The Democratic Reconquista

The Reconquista (Portuguese and Spanish for "reconquest") was a period in the history of the Iberian Peninsula of about 780 years between the Islamic conquest of Hispania in 711, the expansion of the Christian kingdoms throughout Iberia, and the fall of the last Islamic kingdom in Granada in 1492.

The Arab explosion in the 7th century was fueled by belief in divine favor.  The united Arab armies conquered the world from Spain to India, marching confidently into battle with the backing of the one true God.  Their religious identity solidified in the century following the life of Muhammad.  From my perspective in the 21st century, the Arab rule in Spain was undergirded by fanatical religious beliefs.

The Christians of Spain and Portugal sought to reclaim their lands from these foreign conquerors.  To do so, they sharpened their own religious fanaticism.  The completion of the reconquista in 1492 coincided with the peak of the Spanish Inquisition.  Spain had united in spirit to defeat the Moors, but at the cost of freedom of religion for others such as the Jews.  Truth and rationality were less important than unity under the Christian identity.

Something similar is happening today in the United States.  The traditional Christian / white male led community has united under the banner of the Republican party and backed the more diverse Democratic faction into a corner.  The Democrats are now demanding unity, and are not tolerating dissent within their ranks. 

Some examples of such intolerance:

• Planet of the Censoring Humans

The campaign to remove Michael Moore’s new documentary from the Internet – led by Moore’s erstwhile progressive “allies” – is a significant advance in the censorship revolution... 

Environmentalists denounced the film as riddled with “lies” and “misinformation,” claiming among other things that Moore used old data to discredit green technology. A campaign to remove the film from circulation immediately took shape... 

The removal of a film by Moore – a heavily-credentialed figure long revered by the liberal mainstream – takes place amid a dramatic acceleration of such speech-suppression incidents, many connected to the coronavirus disaster... 

One problem is the so-called “reputable” fact-checking authorities many platforms are relying upon have terrible factual histories themselves. There’s an implication that “misinformation” by foreign or independent actors is somehow more dangerous than broadly-disseminated official deceptions about U.S. misbehavior abroad, or manufactured scandals like Russiagate. We now expect libertarian or socialist pages to be zapped at any minute, but none of the outlets which amplified the bogus Steele dossier have been put in Internet timeout... 

In Planet of the Humans, Moore and Gibbs make a complex argument. In essence, they charge that people have become dependent upon the high-consumption lifestyles made possible by fossil fuels, and that it’s our addiction to that way of life, as much as to fossil fuels themselves, that is driving humanity off a “cliff.” ... 

The new take is that episodes like Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the Charlottesville tragedy, a cascade of racially-motivated mass shootings and cases of police violence, and more recently the coronavirus disaster, have all proven that incorrect speech can no longer be tolerated. It’s now understood the consequences are simply too severe, especially for disadvantaged communities. 

In the multitudinous critiques of Planet of the Humans, a creepy kind of rhetorical intersectionality is observed. Moore’s film is consistently depicted as not merely misinformation, conspiracy theory, or Trumpian hate speech, but somehow an interlocking combination of all of these things. Critics all seem to have gotten the same memo... 

With Planet of the Humans, we’ve come full circle. Now liberal critics are deriding all this tree-hugging as not just misanthropy, but supportive of racism and even genocide, using language that blows away Bush-era conservative rhetoric. 

“Protecting the trees has almost always come with a judgment about which kind and color of humans they need protection from,” wrote Kate Aronoff at the New Republic. She added, “Gibbs does not appear to be a white nationalist himself, but his film echoes their approach.” 

In The Nation, which lists Moore on its masthead as a contributing editor, Fox wrote a piece denouncing the film as not only “racist,” but, potentially, an “incitement to eco-fascist population controls.” 

Leah Stokes on Vox wrote the film’s takes on the dangers of overpopulation had “more in common with anti-immigration hate groups than the progressive movement” and expressed hope the film would be “buried.” Gizmodo argued the film has “more than a whiff of eugenics and ecofascism… Who are we going to knock off or control for?”
Given that the primary criticism of Moore’s film is that it unfairly depicts people like McKibben as sellouts, it’s more than a little odd that the apparently serious return criticism is that Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs want to massacre nonwhite people. This would be laughable were it not for the fact that the campaign succeeded... 

Maybe Moore is wrong about the environmental movement, but these new suppression tactics are infinitely more dangerous than one movie ever could be, and progressives seem to have lost the ability to care. 

• Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties

Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of Miranda, and the use of never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer. 

Russiagate cases were often two-level offenses: factually bogus or exaggerated, but also indicative of authoritarian practices. Democrats and Democrat-friendly pundits in the last four years have been consistently unable to register objections on either front.

• Ghost of J. Edgar Haunts Flynn Investigation

I will venture to say that FBI “entrapment” type actions in manufacturing crimes, as was practiced on Flynn, got its early start as a more normalized standard procedure after 9-11 with Robert Mueller’s FBI gravitating to using con-artist type informants to infiltrate Muslim communities in order to identify, coerce and entrap the more emotionally vulnerable members into committing acts that the FBI could take credit for as “preventing” terrorism...

•  We Could All Be General Michael Flynn Tomorrow

In 2018, the Department of Justice initiated approximately 80,000 federal prosecutions. Two percent of these cases went to trial, with an 83 percent conviction rate. Of the remaining 98 percent of the cases, some 90 percent ended with the defendant pleading guilty; ... The plea process is so prevalent and pervasive in the U.S. Court system that in the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Missouri v. Frye, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, quoted a prominent law review article which concluded that “[Plea bargaining] is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system.”  

Federal prosecutors are equipped with a considerable range of legal weapons that can be used to compel confessions and discourage a jury trial, including charge-stacking (charging multiple criminal counts derived from a single act), mandatory-minimum sentences which eliminate discretion on the part of a sentencing judge, pretrial confinement, inordinately high bail, threats against friends and family, and the reality that any sentence handed down after trial will be substantially greater than one that could be reached via a plea bargain.  

The upside of such a process is a streamlined criminal justice system which places a premium on convictions and incarceration without the cost of a trial. The downside, however, is an unacceptably high rate of false confessions obtained by the plea deal process—the National Registry of Exonerations estimates that as many as 20 percent of all plea deal-related confessions are false. 

• A Newsweek Reporter Resigns, A Counter-Narrative Won’t Die

It is perhaps the least reported media scandal about the least reported international controversy in recent times—the resignation of Tareq Haddad, a well-regarded journalist from Newsweek, a mainstay of the mainstream media. 

