Pat Buchanan is asking all the right questions with his latest article. Pat being Pat, his audience isn’t the hyper red-pilled internet intelligentsia but rather the mainstream bi-coastal politicos whose range of discussion can fit, as Tom Woods puts it, on a 3×5 index card.
Along with Trump’s signing of the new sanctions bill imposed by Congress, which strips him of his authority to lift those sanctions without Hill approval, these developments raise larger questions.
Is President Trump losing control of Russia policy? Has he capitulated to the neocons? These are not academic questions. For consider the architect of the new arms package, Kurt Volker, the new U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations.
A former CIA agent, member of the National Security Counsel, and envoy to NATO, Volker believes Russian troops in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk are all there illegally — and U.S. policy should be to push them out.
A former staffer of Sen. McCain, Volker was, until July, executive director of the neocon McCain Institute.
I told you back in July that Trump’s appointing Kurt Volker to Ukraine to negotiate on his behalf would be bad.
And this brings me back to Volker’s appointment. It can be seen as a sop to John McCain to shut his senile pie-hole up for a few days. It won’t work. McCain, like the rest of the traitorous neocons, only take and never give ground. It likely is.
It is also likely a case of getting someone toxic in over their head to watch them hang themselves with their own rope. (See: Waffle House Waitress Nikki Haley’s appointment as U.N. ambassador.)
So, having Victoria-Nuland-in-drag in charge of the Ukrainian side of the negotiation will guarantee no implementation of the Minsk II agreement. But, then again, I don’t think anyone seriously thinks Minsk II was brokered to be implemented.
But, Pat does a wonderful job leading the IYI crowd (Nassim Taleb’s Intellectual Yet Idiot) through the current miasma of D.C. politics as it pertains to escalating tensions over Ukraine and the Donbass to the conclusion that the fundamentals of our political system have been subverted in Congress’ quest to punish Donald Trump for not being suitably in the corner of the powerful lobbies of ‘conventional wisdom’ that dominate D.C.
In reality, however, things are far worse than Buchanan lets on in his article. Trump’s White House is now a nest of vipers like H.R. McMaster who looks emboldened by Trump’s failures with Congress to fire any and all of his appointments.
National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster met with President Trump Thursday amid his purge of Trump loyalists from the White House national security council, a heated debate about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan and a report that he allowed former Obama administration aide Susan E. Rice to keep her security clearance.
Gen. McMaster sent a letter to Ms. Rice in April giving her unfettered and continuing access to classified information and waiving the “need-to-know” requirement on anything she viewed or received during her tenure as President Obama’s national security adviser. A copy of the letter was obtained by Circa; Mr. Trump reportedly was not aware of Gen. McMaster’s action. [emphasis mine]
Then it comes out that he allowed serial leaker and Obama toady Susan Rice to retain her top secret security clearance when she should be wearing an orange jumpsuit for the same reasons.
And every day that Trump doesn’t fire McMaster for gross insubordination is another bit of evidence that Trump has no power within his own administration to effect his policy.
This has to be the moment where Trump strikes back, while Congress is out of town, with only pro-forma sessions on the docket to block him from any recess appointments.
We’ll find out this week whether Trump is a Deep State prisoner within the White House like Bush the Lesser and Obama before him or if he has a few more punches left in him.
He’s running out of time.
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