That’s how I read it, too.
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You know what is transparent? Russia and Bannon’s attempt to get McMaster fired.
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Dear Ambassador:
Western intelligence agencies bugged your phone. They have transcripts and audio recordings of all those conversations.
Never go anywhere from which you can be extradited to the USA.
Oh, and? Avoid hotel balconies, and drinking tea.
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Trying to infer strategic intent from the activities of their Internet troll army and semi-overt propaganda outlets is a fool’s errand, but I am that fool.
I can’t say I can read their minds, but a model that is consistent with what I’ve been seeing from them lately is that they have suddenly realized that it actually still matters what people in America think and that we don’t all think what we’re told to think. This would, of course, be a very easy mistake for the FSB, GRU and, above all, Putin to make.
And lately, they seem to be waking up to the fact that their genius ratfucking regime change has resulted in them incurring the wrath and lasting enmity of a huge chunk of Americans who were formerly indifferent, in denial or actually receptive to their soft propaganda (remember that period when there was a cadre of hipster douchenozzles who thought RT was a news source because hey, state propaganda organ, corporate media, same difference, right?)
To put it baldly, with the exception of the odd Greenwald or Taibbi and the occaisional Jill Stein idiot, most of the American left and, to a lesser degree, the center, now has the ass for Putin and it isn’t going away until he does. And that being the case, it looks like they’ve decided that the softest landing they can arrange is to try to exploit Cleek’s Law and keep the idiot right pro-Russian just because liberals are against them. To that end, it seems like one of the things they’re doing is ensuring that no comment thread or discussion anywhere is free of their lowest common denominator Hillary hate and Putin apologist messaging. I infer the goal is to ensure that no conservative is ever short of bias-confirming messaging even when he wanders out of the epistomological Gulag they’ve imprisoned themselves in.
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Yup, sounds like the Russian bots are all over this too.
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“Da, our talks with Flynn were just as transparent as the bank vault used to house the hundreds of billions of rubles that Great and Glorious Leader Vladimir “Dad Bod” Putin legally earned by making late-night telemarketer calls from tiny apartment in Vladivostok.”
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Lovely picture.
Jabba the Trump Slutt
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The thing is, Donnie has a compulsion for surrounding himself with (“his”) generals, and with the exception of Flynn none of them is pro-Russia. So you get McMaster out…then what?
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Just imagine: if you had a pile of pet food the size of Sam Clovis, you could feed every one of those starving dogs and cats in the late-night Sarah McLachlan commercials for six months.
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Bang-on. Let’s go get 'em. Regime change at home and abroad!
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Insightful comment. Thanks.
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We saw during the campaign that, under the greatest of compulsion and with extremely strict and seamless handling (i.e. no fumbling of the minder shift-changes), he is capable of not tweeting or saying anything self-destructive or stupid for as many as twelve days before the pent up rage and need for attention explodes into an especially extreme binge.
This is what they did during the last two weeks of the campaign. Because they knew that the MSM and a critical five to ten percent of the American electorate have a form of brain damage that causes them to be unable to remember anything that happened more than two weeks ago and/or believe that a couple of weeks prove a seventy year old man with Narcissistic Personality Syndrome can change and control his behavior on a dime.
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And let that be a friendly reminder to anyone in trump’s circle who met with Kislyak and is planning to lie about it.
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Good question and if McMaster is fired will Kelly stay?
“Blue thumbs”?
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Kislyak’s talks with Flynn, Sessions, and the rest were so transparent as to have been invisible–and therefore were completely forgotten by every single person who engaged in them.
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It’s only a model.
Seriously, thanks, but the thing about models like this, especially in poli sci, is you have to be careful not to let yourself confuse them with reality. They may explain observed facts and generate testable predictions but you can’t let yourself get hypnotized by them. And particularly, you always have to remember that the reality is lots and lots of different people with their own agendas and different understandings of their directives doing stuff for their own reasons or out of their own perceptions of duty.
Same with statistics, weather forecasting, polling. What have you. You create these little simplified models to bypass a reality that is only describable through chaos theory but a lot of the time, it’s mere matrixing, like seeing a face in the Moon. In the end, you can end up confusing the map with the terrain and walk into follies like the belief in monolithic Communism of the 50’s or the model that led to the appeasement policies of the 30’s or, for that matter, systemic institutionalized racism.
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That man needs to lay off the pork rinds.
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You laugh, but it’s a lot like that. It’s why the eventual explosion is so often utterly depraved.
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Probably not if Trump humiliates him on the way out…which is inevitable.
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