Hobgoblins everywhere
by digby
Michelle Goldberg makes an important point in her New York Times column today. She notes that this latest bad faith attack on the FBI and the DOJ is just the latest in a long line of self-serving, right wing assaults on American norms, rules and institutions.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the American right set about undermining trust in the mainstream media, which it saw as dangerously infected with liberal assumptions. Later, in debates over evolution and the environment, some on the right attacked the validity of modern science. By the turn of the millennium, it was an article of faith among conservative ideologues that whole realms of human expertise were in fact intricate structures of propaganda that trapped the unwary in a matrix of deceit.
In an invaluable 2017 Vox essay titled “Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology,” David Roberts quoted a 2009 Rush Limbaugh rant: “Science has been corrupted. We know the media has been corrupted for a long time. Academia has been corrupted. None of what they do is real. It’s all lies!” With Trump, this ethos reached the White House. And now, to protect Trump, the right has expanded its war on empiricism to that most conservative of institutions, the F.B.I.
That’s the best way to understand the farce surrounding the infamous classified memo written by aides to Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which Trump reportedly believes will help discredit the Russia investigation. The events involved in the creation of this memo, and the multifront political battle over efforts to make it public, are so absurd and convoluted that they’re difficult to summarize, and in some ways that’s the point.
In their attempts to undermine the Russia probe, Republicans aren’t presenting a coherent theory — even a coherent conspiracy theory. They’re just sowing confusion and distrust toward the nation’s premier law enforcement agency in order to protect the president. In December, conservative columnist Kurt Schlichter wrote that, under the influence of the “poisonous” liberal establishment, the once-proud F.B.I. had become “just another suppurating bureaucratic pustule.” That’s exactly how Nunes is treating it.
She goes on to outline the "memo" scandal and the alleged concern these Republicans now purport to have about transparency with respect to none other than Carter Page, a man actually named by convicted spies as someone they were trying to recruit. She concludes:
If and when it’s released, the Nunes memo will probably only vindicate Trump among people who already share right-wing assumptions. But it will put the F.B.I. in a difficult position, since to defend itself against accusations that it relied solely on Steele’s findings to get a warrant on Page, it would have to release additional classified evidence. (CBS News reported on Thursday that, if the memo is released, the F.B.I. is prepared to issue a rebuttal.)
To some commentators, it is ironic that liberals are now defending the F.B.I., long a left-wing bête noire. But liberals recognized the dangers of the campaign to broadly discredit the mainstream media even though they had their own passionate criticisms of it. The right’s war on the F.B.I. is a sign of how far some are willing to go to subvert any checks on Trump’s power to create his own reality.
This is important. I'm far less concerned about "Russia" than I am about what these Republicans, led by Trump, are doing to our government, our culture and our society. There is a reason that Russians are backing the GOP to the hilt and understand that the way to "sow discord" is to target Republican voters with misinformation. They are primed for it.
This is a long term problem. The Russia thing is just a symptom of a much deeper rot in the Republican party and with the emergence of an energized white nationalism welcomed into its midst and the election of this cretin it's now reached the point of existential threat.
Anyone who reads my writing knows that I'm not a big flag waver. I'm not a defender of the FBI or the Intelligence services and I am a harsh critic of the mainstream corporate media. But as Goldberg points out, it is possible to hold two ideas in your head at the same time --- you can be a critic of all those things and understand that the assault on them from the right is even more dangerous. Their handwringing over "transparency" is clearly being done in bad faith. Beyond bad faith.
The Republican Party had been degrading our political process for at least 25 years. Today, led by the man in the White House and his henchmen in the congress they are in the process of destroying any institution that has the capacity to stop them. You don't have to be an FBI apologist to see that. You just have to open your eyes.
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