Watergate through the looking glass

The dirty dossier, allegedly produced by Russian agents, was a smear job on Donald Trump. Why it was ever considered to be a sign of the Russians helping Trump to victory in the election is a mystery quite as impenetrable as the case of the Mary Celeste or the virgin birth.

There is much more disentangling to be done in the whole Trump-Russia saga. Two lucid descriptions of the affair are available already, the first from Paul Sperry in the New York Post:

Exhibit A is the book “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. In light of this week’s revelation that Hillary’s campaign funded the dirty anti-Trump “Steele” dossier, the book takes on a new significance. It reveals:

“Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [campaign chair John Podesta and manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

The plan, according to the book, was to push journalists to cover how “Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign,” and it succeeded to a fare-thee-well. After the election, coverage of the Russian “collusion” story was relentless, and it helped pressure investigations and hearings on Capitol Hill and even the naming of a special counsel, which in turn has triggered virtually nonstop coverage.

[…]

The irony is, it may have in fact been Hillary who came closer to colluding with the Russians in smearing Trump as a Russian traitor than anything Trump did in trying to beat Hillary. The information in the dossier she bought for millions came from Russian intelligence sources, and her lawyers brokered the deal with a Kremlin-tied lobbyist. When it failed to stop Trump, the Russia paymaster turned into the Russia spinmeister.

In hindsight we now know that the appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Prosecutor was also managed by a job, as Scott Johnson summarizes in PowerLine:

When President Trump fired then FBI Director James Comey, Comey had an inspired idea. He would strategically leak memos of his conversations with President Trump to his friend Daniel Richman at Columbia Law School. Richman in turn was to read the memos to New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt. If all went according to plan, the resulting story was to lead to the appointment of Special Counsel to investigate all things Trump.

All went according to plan. Comey is a sophisticated Washington operator who has moved for a long time in rarefied law enforcement circles. He knew roughly everyone in the small world from which the Special Counsel would be drawn. When Rod Rosenstein appointed Comey’s friend and “brother in arms” Robert Mueller as Special Counsel, Comey was home free to ascend Mount Olympus and pronounce his deep thoughts via Twitter.

We have had the idiotic noise from almost all of the mainstream media about the Russian connection for more than a year now. The Democrats played the media in an attempt to delegitimise the election and, in turn, the media were happy to be played.

Reliving history in the looking glass

The media have made frequent comparisons with Watergate, when plucky reporters, led by the Washington Post, doggedly uncovered President Nixon's wrongdoings – there's much more to it than that, of course.

The irony of such claims is lost on them, because what we have now is actually a reverse Watergate, in which crazed 'reporters', led by the Washington Post and New York Times, spent a year smearing an innocent President and doing everything they could to belittle him. The reputational blows to the USA itself were just collateral damage in the hunt for the smoking tweet. Now the reality is bursting through, will the MSM impeach itself?

One further irony. During the Camelot years of the Kennedys – that stinking sewer the manholes of which were firmly held down by the media of the time – it was a trope of the Democrats that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were out to get the golden boys. There are still some today who think that the FBI had a hand in JFK's assassination. How plaintive the complaints of today's Democrats, that Trump and the Republicans are trying to subvert the work of the noble FBI!

Ah, President Kennedy, that cool leader with the will of iron who faced down Nikita Khrushchev over his Cuban missiles and saved the world for freedom! Now Trump brings the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon by facing down Kim Jong-un – what a dangerous lunatic!

The only question left is which of Hollywood's current crop of beauties will get to play the heroic journalists in the film Trumpgate? What? – you don't think such a film will ever be made? Come to think of it, you're probably right.