At issue was what he said regarding the magazine’s refusal to cover the scandal unfolding within the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Evidence has been building for some time that the OPCW cooked the books in its investigation of alleged chemical weapons use in the Syrian town of Douma on April 7, 2018. These allegations served as the justification for a subsequent joint U.S.-U.K.-France attack against suspected chemical weapons targets inside Syria, despite the fact that the OPCW had yet to inspect the Douma location, let alone issue a report on its findings... 

Under normal circumstances, the leaked documents and first-hand testimony of a whistleblower like “Alex” would have garnered the attention of the mainstream media..  The OPCW whistleblower scandal has all the elements of a blockbuster—heroes, villains, scandal, lies, and cover-up. But fact-based truth is no longer the fuel of the media business that modern journalism is supposed to sustain, especially when the truth can so easily be fobbed off as “pro-Assad” or “pro-Russia.”

• All the Adam Schiff Transcripts
  Newly released documents show he knew all along that there was no proof of Russia-Trump collusion.

The question we’d ask our friends in the media is when are they going to stop playing the fool by putting him on the air? Mr. Schiff is a powerful figure with access to secrets that the rest of us don’t have and can’t check. He misled the country repeatedly on an issue that consumed American politics. 

President Trump often spreads falsehoods and invents facts, but at least he’s paid a price for it in media criticism and public mistrust. An industry of media fact checkers is dedicated to parsing his every word. As for Mr. Schiff, no one should ever believe another word he says.

• The NY Times Used to Correct Its Whoppers. But Not These Two. Here's Why.

A fuller accounting by the Times is especially necessary because the media’s pushing of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories was central to an unprecedented and possibly criminal effort to subvert or remove a president under false pretenses. Unless the Times and other sources come clean about who was feeding them misleading and partisan information, we may never understand this momentous chapter of history...

It is clear now that a prime engine of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory was the opposition research commissioned from the Washington firm Fusion GPS, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The so-called Steele dossier – named for the former British spy who helped compile it, Christopher Steele – included a range of wild tales that deeply influenced federal investigations, including kinkiness with Russian prostitutes and cloak-and-dagger intrigue in Prague. While the FBI’s close and credulous relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS has been exposed in a series of news and official reports, media outlets have not been forthcoming about their interactions with the opposition research firm and how and why they followed its lead into the dead end of collusion... 

• Backing the Wrong Horseman

Nobody knows how many people died as a result of the UK/US Coalition of Death led destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, by proxy, Syria and Yemen...   

The neo-con drive to dominate the Middle East, in alliance with Saudi Arabia and Israel, has caused an apocalyptic level of death and destruction. It really is very difficult indeed to quantify the number of people killed as a direct result of the policy of “liberal intervention” in these countries. Bombing people into freedom has collateral damage. There are also the vast unintended consequences. The destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria launched a wave of refugee migration which led to politicial instability throughout Europe and contributed to, among many other consequences, Brexit. 

For the purposes of argument, I am going to put an extremely conservative figure of 5 million on the number of people who died as a result of Western military intervention, direct or proxy, in the Middle East.

Now compare that to the worldwide death toll from coronavirus: 220,000. Let me say that again:  Western aggressive wars to coronavirus: 5,000,000 : 220,000. 

• The Terrifying Rise of the Zombie State Narrative

The ruling Establishment has learnt a profound lesson from the debacle over Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. The lesson they have learnt is not that it is wrong to attack and destroy an entire country on the basis of lies. They have not learnt that lesson despite the fact the western powers are now busily attacking the Iraqi Shia majority government they themselves installed, for the crime of being a Shia majority government. 

No, the lesson they have learnt is never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong. They see the ghost-like waxen visage of Tony Blair wandering around, stinking rich but less popular than an Epstein birthday party, and realise that being widely recognised as a lying mass murderer is not a good career choice. They have learnt that the mistake is for the Establishment ever to admit the lies...

There is no doubt that Douma was a false flag. The documentary and whistleblower evidence from the OPCW is overwhelming and irrefutable...

None of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, the Guardian nor CNN – all of which reported the Douma chemical attack very extensively as a real Syrian government atrocity, and used it to editorialise for western military intervention in Syria – none of them has admitted they were wrong. None has issued any substantive retraction or correction. None has reported in detail and without bias on the overwhelming evidence of foul play within the OPCW. 

The official UK, US, French and Spanish government line, and the line of the billionaire and state owned media, continues to be that Douma was a Syrian government chemical weapons attack on civilians. They intend, aided and abetted by their vast online propaganda operations, to brazen out the lie. 

In the next instalment I shall consider how the Establishment is brazening out similar lies on the Russophobe agenda, and sticking to factually debunked narratives on the DNC and Podesta emails, on the Steele Dossier and on the Skripals. 

I could go on and on (as I have in previous posts) -- truth does not matter so much as unity in defeating the Republicans.  Perhaps this is an acceptable tradeoff?  I'm pretty sure that's what most Democrats believe.

Significance of Trump/Putin Collusion Saga

I'm not surprised to hear the opinion that the Trump/Putin story is "very old news", and thus presumably not worth discussing.  I feel differently, as here is my understanding of where this story stands.

1. U.S. intelligence agencies began investigating Trump's ties to Russia in 2016.  They did this my using U.S. "assets" (people who work with U.S. intelligence agencies as business partners rather than employees) who pretend to be connected to Putin.  Joseph Mifsud is the premier example of this, but most if not all of the Russian contacts mentioned in the Mueller report fall into this category.
2. The Hillary Clinton presidential campaign hires a firm to collect opposition research on Donald Trump.  The firm employs Christopher Steele who creates a dossier full of lurid tales and shady connections between Trump and Putin/Russia.  We now know that this opposition research was false. This is not disputed by anyone and as a result Mueller's team didn't even investigate the Steele Dossier.
3. The Steele dossier was leaked to the media before the 2016 election as "intelligence".  It was given tremendous publicity and credibility before and after the election by the mainstream media, and was the basis for wiretapping members of Trump's team and warning the country about Russian interference in the election and extensive misinformation from Adam Schiff, Brennan, and other politicians, media figures, and former intelligence agents / employees.
4. After years of investigation, Mueller's team uncovered no sign Russian collusion.  Rather than admit this, the Democrats, the mainstream press, and the involved intelligence personnel accused William Barr of lying about the findings.  They also have implied that there really was collusion but that Trump obstructed justice.
5. Another year has passed, and the debunking of the Trump/Russia collusion narrative has continued as additional facts have come out.   The most important of these was the Inspector General's report in December, but the recent dropping of charges also fits.
6. The Democrats and mainstream media have doubled down on the debunked narrative instead of admitting that mistakes were made.  For example, the New York Times recently (May 9) editorialized on William Barr’s Perversion of Justice.  Quoting:

Last year, barely a month after he was confirmed to his post, he stood before the American people and misrepresented the contents of the long-awaited report by Robert Mueller, the special counsel who investigated ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in 2016.
The report itself, at 448 pages, documented extensive evidence of those ties, as well as multiple instances of lying and obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump and other top government officials. Mr. Barr’s four-page summary claimed the opposite — that Mr. Mueller had found no collusion or obstruction of justice. Mr. Mueller protested, and yet weeks passed before Americans could see the report themselves and discover just how much Mr. Barr had twisted its findings to benefit Mr. Trump.

