The Vlad and Donald Show – A Glorious Blow for Peace!

By David Stockman | Source: Anti-War.com

The Vlad and Donald show in Helsinki Monday was simply brilliant and breathtaking – we’d say even a beautiful thing to behold.

Between them, they left CNN’s nattering nabobs of neocon nonsense sounding like the shrieking monkeys they actually are. And that’s to say nothing of the fools they made out of the newly minted liberal and progressive warmongers on the Dem side of the aisle in Washington or the so-called journalists who fill 90% of the space in the so-called mainstream media with endless pro-war propaganda.

But most of all it was the single greatest blow to the War Party since it turned Imperial Washington into a colossal menace bent on global hegemony when the Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history in 1991.

We have said all along that Putin and Russia have been demonized because the Warfare State desperately needs an “enemy” to justify its $800 billion annual mugging of America’s taxpayers. Yet today’s spontaneous chorus by the two leaders in behalf of détente, dialogue and diplomacy puts the kibosh on that Big Lie more completely than could 100 Ted Talks or a year’s worth of pro-peace op eds in the Washington Post.

So Flyover America will have no trouble seeing the good of the Helsinki Summit. Trump and Putin just killed it on every topic where the War Party and its shills in the press wanted to drive a wedge.

That is to say, cooperation on Syria, arms control, terrorism, North Korea, Ukraine; friendly competition on supplying natural gas to Europe; an invitation to Mueller to send his legal sleuths to Russia to participate in the interrogation of the 12 GRU ham sandwiches named in the indictment; and best of all, a reciprocal notion that Russian prosecutors come here to question Deep State operatives about how they helped one of the greatest scoundrels of modern times, Bill Browder, abscond from Russia with almost $1.5 billion skimmed from its people and on which he and his posse paid zero taxes either there or here.

Indeed, the debunking of the false mainstream narrative about Russia’s nefarious intentions and doings was so complete that the Deep State apparatchiks were reduced to sputtering hysterically. For instance, here is the bile issued by the central architect of the Russian collusion lie, former CIA director John Brennan:

Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???

Then again, when you actually read the transcript of the joint press conference, you will find the very words, phrases and tonalities that harken back to the courageous efforts of liberal democrats like Senators George McGovern and Frank Church and even President Jimmy Carter to promote diplomacy and détente during the height of the Cold War confrontation when each side had 9,000 nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert.

And exactly what was John Brennan doing circa 1976?

Why, he voted for the communist candidate for President, Gus Hall, because he thought Jimmy Carter was too much of a cold warrior!

In other words, the guy is a demented partisan hack who arose to power during a 25 year career in the CIA that began in 1980, and during which he sold his soul to the Warfare State in pursuit of position, power and pelf.

But beyond our joy in hearing the gaskets popping all over the Imperial City we can say this: In the course of that press conference the Donald threw down the gauntlet to the Deep State in a manner so explicit and unequivocal that there is now no turning back.

Either he will rally the undoubtedly dazed GOP troops on Capitol Hill and his base in behalf of rapprochement with Russia and an end Washington’s arrogant Imperial hegemony – or they will indeed put him on the Dick Nixon Memorial Helicopter for a final ride to Gonesville.

At the point we are at a loss – 50 years of studying the Imperial City notwithstanding – to know which way it will go.

But we have no doubt that the Deep State and its shills, assigns and nomenklatura throughout the Imperial City will now escalate their war against the Donald to red hot intensity. The signal for that was in the very first words that came off Anderson Cooper’s viperous tongue the instant the press conference was finished:

“You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader, that I have ever seen”.

But just call it fever pitch on steroids. That’s the condition that CNN had already worked itself into after a full weekend of near-hysterical gumming about Robert Mueller’s latest gambit.

We are referring, of course, to his Friday indictment of 12 alleged election meddlers slathered in Russian dressing.

But wasn’t that just another Deep State “insurance policy”?

Wasn’t that a desperate, bald-faced effort to sabotage today’s summit in Helsinki?

After all, why did these indictments come down on Friday afternoon July 13?

Did Mueller and Rosenstein need to hurry-up their indictments and make lightening perp-walk style arrests so that their targets wouldn’t flee the country in the dead of night?

Not at all. The 12 indictees were already long gone. In fact, these particular Russians were never here, if they actually exist at all.

So let’s call a spade a spade. Friday afternoon’s action by his own Justice Department was a brazen shot across Donald Trump’s bow by the Deep State the likes of which we have never before seen; and which after today’s rebuke of its entire false RussiaGate narrative will undoubtedly prove to be a mere token of the pounding attacks yet to come.

