"A Hall of Smoke and Mirrors"
by Jim Kunstler
"If the drawn-out election melodrama were a movie, think: 'Seven Days in May' meets 'Six Days in October' meet 'Burn After Reading.' You get a nice serving of treason in high places with a side-dish of Cuban Missile Crisis end-of-the-world angst, and for dessert, a comic fiasco of bumbling government depravity. The Democrats, you understand, are the party of chaos, yet President Trump’s attempt to impose order on the scene has the quality of clown car driving to put out a fire.
It’s almost impossible to see through the smoke-and-mirrors of all news media. The mainstream, left-leading media won’t cover, or even pursue, legitimate news stories that counter its precooked, self-serving narratives. On the other hand, much of the news on the Right seems to emanate from TinFoilHatLand. Fact and emotion corrupt each other until truth itself is cancelled, disgraced, and deplatformed. Meanwhile, authority hides offstage wringing its hands, trying to appear impartial but powerless.
Case in point: Mr. Barr, the Attorney General, who told the Associated Press on Tuesday, “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Playing Games at a Crucial Moment in Political History: A curious remark, with all the weight of Justice Department authority, in a week that featured many broadcast spectacles of sworn testimony of ballot fraud before swing state committees plus videotape of vote-counting irregularities vividly in action. Perhaps Mr. Barr is just stalling so as to not taint whatever case Mr. Trump’s lawyers bring before the Supreme Court. But Mr. Barr must also be implying that his FBI - the investigative arm of his DOJ - suffers epic incompetence with a tinge of malice.
Of course, that state-of-things has been obvious for four years in the long, dirty epic of RussiaGate - another enormous, legitimacy-killing mess that Mr. Barr has appeared reluctant to resolve, even though he anointed U.S. Attorney John Durham a “special prosecutor” this week. Since his appointment two years ago, Mr. Barr has expressed more than once in formal speeches his keen concern for institutional integrity, yet he appears to be playing games with it at a crucial moment in political history.
Then there was the weird event on Wednesday in Alpharetta, Georgia, featuring freelance lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood before a so-called rally, at which they told the rowdy crowd to boycott the January Senatorial runoff election – say, what…? Do they really want both Republican candidates to lose, handing the Senate to the Democrats?
What’s the Strategy? There was a lot of whooping and hollering, though Miz Powell seemed a little unnerved by the lack of decorum. One infers that they’re angry at Republican candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue for not taking a public stand on the Georgia voting mischief. And especially for not rebuking Republican Governor Brian Kemp and SoS Brad Raffensperger, who failed to do anything about all that in the month following the election. But, really, what did it serve their case to go down that rabbit hole?
The bigger questions for Mr. Wood and Miz Powell surround what kind of evidence they will bring into a courtroom. Miz Powell, especially, because of her relationship with General Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, appears to have inside Department of Defense (DOD) information that goes deep into the Dominion vote tabulation company’s origins, history, and abnormal activities in the 2020 election. That includes the seizure of Dominion servers at the giant U.S. military complex outside Frankfurt, Germany, where the CIA maintains its chief cyberwarfare IT center outside the USA.
Martial Law? General Flynn has been bottled up since 2017 in a corrupt prosecution eventually dropped by the DOJ, but stalled for half a year by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan even after he was ordered by the DC Circuit to dismiss the case. But now General Flynn has been liberated by presidential pardon to speak and act, and he’s doing both in startling terms. On Wednesday, he joined with retired three-star general Thomas McInerney in calling for the president to declare martial law in order to use military tribunals to investigate and prosecute treason in the election.
They’re not the only ones chattering about that. They allege that Dominion Systems - which is not an American-owned company - invited meddling by several foreign nations and, in fact, enabled it through connections to the Internet. There is evidence that Chinese companies linked to the CCP are majority investors in the holding company out of Switzerland, UBS Securities, that owns Dominion. And lurking in the background of that is the evidence exposed from Hunter Biden’s laptop, of multi-million dollar deals for the Biden Family to represent Chinese companies affiliated with China’s Intel service.
Outlandish? Is it outlandish to wonder if Joe Biden is a national security risk? Is it, at least, worth looking into, considering the evidence trail? Many people who read and view only the leftish mainstream news media, may know nothing about Hunter B’s laptop and the tales it told because social media blacked out all the news about it and the mainstream media went along with the blackout.
Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave $350-million to a “safe elections” project run by the non-profit Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), that was chiefly active in setting up Democratic vote-harvesting operations. Could he be liable for prosecution in enabling ballot fraud? Has the FBI asked him any questions? Another story ‘out there’ says that behind the election hijinks a war is underway between the Defense Department and the CIA.
Power Struggle: On Wednesday, acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller announced that all special operations run by the CIA would henceforward report to the Secretary of Defense. In effect, the President has ordered the dismantling of the CIA’s troublemaking capabilities, reducing the agency to the task of intel analysis. This means, for instance, ending the CIA’s ability to foment “color revolutions” (coups d’état) in foreign lands - with the implication that irregularities around the Dominion System may have amounted to an attempted color revolution in the USA.
Is it worth wondering whether former CIA Director John Brennan, who was probably an architect of RussiaGate, was involved in any of the election ops? If the FBI won’t question him about it, who will? (Answer: The Department of Defense.) Ditto Gina Haspel, current CIA Director. After all, what were the Dominion servers doing at the CIA’s server farm in Germany?
Events are moving quickly under the plodding surface of the ongoing swing state hearings, which are largely concerned with on-site mail-in ballot fraud shenanigans. Will the Supreme Court take a case in the few days left before the state vote certification deadline next Tuesday? Will Mr. Trump intervene with some extraordinary measure - martial law, the Insurrection Act? - to actually abort the election and bring about some kind of do over? Will the country survive its own feckless inability to hold a credible vote? Stand by with me on all that."
