Month: March 2017

Mission Creep

by digby

A couple of news stories passed more or less unnoticed today. The first was this one:

More troops in Syria. Trump orders boots on the ground to battle ISIS.

The second was this:

Top general expects more US troops will be sent to Afghanistan

I thought it might be a good day to re-up this Salon piece of mine from last month. I suspect that the anti-war movement is about to become a much bigger part of the Resistance:

On Wednesday NBC News released a poll reporting that 66 percent of Americans surveyed were worried that the United States will become involved in another war. One might think that’s surprising since President Donald Trump has famously been portrayed as an old-school isolationist, an image mostly based upon his lies about not supporting the Iraq War and his adoption of the pre-World War II isolationist slogan “America First.”

As I laid out for Salon a few weeks ago, that assumption is wrong. Trump is anything but an isolationist. He’s not much on alliances, preferring to strong-arm other nations into supporting the U.S. “for their own good.” But if they are willing to cough up some protection money, he might agree to fulfill our treaty obligations. His adoption of the phrase “America First” reflects his belief that the U.S. must be No. 1, not that it should withdraw from the world.

In other words, while Trump has no interest in perpetuating the global security system under which the world has lived since the dawn of the nuclear age, that’s not because he believes it hasn’t worked. He doesn’t know what it does, how it came to be or why it exists. He simply believes other countries are failing to pay proper respect and he is aiming to make sure they understand that America isn’t just great again; it’s the greatest.

This has nothing to do with American exceptionalism. Trump is happy to admit that American pretenses to moral leadership are hypocritical, and he’s openly contemptuous of anyone who believes that the U.S. should try harder to live up to its ideals. If you want to understand what Trump believes, “to the victor goes the spoils” pretty much covers it. He means it in terms of his family, which continues to merge the presidency into its company brand all over the world, and he means it in terms of the United States, believing that this is the richest and most powerful nation on Earth and we can take whatever we want.

One of his goals is to “defeat ISIS.” And when he says defeat, he means to do whatever it takes to ensure it does not exist anymore. That does seem like a nice idea. After all, ISIS is an antediluvian, authoritarian death cult and the world would be better off without it. The question, of course, has always been how to accomplish such a thing.

Thoughtful people rationally understand that “defeating” radical extremism of any kind isn’t a matter of killing all the people. Indeed, the more extremists you kill, the more extremists you tend to create. But while Trump simply sees the world by playground rules, his consigliere Steve Bannon sees the threat of ISIS as a preordained apocalyptic confrontation between Western countries and the Muslim world. In a notorious speech he gave at the Vatican in 2014, Bannon put it this way:

We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict . . . to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.

He has called Trump his “blunt instrument” to bring about this global conflagration. Bannon is now a member of the National Security Council and is said to be running a parallel national security agency called the Strategic Initiatives Group, which he has stacked with kooks who share his views. He is a powerful influence.

Trump has promised to take the gloves off, and I think we all know exactly what he meant by that. He said it many times during the campaign: He favors torture. And he reiterated it just last month in his interview with ABC’s David Muir saying, “When ISIS is doing things that nobody has ever heard of since medieval times, would I feel strongly about waterboarding? As far as I’m concerned, we have to fight fire with fire.”

And Trump went on to grudgingly promise that he would listen to the secretary of defense and hold back on torture if that was his recommendation. But Trump also claimed that he’s talked to people at the highest levels of the intelligence community who told him that torture works like a charm. So we will have to see if the president is really able to restrain himself. (His CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, has been all for it in the past. Maybe they’ll simply decide to leave Defense Secretary Jim Mattis out of the loop.)

But what about Trump’s promises to “bomb the shit out of ’em” and “take the oil?” What about Bannon’s desire to bring on WorldWar III? Will that really happen? It might, and sooner than we think.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday:

More American troops may be needed in Syria to speed the campaign against the Islamic State, the top United States commander for the Middle East said on Wednesday.

“I am very concerned about maintaining momentum,” Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the head of the United States Central Command, told reporters accompanying him on a trip to the region.

“It could be that we take on a larger burden ourselves,” he added. “That’s an option.”

Despite his unfounded reputation for isolationism, it’s obvious that Trump is itching for a war. Responding to a debate question about whether he would follow a military commander’s advice to put troops on the ground, Trump said, “We really have no choice; we have to knock out ISIS. We have to knock the hell out of them.” When asked how many troops he thought might be needed, he replied that the number he had heard was 20,000 to 30,000.