Short version:  Democrats paid intelligence operatives who invented story that Trump was treasonous.  The false stories were leaked to the media before the election and embellished by intelligence figures after Trump assumed the presidency, with continued"leaking" of false intelligence that Trump had been engaged in treasonous behavior.  The Democrats and mainstream media declared the treasonous accusations to be true and engaged in a multiyear investigation of the Trump Administration by the FBI.  When the accusations of treason or any sort of improper behavior with regard to Russia were found not to be true, the Democrats and mainstream refused to admit that they were wrong, but rather blamed Trump for obstruction of justice.  At present, they are attacking the Attorney General for daring to discuss what happened and how this combination of intelligence agencies working with one political party against the other is a threat to our democracy.

We have a constitutional crisis, and the NY Times is using Trump's alleged collusion with Russia (citing the Mueller Report), as evidence against the Attorney General.

Political Economy Musings

I wrote here about the political prospects for 2020 back on 10/2/2019.  I'd like to revisit a few of my observations / predictions from that time.

I think the Dems will nominate Warren, who is the only plausible candidate to bridge the Clinton-Sanders divide that plagues the party.  

I missed this one.  While I was correct that opposition to Sanders would stop him from getting the nomination, I overestimated the ability of Warren and the Democrats to bridge the gap.  Warren seems to have been taken out by the "centrists" who thought she was too radical.  She reacted by moving to the center and trying to draw contrasts between herself and Sanders.  As a result, Sanders supporters (such as myself) moved away from Warren, while the centrists stayed with the more status quo candidates.

Looking at this in more depth, it seems that I underestimated the inflexibility of the status quo.  Sanders' signature issue was Medicare for All, in the sense of a Canadian style single payer health care system.  This is very practical except to the degree which it would disrupt the vested interests in the healthcare industry.  The COVID-19 situation gives further clarity to the dysfunction of our current system, and the advantages of a Canadian type system.  The Bloombergs and Bidens of the Democratic party seem to be continuing down the wrong path.

On the other hand, not only Sanders but all the candidates were drifting far to the left before Bloomberg jumped in.  They were mostly in favor of forgiving student debt, going easy on illegal immigration, and supporting some sort of green new deal.  Conservatives such as Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper were among the first to drop out of the presidential race.  Future conservatives such as Pete Buttigieg were on the liberal side (e.g. Medicare for All) early in the campaign.

Bernie Sanders seemed to have the only coherent campaign, and the pushback was fierce.  In addition to the mainstream press which had been strongly against him in 2016, all the other Democratic candidates got the message that he was beyond the pale, as were his policies.  By the time of the crucial South Carolina and Super Tuesday primaries, the debate consensus had shifted to the attitude that Sanders was too much of a socialist too win the general election.  In about one week, he moved from being the overwhelming favorite to virtually all other candidates endorsing Biden.  The Democratic status quo held, although Biden was not the fresh face that many had hoped to see.

If the Democrats nominate a status quo figure such as Biden, Republicans will be in a better position to benefit from economic weakness. 

The economy has cratered, but due to natural disaster as opposed to manmade failure.  Trump is widely seen (correctly) as having bungled the response, so Biden has thus far not taken much heat as a symbol of the status quo.  Rather, Trump is a lightning rod for the status quo failures.  Democrats have been wise to keep Biden out of the spotlight, but this cannot continue through a presidential election.

The economy has cratered, but federal stimulus has poured in and the stock market has been resilient.  Uncertainty reigns, but most expect to see a return to the status quo prior to the pandemic.  Yet changes such as reduced economic globalization and increased labor power are likely to persist.  These factors point to higher prices, offset somewhat by a weak government and a weak economy.

I sense that the U.S. is desperate for a strong leader.  Sanders would have been a good leader, but hounded by all parts of the status quo.  Joe Biden is weak in that he is a figurehead or compromise candidate, and will be in a weak position if elected in my opinion.  I would expect a lot of infighting behind the scenes in a Biden administration.  Trump is weak, with little support from the establishment including the mainstream media.  There is something of a vacuum of leadership at the moment.

As much as I'd like a progressive like Sanders or FDR to be the strong president that people crave, it must be acknowledged that the Democratic party is moving in the opposite direction.  Many Dems now associate with CIA, FBI, and renewed cold war against Russia and China.  They are in lock step with the media to a frightening degree.  The stage is set for the mother of all negative presidential campaigns, as the Republicans have long been strong in this regard and Trump is a particularly savage negative campaigner.  The situation may get so ugly that we get some sort of military coup.

Unfortunately or fortunately depending upon your perspective, the U.S. military is much stronger at home than it is in its role as defender of the neoliberal empire around the world.  China and Russia are out of our control, as is much of the Middle East, where the U.S. has suffered a string of defeats, and Africa.  The U.S. military-intelligence-industrial establishment is likely to focus on the homefront, further marginalizing populists while at the same time enacting some populist reforms.

Only a firm right wing military type will be able to implement socialist reforms to our healthcare, legal, and political systems.  Such a figure will also curtail the culture wars in favor of patriotism and strict enforcement of select laws. 

How we get from here to there seems fairly straightforward, if impossible to predict with regard to details.  The Dems have already attempted to remove Trump via a couple of intelligence agency inspired investigations and charges of treason.  And the Dems demonstrated in the Democratic primaries that they will do whatever it takes to prevail.  But the Republicans have some weapons too, including Attorney General Barr and the truth with regard to the Russiagate offensive by the Dems.  With the Covid-19 uncertainly cancelling remaining primaries, it is not clear that the presidential campaign can go ahead on a business as usual basis.  The chances that Reps and Dems will agree on new rules to accommodate the virus without breaking down in partisan rancor are slight.   Biden is a mirror image of Trump, with allegations of sexual assault, lying pathologically, and poor mental acuity.  There is a need for someone at least moderately credible to take charge, and only a military type man would be acceptable to the powers that be.

