Dana Boente, 38 year veteran of the FBI and its top lawyer was fired yesterday after he was criticized by Trump Toad Lou Dobbs on Fox News.  The order to fire him came from a “high level”, and not FBI director Christopher Wray.  Boente led the investigation of Russian colluder Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI  about his role with the Russians.

The firing happened on the same day that a new transcript of Flynn’s conversation with Sergey Kislyak was released by the White House that showed he actually WAS colluding with the Russians.

You just can’t make this up.

In early 2018 Steve Bannon gave away the entire game plan for Trump in an interview with Michael Lewis of Bloomberg News.  In that interview, Bannon said a lot of things, but summed up his entire strategy in this one sentence:

“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

That’s it.  That is the entire strategy for TrumpWorld.  Not surprisingly, that’s Vladimir Putin’s strategy, too.  In fact, he’s the guy who perfected it.  In the bad old days of Soviet communism, propaganda was directed in monolithic terms.  The government had it’s own version of truth, and repeated it 24/7.  But that stopped working as the few large media outlets lost the volume battle to alternative sources of “news” and with the rise of social media.  Putin’s strategy now is to confuse and contradict so much that people get numb to it all and start believing that the truth is unknowable.  In his new book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev describes this strategy in the modern Russia which is now completely controlled by Putin.  Putin controls all the mainstream media in the country, and his military hacks into social media around the globe to spread the same misinformation used to control his own people.

The Bannon/Trump strategy keeps Americans off balance by spewing a mountain of bullshit on a daily basis which is why you hear Trump complaining about everything from low water use toilets to windmills killing millions of birds.  He’s done it at least 16,000 times since he became president, and his entire group of enablers from Giuliani to Kellyanne do it in a continuous stream.  There is so much bullshit that people are exhausted trying to keep up, and those he has brainwashed amplify the amount of bullshit circulating television, radio, and social media, repeating said bullshit millions of times.  They did it to Hillary with the debunked uranium story, and they’re trying to do it to Biden right now with the false Ukrainian corruption fiction they’ve whipped up.

The strategy works almost flawlessly.  This is how you get Trumpists, in the face of a tsunami of evidence that Trump illegally extorted Ukraine for his own political benefit, deny he did, and if he did, they say “so what?”    Think about it – what used to be headline news just ten years ago is now just a little dust you brush off your sleeve.  The disinformation is so perfectly delivered and maintained that people actually believe that everyone, including all of the mainstream press, all Democrats, all nonpolitical people, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and the courts are lying.  The ONLY source of truth is Donald Trump and his talking heads.  Confusion propaganda is designed to sideline the truth and convince otherwise normal people that the only way to get unconfused is to believe only one leader who, in his “great and unmatched wisdom” is the only person to know true truth.

This is how democracy is destroyed.  When the people no longer trust the system, especially when it comes to voting, the news, and the common good, then the bad guys win.  Trump, Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the criminals in TrumpWorld want you to be stupid.  And they keep you stupid by feeding you mountains of bullshit. When you believe that bullshit, he’s got you, and you then virtually can’t be saved.

Yesterday I talked about how Trumpists flocked to their latest article of faith that Trump isn’t really impeached because the House hasn’t transmitted the articles of impeachment to the Senate.  There is no basis in law or fact for that belief, but it’s there anyway, virally spreading throughout Trumpland.  During our Trumpist infestation we experienced yesterday that was the recurring theme.  These trends often start as a joke or a hoax, sometimes on satire sites, but quickly morph into viral proliferation by those who desperately cling to anything that supports their predisposed beliefs.  Here’s the Google trend line for searches this week on “Trump not impeached”:

And, as you would imagine, the regions that have the most searches are the red states.  There’s new viral rumor now growing in Trumpland and that is, now that Trump is impeached, he’s automatically eligible to run 2 more times.  That is REALLY stupid, and is completely unsupported both in the Constitution including the 22nd Amendment.  It started as a “joke” in October, but really took off this week, spreading across right wing pages by Trumpists.  Here’s the Google trend line for “Trump can run for third time”:

This kind of proliferation is what makes brainwashing so nefarious.  Many of the Trumpists’ comments during our infestation yesterday were repeating absolute nonsense, Russian propaganda, boasting, taunting, and personal insults.  None of the dozens of comments we received were based in any kind of fact; all taunted; none were even reasonable.

