The Mad Fishmonger: Part II.1
[I really hoped to do more with this but things, as they say, are getting weird. There’s a good article on the topic from The Nation, which I had hoped to explore, but instead I just linked to it at the end.]
One of my favorite English language terms is “ill-advised.” Taken on its own it implies a certain smugness on the part of the observer, not unlike what one feels when watching those “Epic Fails!” video compilations on the web. But taken literally, it implies someone nearby who is presumably a trustworthy source of counsel.
For instance: “It’s only, like, ten feet across. Do it!”
Or: “You guys own the muffler shop, so by all means you should feature in the late night public-access commercial. And don’t forget your dogs!”
And: “We had one little operation; it’s been aborted out in Los Angeles which, I think, is better that you don’t know about [Mr. President].” (“The White House Plumbers”, Wikipedia)
That last one is an actual quote from John Erlichman and the president in question is Richard M. Nixon. Erlichman was then-Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs and Special Investigations Unit. So, given the conversational tone of the quote, seeming physical proximity to Tricky Dick, and Erlichman’s ridiculous (but in-hindsight-not-at-all-cryptic) title, this satisfies both of my criteria for the term. The Special Investigations Unit in Erlichman’s title refers to an infamous crew now publicly known as The Plumbers. They called themselves that because, according to lore, on of them joked to his mother that his job at the White House was to fix leaks. And they “investigated” things, namely by breaking into private offices in the dead of night and rifling through shit like a bunch of walleyed chimpanzees. Thanks to them, and an oddly named apartment building, our media is compelled to append every single scandal, however lame, with the the suffix “-gate”. Perhaps someone even closer to Nixon should have advised, “Giving them an office right down the hall is a bad idea, Dick. And that Liddy guy is completely unstable.”
But why bring up Watergate now? Because it happened. Watergate happened and it was a nightmare of epic proportions. I was very young but I remember it — the arguments between my parents and my older brothers and anyone else in the house, the nightly news litany of inexplicable weirdness, and the specter of Nixon’s transformation from statesman to cornered javelina. It happened because a paranoid egomaniac was in the Oval Office, and anyone nearby was either unable or unwilling to provide the proverbial check and balance. It’s imperative to reflect on that bit of history because what’s going on now is potentially, hell, already is far worse. Donald J. Trump is a vainglorious buffoon surrounded by advisers who are really quite ill.
DEEP STATE
[Trump is a] “blunt instrument for us… I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.” — Assistant to the President and White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. (Vanity Fair)
Throughout his presidential campaign Donald J. Trump made it clear he didn’t think much of anyone in the national security or intelligence communities. He boasted he knew more than the generals directing military operations abroad and he further stated the intelligence agencies are run by people who repeatedly get things wrong, in particular the thoroughly fucked up and politically warped issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Whether Trump intended these pronouncements “literally” as opposed to “seriously” is immaterial. The former was pure, ignorant braggadocio and had very little to do with impressing or convincing his supporters than it did in propping up his own self-belief. “Believe me!”
The latter, however, was decidedly calculated and far more troublesome. He said this in response to mounting speculation that Russian state-directed operators had hacked and deliberately disseminated information potentially damaging to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Details of connections between Russia and key members of Trump’s campaign staff were slowly being exposed and Trump was trying to muddy the waters. In doing so, some speculated Trump had pissed off a few singularly cunning and savvy operators. Others figured these operators already had it in for Trump and Russia and were trying to stir up a new Cold War because that’s just the sort of thing spooks do. Welcome to the Deep State.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield. As we’ve heard, the intervention of anonymous spies into domestic politics has led to accusations of a sort of silent coup.
…
MALE CORRESPONDENT: We’re seeing a deep state revolt against Mike Flynn.
MALE CORRESPONDENT: Is the deep state trying to reach into the White House?
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: The uncomfortable chasm between the deep state and the new administration has been exposed, and General Michael Flynn may be the appetizer in an unhappy meal that has several courses to go.
…
BOB GARFIELD: Michael J. Glennon is Professor of International Law at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and author of National Security and Double Government.
MICHAEL J. GLENNON: The public believes that the president and the Congress and the courts effectively define and manage national security, but over the last 40 or 50 years that’s less and less true, with the national security bureaucracy that was established, really first by President Truman, has come to dominate the management of and definition of national security in the United States. I call it a double government.
BOB GARFIELD: Not shadowy, not conspiratorial, not even secret but, nonetheless, a force to be reckoned with.
MICHAEL J. GLENNON: Yes, it’s hidden in plain view. It’s no secret that these organizations exist. I think the extent of their dominance is not widely realized. The extent to which the courts defer to them, the extent to which congressional oversight is largely a sham and even the extent to which presidents are largely presiders, rather than deciders, when it comes to national security policy-making. The national security bureaucracy has become more and more unaccountable and less and less subject to democratic control. (On The Media)
In January of this year Glenn Greenwald posted the following at The Intercept:
It is not hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton over Trump. Clinton was critical of Obama for restraining the CIA’s proxy war in Syria and was eager to expand that war, while Trump denounced it. Clinton clearly wanted a harder line than Obama took against the CIA’s long-standing foes in Moscow, while Trump wanted improved relations and greater cooperation. In general, Clinton defended and intended to extend the decades long 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. (The Intercept)
The Nation: What Is The Deep State?
