The Lajes’ Protocol IV: The President, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Politicization of the DOJ

What a cluster of stupid motherfucking motherfuckers.

I’m ready for someone to rid me of this meddlesome pres…oh, whatever. I’ve been praying for it for two years now and it hasn’t happened. VOTE LIKE YOUR REPUBLIC DEPENDS UPON IT, because it surely does.

Also: any enterprising young reporters out there want to ask GOP lawmakers YET. AGAIN. what they would do if a Democratic president under investigation pulled this shit? Would DC even still be standing?

@Jeffro:
Do you really have to ask?

@The Midnight Lurker:
There are plenty of republicans left that would like to stop this insanity. Unfortunately, none of them are in a position to do anything about it right now and aren’t in the ruling party.

@Ruckus: I am the Duke of Rhetorical Questions, it’s just my thing, ok?

Seriously, though, it’s like Exhibit #1183 in the Hall of Shit that Republicans Would Never Even Come Close To Maybe Even Thinking About Entertaining About Thinking About Entertaining if it Were A Dem.

Fuck it, who cares…WE ARE COMING FOR YOU IN NOVEMBER, Republicans!

@The Midnight Lurker: Same thing I put out most days on FB and to friends and rag on my RWNJ dad/brother about: this. man. has no. bottom. And truly, everything he touches turns to shit.

Or perhaps it’s just to provide a cover narrative for when the hacked vote totals diverge from the polls by 14 points.

More and more, I feel like we should have been banging on Trumpov’s GOP enablers all along. That and the “both sides” media (although frankly most mainstream outlets have been covering his many abuses accurately).

But every time he pulled his nonsensical, anti-American, inhumane, stupid, moronic, racist shit, we should have just beat the shit out of GOP officials at all levels. Ah well, we’ll get to do it in November. But we should have been beating on them non-stop for the past two years.

Rep. Devin Nunes, who chairs the intelligence committee, says the Democrats have “corrupted” the Justice Dept. and FBI.

Nunes and Trump are definitely on the same page, and Nunes is willing to do anything to give Trump cover, even destroy the FBI and CIA.

I agree that this foolishness is inept and only makes the GOP look stupid. But it also erodes any belief that government can be something other than a malignant force in the lives of the people.

@🇺🇸🌎 Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  🗳🌷: I have no interest in American hegemony, but Bosnia and Rwanda happened when i was trying to form a world view that wasn’t just my college idealism. And yet, if you can help, you should help still popped up. We are an extremely rich country. We could do a lot of good things, if we chose to do so – domestically and overseas.*

*Christ, I am having an earnest day.

@Adam L Silverman: No argument from me. As I just said to Goku above, Bosnia and Rwanda happened a very influential time in my life. I’d err on the side of trying to save lives. Cole is a few years younger and went a different route.

@Omnes Omnibus:

Christ, I am having an earnest day.

Nothing wrong with that, mate.

Help if you can is a damn good life plan.

@Major Major Major Major:
They have somewhat of a point. Most all of our “help” hasn’t.
And for example Russia is currently trying to “help” us. That’s going swimmingly isn’t it?
Not trying to be an isolationist at all but butting in to shore up dictators hasn’t been one of our finest moments. Maybe there is another way than trying to be the worlds police, when the police in question is modeled after the kinds of police action that we’ve seen in the US. IOW kill the supposed bad guys no matter the evidence and allow no discussion of the propriety doing so.

@Adam L Silverman: I just hope Bredesen has enough coattails to bring Karl Dean into the governor’s mansion.

I’m in the beginning process of outlining and planning the plot for my novel, and I kind of know the elements I want to include but I’m worried that there could be undertones of xenophobia.

The story deals with magical and supernatural elements interacting with our world and generally fucking things up. I plan on presenting this as ultimately negative and that the realms of science and magic should probably stay separate. This mostly stems from my own distrust of unfettered power and fear of tyranny. I also planned on presenting the government’s search for the as somewhat reasonable and understandable; fear of the unknown can be justified as long as you don’t panic and act irrationally.

