The Coup d’état Against And/Or The Assassination Of... Señor Trumpanzee

Some wonder how Señor Trumpanzee could have possibly passed over Jerome Corsi when he put together his Cabinet. Is it possibly that not even the 5th level baboons he put in place would agree to serve with Corsi, the far right's foremost conspiracy theorist? His latest is that the CIA is planning to kill Señor T. Remember that Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, Indira Gandhi body guards shot her in her garden. And if that isn't proof enough, Corsi asserts in his new book, Killing The Deep State that Trump is the target of a coup d’état being undertaken by the Deep State, including the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies that maintain a commitment to a globalist New World Order." For some reason-- no doubt the CIA-- Corsi can't find a real publisher and the book is being put out by Trump’s crony Christopher Ruddy on his neo-fascist propaganda outfit, Newsmax.

So who's this Corsi, the man who is even a less believable conspiracy theorist that Trump himself?

No one, however, has gone as far as Jerome R. Corsi, the self-proclaimed “investigative reporter” whose book during John Kerry’s presidential campaign, the “Swiftboating” of his Vietnam War record, badly damaged Kerry’s campaign, although the charges were false.

He is the same man who in 2012 wrote a column claiming Obama is a homosexual. This is the same Corsi who argued he had proof of Obama’s Kenyan birth, and that a pattern on a ring Obama wore proved that he was a secret Muslim. Corsi has a Ph.D. from Harvard and uses that credential to assert that his words have credibility.

Corsi is Washington correspondent for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars. Recently, he appeared on C-Span’s book show Afterwords, where he talked about his new book, Killing the Deep State. In a nutshell, here is how Corsi describes his thesis: “The central premise of this book is that President Trump is the target of a coup d’état being undertaken by the Deep State, including the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies that maintain a commitment to a globalist New World Order.”

From the moment Trump won, Corsi believes the “deep state” promised to interfere with his presidency, beginning with the NSA and Brennan at CIA placing Trump under electronic surveillance. Brennan, along with John Podesta, Corsi claims, began the story about “Russian collusion” to delegitimize the campaign. Robert Mueller was made special counsel because he is “a partisan deep state operative with close ties to FBI Director James Comey.” The deep state, Corsi believes, is seeking to force Trump to resign. If that doesn’t work, it plans to move to “impeachment or a charge under the 25th Amendment that he is mentally incompetent.”

Up to this point, Corsi’s book reads as a rehash of all the claims regularly made daily about the conspiracy by Trumpists. But he takes this one original, and scurrilous, step further. Should that not work, he claims, the deep state operatives have one measure left to take, and that is “‘executive action’-- a CIA plan to assassinate Trump… the deep state’s last resort.”

...Corsi’s narrative is a compendium of all the conspiracy theories put together and is bound to be a basic source for Trump’s defenders, who are taking out the crude edges and using his analysis as the standard for showing why Trump’s presidency must be defended at all costs against the nefarious deep state. In today’s polarized climate, the more that narrative is spread and adopted, the more it poses a serious threat to our democracy.

And it looks like Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has joined the assassination team! Oh yes... plotting a coup and murder, Grassley told CNN that "If I were President of the United States and I had a lawyer that told me I could pardon myself, I think I would hire a new lawyer."

McCain And The Integrity Problem

One of my old friends is as easy to read as a book. His deepest fears and self-doubts, the ones he'd never share with even his closest friends or his wife and children, come out as accusations against everyone around him. He's so big on projecting that all you have to do is sit back and wait and sooner or later he'll tell you all about himself-- in his criticism of others. Today's Washington Post has a much talked about piece on how Obama will stand up to the barrage of smears coming from McCain, his lobbyists and the arms-length surrogates like the execrable Jerome Corsi, who may not ever get an invitation to a State Banquet but who still is a vital part of the McCain campaign.

At one time McCain, suggested they run a respectful campaign. It only took minutes for him to come around to his advisors' perspective that that wouldn't work and that if they were to have any chance of success, it had to be all about smear and racism. McCain took to it like a duck to water. And the relentless attacks say far more about McCain than they do about Obama.

McCain showed no signs of letting up his attacks Monday, charging that behind Obama's demand to end the Iraq war "lies the ambition to be president."