The Mad Fishmonger Part 1: Signal to Noise Ratio
“The Mad Fishmonger was the patron saint of the Warren Belch Society. He, or she, had originally appeared, or had been alleged to have appeared, in Cromer Gardens, Worcester, England, on May 28, 1881. He, or she, along with perhaps a dozen assistants, had rushed through Cromer Gardens at high noon, throwing crabs and periwinkles all over the streets. They also threw crabs and periwinkles into the fields beside the road. They climbed high walls to dump some of the fish into gardens and onto the roofs of houses.
It was thorough, painstaking work, and since the Mad Fishmonger and his, or her, associates accomplished it all at noon on a busy day without being seen, the citizens of Cromer Gardens claimed that the crabs and periwinkles had fallen out of the sky.
This notion was not acceptable to the scientists of the day, who held it as axiomatic that crabs and periwinkles do not fall out of the sky. A scientist from Nature magazine therefore offered the Mad Fishmonger an explanation, although he failed to explain how the Fishmonger and his co-conspirators had accomplished their feat without being noticed by any of the citizenry.
Charles Fort, founder of the Fortean Society, rejected the Mad Fishmonger indignantly and claimed that crabs and periwinkles did fall from the sky. After Clem Cotex was thrown out of the Fortean Society for his heresies, he reconsidered the whole puzzling case of the mysterious event in Cromer Gardens on May 28, 1881. Cotex decided to believe in the Mad Fishmonger. It was the fundamental hypothesis of his system of philosophy, and the guiding light of the Warren Belch Society, that the craziest-sounding theory is the most likely one. All things considered, the motives and methodology of the Mad Fishmonger were much more mysterious than shellfish falling from the sky; ergo, the Mad Fishmonger probably did exist.”
— R. A. Wilson; Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy, Book One: The Universe Next Door
Last week I was watching the third episode of John Oliver’s triumphant return to the cablewaves with a dear friend. In the middle of a segment dissecting President Donald Trump’s ongoing flamewar with reality, Oliver keyed in on a recent exchange between Trump and Fox News host Bill O’Reilly…
O’Reilly: Putin is a killer.
Trump: There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent?
My friend snatched up the remote and stabbed at the pause button. She stood up and stalked away from the television, cursing, with her hands upside her head, universal sign language for “my head a’splode!”
“I just realized,” she said after a few seconds of making sure her head hadn’t in fact exploded. “Trump killed someone.”
“What? Like, with his bare hands?”
“I don’t know. Or he had someone do it. Look.” She hit rewind, then paused it again just as Trump was about to reply to O’Reilly’s assertion about Putin. “Look at his eyes. His expression.” She hit play.
There are a lot of killers.
Fish and periwinkles do not fall out of the sky. The craziest-sounding theory is the most likely one.
A lot of people think Trump is a fucking madman. Psychiatrists who never even met the guy are on record with diagnoses ranging from delusional paranoia to malignant narcissism. Physicians have suggested everything from possible side effects of hair loss medication to untreated syphilis. (All this beaming through the transom of our Web devices, of course, so those assertions fall everywhere on the dead-serious-to-pure-bollocks spectrum.) But the craziest-sounding theory is that he’s stone cold sane. And ruthlessly calculating to boot.
Some speculate that Trump’s increasingly bizarre behavior is explained by something called, appropriately enough, the “madman theory”:
The madman theory was a feature of Richard Nixon’s foreign policy. He and his administration tried to make the leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations think Nixon was irrational and volatile. According to the theory, those leaders would then avoid provoking the United States, fearing an unpredictable American response.
Nixon’s Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman, wrote that Nixon had confided to him:
I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button” and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.
Last December Barton Swaim wrote about this conundrum in the Washington Post. After considering a view from fellow Post columnist Dana Milbank that “In Trump’s application of the Madman Theory there seems to be less theory than madman,” Swaim writes:
[P]ut to one side your views of Trump, his character, his statements — and consider the possibility that he may be more calculating and deliberate than anybody gives him credit for. Nixon’s madman theory may in that case prove more effective for Trump than it ever did for Nixon. Even after hearing Trump talk about nearly everything for 18 months, no one’s sure what he’ll do or even what general approach he’ll take to foreign confrontations. If there is a foreign leader who feels he or she has got the measure of President-elect Trump, that foreign leader is an idiot.
Trump’s behavior might be charitably characterized as unconventional or more accurately as unhinged. But whethere truly batshit crazy or just calculatedly disarming, one thing is certain; he’s got a whole crew of accomplices (enablers?). Remember them? Maybe that’s how it works. We are all staring at the sky where the crazy-ass voice is coming from when Thunk! Splat! Drumpf! Thud! Fish and periwinkles everywhere.
Thunk! – House of Representatives. Splat! – CPAC. Drumpf!* – His own bad self. Thud! – This fucking guy.
Another certainty; the confusion is intentional.
Next – The Mad Fishmonger Part 2: Deep State, Deep System, Deep Shit
*This is an egregious violation of the Onomatopoeia Act of 1570 BCEGoT (Before Common Era Give or Take). I have no idea what a periwinkle sounds like when it hits the ground.
Loopholes
The first of a series of articles about FBI legal authority made available by The Intercept:
Hidden Loopholes Allow FBI Agents To Infiltrate Political And Religious Groups
Hidden Loopholes Allow FBI Agents to Infiltrate Political and Religious Groups
Ritual Reality 