With regard to the economy, chaos looms.  The political chaos described above is matched by the uncharted territory of the global economy.  Supply chains have been disrupted, unemployment is soaring, and there is no clear path to recovery.  Stay in cash and near cash equivalents for the time being.  When the coup has been accomplished and the new strongman allows markets to find their own way again, then will be the time to reinvest.

The center of U.S. politics has not held.  Trump was elected in 2016, and the status quo has continued to unravel since then.  Culture wars and identity politics have brought the Dems to the Biden candidacy, which would seem to be the end of that road.  Crumbling empire and domestic impotence make it inevitable that there will be a coup of one sort or another, and the democratic path for populist change is blocked. 

Russiagate Origins Revisited

On August 26, 2019, I wrote a post entitled What Was Russiagate All About?

Why was a special counsel appointed to investigate allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia?  And why were these baseless allegations taken so seriously by the mainstream press and Democratic politicians?  Why did the press, as well as Mueller himself, fail to acknowledge that the whole story was fabricated?

I just reread this post and my best guesses as to what happened seem to have been remarkably accurate (if I do say so myself).  One item to be added is that it now appears that Russian disinformation played a significant role in getting these investigations started.  Also, it appears that the FBI knew or was warned about this, but chose to ignore these facts.

Declassified Horowitz Footnotes Show Obama Officials Knew Steele Dossier Was Russian Disinformation Designed To Target Trump

Newly declassified footnotes from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December FBI report reveals that senior Obama officials, including members of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team knew the dossier compiled by a former British spy during the 2016 election was Russian disinformation to target President Donald Trump. 

Further, the partially declassified footnotes reveal that those senior intelligence officials were aware of the disinformation when they included the dossier in the Obama administration’s Intelligence Communities Assessment (ICA). 

As important, the footnotes reveal that there had been a request to validate information collected by British spy Christopher Steele as far back as 2015, and that there was concern among members of the FBI and intelligence community about his reliability. 

So the Russiagate investigation pursued by Democrats along with the mainstream media was based upon a combination of incompetence and political interference by the intelligence community.  The mainstream has refused to accept this however and was goaded into an impeachment trial by intelligence operatives working with colleagues in the "interagency".  Thus, the Russiagate investigation has metastasized into a cold civil war.

Media, Military Intelligence Complex, and Other Ramblings

A Letter from 2/22/2020

Greetings Fellow Citizens,

I was asked last night about my sources of news.  I mentioned a few (The Grayzone, Current Affairs, Consortium News, RealClearPolitics -- a news aggregator which includes a variety of sources including both Democratic and Republican leaning publications, i.e. Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, American Greatness, New York Times, TN Star, Fox News, TAP, The Hill, Foreign Affairs, Defense News, Fortune, Las Vegas Review Journal, Vox, RCP, Daily Caller, Washington Post, San Diego Union Tribune, ...).

But the issue when talking to skeptics such as most people I know is that news from little known sources is not convincing.  It's like trying to convince devout Christians that there are flaws in the Bible.  One way of dealing with such situations is to highlights inconsistencies in the mainstream media outlets.  That's one reason why I read the mainstream media, even though I feel that they often spin the news in favor of the vested interests.  If I can point out that Russiagate, for example, has been discredited by even the NY Times, then it carries more weight than if I tell you I get my news from Consortium News.

So here's one example from the NY Times, from December 11, 2019:  We Just Got a Rare Look at National Security Surveillance. It Was Ugly.  This was a report following the Inspector General (Michael Horowitz - a Democrat) report on the FISA authorized wiretapping of Trump associate Carter Page. 

The Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, and his team uncovered a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process in how the F.B.I. went about obtaining and renewing court permission under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.

But the inspector general found major errors, material omissions and unsupported statements about Mr. Page in the materials that went to the court. F.B.I. agents cherry-picked the evidence, telling the Justice Department information that made Mr. Page look suspicious and omitting material that cut the other way, and the department passed that misleading portrait onto the court.

To give just three examples:

First, when agents initially sought permission for the wiretap, F.B.I. officials scoured information from confidential informants and selectively presented portions that supported their suspicions that Mr. Page might be a conduit between Russia and the Trump campaign’s onetime chairman, Paul Manafort.

But officials did not disclose information that undercut that allegation — such as the fact that Mr. Page had told an informant in August 2016 that he “never met” or “said one word” to Mr. Manafort, who had never returned Mr. Page’s emails. Even if the investigators did not necessarily believe Mr. Page, the court should have been told what he had said.

Second, as the initial court order was nearing its expiration and law-enforcement officials prepared to ask the surveillance court to renew it, the F.B.I. had uncovered information that cast doubt on some of its original assertions. But law enforcement officials never reported that new information to the court.

Specifically, the application included allegations about Mr. Page contained in a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose research was funded by Democrats. In January 2017, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Steele’s own primary source, and he contradicted what Mr. Steele had written in the dossier.

The source for Mr. Steele may, of course, have been lying. But either way, officials should have flagged the disconnect for the court. Instead, the F.B.I. reported that its agents had met with the source to “further corroborate” the dossier and found him to be “truthful and cooperative,” leaving a misleading impression in renewal applications.

Finally, the report stressed Mr. Page’s long history of meeting with Russian intelligence officials. But he had also said that he had a relationship with the C.I.A., and it turns out that he had for years told the agency about those meetings — including one that was cited in the wiretap application as a reason to be suspicious of him.

Here's a piece I read by former U.K diplomat Craig Murray.  Murray goes to original source documents (e.g. reports by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons - OPCW).  The Terrifying Rise of the Zombie State Narrative.  In addition to referencing publicly available source documents, Murray includes consideration of OPCW whistleblowers who are not given space in the mainstream media, for the obvious reason that the whistleblower reports contradict the U.S. / British narrative that Russia and Assad used chemical weapons at Douma in Syria.

The ruling Establishment has learnt a profound lesson from the debacle over Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. The lesson they have learnt is not that it is wrong to attack and destroy an entire country on the basis of lies. They have not learnt that lesson despite the fact the western powers are now busily attacking the Iraqi Shia majority government they themselves installed, for the crime of being a Shia majority government.

