The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”
Is the Trumplestilskin is intelligent enough to come to a conclusion after reading raw data: Oh wait, does he even have the attention span to read it in the first place? We are doomed.
Anyone started a pool yet on when some spook takes a run at him? Or when his Secret Service detail, who he purposely undermined by inserting his own personal security detail, shrug and say “am I taking a bullet for this guy? Hmm…”
Undermining the intelligence community is a really piss poor idea. REALLY piss poor. Spicer knows it, GOP knows it. But there’s no stopping the pumpkin when he does this apparently. Welcome to four years of this kind of rank amateurism. Spicer should just change his name to Zamboni, he’ll be street sweeping this kind of reckless bullshit for a long time. He should get danger pay.
I just can’t understand our press and media. They could save themselves a lot of time and money and just visit my retired independent plumbing contractor, brother-in-law who will be more than happy to regale them for hours with many cheerful facts about a flat tax, the downside of contraception, why Keynesian economics is a failure, military theory, including why MacArthur was right about Korea, and a host of rightwing minutiae. And, my BIL would jump at the chance to give news conferences. Why the fuck do we need Trump when we can have my BIL on the cheap.
Obviously, Trump doesn’t want to accept the conclusions of the intelligence community. In the meantime Trump and Putin continue to send billets-doux to each other while we patiently wait for the inception of the Fourth Reich.
If the daily intelligence briefings that Trump receives have a larger vocabulary than the text of The Cat in the Hat, Trump is going to have trouble following along.
I don’t know anyone who’d make you a prediction. I just know you could easily list a dozen ways Trump is a serious immediate threat to the security of this nation. And the IC is paid to think about stuff like that and do something about it. So it’s interesting.
People in America are underestimating possibility things could get really weird and really scary really fast.
Whatever happened to the stuff that Trump was going to tell us? The stuff that he knows but nobody else does? Has he already devolved from knowing something that no one else does to just trashing what the experts know?