I remember watching JLU a long time ago and I remember Cadmus and the lengths they went to protect against supers. I may have disagreed with some of their morally questionable methods but I understood where they were coming from. Superman is an inspiring hero when he’s sane and good. But a person’s mental state can be a fragile thing even without powers. In other words, I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that if something akin to individuals with superpowers existed in real life they couldn’t be allowed to exist because they’re too dangerous to humanity as we know it. They could neither be allowed to exist unchecked nor could they be allowed to be in government custody as they could be used as weapons by said government.

@HinTN: I am a confirmed snarker and sarcasm addict. Earnestness is not my milieu.

But you just can’t stand aside while horrible things happen when you have a chance stopping the horrible. Cole went with, “We will make it worse. Stay away.” I am more of an optimist than he is.

Peter Beinart has a piece on what a new Democratic foreign policy should look like. tl;dr give up Taiwan to China and the Baltics to Russia because nobody here cares enough to die for them. It’s a hard pill to swallow but sadly I think he has a point.

@Brachiator: Nunes is covering his own ass. It’s really as simple as that. Whatever he has hiding in his closet will make an appearance before this all shakes out.

@🇺🇸🌎 Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  🗳🌷:
This also brings up the uncomfortable dilemma of a person’s human rights vs national security; the hypothetical point where a person/being would no longer be a mere criminal or terrorist that still possesses certain inalienable rights but an existential threat that would have to be destroyed or contained at nearly any cost.

@Omnes Omnibus: Regarding Libya, we did make it worse and we should have stayed away. Are you disputing that?

@Mnemosyne: Jebus. My knee was wrecked – ACL, partial MCL, and meniscus. I had the surgery done on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend and went back to work on that Tuesday. What happened?

@Major Major Major Major: is it still major4@clownsex.com?

@Bobby Thomson: He was in the 11 ACR, so he was there in the aftermath. We were soldiers at the same time. I was an artillery officer and he was an enlisted tanker. This can also affect views.

@Omnes Omnibus: So instead of a few thousand dead in Libya, we could have hundreds of thousands dead like Syria?

So, as I drove down the I-10 this morning, I saw a sign that someone had put up behind the fence on an overpass. It read:

TICK TOCK MTHRFCKR.

I thought of y’all with great fondness and affection.

Tick fucken tock.

@James E Powell: Disappearing from the news does not equal disappearing from Mueller and company’s undivided attention. The fruits of their pleas and cooperation will doubtless rise to dominate the news cycle another day (and another, ad nauseum).

@Doug R: I believe in Just War Theory.

@Mnemosyne:

Sorry to hear you had a rough day.

@Adam L Silverman:
No thanks. I want to avoid possible xenophobic undertones, not embrace them like Dead Eyes Miller. :p

Adam, I know I’ve asked this sort of question previously, but is this move by Trump the kind of thing that could lead to the IC leaking something to “remind” Trump that he’d better play by the rules?

@Mnemosyne: If it’s that bad, take the Aleve. My doctor told me you can take 3 tablets (600 mg) twice a day when you’re having major orthopedic problems. Just don’t do it on an empty stomach. Good luck dealing with this. Here’s hoping a good night’s rest will work miracles.

@jonas:

Can some lawyerly type explain how this is not obstruction of justice?

I can’t, because it clearly is.

@Mnemosyne: I was working for the US Courts at the time. My insurance was amazeballs. Total out of pocket was about $250 – it was 1999 though.

@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

Suggested reading:

Superfolks by Robert Meyer
George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards universe of stories/anthologies
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon.

@B.B.A.: So is oil the only thing we care to die for?

