Bolton Firing and Russiagate Resuscitation Proof of Rising People Power

My interpretation of Trump's termination of national security adviser John Bolton is that the president is not sanguine about his reelection. Trump ran to Hillary's left on issues of war and peace, but there's little hope that he will be able to do it again in 2020 (though he should be able to muddy the waters if Biden ends up being the Democratic Party's nominee).

I opined this past spring that Bolton would have to be kept in employment well into 2020 to guarantee access to Sheldon Adelson's casino coffers for the presidential election campaign. Trump either thinks fundraising won't be a problem or he feels that Bolton's regime-change foreign policy has become too much a drag on his brand. Likely it is a combination of both.

In any event, Trump's foreign policy, minus any of the peace overtures, was crafted by John Bolton. We should know fairly quickly if things are going to be any less bellicose under the new national security adviser based on the number of provocations in the Middle East. Recently there have been reports of "mystery airstrikes" killing members of the Iraqi popular mobilization forces on the Syrian border.

Trump might be frightened of losing the election, but so too are the grandees on the national security state. How else to interpret the frontpage resuscitation of Russiagate? After the most ardent of MSNBC/CNN viewers have moved on with their lives following Mueller's popcorn fart, the CIA is calling them back with old promises that it was rock solid human intel from a Putin loyalist within the walls of Kremlin that proves Russia stole their election.

As Andre Damon concludes,

In the name of combating “Russian meddling,” politicians pressured American technology firms to undertake the most onerous program of political censorship in the history of the internet in the US. Accounts with millions of followers were deleted overnight, while Google manipulated search results to bury left-wing viewpoints.

There was a massive effort to poison public opinion against Julian Assange, the courageous publisher and exposer of war crimes. He was slandered by the Democrats and the Times as a Russian agent who colluded with Trump, setting the stage for his imprisonment.

More information will no doubt emerge about the background and possible motivations of Smolenkov. But regardless, the fact that the source behind allegations the newspaper breathlessly proclaimed as fact had serious credibility problems makes clear that the Times made no serious efforts to question, much less validate, its chosen political narrative.

This newspaper functions as a clearinghouse for unquestioned, unexamined dispatches from within the American intelligence apparatus. Its role in promoting the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was not an aberration, but its modus operandi.