Even then, Friday’s bald-faced attempt to sabotage the summit in itself raises deeply troubling questions about whether even the veneer of democratic self-government has much shelf-life left in America.

That’s because Friday’s theatrics amounted to a frontal attempt to nullify the 2016 election. If the Donald said anything about his agenda during the 2016 campaign that was remotely coherent (besides building the Mexican Wall) it was that he would seek a rapprochement deal with Putin.

Needless to say, the War Party is dead set against constructive engagement with Russia because the Fake Enemy represented by its risible demonization of Putin is literally its authorization to continue squandering $800 billion per year on “national security”; and that, in turn, is the very lifeblood of Imperial Washington’s malodorous prosperity.

So what happened even before today’s press conference demarche was a profoundly anti-democratic and unconstitutional attempt by the permanent government to thwart Trump’s effort to pursue his self-evident mandate from the US electorate.

But for crying out loud. Friday’s indictment of 12 ham sandwiches from the GRU (Russian military security agency) had nothing to do with justice or Mueller’s mandate; and even less so with genuine national security.

As to the former, there will never be any arrests, let alone a trial or conviction. That’s because the source of the purported “evidence”, memorialized in the indictment’s 29 pages of spurious exactitude, is presumably classified and would never be presented in open court.

Indeed, the CNN bobbleheads are always remonstrating about the sanctity of the rule of law, but exactly what do they think Mueller’s grandstanding stunt was other than an insult to exactly that?

They surely can’t claim that Mueller’s hired political assassins were faithfully administering regular-way justice when the guilt or innocence of the charged cannot possibly ever be adjudicated. How could it be when there can never be a legitimate trial with empty defendants’ chairs and no admissible evidence that the government is willing to present in a public proceeding?

In fact, the despicable Rod Rosenstein made absolutely clear that the indictment is going directly into the dead letter file, with nary a passing swipe by Robert Mueller’s vaunted prosecutors:

“The special counsel’s investigation is ongoing and there will be no comments by the special counsel at this time … we intend to transition responsibility for this indictment to the Justice Department’s National Security Division (NSD) while we await the apprehension of the defendants.”

Really?

Either the DOJ is fixing to send Seal Team Six into Moscow to snatch the 12 GRU operatives or it expects the Kremlin to dispatch them to Washington handcuffed to their seats on a Russian air force jet at the very next opportunity.

As it happened at the press conference, both the Donald and Vlad put the fork in even that absurdly improbable prospect.

That is, Putin referenced a 1999 cooperation agreement between the two countries on criminal matters and welcomed Mueller’s grand inquisitors to come to Moscow to participate in an interrogation of the defendants; and the Donald welcomed it as a creative approach on the matter.

Likewise, the timing of Friday’s action had no national security purpose whatsoever. If the Deep State apparatchiks really wanted Putin confronted on the matter – then in any rational universe they would have armed the Donald with the indictment’s particulars and sent him into the meeting to confront Putin before it became public.

Either that, or the Donald was briefed but un-persuaded and therefore refused to do their bidding. So Mueller and the DOJ simply “leaked” the charges via the clownish device of an un-implementable indictment in order to blowup the summit.

That is, their purpose was to countermand the decision of the US president to pursue the very objectives he promised the American electorate. And since Brennan and his Deep State ilk have brought up the “treason” word, we leave it to Justin Raimondo to appropriately turn the tables:

Yet the brazenness of this borderline treason is what makes it so ineffective. The American people aren’t stupid: to the extent that they’re paying attention to this Beltway comic opera they can figure out the motives and meaning of Mueller’s accusations without too much difficulty.

The indictment reads like a fourth-rate spy thriller: we are treated to alleged “real time” transcripts of Boris and Natasha in action, draining the DNC’s email system as well as our precious bodily fluids. This material, perhaps supplied by the National Security Agency, contains no evidence that links either Russia or the named individuals to the actions depicted in the transcripts. We just have to take Mueller’s word for it.

After today’s post-press conference hail of calumny at the Donald by a endless line of Dem pols it is perfectly clear that the alleged Russian election meddling is a sideshow. In fact, the Dems are so distraught and un-reconciled to their loss to surely the weakest presidential candidate ever fielded by the GOP (including Alf Landon and Barry Goldwater) that they have subordinated rationality itself to their pursuit of vendetta.