Even the most ardent Republicans in the land know that there is no politician in America, not even a Clinton, whose ambitions to grab the White House is more all-consuming than McCain's. McCain will say or do anything to be president. There's never been anyone like him in our political system before. Once he said he thought building a wall was idiotic but if the idiotic voters wanted a wall and that's what it took for him to get into the White House, he'd say he'd build them a wall. Once McCain said that tax breakers for the richest 10% was a disgrace; today he's promising tax cuts for the rich that will almost make Bush like progressive! This is what the L.A. Times reported on January 4, 2000:

Sixty percent of the benefits from his tax cuts go to the wealthiest 10% of Americans-- and that's not the kind of tax relief that Americans need... Gov. Bush wants to spend the entire surplus on tax cuts. I don't believe the wealthiest 10% of Americans should get 60% of the tax breaks.

Well now he does-- or says he does. Many Democrats want to see Obama come out swinging. Others think McCain is painting himself so ugly with his own brush that it isn't necessary. They're wrong. It is. At Pastor Rick Fest on Saturday, the audience preferred McCain's shallow memorized lines to Obama's thoughtful attempts at real dialogue. Should you ever feel yourself underestimating the naiveté and desire to be pandered to by any democratic electorate, just remember this-- even if Bush stole both 2000 and 2004's elections, as seems likely, many millions of people voted for him.

This morning CNN is offering more than just Jack Cafferty's incisive look at McCain's wretched shallowness. Their business show lays out the startling relationship between McCain and Big Oil special interests.

If cash equals friendship, then John McCain and the oil industry are best friends.

The Arizona Republican has taken $1.4 million from oil industry employees in the 2007-2008 election cycle, more than any other politician, according to CRP.

That's over three times as much as Barack Obama, who ranks just below Hillary Clinton as the highest Democrat recipient.

Those numbers are consistent with how employees in the oil sector give overall - nearly three quarters of their money usually goes to Republicans, although they have been leaning a bit more Democratic in the recent election, according to CRP.

With gas prices near record levels and the public clamoring for something to be done, now is a dangerous time for any politician to be taking money from the oil industry.

What's really at stake in Swiftboat-style propaganda assaults like the Obama hatchet-job books? Oh, it's just the health of our democracy

Liar Jerome Corsi and lie-debunker Paul Waldman last night
on Larry King Live (thanks to Media Matters)


"This book and books like it destroy our political culture, undermine fair elections, inhabit the slippery space between politics and slander. . . .

"These books destroy civic debate on purpose -- and are fundamentally at odds with democracy. The goal of Corsi's project is not to discuss facts -- it is to destroy the very possibility of discussion by implying that a Presidential candidate is a sleeper-cell terrorist -- and doing so in the context of a huge broadcast media effort to convince the country of the same thing.

"That is not just factually wrong. It is wildly immoral. Whether or not Corsi published lies is not even half the discussion we should be having."

-- Jeffrey Feldman, in a Frameshop post today,
"What America Needs to Hear About Jerome Corsi"

by Ken

Every now and then a writer articulates a point that makes a whole bunch of swirling phenomena come into focus for me. Today our Frameshop colleague Jeffrey Feldman (most recently author of Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy) did it with some comments on the debate on last night's Larry King Live between noted liar Jerome Corsi (of the Swiftboat liars) and noted lie-debunker Paul Waldman (of Media Matters, most recently co-author with John Dean of Free Ride: John McCain and the Media).

If you don't immediately recognize Corsi's name, it first came to our attention when he helped orchestrate the Swiftboaters' lies to demolish John Kerry's 2004 presidential bid. Now he has dipped into his grab bag of snares and delusions to produce an alleged book (well, it's got covers, and pages with type on them between the covers, and it comes from a company formerly known as a publisher of actual books) that sets out to assassinate the character of the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama.

PARENTHETICAL DIGRESSION: WOULD YOU BELIEVE
SIMON & SCHUSTER IS PUBLISHING THIS CRAP?

I really didn't pay much attention when I heard that there were two book-form hatchet jobs on Senator Obama coming out. Well, of course there are, I thought. Why wouldn't there be? That's one of the things the Right-Wing Noise Machine does: publish book-form piles of crap to stroke the prejudices of the wingnut faithful and, with any luck, hoodwink a few lazy or gullible readers outside the tent. They've got their own little publishing industry, and their own publishers, like Regnery. Then I gave it as little further thought as possible.

So I was kind of stunned to hear that Jerome Corsi's Obama hatchet job is published, not by Regnery or one of those other make-believe publishers, but by Simon & Schuster! Well, not Simon & Schuster exactly, but an imprint crated by S&S for celebrated right-wing propagandist Mary Matalin.

