Given that Russia had at least as many nuclear weapons as the U.S., Putin was far and away the scariest person on the planet the moment Trump was sworn in. Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, hoped for a return to the era when the Soviet military was considered the equal of America’s, and he sought to rebuild the Soviet empire by invading former Soviet territories Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. By then, the Soviet Union had long collapsed and Washington’s strong relations with Boris Yeltsin, the first president of Russia, were a distant memory. Yet after witnessing Trump’s presidency, few on the left think this clout is “terrifying.” They know that when Trump took office, the biggest existential threat to the U.S. “Let me tell you,” the New York attorney said, “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” The ACLU called this comment “uniquely terrifying” because of these agencies’ enormous power. 3, 2017 - 17 days before Trump’s inauguration - Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer said on MSNBC that the president-elect was “really dumb” to lambaste national security officials. ![]() spying on allies and their leaders because he was so worried about “a backlash from national security agencies” - an ominous observation that didn’t make the headlines it should have.Īnd in a comment that was astoundingly prescient, on Jan. In 2014, for example, The New York Times reported President Barack Obama was struggling to respond to an international firestorm over U.S. No such scandals have emerged since then, but there are hints of deep friction. (Nixon didn’t go public with the Pentagon’s treachery because he knew it gave him a tool to coerce the Joint Chiefs.) That spy, Navy stenographer Charles Radford, stole thousands of top-secret documents from the office of then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger. Rather incredibly, the Joint Chiefs of Staff placed a spy in Richard Nixon’s White House in 1970-71 because they were so worried about the most independent commander-in-chief they had ever seen. policies that they wanted a new president by any means necessary. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, carefully examined the possibility that national security agencies were among those so upset with U.S. The Warren Commission, which investigated John F. Dwight Eisenhower, a former five-star general, used his final speech as president in 1961 to say the power of the “military industrial complex” was a threat to democracy. What also makes dismissiveness of the deep state laughable is U.S. The national media accepted this characterization without push-back - even though the New York Post report had built on a 2019 New Yorker story about Hunter Biden’s foreign deal-making and “tumultuous” lifestyle. The statement depicted an accurate New York Post report detailing Hunter Biden’s sordid personal life - and, much more seriously, his coarse influence-peddling to foreign business interests when his father was vice president - as “Russian interference” designed to help Trump win a second term. ![]() senior intelligence officials, to Joe Biden’s immense benefit, three weeks before the election - should confirm the deep state theory beyond any doubt. The continuing drip-drip-drip of details about the October 2020 statement - signed without any corroborating evidence by 51 former U.S. ![]() At this point, how anyone disputes this claim with a straight face is beyond me. They argue that - however one feels about Donald Trump - there is no question that he is a target of the “deep state,” an informal alliance of national security officials convinced Trump is dangerous. On the left, the honesty shortage is on greatest display in the harsh derision that greets reporting by award- winning liberal journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. At least a large chunk of the right - starting with the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal - knows this is posturing and pandering. But to see Fox News pundits claim that COVID-19 was and is mostly hype - after the deaths of more than 1.1 million Americans and when up to 35 million more face potentially debilitating “long COVID” - is stunning. Solid cases can be made that schools were closed too long, that some crackdowns violated religious freedoms, and that too many people wouldn’t even discuss the “lab leak” theory of COVID-19’s origins and were too quick to tarnish people who offered these critiques. On the right, the most obvious need for institutional media honesty has to do with COVID-19. They’ll just be replaced by others ready to offer shaky claims as factual gospel. The firings of MAGA propagandist Tucker Carlson and loopy lefty Don Lemon change nothing. In 2023, the need for honesty-first media companies is stronger than ever.
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