So doing, they have made the Democratic party the new handmaids of the Warfare State, as Justin Raimondo further aptly observed:

The disgusting – and depressing – response of the Democrats to the Helsinki summit has been a concerted campaign to … cancel it. Yes, that’s how myopic and in thrall to the Deep State these flunkies are: world peace, who cares? Never mind that we’re still on hair-trigger alert, with our nukes aimed at their cities and their nukes targeting ours. The slightest anomaly could spark a nuclear exchange – the end of the world, the extinction of human life, and probably of most life, for quite some time to come.

And yet – what does the survival of the human race matter next to the question of how and why Hillary Clinton was denied her rightful place in history? I mean, really!

After the announcement on Friday, John Podesta smirked “they caught the witches”. But as George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley observed,

In other words, if there were a real hunt for election witches, we (the US and its intelligence apparatus) would find ourselves at the head of the line to the pillory.

At the end of the day, this is not about a national security threat at all because Russia isn’t one. Let us again observe that even in its current state of alleged disrepair and under-spending that the NATO-29 (including the US) have a combined GDP of $36 trillion and military budget of $1 trillion.

Those figures are 24X Russia’s GDP of $1.4 trillion and 16X its military budget of $61 billion. Accordingly, there us not a snow balls’ chance in the hot place that the perfectly rational leader of what is actually a pint-sized nation who stood alongside the Donald at today’s press conference has any illusions whatsoever about military aggression.

But now that he has thrown the gauntlet at the Deep State, we can hope that the Donald will reclaim his powers as the dully elected President of the United States and order an examination of the DNC computer that has been AWOL during this entire witch hunt; and, even more to the point, declassify every single NSA intercept on which Mueller’s comic book indictment was based.

We are perfectly willing to believe that operatives in the GRU went spearfishing at the DNCC and DNC, and that like millions of everyday folks who fall for these gambits everyday on the global internet that some naïve or stupid DNC staffers, as the case may be, opened their digital kimono’s to the intruders.

But so what?

None of the shenanigans and skullduggery inside the Dem apparatus that were revealed to the American electorate were untrue. So how did the truth of the matter undermine America’s democratic process of selecting a leader?

The only thing the indictment proves – even if it is accurate to the chapter and verse cited – is that if you live in a glass house, don’t start throwing stones.

The US spends $75 billion per year on a colossal globe-spanning surveillance, hacking and Internet intruding operation that makes the indictment’s alleged GRU tom foolery look trite by comparison.

The recently renamed TAO (tailored access operations) alone consists of a dozen sprawling buildings in Maryland, Texas, Hawaii, Georgia and Colorado chock-a-block with a veritable army of military and civilian computer hackers, intelligence analysts, targeting specialists, computer hardware and software designers, and electrical engineers. And there job is to do a thousand times over to foreign governments, elections and political processes exactly what the Mueller indictment charges against the GRU.

Indeed, TAO is the Typhoid Mary of the global Internet, infecting systems of friend and foe alike with a continuous tsunami of implanted malware. While originally chartered as an eavesdropping agency, the N.S.A. has embraced hacking as an especially nifty way to spy on foreign targets.

The intelligence collection is often automated, with malware implants – computer code designed to find material of interest – left sitting on the targeted system for months or even years, sending files back to the N.S.A.

According to the diligent 2013 investigation published by a leading German news site, Hamburg based Spiegel ONLINE, and based on leaked NASA documents, the US engages in massive malware implanting activities which are far more menacing than the primitive “phishing” operations described by Mueller’s latest comic book:

One of the hackers’ key tasks is the offensive infiltration of target computers with so-called implants or with large numbers of Trojans. They’ve bestowed their spying tools with illustrious monikers like “ANGRY NEIGHBOR,” “HOWLERMONKEY” or “WATERWITCH.” These names may sound cute, but the tools they describe are both aggressive and effective.

According to details in Washington’s current budget plan for the US intelligence services, around 85,000 computers worldwide are projected to be infiltrated by the NSA specialists by the end of this year. By far the majority of these “implants” are conducted by TAO teams via the Internet.

Nevertheless, TAO has dramatically improved the tools at its disposal. It maintains a sophisticated toolbox known internally by the name “QUANTUMTHEORY.” “Certain QUANTUM missions have a success rate of as high as 80%, where spam is less than 1%,” one internal NSA presentation states.

A comprehensive internal presentation titled “QUANTUM CAPABILITIES,” which SPIEGEL has viewed, lists virtually every popular Internet service provider as a target, including Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and YouTube.

