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I've omitted the first few paragraphs and am starting with an excellent discussion of Democrats, liberals, foreign policy and military elites: We see a constant parade of Washington pooh-bahs like James Comey, Andrew McCabe and John Brennan on cable, sounding the alarm and presenting themselves as the white hats to Trump’s black hat. Retired generals grimace at the president’s impetuous, ego-driven foreign policy. The left keens that the president is destroying our sacred institutions and jeopardizing our national security. But for many Americans, the events of the last week prove that Trump is right to be cynical about a rigged system and deep-state elites. The inspector general’s report about the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation offered a hideous Dorian Gray portrait of the once-vaunted law enforcement agency. As Charlie Savage wrote in The Times, the report uncovered “a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process.” The F.B.I. run by Comey and McCabe was sloppy, deceitful and cherry-picking — relying on nonsense spread by Christopher Steele. With the stunning and sad “Afghanistan Papers,” The Washington Post revealed what we knew in our hearts: We have spent 18 years and a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, with generals lying and hiding evidence that the war was unwinnable, just as the generals did in Vietnam. As one general conceded, they did not understand Afghanistan and didn’t have “the foggiest notion” of what they were doing. Even as President Barack Obama escalated the war, poured in more billions and promised to crack down on corruption, The Post said, the United States looked away and let its allies — the Afghan president, warlords, drug traffickers and defense contractors — wallow in fraud, corruption and dark money. Then there’s “The Report,” streaming on Amazon, the heroic saga of Daniel Jones, played by Adam Driver. Jones is working for Dianne Feinstein on the Senate Intelligence Committee and spends years compiling a report documenting the C.I.A.’s use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in secret prisons, a barbaric, un-American and ineffective system designed by two creepy psychologists who were paid about $81 million by the C.I.A. The movie is not kind to Barack Obama and Denis McDonough, suggesting that they protected the C.I.A. and tried to bury grisly details from the report to fend off criticism that Obama was weak on terrorism. It is also a harsh portrayal of Brennan, MSNBC’s Voice-of-Morality, who, as C.I.A. director, fought the Senate inquiry so hard that his operatives even clandestinely hacked into the computer network of committee staff members to figure out how they were getting their information. If this weren’t enough institutional perfidy for one week, we had the Boeing hearing in Congress: An F.A.A. analysis done after the first deadly crash off the coast of Indonesia showed that the agency knew that if it did not act, the Boeing 737 Max was likely to crash 115 times in the 45 years it was expected to fly, theoretically killing more than 2,900 people. But that wasn’t enough to immediately ground it. The government is supposed to protect us from the greedy capitalists, not the other way around. Unfortunately, this climate of confusion and cynicism allows Trump to prosper. He did not come to Washington to clean up the tainted system; he came to bathe in it. full at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/14/opinion/sunday/trump-afghanistan-report-boeing.html _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