No, the lesson they have learnt is never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong. They see the ghost-like waxen visage of Tony Blair wandering around, stinking rich but less popular than an Epstein birthday party, and realise that being widely recognised as a lying mass murderer is not a good career choice. They have learnt that the mistake is for the Establishment ever to admit the lies.

The Establishment had to do a certain amount of collective self-flagellation over the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, over which they precipitated the death and maiming of millions of people...

These situations are now avoided by the realisation of the security services that in future they just have to brazen it out. The simple truth of the matter – and it is a truth – is this. If the Iraq WMD situation occurred today, and the security services decided to brazen it out and claim that WMD had indeed been found, there is not a mainstream media outlet that would contradict them.

The security services outlet Bellingcat would publish some photos of big missiles planted in the sand. The Washington Post, Guardian, New York Times, BBC and CNN would republish and amplify these pictures and copy and paste the official statements from government spokesmen. Robert Fisk would get to the scene and interview a few eye witnesses who saw the missiles being planted, and he would be derided as a senile old has-been. Seymour Hersh and Peter Hitchens would interview whistleblowers and be shunned by their colleagues and left off the airwaves. Bloggers like myself would be derided as mad conspiracy theorists or paid Russian agents if we cast any doubt on the Bellingcat “evidence”. Wikipedia would ruthlessly expunge any alternative narrative as being from unreliable sources. The Integrity Initiative, 77th Brigade, GCHQ and their US equivalents would be pumping out the “Iraqi WMD found” narrative all over social media. Mad Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council would be banning dissenting accounts all over the place in his role as Facebook Witchfinder-General.

Does anybody seriously wish to dispute this is how the absence of Iraqi WMD would be handled today, 16 years on?

If you do wish to doubt this could happen, look at the obviously fake narrative of the Syrian government chemical weapons attacks on Douma. The pictures published on Bellingcat of improvised chlorine gas missiles were always obviously fake. Remember this missile was supposed to have smashed through ten inches of solid, steel rebar reinforced concrete (editor's note: there is a photo on linked website showing the missles).

As I reported back in May last year, that the expert engineers sent to investigate by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) did not buy into this is hardly surprising.

The highlights are:

“No nerve agents had been detected in environmental or bio samples”

“The experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure”

“The experts were also of the opinion that the victims were highly unlikely to have gathered in piles at the centre of the respective apartments, at such a short distance from an escape from any toxic chlorine gas to much cleaner air”.

 We see now how the OPCW managed to produce a report which was the opposite of the truth. Ian Henderson, the OPCW engineer who had visited the site and concluded that the “cylinder bombs” were fakes, had suddenly become excluded from the “fact finding mission” when it had been whittled down to a “core group” – excluding any engineers (and presumably toxicologists) who would seek to insert inconvenient facts into the report.

That the consequences of the fake Douma incident were much less far-reaching than they might have been, is entirely due (and I am sorry if you dislike this but it is true) to the good sense of Donald Trump. Trump is inclined to isolationism and the fake “Russiagate” narrative promoted by senior echelons of his security services had led him to be heavily sceptical of them. He therefore refused, against the united persuasion of the hawks, to respond to the Douma “attack” by more than quick and limited missile strikes. I have no doubt that the object of the false flag was to push the US into a full regime change operation, by falsifying a demonstration that a declared red line on chemical weapon use had been crossed.

There is no doubt that Douma was a false flag. The documentary and whistleblower evidence from the OPCW is overwhelming and irrefutable. In addition to the two whistleblowers reported extensively by Wikileaks and the Courage Foundation, the redoubtable Peter Hitchens has his own whistleblowers inside OPCW who may well be different persons. It is also great entertainment as well as enlightening to read Hitchens’ takedown of Bellingcat on the issue...

None of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, the Guardian nor CNN – all of which reported the Douma chemical attack very extensively as a real Syrian government atrocity, and used it to editorialise for western military intervention in Syria – none of them has admitted they were wrong. None has issued any substantive retraction or correction. None has reported in detail and without bias on the overwhelming evidence of foul play within the OPCW.

Those sources who do publish the truth – including the few outliers in mainstream media such as Peter Hitchens and Robert Fisk – continue to be further marginalised, attacked as at best eccentric and at worse Russian agents.

What we are seeing is the terrifying rise of the zombie state narrative in Western culture. It does not matter how definitively we can prove that something is a lie, the full spectrum dominance of the Establishment in media resources is such that the lie is impossible to kill off, and the state manages to implant that lie as the truth in the minds of a sufficient majority of the populace to ride roughshod over objective truth with great success. It follows in the state narrative that anybody who challenges the state’s version of truth is themselves dishonest or mad, and the state manages also to implant that notion into a sufficient majority of the populace.

These are truly chilling times.

I (Dan) remember the Douma incident at the time (April 7, 2018) as being highly suspicious.  The Syrian Army was just completing their defeat of Isis/Al Qaeda in southern Syria.  Everyone knew that the Syrians had won and Isis would be retreating.  It certainly seemed to me at the time that it's highly unlikely that Assad would bring out chemical weapons when the battle was already won.  Much more likely, the Isis/Al Qaeda rebels were on the brink of defeat and made a desperate false flag attempt to get the U.S. to intervene. 

Ah well, I could be wrong about all this.

A lot more follow up on our conversation last night.  I don't expect any of you to read this unless you are interested in knowing why I hold heretical (for Democrats) views regarding the role of the mainstream media, Democrats, and the intelligence community with regard to Trump's alleged collusion with Russia, and related threats to democracy.

Regarding the Stone prosecution -- Seeing Through the Lies – US Edition

To finish with Stone, the ludicrous vindictiveness of the prosecutors in pushing for a seven to nine year jail sentence for an offence that was really no more than wasting investigators’ time with his fanatasies, was rightly called out by Donald Trump. The notion that Roger Stone threatened witnesses is problematical. Randy Credico, the only person Stone was convicted of threatening, has written to the judge asking for Stone not to be jailed and making plain he did not feel threatened. He had known Stone for years and was used to his blustering talk, which Randy never took as intended to be a serious threat...

To maintain this stance in the face of all factual evidence requires great skill and dexterity from Guardian journalists. Fortunately for the Guardian it does not lack for fantasist Russophobe fabricators like Luke Harding or for more subtly corrupt spinners like David Smith, who last week wrote of Stone that “He was the sixth former Trump aide to be convicted in cases arising from the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.”

