Maverick's World

The Daily Donald 4/10/2017

I apologize for the gap in the series. Given all that is going on, it is very hard to stay on top of this.

Since the last post, we have seen Donald Trump start a phony war with Syria. On Donald Trump's instructions the US Navy fired 60 cruise missiles at Shayrat Airbase in Syria. Congress was not informed about the attack & no permission from them was officially sought before the fire order was given from Mar-a-Lago. However it seems the Russians (and the Assad Regime targets) were actually informed before the strike. Coupled to the fact the runways at the airfield were deliberately not targeted, it appears this strike was deliberately designed to be ineffective. This is at best a phony war, aimed at boosting Donald Trump's personal ratings which have plunged to abysmal levels.  The problem with phony wars is that in order to achieve what they are designed to do, they have to look real. A real war quickly goes off script and takes on a life of its own. It is extremely challenging to hold the narrative in a phony war and the line between a real war and a phony war is easily blurred. Given the staggering levels of intellectual inbreeding and incompetency we have seen from this WH, I feel it is unlikely we will be able to prevent this phony war from sliding into a real one.

A civil war had been brewing in the ranks of the Alt-Right last week after news of Bannon being fired from the NSC broke. After the cruise missile strikes, RIS provocations embedded in the Alt-Right had openly criticized Trump for acting against Assad in Syria and openly stated that they were "off the Trump Train". The Bannon/RIS factions had let loose a volley of "cuck", "Globalist", "Jew" etc... on Twitter - aimed at Donald Trump and even started a #FireKushner. And Lee Stranahan who recently left Breitbart News for Sputnik in Moscow - has started a website that focused on firing Kushner.  The mainstream media had reported that the Jared Kushner had lied on Top Secret clearance form and withheld information about meetings with RIS operatives. This information most likely came from Bannon friendly sources.

On Sunday Kushner and Bannon were forced by Donald Trump to sit down and make up. But before the meeting took place (11 AM by some accounts) , the Kushner faction in the Alt-Right struck back quite viciously. A particularly egregious event was the manner in which both BakedAlaska and Cassandra Fairbanks were doxxed by a Kushner friendly hacker called 0hour. BakedAlaska was outed as a homosexual, and pictures/video(?) of a sexual encounter between Lee Stranahan and Cassandra Fairbanks were made public. A number of bystanders (like Louise Mensch)  tried to dissuade 0hour from committing what amounted to a criminal sexual assault on Cassandra, but that didn't stop anything. The entire thing seemed to be terribly pre-programmed.

In the NSC, a Robert McFarlane proxy - K T MacFarland was sent packing as Amb to Singapore. Most observers have welcomed this move as it signals that the entire End-RU-Sanctions-for-RU-Natural-Gas saga is on hold. It was never clear to me if that scheme actually paid for itself or if we were simply compromising the security of our supply just so some lobbyists can have a windfall.  From reports it seems that MacFarland did not go quietly. So one can expect some fireworks on the issue later in the week perhaps.

HPSCI Chairman Nunes finally recused himself from the Russian interference investigation. This will doubtlessly lead to more disturbing revelations about collusion between DJT and Russia during the election.

Also last week, we heard news report that Trump was close to firing both Bannon and Priebus and that a counteractive pressure was mounting from the GOP and the RIS backed Bannonite group to fire Kushner and Ivanka. Several observers compared the situation to machinations seen in the medieval era House of Tudor with several factions backstabbing each other to get ahead. But if that view is correct, the like the House of Tudor, the House of Trump is perilously close to a complete financial collapse. The reason the House of Tudor had all this stuff going on inside it is that medieval England was not a cash cow. The predominantly agrarian economy could not generate wealth and captive capital reserves at a level where even the reign of one Tudor king could be bought and paid for.

Apparently the Spanish authorities have arrested a hacker named Peter Levashov, apparently he is connected with the Kaspersky researcher Stoyanov who was arrested by FSB for involvement in hacking the election. I think this will help unravel the true extent of RIS interference in the 2016 election.

And as expected - Mitch McConnell has managed to do what Bin Laden couldn't - he has managed to actually destroy the American democracy. By viciously propagating a toxic personal agenda, Mitch McConnell has carved his name into history but in a place typically reserved for mass murderers and other generally terrible human beings.

So - where do we stand?

I feel the House of Trump is falling apart under pressure from the Russia investigation. As the Russia investigation cuts to the heart of Trump's claim of legitimacy, defeating it is crucial to Trump's survival.  As the HPSCI investigates and the FBI rounds up more people connected with the RIS effort - both Trump and Putin face immense pressures. The phony war in Syria is an attempt to defeat these pressures and buy some semblance of legitimacy. With pliable GOPers like Ryan, McConnell and the Freedom Causes, it should not be too hard for DJT to buy himself legitimacy with a phony war but the phony war will eventually slide into a real war and that is when we will all suffer.

posted by maverick @ 5:35 AM