With rampant propaganda proliferated over social media facts or truth no longer matter.  Worse, Trump’s Twitter account amplifies these lies.  Every time he tweets one of his insults, childish taunts, threats, or lies,  it goes out to millions or users, retweeted thousands of times.  In the hands of an immoral politician like Trump, social media is weaponized for the dark side.  You can see it, but can also measure it.  Here’s the search terms “Burisma” and “Hunter Biden”:

These trends follow Trump’s twitter feed and those who support him.  Nobody ever even heard of Burisma, and few were even aware of Hunter Biden until Trump, Giuliani, and the Noise Machine started repeating it.  And, they almost got away with it; were it not for the whistleblower, Ukraine would have announced an investigation of the fabricated Russian story that Ukraine was the bad actor in 2016, and Biden’s chance to become the Democratic presidential nominee would have been destroyed.

Integrity matters, but evil can easily run over integrity because brainwashing works really well.  And THAT threatens our republic more than any outside force.

In a court filing yesterday, the US Attorney prosecuting Giuliani associate Lev Parnas claimed that he was being paid by the Russians, too, and that he was hiding the money in his wife’s name.  He received  a cool $1 million from them in September.  They have asked the judge to revoke Parnas’ bail and jail him.

More manure on the giant Trump manure pile.

We were all outraged when Trump spoke to the Hitler Youth Turning Point USA Youth Conference earlier this week when he falsely asserted that Article II of the Constitution allowed him to “do anything I want,” and spouted a three course menu of other lies.  It was one of those events staged to whip up the crowd and provide sound bites for Fox Noise to broadcast in a continuous stream, but it ended up causing rising derision and laughter.

What’s causing the laughter?  There was one little detail in the visuals projected onstage that no one noticed until it was too late – it was the presidential seal that Trump loves to liberally splash around (and attach to the cheesy crap that he sells on the side).  But the seal projected on the screen behind him onstage was not the actual presidential seal. Have a look:

Look closer:

The seal had been doctored with the eagle from the Russian seal, the arrows replaced by golf clubs, and the olive branch replaced with a wad of cash.  The “e pluribus unum” ribbon has been replaced by “45 es un titere,” which is Spanish for 45 is a puppet.”  For reference, here’s the Washington Post’s side by side comparison with the Russian seal:

The seal is being sold on T shirts by a merchant that calls itself “One Term Donnie“, which is pretty funny by itself.  Combine that with some absolute genius who engineered getting it projected right behind His Orangeness, this imagery is not only hilarious, it’s perfect.  This seal precisely illustrate’s Trump’s total devotion to his Russian handlers, his love of golf and his drive for ill-gotten cash.

Turning Point USA is frantically trying to find the person who did this.  When they find him/her, rather than being punished, they should be awarded the Nobel price for brilliance and bravery.  Oh, and I bet the person who dropped the ball on this at the WH is already fired.

LOL.

His Orangeness’ tweet storm this morning:

Look at that second tweet.  As Trump rants about “Presidential Harassment”, “Fake News”, “Witch Hunt Hoax”, he also makes a Freudian slip saying, “And now Russia disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected.”  Trump has just acknowledged that indeed it’s true that Russia assisted him into office.  Trump is now in an interesting position…he has denied Russian involvement since it happened, but now he’s saying that it did, but he’s not going to do anything about it.  That can only mean that he’s hoping the Russians do it again.  I don’t believe that statement quite meets the standard of “protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States”, but that’s just me.

I’m getting close to changing my mind on impeachment of this son of a bitch, but not yet.