The broader point is that alliances are not about whether we are prepared to die for country X, but whether those alliances serve strategic purposes in deterring behavior that ultimately we believe will be detrimental to our country. Chamberlain believed that Czechoslovakia was not worth fighting for, but he ended up going to war over Poland a year later, after 35 Czechoslovak divisions were eliminated and Hitler scooped up all their factories and used their tanks, planes, and artillery to invade Western Europe. (Some people say that Britain was not ready to fight in 1938, etc., but Hitler’s generals for sure believed they were not ready to fight in 1938, which is why they were prepared to kill him if he declared war then.) The US refused to participate in any alliances following WWI, and still got involved in WWII. NATO was founded because the men who fought WWII believed that alliances were necessary to keep the Germans down and the Russians out, and they were not wrong, notwithstanding the fact that few of them believed that Americans should die to save German lives. You can say tant pis to the Taiwanese and the Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians, but that won’t stop the Chinese or the Russians from demanding more territory, and when that happens, the US will have fewer allies to rely on.

@PJ: England was mot ready to fight in 1938.

@Omnes Omnibus: Not. Fuck.

@Omnes Omnibus: And neither were the Germans. But the Czechoslovaks were. Who was more prepared to fight in 1939, the Germans or the British? Delaying the war by a year only made the German Army stronger, and eliminated an ally.

@Adam L Silverman: I don’t have the patience to type that.

@NotMax

One more definite suggestion: The comics book series of Akira (not the movie*).
Possibly also the comic book series Mai, the Psychic Girl.

BTW, any similarities between Alan Moore’s Watchmen and the earlier novel Superfolks which I mentioned above are entirely intentional, as Moore has freely admitted.

*Fine in its own right but a greatly differing unfolding of the story than in the original.

@Omnes Omnibus: Germany wasn’t ready either. Germany improved its military more from 38 to 39 than the Allies did so delaying made things worse.

@tobie:

I took 2 Aleve, and if it still hurts a bit when it’s closer to bedtime here on the West Coast, I’ll take a Tylenol, too. I slept very badly last night, so that’s probably not helping.

@Gin & Tonic:

You mean with your wrist, or did you also have a knee injury that I’m forgetting about? Wrists, hands, and shoulders all seem to require a big chunk of time off. Someone I know who broke her elbow had to take almost 6 months off work.

@Adam L Silverman:

Thanks, Adam. I should have read more closely!

@PJ:

So is oil the only thing we care to die for?

We tried that and we didn’t even get any oil. If we’re going to spend trillions to have the biggest and most powerful military on earth and its only solid accomplishment in half a century is overthrowing the microstate of Grenada, what the hell is the point?

Obviously Trump’s idiotic flailing is only making things worse.

@Adam L Silverman: we’ll double your pay!

This selective releasing is the equivalent of striking a giant match to check the stores in the powder magazine.

@Adam L Silverman: Be that as it may, the question remains, was it better for Britain to wait, because during that time the Germans would be building up as well. And, in the meantime, as Hitler is supposed to have said, “with dictatorships, nothing succeeds like success.” Capturing Czechoslovakia without firing a shot boosted German morale and sunk the morale of other countries in Europe. It led to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which also strengthened Germany, and the dismemberment of Poland. We can never know, but could a bloody German nose in 1938 have prevented WWII, or lessened the extent of its destruction?

If we are unwilling to back up our alliances and enforce our treaties, as Trump seems wont to do, then we might as well be the French in 1938, or 1936, for that matter, when they did nothing when the Rhineland was remilitarized.

I am no expert on any of this, so I defer to your judgment, but it seems to me that these kinds of questions were precisely why NATO was formed and, until people give up using violence as the means to attain political ends, why alliances will be necessary, and why they must be vigorously defended.

@Jeffro:

Also: any enterprising young reporters out there want to ask GOP lawmakers YET. AGAIN. what they would do if a Democratic president under investigation pulled this shit? Would DC even still be standing?