The oleaginous David Smith omitted to note what any half honest human being would consider a very pertinent fact – that not one of those convictions had anything at all to do with Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, being either entirely unrelated tax and corruption matters turned up while trawling, or as with Stone being questions of process. Stone’s case is unique in that not only did his conviction not relate to any Russian interference, it was for promoting precisely the same ludicrous fantasy that the Guardian is promoting. It was illegal for Stone to persist in telling his lies on oath; there is no legal bar to the Guardian promoting the same Trump/Wikileaks/Russia fantasy ad nauseam.

Yet we have the spectacle of Julian Assange standing before a judge facing extradition to the United States and up to 175 years in jail for “espionage”, when everything Wikileaks has ever published has a 100% record for truth and accuracy.

And from https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/the-roger-stone-sentencing-fiasco/ --

As is his wont, the president went bonkers on Twitter upon learning of the recommendation, calling it “horrible and very unfair” and a major “miscarriage of justice” because “the real crimes are on the other side” — i.e., the Russia-probe investigators — yet “nothing happens to them.” While the Justice Department was obviously aware of the president’s tweet, as well as press reporting about the harshness of the prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation, the DOJ and the White House have had no communications about the case, according to both the president and a spokeswoman for the attorney general.

It seems like Trump has a point.  But, no, he shouldn't be tweeting his opinions as that could be exerting inappropriate pressure on the Attorney General and others.  (I was wrong about this last night, I believe, and … was right.)

From Bill Barr Derangement Syndrome:

Barr allowed the Mueller probe to reach its conclusion unmolested. The extent of his alleged interference was, prior to the release of the report, summarizing its findings in a way that wasn’t harsh or detailed enough for Trump’s critics.

Finally, he declined to prosecute former Department of Justice official and frequent Trump target Andrew McCabe for lying to investigators. If Barr is really Trump’s Roy Cohn, his personal enforcer masquerading as a top law-enforcement official, nailing McCabe would have been his Job One.

So, is Trump right that Democrats caught lying, like McCabe, have not been prosecuted for perjury?  Consider You Can’t Fool All the People All the Time. 

The Horowitz report is not some ordinary rebuke, but an epic assault that has left the FBI reeling. After fawning over the bureau for years, the New York Times tried to salvage a shred of self-respect by declaring that even though it “painted a bleak portrait of the FBI as a dysfunctional agency,” all was not lost because the inspector general uncovered “no evidence that the mistakes were intentional or undertaken out of political bias.”

This was incorrect. Horowitz made it clear in his Dec. 11 appearance before the Senate judiciary committee that while there was “no evidence that the initiation of the investigation was motivated by political bias,” the question gets “murkier” when it comes to subsequent FBI actions like withholding or doctoring evidence. Considering that FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, the man who allegedly falsified evidence against Page, is a never-Trumper who once texted “viva le resistance,” it’s hard to see how bias could not have been a factor.

The inspector general lists seventeen “significant errors” the bureau made in applying for a secret surveillance warrant. It failed to inform the court that Page had been a CIA informant for years and had been found to have been truthful throughout; that he told an undercover agent that he “literally never met” or “said one word to” Paul Manafort, his alleged co-conspirator, and that Manafort had never responded to any of his emails; that a source for ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s famous “golden showers” dossier was known to be a “boaster” and an “egoist” who may “engage in some embellishment”; and that professional associates of Steele said he “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness [and] poor judgment” and “pursued people with political risk but no intelligence value.”

Steele, the man who turned US politics upside down, was a flake in other words while Page was more likely on the up and up. Yet the FBI assumed the opposite. Perhaps the most amazing section in Horowitz’s report concerns a Steele informant who confessed that reports of Trump’s sexual escapades in the Moscow Ritz Carlton were “just talk,” conversations he or she “had with friends over beers,” and statements made in “jest.” Yet the Steele dossier reported them as a real, and a credulous press lapped them all up. Steele’s supposed high-level Kremlin contacts, the source added, were individuals “who may have had access” – and, then again, may not have. Corroboration of Steele’s findings was meanwhile “zero.”

Yet this is the document that the FBI continued using to pursue Page and Trump and convince the public that collusion was genuine.

And Unraveling the Criminal Web at Comey's FBI and Beyond

So, who are the weakest links as Durham’s investigation moves forward? One is surely Kevin Clinesmith, a lawyer in Comey’s FBI who is highlighted in the Horowitz Report (pages 186-190). Sen. Lindsey Graham mentioned those pages in his Tuesday press conference. In them, Horowitz presents evidence that Clinesmith not only altered official documents, he completely changed their meaning. The altered documents painted Carter Page as a foreign spy; the originals said there was no evidence for that. The exculpatory evidence was hidden from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts. The lies helped gain a secret warrant to spy on Page.

How important was the Steele dossier to gaining the warrant? The FBI’s own legal counsel said, in internal documents, “this is essentially a single source FISA” (p. 132). That source was the Steele dossier. (Remember when Comey and all the Democrats denied that? There was lots more evidence in the applications, they said. There wasn’t.) Horowitz underscores the dossier’s significance when he concludes it was “central and essential” to gaining the surveillance warrant (p. 359).

How did the FBI and DoJ know the Steele dossier was garbage? Because they couldn’t substantiate any of its key claims and because they interviewed Steele’s most important source. This “subsource” told them unambiguously that the scandalous claims in the dossier were based on his own statements to Steele but that they were exaggerated and distorted in the dossier. The subsource told the FBI that Steele’s misleading, unverified claims were simply rumors and “bar talk.” Again, the FBI had this damning evidence in hand before it renewed the FISA applications on Carter Page. (It should have had them before the first application, but it didn’t bother.) Again, it lied to the FISA court.

These are serious crimes, not only against Carter Page but against the true target of the spying, Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency -- and ultimately against the American people. Those who committed the crimes must be held to account. 

But as far as I know, none of the FBI officials involved in surveilling Trump based upon these lies have yet been prosecuted. 

Speaking of accountability, I think this article makes some good points regarding Adam Schiff's record:  Adam Schiff's history of inaccuracies, conspiracy theories follows him to Senate floor

Conservatives take a decidedly different view. They wonder on social media why a congressman who floated unproven conspiracies and a false dossier is leading the case against Mr. Trump, and they ask why the liberal media are so uncritical.

As a backdrop: On Jan. 10, 2017, BuzzFeed posted the Christopher Steele dossier, which made a dozen felony charges against Mr. Trump and his allies. A month later, The New York Times reported that the intelligence community owned a year’s worth of phone records and intercepts between the Trump campaign and Kremlin intelligence.

The dossier allegations and Times story were both false.