I don't know what was in the S&S folks' minds. Oh wait, I do. I'm sure some genius reading Publishers Weekly noticed one day that make-believe publishers like Regnery sell a shitload of books to their gullible and brain-challenged readers. And I guess that turned into a mandate: How can we get us some of that boodle? And somebody thought of Mary Matalin, and nobody thought to wonder whether her business plan would be to bring shame upon a publishing house with a long and honorable tradition. Or maybe nobody at S&S cared about that possibility. Heck, there's probably nobody affiliated with the company with any awareness of its history.

I would suggest a vigorous campaign to heap shame upon the current custodians of S&S, except that I doubt there's anybody on the job there who's capable of shame.

From the people I know who watched the Larry King extravaganza, while liar Corsi bombarded viewers with gobs of his made-up "facts," and kept challenging his adversary to answer his "facts," lie-debunker Waldman avoided the trap of debating phony facts and went after the kind of work Corsi does. My sources were all aglow over the job Paul did showing the phony up.

All my sources except Jeffrey Feldman, that is. Oh, he was filled with admiration for the job Paul did standing up to the liar. However --

It saddens me to have to acknowledge that, even though Paul did a great job on Larry King, I think Corsi won the debate -- unfortunately.

Why?

From the very start of the broadcast, Corsi made the debate about 'the facts' and kept returning back to that idea. 'I'm getting out the facts,' 'MM makes ad hominem attacks, but cannot refute the facts,' etc., etc. Paul did a great job pulling back the curtain (amazing job). But King never let the conversation come up to the real issue: this book and books like it destroy our political culture, undermine fair elections, inhabit the slippery space between politics and slander.

Left unsaid here is that it would have been futile, even fatal, for Paul to try to debunk Corsi's fake facts, and if he had tried, he would have ceded the ground to the liar. This is, of course, exactly what the professional liars of the Right-Wing Noise Machine count on.

I don't know that there's anything to be done about it, but I think it's desperately important that those of us who are able and willing to understand what Jeffrey is saying here at least become aware of the nature of the assault on democracy represented by the Swiftboating school of right-wing demagoguing.

At this point I should yield the floor to Jeffrey, who -- it turns out -- has a vision of how last night's debate might have gone differently:

Americans from all over the country have talked about this problem before--the problem of shady right-wing groups that assemble huge private backing and then wade into elections with the purpose of bullying a candidate off the national stage--so this is nothing new. But the media ignores us. Saps like Larry King choose instead to debase the hard work of researchers like Paul Waldman, and to willfully ignore the larger issue here: the wholesale undermining of our civic culture by deep-pocketed right-wing groups with a history of breaking election laws.

What America needs to hear from Larry King about Jerome Corsi is something like,"This book is filth. It goes against everything we believe in about honest, healthy civic debate. Don't buy it. Jerome, you are obviously part of a shady organization that uses money to sell lies with the goal of undermining serious debate in the 2008 Presidential election. The only reason your book is atop the best-seller list is because you have a giant political marketing machine working behind the scenes. Caveat emptor -- buyer beware."

Yeah, yeah. I know. It is hard to imagine someone like Larry King saying that on his show -- hard to even conceive of an America in which journalists use their broadcast power to protect our civic culture rather than promote shadowy figures who seek to destroy it. But imagining it is the first step.

Demanding it is what comes next.

Now this is a fantasy, but it's a pretty fantasy, and I'm afraid -- as Jeffrey suggests -- a necessary one. There's a line in there that's so potent, I think we all need to hear it again, so I'm going to pull it out, with just a tad of elision:

"It is hard to conceive of an America in which journalists use their broadcast power to protect our civic culture rather than promote shadowy figures who seek to destroy it. But imagining it is the first step."


BRAVE NEW FILMS GOES AFTER FOX'S PERENNIAL OBAMA SMEARS

One important weapon we have now against the Right-Wing Noise Machine which we didn't have in 2004 is Robert Greenwald's truth-telling team at Brave New Films. They've issued a new appeal:

The FOX smears are continuing and we need to stop them from spreading to the rest of the media. Watch FOX's laughably inaccurate distortions, as they smear Barack Obama on everything from the economy to race to patriotism to flag pins.

In the coming weeks, FOX will escalate its gross misrepresentations of Obama, and we know from painful past experience that some in the corporate media will spread FOX's canards by presenting them as fact. We must stop the spread.

At the link, along with the video there's a petition to sign, declaring:

"Fox is a Republican mouthpiece, not a legitimate news organization. Real news organizations must reject Fox's smears of Barack Obama and get the real facts out."

#