If that was the case, articles of impeachment would have been filed months ago. But I lived by that issue for a while, and it’s useless. Response from any Republican lawmaker would be (out loud) “I won’t talk about hypotheticals”, as you noted. Now, the other (unspoken) part: “and so what? People expect Republican presidents to be incompetent and semi-corrupt at this point, what’s a little narcissism on top of that? He’s getting our donors’ priorities right and the base loves him, so he’s untouchable. Not so for a Democrat.”

@Adam L Silverman: And what a glorious accomplishment that was.

@Adam L Silverman: point taken. I didn’t mean to imply that you were suggesting we give up our alliances, but that was someone above (or perhaps they were just quoting someone else) started the discussion.

@Steve in the ATL:

Aleve plus vodka.

Note: I am not a doctor.

Aleve is sodium naproxene, a Non-Steroidal-Anti-Inflammatory-Drug (NSAID) which can cause GI bleeding when taken with or close to alcohol. Best to wait a day or so between different “medications”.

@B.B.A.: Right, but that elides the issue of all the wars that were never started because other countries didn’t want to deal with the US or our allies, just as our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq obscure what we could have done with our wealth and lives instead of flushing them down the toilet. Power is destructive if you use it stupidly and viciously, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be beneficial also.

@Doug R:

“Bottom Lines

• The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong. Libya’s 2011 uprising was never peaceful, but instead was armed and violent from the start. Muammar al-Qaddafi did not target civilians or resort to indiscriminate force. Although inspired by humanitarian impulse, NATO’s intervention did not aim mainly to protect civilians, but rather to overthrow Qaddafi’s regime, even at the expense of increasing the harm to Libyans.

• The Intervention Backfired. NATO’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold, while also exacerbating human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors. If Libya was a “model intervention,” then it was a model of failure.

• Three Lessons. First, beware rebel propaganda that seeks intervention by falsely crying genocide. Second, avoid intervening on humanitarian grounds in ways that reward rebels and thus endanger civilians, unless the state is already targeting noncombatants. Third, resist the tendency of humanitarian intervention to morph into regime change, which amplifies the risk to civilians.”

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/lessons-libya-how-not-intervene

Casualty counts are coming up on 100,000 dead with no end in sight.

@Brachiator:

If you haven’t done so already, consider donating to Andrew Janz, who is running against Nunes.

@Wag:

Is there any particular reason to prefer naproxen over ibuprofen? Ibuprofen is my usual go-to pain reliever, but my ortho said to take naproxen instead, so I am.

(Don’t worry, I know not to mix NSAIDs.)

@PJ: All this crap about “the Czechoslovaks were ready to fight” overlooks some rather large facts: (1) After the Anschluss the Germans had Bohemia & Moravia effectively surrounded, with a fractious Slovakia at their rear & their other “neighbors” (Hungary & Poland) hot to snag disputed territory from them; (2) the very solid border fortifications that were the keystone of Czechoslovak defense plans were all in regions where the indigenous populations were overwhelmingly Sudeten Germans; who (3) threatened to act as a fifth column disrupting those defenses (at a time when the concept was a hot item – the term “fifth column” originating just 2 years earlier during the Spanish Civil War). (Point #2 is the main reason why Hitler was able to annex the rest of Czechoslovakia the following year without firing a shot – the lands transferred to Germany at Munich were the ones containing those fortifications & the Czechs were essentially helpless without them.)

Couple neighbors are retired secrete service, and a couple are retired FBI folks. Next door neighbor is a local police officer. All five of those deep state secret Democrats thinks my politics is a danger to the country, and Trump is great.

@Mart:
Delusion is a funny thing. It can strike people at any time but some people are much more susceptible to it than others. Conservatives are one group that is very, very susceptible to any delusional falsehood. Especially one that liberals do not like. Delusional falsehoods are like Hagen Das oxygen flavor to them.

@The Midnight Lurker:

McCain was the closest thing to it, and he’s dead.