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[Thread] A few quick thoughts on the Trump admin's flailing on North Korea - I'll skip over the we-told-you-so part... 1/
No one should be surprised that Kim Yong Chol is obstructionist - the dude is responsible for sinking the Cheonan, shelling YP-do, and the Sony hack. Thug doesn't even begin to describe.... 2/
Any illusion that Ri Yong Ho is the better alternative, though, just shows how much these guys are flailing. Ri has NO power in the DPRK system - so you may get a more amenable negotiator, but he won't be able to get anything done internally. 3/
But the reality is that, after going straight to a summit, and coming away with it with no specifics on timeline or process, Kim's regime has zero incentive to deal with anyone below the leader level. 4/
Meanwhile, not only are we not getting anything on denuke, but pressure on the North is all but gone - and that's not bad just for leverage, but unenforced sanctions increase the proliferation risk. 5/
It's also clear they have no plan B. And that should make us all worried. 6/
Trump's apparent surprise at all of this is a clear illustration of the real dangers of folks around him enabling him. This was all entirely predictable and avoidable. End.
Thread by @rosenbergerlm: "A few quick thoughts on the Trump admin's flailing on North Korea - I'll skip over the we-told-you-so part... 1/ washingtonpost.com/world/na […]"
No one should be surprised that Kim Yong Chol is obstructionist - the dude is responsible for sinking the Cheonan, shelling YP-do, and the Sony hack. Thug doesn't even begin to describe.... 2/
Any illusion that Ri Yong Ho is the better alternative, though, just shows how much these guys are flailing. Ri has NO power in the DPRK system - so you may get a more amenable negotiator, but he won't be able to get anything done internally. 3/
But the reality is that, after going straight to a summit, and coming away with it with no specifics on timeline or process, Kim's regime has zero incentive to deal with anyone below the leader level. 4/
Meanwhile, not only are we not getting anything on denuke, but pressure on the North is all but gone - and that's not bad just for leverage, but unenforced sanctions increase the proliferation risk. 5/
It's also clear they have no plan B. And that should make us all worried. 6/
Trump's apparent surprise at all of this is a clear illustration of the real dangers of folks around him enabling him. This was all entirely predictable and avoidable. End.
Thread by @rosenbergerlm: "A few quick thoughts on the Trump admin's flailing on North Korea - I'll skip over the we-told-you-so part... 1/ washingtonpost.com/world/na […]"
This is the extraordinary 30-hour assassination mission to Salisbury that Britain believes was carried out by members of Putin's feared military intelligence service specially trained to hunt down and punish traitors.
A team of up to four spies including a woman are claimed to have been sent to murder double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia - two agents to carry and administer the Novichok and two more as back up in case their comrades fell ill or failed.
Numerous security sources say the hit squad was probably made up of existing or former GRU agents not known to MI6 who may even have followed Yulia from Moscow to London on March 3.
by Garry Kasparov ...
On Thursday, the news broke that President Trump has invited Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the White House, proving once more that Trump has an unparalleled ability to surprise. It’s like inviting the man who burglarized your house, just in case he forgot to swipe any of the fine silver.
It also illustrates the scandal-driven dynamic of the Trump administration: No outrage is so bad that it cannot be driven from the headlines by an even worse one.
Still, it is important not to lose track of what is causing this desperation. The investigation into the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 election continues to heat up, with a dozen new indictments of Russian military intelligence operatives by special counsel Robert Mueller. An alleged Russian undercover agent has been charged with attempting to influence U.S. politics, including extensive connections with the National Rifle Association.
These are acts of foreign aggression, direct attacks on the integrity of the American political system. Call it hybrid war or whatever you like, but a war is what it is. Putin understood this many years ago and has been investing heavily in the weapons with which this new type of war is fought: propaganda, cyberwarfare, supporting extremists on all sides, and dividing allies.
That his targets are still arguing about what to call it instead of fighting back is why Putin has had such success.
So it’s an odd time for the U.S. to be rolling out the red carpet for Putin, who directs these actions and is surely plotting more. Perhaps like any good real-estate agent, Trump just wants to give Putin a personal tour of the house he purchased online. It’s hard to imagine any legitimate reason for such a scandalous invitation, especially after the debacle of their summit last week in Helsinki.
