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New Boss(es), Same as The Old Boss(es)

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English: Aerial view of the White House in Was...
English: Aerial view of the White House in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Donald Trump ran for president in part on a promise to “drain the swamp” that is Washington, DC. He positioned himself as a political outsider, beholden to no one and capable of bringing sweeping  changes to a federal government set in its ways. But as Inauguration Day approaches, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the fundamentals aren’t going to change much.

While Trump’s cabinet picks do reflect the usual party line changing of the guard, they’re hardly “outsiders” by any conventional definition.

So far Trump has named three sitting members of Congress to head up executive branch departments: US Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) for Attorney General, US Representative Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) to run the Office of Management and Budget, and US Representative Tom Price (R-GA) for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

His Secretary of State designee, Rex Tillerson, is putatively a private sector type as CEO of ExxonMobil. In reality he’s the consummate political insider. He’s a frequent speaker at Council on Foreign Relations events and sits on the board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; these are two of the most “establishment” organizations on the block. Over the years he’s donated around half a million dollars to Republican candidates and PACs.

Secretary of Labor nominee Andrew Puzder is national co-chair of the wholeheartedly establishment American Enterprise Institute.

Incoming Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao is a former Deputy Secretary of Transportation, a former Secretary of Labor, and the spouse of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Speaking of McConnell, even if Trump wanted to clean house he would have to deal with Congress. McConnell remains Senate Majority Leader; the Democrats have a new Senate Minority Leader (New York’s Charles Schumer), but only because Nevada’s Harry Reid retired. On January 3, Republicans in the US House of Representatives were nearly unanimous in re-electing Paul Ryan as Speaker, as were Democrats in retaining Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

So far, the incoming Trump administration looks a lot like George W. Bush’s fifth term (the third and fourth were served by the supposedly “transformative,” hope-y, change-y Barack Obama, who gave us eight years of business as usual), with a Congress to match.

That might actually be the best outcome we can hope for. But I suspect Trump’s most devoted supporters will be sorely disappointed.

If 2016 was The Year of Trump The Outsider, 2017 looks set to be The Year of Sorry, Trump Was Only Kidding.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Russian Hacking Report: All Hat, No Cattle

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English: Colin Powell's UN presentation slide ...
English: Colin Powell’s UN presentation slide showing alleged mobile production facility for biological weapons. (Subequently shown to be an incorrect allegation.) Speech entitled: Remarks to the United Nations Security Council, Secretary Colin L. Powell, February 5, 2003 Slide entitled: detail of where material is carried in mobile production facilities for bio weapons work (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In early 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell took the stage at the UN “to share with you what the United States knows about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” Powell justified the impending US invasion of Iraq on the claim that Saddam Hussein’s regime continued to produce and stockpile chemical and biological weapons in violation of UN resolutions. He dazzled his audience with audio recordings and surveillance photographs that he claimed constituted evidence of Iraq’s perfidy.

Two years later Powell called the presentation a “blot” on his record, admitting that he had deceived the UN. The “weapons of mass destruction” didn’t exist. All the Saddam-era chemical weapons recovered in Iraq since 2003 are of pre-1991 manufacture with no evidence linking them to the regime since the 1991 war.

How long can we expect to wait for the National  Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center to admit that its report,  “GRIZZLY STEPPE — Russian Malicious Cyber Activity” — pre- hyped as providing “evidence” of Russian government interference in the 2016 US presidential election — is a reprise of Powell’s UN speech?

Marcello Truzzi, a skeptic of paranormal claims, once said “an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.”

The claim of Russian interference in the election is certainly extraordinary (“beyond what is ordinary or usual; highly unusual or exceptional or remarkable”). So is US president Barack Obama‘s response, including the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and closure of two diplomatic compounds in the US.

The “evidence” in the report, however, is not extraordinary. It’s not even ordinary. It’s non-existent. The report is just a list of cyber warfare methods accompanied by some pretty diagrams. No IP or MAC addresses. No chain of verifiable records showing suspect packets coming from, or going to, Russian machines. The  report’s “evidence” for Russian government involvement is the same “evidence” we’ve been offered before: “It’s so because we say it’s so. Trust us.”

Did the Russians conduct cyber attacks for the purpose of influencing the election’s outcome? It wouldn’t surprise me, but I don’t know. You probably don’t know either. The US government continues to state it as fact while declining to prove it.

It seems silly to go to these lengths for no higher purpose than to shift blame away from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton for their poor nomination decision-making and her mediocre campaign. And dangerous to do so at the risk of further queering  already tense US relations with a nuclear power.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Obama’s Christmas Gift to Trump: A Ministry of Truth

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The "Lenin" train of literature and ...
The “Lenin” train of literature and propaganda (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the Friday before Christmas — the kind of time politicians pick to do things they hope you won’t notice — US president Barack Obama signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act.

Along with the usual terrible, horrible, very bad, no good NDAA stuff (all the little mandates involved in continuing to operate the most irresponsibly bloated and expensive military machine on the planet), this NDAA included an ugly little Christmas gift for incoming president Donald Trump: The Countering Foreign Disinformation and Propaganda Act.

The CFDAPA (yes, I’m going to give that mouthful an acronym) started out as a separate piece of “bipartisan” legislation  introduced by US Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) Chris Murphy (D-CT). It got rolled into the NDAA for the same reason Obama signed it on the Friday before a holiday weekend. That is, to minimize public attention and mute criticism.

Some of the more overheated responses to the CFDAPA paint it as a scheme allowing the federal government to “outlaw” media outlets that don’t toe the government’s line: Just wave a magic wand, declare an impertinent blog to be “foreign disinformation and propaganda,” shut the blog down, and maybe drag the blogger off to Gitmo for a long chat.

No, it’s not quite that, at least in theory, but the prospect shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. And in some ways it’s actually worse.

Even given the regrettable decline in Americans’ vigilance against threats to our rights over the last few decades, straightforward, openly admitted political censorship would provoke widespread and likely effective resistance.

Instead, the CFDAPA sets aside $160 million over two years to, among other things, “support local independent media to refute foreign disinformation and manipulation in their communities.” That is, to bribe local media to publish Washington’s disinformation and propaganda instead of disinformation and propaganda from foreign sources. Not an entirely new project — the Office of National Drug Control Policy has been paying Hollywood to lie to us about marijuana for decades now.

The CFDAPA’s purpose is to set the federal government up as the plenary arbiter of truth and to marginalize any and all narratives that don’t accord with whatever line gets pushed out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in drag.

Overt censorship might not be far behind.  Facebook and Twitter are already cooperating with the US government in “countering Islamic State Disinformation and Propaganda.” And  remember that only a only a year ago, Donald Trump publicly called for “closing” parts of the Internet used for recruitment by the Islamic State.  CFDAPA isn’t just bad on its own merits — it’s also tailor-made for abusive expansion by an unbridled chief executive.

Repeal of this abomination should be 2017’s policy priority number one for freedom-loving Americans.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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