The next month, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence convened the first major hearing into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election by computer hacking and social media warfare. A key question was whether the Trump campaign was a witting ally.

It was in that media glare that Mr. Schiff began making a series of conspiracy claims as he sat on a committee that is supposed to deal in facts. At the witness table were FBI Director James B. Comey and Navy Adm. Michael S. Rogers, head of the electronic-listening National Security Agency.

Mr. Schiff immediately endorsed the 35-page dossier and praised its author, former British intelligence officer Mr. Steele.

To bolster Mr. Steele’s credibility, Mr. Schiff said this about Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and Russian oil giant Rosneft: “Is it a coincidence that the Russian gas company Rosneft sold a 19% share after former British intelligence officer Steele was told by Russian sources that Carter Page was offered fees on a deal of just that size?”

The only coincidence was that the 19% figure was in the press weeks before Mr. Steele wrote his memo.

Mr. Schiff also quoted Mr. Steele on a purported conspiracy between campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Mr. Page: “According to Steele, it was Manafort who chose Page to serve as a go-between for the Trump campaign and Russian interests.”

Independent evidence shows the two never knew or spoke with each other.

Mr. Schiff also said Mr. Steele was “highly regarded” by U.S. intelligence.

When Mr. Page later appeared before the committee, Mr. Schiff repeatedly quoted the dossier in questioning the former aide, forcing him to disprove what Mr. Steele had written.

Mr. Schiff also tried to use Mr. Page to prove another dossier allegation: that Trump attorney Michael Cohen secretly traveled to Prague to visit operatives of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He asked Mr. Page whether his 2016 trip to Hungary was linked to Cohen.

By November 2017, Mr. Schiff was dismissing critics and sticking by Mr. Steele and his dossier.

“So I think this is a bit of an effort to discredit Christopher Steele, discredit the dossier, ignore how much of it has been corroborated already and ignore the fact that the intelligence community is operating from a broad array of sources as a way of basically calling this all a hoax. And it just doesn’t add up to me,” he said on CNN...

Mr. Schiff said several times that he had seen evidence of Trump-Russia collusion to interfere in the election and it was beyond circumstantial.

He began this talking point in March 2017.

“I can tell you that the case is more than that,” he said on MSNBC. “And I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller said in his March 2019 report that he did not find a Trump election conspiracy. No Trump associate was charged in such a conspiracy...

As the dossier’s credibility began to fall apart in 2017, Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican and then-chairman of the House intelligence committee, began an attempt to find out who financed Mr. Steele’s work and to answer this question: Did the FBI use the dossier to obtain a judge’s permission to place a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretap on Mr. Page?

Mr. Schiff, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for not turning over documents, opposed Mr. Nunes on both fronts.

He fought Mr. Nunes’ bank subpoenas, which forced Democrats to acknowledge in October 2017 that the Hillary Clinton campaign funded the dossier through opposition research firm Fusion GPS and co-founder Glenn R. Simpson.

After Mr. Nunes issued a memo in 2018 disclosing FISA abuses, Mr. Schiff issued a countermemo that proved off-base on several points.

Mr. Schiff titled his Jan. 29, 2018, countermemo “Correcting the Record — The Russia Investigation.”

“FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign,” he said.

In fact, Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz’s Dec. 9 report found that the FBI did abuse FISA. He found 17 instances in which agents submitted inaccurate information to the judge or omitted exculpatory statements about Mr. Page.

Mr. Horowitz said the warrant could not have been submitted without the Democratic Party-financed dossier. There was no other evidence of a conspiracy.

Mr. Schiff said in his countermemo: “In subsequent FISA renewals, DOJ provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”

Not true, said Mr. Horowitz. None of Mr. Steele’s reporting in the warrant was ever corroborated. In fact, FBI agents acquired evidence from Mr. Steele’s main source, who placed great doubt in Mr. Steele’s allegations. But the FBI left this evidence out of subsequent warrant renewals.

Mr. Schiff said in his countermemo: “The FBI and, subsequently, the Special Counsel’s investigation into links between the Russian government and Trump campaign associates has been based on troubling law enforcement and intelligence information unrelated to the ‘dossier.’”

In fact, there is no indication in the Mueller or Horowitz reports that agents found evidence — texts, emails, communication intercepts, informants or whistleblowers — that provided evidence of a conspiracy outside of the dossier.

Peace, love, and hugs...

Thinking About Biden's Candidacy

Introduction

In Biden's Candidacy About Nothing, Nathan Schneider proposes that "Joe Biden’s minimalist version of the presidency could be a blessing in disguise".  Schneider makes the following points:

1. The presidency is a black hole that pulls inexorably on the public’s attention.
2. The Obama presidency was in that mold, as he modeled the use of executive orders for doing the work that Congress once did.
3. Biden offers the possibility of a presidency one can finally turn away from, a presider who will leave enough room for others to set the agenda. 
4. Biden is more likely to let experts be in the spotlight, and thus will provide room for more constructive national discourse.

I will consider these one at a time and then come to some general conclusions regarding the 2020 presidential election.

The presidency is a black hole that pulls inexorably on the public’s attention.

I agree very much that this is the case with the Trump presidency, and this is a bad thing because I don't think Trump is a good leader.  However, I don't agree that having an outspoken president is a bad thing in general.  FDR's fireside chats were probably a good thing.  George W. Bush's response to 9/11 was good until his administration went off on the wrong track in pursuit of war in Iraq.  Teddy Roosevelt's embrace of conservation of nature set a different tone for the nation with respect to the environment.  Lincoln was effective in leading the union and freeing blacks from slavery.

Moreover, I think there is a more general problem than presidential style with regard to public attention.  Before Trump, the country had already become extremely polarized with the likes of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. inflaming discourse.  With the Internet and the advent of social media, the anger and polarization has become much worse.  Political operatives and the media are rewarded (more viewers and clicks) when their base gets angry at the opposing side.  I would like the president to try to moderate the discourse and focus on what is important.

All of us have a role to play in this regard.

The Obama presidency was part of this unfortunate trend where the president is the focus of public attention.  

In support of this idea, Schneider notes that "Barack Obama modeled the use of executive orders for doing the work that Congress once did."

I don't agree that Obama was a lightning rod for the public's attention, in the same way that Trump is.  Rather, my opinion is that Obama did not use the "bully pulpit" effectively to counter the misinformation that was coming from Republicans and the Tea Party.  This was apparent to me when Obamacare was getting attacked with references to death panels, while Obama stayed above the fray.