As has already been written in the annals of ignominy, Monday, Trump had a private meeting with Putin and then joined him in the most disturbing press conference spectacle most of us have ever seen. Trump’s subservient display has been well-described already, so I won’t waste time detailing how the American President presented the Kremlin line better than Putin himself.
I’ve spent many years countering Kremlin propaganda that tries to put America and other free world nations on the same ethical plane as Putin’s murderous and repressive mafia state. “There is no good or evil,” it goes. “We all do bad things, so don’t judge. Let’s do business and forget about democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”
Listening to the U.S. President make such moral equivalence arguments — standing next to a KGB-trained dictator, no less — was infuriating and heartbreaking.
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Slip Through ... LMAO ...
[Thread] An important takeaway from the Carter Page FISA documents released today: They prove without a shadow of a doubt that @DevinNunes lied about the FISA warrant to try to discredit the Russia probe. And they also prove that @RepAdamSchiff told the truth.
Thread by @RVAwonk: "An important takeaway from the Carter Page FISA documents released today: They prove without a shadow of a doubt that @DevinNunes lied about […]"
Thread by @RVAwonk: "An important takeaway from the Carter Page FISA documents released today: They prove without a shadow of a doubt that @DevinNunes lied about […]"
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Michiko Kakutani, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, sometimes acerbic former New York Times book critic — in other words, the kind of voice that 41 percent of Americans love to hate — has a new book out called The Death of Truth in which she amplifies the common laments of our time, that President Trump is, among other things “a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery and tyrannical impulses (not to mention someone who consumes as many as a https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/12/12/trump-reportedly-drinks-12-cans-of-diet-coke-each-day-is-that-healthy/?utm_term=.fae91a10e6c9 (dozen Diet Cokes a day)).”
Kakutani chronicles the 45th president’s blatant disregard for facts but, like the rest of us, doesn’t seem to have a solution. She did collect this anecdote, however, which I think gets to the essence of how the Trump presidency manages to be both an utter failure and — on his terms, anyway — a rip-roaring success at the very same time.
Precise words, like facts, mean little to Trump, as interpreters, who struggle to translate his grammatical anarchy, can attest. Chuck Todd, the anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press, observed that after several of his appearances as a candidate Trump would lean back in his chair and ask the control booth to replay his segment on a monitor – without sound: “He wants to see what it all looked like. He will watch the whole thing on mute.”
Whether you believe Putin really has some kind of compromising material to make Trump do his bidding or if Trump is simply being nice to people who partially helped get him elected, or if you somehow still think, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that all this is much ado about nothing, the fact is President Putin is a very experienced former KGB officer. He has both the know-how and the intelligence to carry out very far-sighted and ingenious operations. We don’t know his endgame and neither do we know how much of his KGB training he still employs, but in light of current events, there may be a way for us to get a deeper understanding by studying the words of Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, a former KGB agent who defected to Canada in 1970.
In 1984, Bezmenov gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin from which much can be learned today. His most chilling point was that there’s a long-term plan put in play by Russia to defeat America through psychological warfare and “demoralization”. It’s a long game that takes decades to achieve but it may already be bearing fruit.
Bezmenov made the point that the work of the KGB mainly does not involve espionage, despite what our popular culture may tell us. Most of the work, 85% of it, was “a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare.”
What does that mean? Bezmenov explained that the most striking thing about ideological subversion is that it happens in the open as a legitimate process. “You can see it with your own eyes,” he said. The American media would be able to see it, if it just focused on it.
Here’s how he further defined ideological subversion:
“What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”
Bezmenov described this process as “a great brainwashing” which has four basic stages. ...
The first stage is called “demoralization” which takes from 15 to 20 years to achieve. …
Once demoralization is completed, the second stage of ideological brainwashing is “destabilization”. During this two-to-five-year period, asserted Bezmenov, what matters is the targeting of essential structural elements of a nation: economy, foreign relations, and defense systems. …
The third stage would be “crisis”. It would take only up to six weeks to send a country into crisis, explained Bezmenov. The crisis would bring “a violent change of power, structure, and economy” and will be followed by the last stage, "normalization." That’s when your country is basically taken over, living under a new ideology and reality. …
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