Finally, why do we think this was an utterly desperate move by Mueller?

Because the indictments go out of their way to preclude any Americans having any involvement in these ‘hacking events’ at all.

As Tom Luongo cogently observed:

Now with Trump prepared to sit down with Putin and potentially hammer out a major agreement on many outstanding issues like Syria, arms control, NATO’s purpose, energy policy and terrorism the Deep State/Globalist/Davos Crowd needed something to saddle him with to prevent this from happening.

The reasoning will be (if not already out there as I write this) that Trump would be a traitor for sitting down with Putin after these indictments.

About the Author

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

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Pat Buchanan: “Trump Calls Off Cold War II”

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Beginning his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin, President Trump declared that U.S. relations with Russia have “never been worse.”

He then added pointedly, that just changed “about four hours ago.”

It certainly did. With his remarks in Helsinki and at the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump has signaled a historic shift in U.S. foreign policy that may determine the future of this nation and the fate of his presidency.

He has rejected the fundamental premises of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and blamed our wretched relations with Russia, not on Vladimir Putin, but squarely on the U.S. establishment.

In a tweet prior to the meeting, Trump indicted the elites of both parties: “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!”

Trump thereby repudiated the records and agendas of the neocons and their liberal interventionist allies, as well as the archipelago of War Party think tanks beavering away inside the Beltway.

Looking back over the week, from Brussels to Britain to Helsinki, Trump’s message has been clear, consistent and startling.

NATO is obsolete. European allies have freeloaded off U.S. defense while rolling up huge trade surpluses at our expense. Those days are over. Europeans are going to stop stealing our markets and start paying for their own defense.

And there will be no Cold War II.

We are not going to let Putin’s annexation of Crimea or aid to pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine prevent us from working on a rapprochement and a partnership with him, Trump is saying. We are going to negotiate arms treaties and talk out our differences as Ronald Reagan did with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Helsinki showed that Trump meant what he said when he declared repeatedly, “Peace with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.”

On Syria, Trump indicated that he and Putin are working with Bibi Netanyahu, who wants all Iranian forces and Iran-backed militias kept far from the Golan Heights. As for U.S. troops in Syria, says Trump, they will be coming out after ISIS is crushed, and we are 98 percent there.

That is another underlying message here: America is coming home from foreign wars and will be shedding foreign commitments.

Both before and after the Trump-Putin meeting, the cable news coverage was as hostile and hateful toward the president as any this writer has ever seen. The media may not be the “enemy of the people” Trump says they are, but many are implacable enemies of this president.

Some wanted Trump to emulate Nikita Khrushchev, who blew up the Paris summit in May 1960 over a failed U.S. intelligence operation — the U-2 spy plane shot down over the Urals just weeks earlier.

Khrushchev had demanded that Ike apologize. Ike refused, and Khrushchev exploded. Some media seemed to be hoping for just such a confrontation.

When Trump spoke of the “foolishness and stupidity” of the U.S. foreign policy establishment that contributed to this era of animosity in U.S.-Russia relations, what might he have had in mind?

Was it the U.S. provocatively moving NATO into Russia’s front yard after the collapse of the USSR?

Was it the U.S. invasion of Iraq to strip Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction he did not have that plunged us into endless wars of the Middle East?

Was it U.S. support of Syrian rebels determined to oust Bashar Assad, leading to ISIS intervention and a seven-year civil war with half a million dead, a war which Putin eventually entered to save his Syrian ally?

Was it George W. Bush’s abrogation of Richard Nixon’s ABM treaty and drive for a missile defense that caused Putin to break out of the Reagan INF treaty and start deploying cruise missiles to counter it?

Was it U.S. complicity in the Kiev coup that ousted the elected pro-Russian regime that caused Putin to seize Crimea to hold onto Russia’s Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol?

Many Putin actions we condemn were reactions to what we did.

Russia annexed Crimea bloodlessly. But did not the U.S. bomb Serbia for 78 days to force Belgrade to surrender her cradle province of Kosovo?

How was that more moral than what Putin did in Crimea?

If Russian military intelligence hacked into the emails of the DNC, exposing how they stuck it to Bernie Sanders, Trump says he did not collude in it. Is there, after two years, any proof that he did?

Trump insists Russian meddling had no effect on the outcome in 2016 and he is not going to allow media obsession with Russiagate to interfere with establishing better relations.

Former CIA Director John Brennan rages that, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki … was … treasonous. … He is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”

Well, as Patrick Henry said long ago, “If this be treason, make the most of it!