This wasn't all Obama's fault.  The mainstream media and the Democrats did a poor job, in my opinion, of reporting the truth and highlighting the consequences.  A good example of this was the Acorn affair of 2009, shortly after Obama and the Democrats in Congress swept into power: Lesson from ACORN -- The Facts Matter.

On Sept. 14, 2009, the Democratic-controlled Senate voted 83 to 7 to block some federal grants to ACORN... On Sept. 17, the House followed suit, with 172 Democrats joining 173 Republicans in voting to defund ACORN... (this) exposed a Democratic Party establishment unprepared for dirty tricks in the Digital Age and unwilling to defend many of the black voters and activists it claimed to represent... The illegal voting accusations never panned out. But within 18 months, Lewis would be forced to close ACORN’s doors ― exhausted, short-staffed, out of money and, most important, out of allies... ACORN registered more than 865,000 voters for the 2008 election. While other groups have tried to pick up the slack, there’s a reason Republicans haven’t selected a new organization to serve as the voter fraud boogeyman: nobody is doing the same caliber work on the same scale that ACORN did.

Other battles the Dems chose not to fight included:

• Prosecution of Republicans for malfeasance (including torture) in Iraq, and in the run-up to the war.
• Letting the big banks fail.  Even the The Economist magazine thought they should be nationalized. 
• Prosecution of various financial sector firms and/or individuals for breaking the law (accounting control fraud).

Nathan Schneider, in the article being discussed here, cites Obama's use of executive orders as being part of the problem of the visible president.  But, in my opinion, the Republicans were at fault for obstructing reasonable governance and Obama was justified in issuing executive orders.  Schneider's "both sides do it" attitude toward the Obama presidency, it seems to me, is symptomatic of the failures of conventional wisdom that led to the Trump presidency.

Unfortunately, I believe that there is now much more validity to "both sides do it" than there was during the Obama presidency, as we shall see in discussion of the Biden candidacy.

Biden offers the possibility of a presidency one can finally turn away from, a presider who will leave enough room for others to set the agenda.

I don't see Biden as an Obama type mellow guy who will avoid controversy.  He says many controversial and untrue things.  He had to drop out of the 1988 presidential campaign because of plagiarism and exaggeration of his record:

In September 1987, newspaper stories stated he had plagiarized a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock. Other allegations of past law school plagiarism and exaggerating his academic record soon followed. Biden withdrew from the race later that month.

 He's got a considerable record of continued tall tales in the years since.  Here is one set of examples:

Biden literally fabricated an entire fictitious career as a civil rights activist. He told audiences he “participated in sit-ins to desegregate movie theaters,” when he did no such thing. Recently he told a black audience an extremely specific story about his involvement in the civil rights movement and his anti-segregation activism. It appears to be entirely made up. He did this over and over, as Shaun King documented. (King’s report is devastating and it’s shocking that it hasn’t gotten more media attention.) Biden said that he was arrested in South Africa on his way to see Nelson Mandela, which also wasn’t true.

So this doesn't look good for Schneider's thesis.  And it's doubly bad with regard to my opinion that we could use a president who speaks effectively on behalf of important social issues.

Biden is more likely to let experts be in the spotlight, and thus will provide room for more constructive national discourse.

This gets to the core of what I want to say.  The contention is that Biden will trust experts whereas Trump is more of a know-it-all who diverts attention from experts.  Doesn't it all depend on what one thinks about the experts?  Recall from the Political / Economic Quadrants diagram that Trump appeals to populist types who distrust the elite.  That in large part explains his ability to get 63 million votes.  Biden on the other hand appeals more to those who trust in the status quo and the experts.  Hillary won 66 million votes from those people.  (Another 100 million eligible voters did not vote in 2016.)

So the country seems fairly evenly split between those who want to trust the experts (maintain the status quo) and those who don't trust the status quo and want a president who will take on the lamestream media.  As I've noted before, I believe there are underlying principles with merit in each of the quadrants; i.e. liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist.  Using the labels too much or too loosely isn't generally constructive.  So my attitude is not that the experts (liberals) are always right, or that the populists (libertarians) are always right.  Rather, we should judge individual issues on their own merits.  In some cases, we may find that the experts have been consistently wrong and we could use a president who dares to think for him/herself.  

For example, Biden seemed to win the Democratic nomination by doubling down on conventional wisdom from "experts" with vested interests who have been proven seriously wrong.  I discussed this in Demagogues for Fiscal Responsibility:

Demagogic logic:

1. Be afraid of Bernie!! He will bankrupt the country.
2. Bernie will lose to Trump because people are afraid.

Of course, according to the demagogues, there are other reasons to be afraid of Bernie (who dares to take on some establishment interests).  For example, be afraid of Bernie because he is supported by the Russians! 

See also: Russiagate -- 3rd Annual Review:

So the FBI officials protesting anonymously were proven wrong about the specifics of the Carter Page surveillance.  And their insistence that the FISA process in general has been handled well has also been discredited...  It's become common for opponents of the mainstream Democrats to be labeled Putin lovers...  

And Robert Mueller, FBI Director in 2003, assured us that Iraq was a threat to the U.S., leading to the horrific Iraq War that Biden supported.  

On February 11, 2003, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified to Congress that "Iraq has moved to the top of my list. As we previously briefed this Committee, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program poses a clear threat to our national security, a threat that will certainly increase in the event of future military action against Iraq. Baghdad has the capability and, we presume, the will to use biological, chemical, or radiological weapons against US domestic targets"

So, while I am a fan of experts in general, some of the most significant experts that Biden has supported have been very wrong about some of the most important things.

But surely Biden is better than Trump?

I am actually more concerned about Biden.  All of the mainstream media, the Democratic establishment, and many conservative Republicans are keeping a close eye on Trump.  On the other hand, I feel a McCarthyist pall (feeling of dread) surrounding the mainstream Democrats, for whom Biden is the candidate:

McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence.

As Chuck Schumer said:

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities. 

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.
“So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.” 

There is little doubt in my mind that this is true and that, as a result, certain opinions are not acceptable in mainstream discourse solely because they go against such powerful vested interests.  Moreover, the vested interests which cannot be openly challenged have a bad track record in some of most important issues such as the rationale for war, international sanctions, international cooperation, and interference in domestic politics.  More about this here and here.

I frequently hear sentiments such as "All I care about is getting rid of Trump".  Such a sentiment is part of the dysfunctional dynamic that Schneider discusses in "Biden's Candidacy About Nothing".  There are other important things to think about and talk about.  Let's be part of the solution to the presidential black hole and focus on what is important.