Blow Back | James Howard Kunstler

James Howard KunstlerJames Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Jan. 22, 2018

Is there any doubt that the Democratic Party will be blamed for the government shutdown brought on by the DACA showdown?

They insisted on a DACA deal that would have enabled everybody-and-his-uncle in a DACA person’s family to migrate to this country, a formula known as chain migration. Did they really believe that would go over? Or is it just more identity politics posturing?

I’m not the first observer to point out that it looks like the Democratic Party puts the interests of non-citizens above everybody else in the country. That’s what will be remembered about this gambit at the polls in November. It also looks like an engineered misdirection away from the more ominous fast-developing story about political corruption at the highest level of the Justice Department and its subsidiary, the FBI.

Unlike the allegations in the slow-cooking Russian Collusion story -- allegations so far uncoupled from evidence -- there’s plenty of evidence that FBI leadership deliberately mishandled several concurrent Hillary Clinton inquiries and, along with other players in the giant NSA matrix, launched the Russia Collusion story to derail Donald Trump’s legitimacy in office. Former President Obama and his White House aides are implicated in these machinations. Whether you’re a Trump fan or not, this ought to raise troubling questions about the legitimacy of the FBI.

On Sunday, the FBI revealed that it had lost five months of text messages between Trump antagonists Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The agency offered a lame explanation that “software upgrades” and “misconfiguration issues” interfered with the app that is supposed to automatically save and archive communications between officials on FBI phones. This was the couple who chattered about an FBI-generated “insurance policy” for the outcome of the 2016 election with Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. When will these three be invited to testify before a house or senate committee to inform the nation exactly what the “insurance policy” was?

The bad odor at the FBI seeps into several other areas of misbehavior involving Hillary Clinton, her campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and members of the permanent Washington bureaucracy. Did the Obama White House use the Christopher Steele dossier, paid for by the Clinton Campaign, to obtain FISA warrants against her opponent in the election for the purpose of conducting electronic surveillance on him? Was the FBI abetting a Democratic Party coup to get rid of Trump by any means necessary once he got into office? Did the FBI conduct a stupendously half-assed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server by dismissing the charges before interviewing any of the principal characters involved, granting blanket immunities to Obama White House officials, and failing to secure computers that contained evidence? Does the FBI actually know what then Attorney General Loretta Lynch discussed with Bill Clinton in the parked airplane on the Phoenix tarmac? Did the FBI fail to investigate enormous contributions (roughly $150 million) to the Clinton Foundation after the Uranium One deal was signed? Did they look into any of the improprieties surrounding the DNC’s effort to nullify Bernie Sander’s primary campaign?

These are some of the big questions that a nation not 100 percent distracted and misdirected will want some answers to. The even greater question is whether the USA’s institutional justice system remains sturdy enough to fairly inquire into all these things. It probably can’t happen without a deep house-cleaning at the Department of Justice and the FBI. For the moment, Trump is just observing the scene like the Cheshire Cat in his tree. Considering what a dope he is, it is one of the many miracles of his long and (so far) lucky life to have his enemies look even dumber.

One thing I wonder is how long this toxic political struggle can go on before the financial markets notice what it says about the country.

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James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling -- A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.