"Wag The Dog, 2020s Edition"
by Addison Wiggin
“What difference does it make if it’s true?”
– Quote
"What a treat! This week availed us to a whole array of “wag the dog” scenarios in the news. "Wag the Dog," if you remember, was a satirical black comedy produced and directed by Baltimore’s own Barry Levinson. It was written by the playwright David Mamet, and stars Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro among a cast of up and comers. The film fictitiously relates the story of a “spin doctor” and a Hollywood producer who fabricate a war in Albania to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. Ultimately, "Wag The Dog" is a satire about the “office behind the Oval office.”
Un-serendipitously, the film was released on Christmas Day in 1997 – one month before then-president Bill Clinton was caught trying to launder Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. “There’s always been a relationship between Hollywood and politics and we wanted to have some fun with it,” Jane Rosenthal, who produced the film with star Robert De Niro, told Vanity Fair on the 25th anniversary of the film’s release. “But as proud as I am of the movie, it makes me very sad that you couldn’t even make up some of the shit that’s going on right now.”
The Biden administration was all too happy, yesterday, to pounce on news about the death of Putin’s political adversary Alexy Nevaly. The President declared it was “yet more proof of Putin’s brutality.” Navalny’s death “underscores the weakness and rot” of Putin’s system, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. Vice President Kamala Harris expressed her “sorrow and outrage” in a private meeting with Navalny’s widow, the White House released.
What are the spin doctors worried about now? Where to start, eh?
The obvious “scandal” the White House would want to distract from voters’ view from today is the Commander-in-Chief’s pitched battle with his own party… and his grasp of reality. Take, for example, the special counsel’s report heard round the world. Robert Hur taking pity on president Biden, forgoing criminal charges for steali… er, storing classified documents in his garage, because he’s “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” Even the Economist took notice and deigned to write “the man supposed to stop Donald Trump is an unpopular 81-year old. In failing to look past Joe Biden, Democrats have shown ‘cowardice and complacency’.”
Tucker Carlson didn’t help. He added insult to injury by allowing Putin to declare he didn’t think Biden was in charge at the White House anyway. Putin:
PUTIN: “We’re convinced Biden is not running the country. Let’s say we have good sources that confirm that but it’s plain for anyone to see for themselves. The U.S. has now entered into a dark period. It has unaccountable leadership.”
And:PUTIN: “Joe Biden may not even be aware of what’s going on. He may not understand the level of sanctions thrown at Russia. Who put those sanctions together? Those are our adversaries…. The elites have deserted you.” Carlson’s interview, in fact, combined both questions – Biden’s senility and the “shadow state” puppet show – and put them front and center for your attention.
As if that wasn’t enough, the apparatchiks convened at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. also had to contend with an exposé of new evidence regarding their own skulduggery leading up to Trump’s successful 2016 bid: Russia-gate. “It was all a lie,” independent journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi wrote in the online publication Public, exhibiting exhaustive research they’ve been doing for 8 years.
“The Trump-Russia scandal made its formal launch on January 6th, 2017, when the office of the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper published what’s called an “Intelligence Community Assessment,” or “ICA,” as it’s universally known in Washington. “Release of the ICA dominated headlines, fixed Donald Trump in the minds of millions of Americans as a Manchurian candidate controlled by Vladamir Putin, and upended his in-coming administration. “The report declared that Russia and Putin interfered in the 2016 presidential election to ‘denigrate’ Hillary Clinton and ‘harm her electability,’ thanks to their ‘clear’ preference for President-elect [Donald] Trump.”
“It was powerful stuff. And it was dead wrong…” The Russiagate “conspiracy” was meant to show that Russians wanted Trump to get elected to the presidency because Trump and Putin were buddies. The opposite is, in fact, true.
First, the Russians weren’t spying on Trump at all. It was the CIA and other members of the “Five Eyes” – the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand – the countries with which the intelligence community shared intel openly.
Second, the Russians actually preferred that Hillary Clinton win the election in 2016, because she was a known entity and represented continuity with the prior Obama group of White House occupants.
In a livestream webcast aired at 4:00 p.m. yesterday, Taibbi exhibited exactly how Lesley Stahl and the CBS flagship news show "60 Minutes" still hasn't corrected its infamous “eye-roll” over surveillance of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. In preparation for the webcast, Taibbi wrote on his own page on Substack:
"The tale of improper CIA and FBI surveillance mixed with manufactured intelligence has been in the ether since late 2017 and early 2018. Then he listed “just a few of the names who reported stories in this direction over the years, in some cases day after day on broadcast shows. An attentive reader will notice nearly everyone on the list has been denounced at some point by the mainstream commentators who got this story horribly wrong.” The list included 11 high-profile journalists who were branded as “conspiracy theorists” and “whack-jobs,” many of whom lost their jobs. Some notable names who got smeared for writing or talking about the truth: the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo and realclearinvestigations.com’s Aaron Mate.
Taibbi also produced facsimiles of the documents that show how the intelligence community of the West was, in fact, spying on the Trump campaign in 2016. As well as recording conversations with members of Trump’s campaign without their knowledge.“On their YouTube page, 60 Minutes,” Taibbi writes, “still hasn’t corrected its headline: ‘President Trump repeats unsupported claim about spying.’ The ‘money’ exchange between Donald Trump and host Lesley Stahl:
TRUMP: They spied on my campaign, Leslie.
STAHL: There’s no real evidence of that.
TRUMP: Of course there is.
STAHL: No.
TRUMP: It’s all over the place.
STAHL: Sir…
TRUMP: Leslie, they spied on my campaign and they got caught.
STAHL: Can I say something? This is 60 Minutes and we can’t put on things we can't verify.
“This is 60 Minutes and we can’t put on things that we can’t verify!” continues Taibbi, “Stahl said this a year after the publication of Barack Obama appointee and Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Trump-Russia investigation that described how the FBI used ‘intrusive techniques,’ like having informants “interact and consensually record multiple conversations” with Trump aides “both during and after the time they were working for the Trump campaign.” That Horowitz report used the term CHS, or “confidential human source” - also known as an informant, also known as a spy - 1,122 times!”
Shellenberger, Gutenberg, and Taibbi are all well known for defending free speech during the crackdown and tech collusion during the pandemic. Taibbi’s project The Twitter Files blew the lid of the White House’s attempts to censor ‘tweet’s that spoke out against the mRNA vaccines and mask mandates.
Ultimately, the White House’s attempts to censor social media landed them in court. The lawsuit Missouri v. Biden, which prohibits members of Biden’s staff from contacting the major social media companies directly, is making its way to the Supreme Court. The furor also enticed Elon Musk to spend $44 Billion dollars of his “own money” to acquire Twitter and rename America’s Town Square “X.”
No doubt, during this election year, 2024, the White House would much prefer a media war against Albania (or Iran) trumped up by Hollywood than have to deal with the fallout of organized collusion between the intelligence community and the Democratic Party coming to light now. So it goes..."
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Full screen recommended.
The Dave Cullen Show, 2/17/26
"Wag The Dog" (1997) Review
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