC.

But I couldn't verify anything so I didn't publish it.

Unlike Buzzfeed.

Which is now objecting to Sean Spicer's characterization of it as a "leftwing blog."

Why object to that? It's what you are, dudes.

Though I'd say "a leftwing blog with lower standards for publication than most credible blogs."

posted by Ace at 05:15 PM

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