Nobody thought much of Trump’s bluster at the time. But now he’s in the White House with an apocalyptic crackpot whispering in his ear and generals on the ground talking about taking on “a larger burden.” Whether his administration’s military advisers, Defense Secretary Mattis and his newly installed national security adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster, are as eager for this battle remains to be seen. But it appears that the two-thirds of Americans who are worried that we’ll be dragged into another war are anxious for good reason.

Randroid Power Point

by digby

I was going to write about Paul Ryan’s exciting Obamacare power point presentation this morning but it was so boring I fell asleep in my coffee. Thank goodness Charlie Pierce was able to pinch himself awake long enough to write this dispatch:

I had thought that the burlesque comic opera The Agony of Paul Ryan, Genius had closed on the night in 2012 when Joe Biden laughed the zombie-eyed granny starver off the stage during their debate. (That was the night that Ryan demonstrated that he knew it snowed in Afghanistan in the winter.) But I had not reckoned with his many fanboys among the kept political press. He ascended to become Speaker of the House, largely because nobody else wanted the job after John Boehner got kicked to the curb by the crazy people.

Now he is out there pimping the dungheap that is the new healthcare reform bill as though Mitch and Murray from downtown were lighting his pants on fire. He even lost the suit coat and broke out the PowerPoint on Thursday. It was like watching something on cable access late at night, or a flop-sweaty rookie substitute teacher, and it was hilarious—except for the parts where people will lose their health insurance and die, of course. And this is what he said and, peace be unto Dave Barry, I am not making it up, either:

Paul Ryan said that insurance cannot work if healthy people have to pay more to subsidize the sick.

This is literally how all insurance works. If someone’s house burns down, some of your fire insurance money goes to help that person rebuild. If someone gets sick, some of your premium, healthy person, goes toward that person’s coverage. Increasingly, I have come to believe that Paul Ryan is a not particularly bright creature from another world. Let us see if we can explain this to the lad.

There’s more and you should read it.

The Ayn Ran fanboy doesn’t believe in insurance. Of course he doesn’t. Insurance is one of those things where your money goes into a big pot to pay for people’s misfortunes with the understanding that it will pay for yours should one befall you. It’s a simple concept that Randroids find ridiculous. Good, moral citizens don’t need to pool their risk with other people because good moral people are rich and bad, immoral people are poor.

That’s Ryan’s belief. It’s a little bit different from the Trump Bannon approach which simply says that good moral people are white so there’s bound to be a little implementation problem. If they can just find a way to ensure that only the poor people of color are screwed we might have a compromise.

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Tweet o’ the day

by digby

Makes you proud to be an American doesn’t it? 

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Wednesday that Trump is in “full sell mode” in support of the legislation, which would enable him to keep his promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. Vice President Mike Pence will travel to Louisville, Kentucky, this weekend to promote the legislation, and Trump will hit the road next Wednesday for a rally in Nashville, Tennessee.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy also voiced his support for the legislation in a wave of Thursday morning TV news and talk radio appearances. And House Speaker Paul Ryan made his pitch Thursday afternoon with a PowerPoint-style presentation on the bill during a news conference at the Capitol.

It was during that presentation that Trump sent out his post, promising that the bill introduced by Ryan would result in a “beautiful picture.”

Actually the legislation is a horrific mess and nobody knows what will happen. I maintain that in Trump’s feral instinct tells him that the status quo is better than destroying it outright which is why he keeps telling people that if this doesn’t work they’ll sabotage it in the executive branch and blame it on the Democrats.

But everything is fluid. All I know is that if this plan passes, I’m screwed. Back to praying that I don’t get sick before medicare kicks in. And if they keep going, that plan might not be workable either since Ryan wants to give me “freedom and choice” with that too. (In other words, destroy Medicare.)

But don’t worry. Trump promises it will be “a beautiful picture” whatever the hell that means.

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He loves strongmen and so do his followers

by digby

I wrote about Trump and Russia and his authoritarian instincts for Salon this morning:

I don’t think there’s much doubt that Donald Trump is a very lucky man. You don’t fail up the way he has without a surfeit of good fortune (or without making a deal with the devil.) He inherited a fortune, and as much as he tried to lose it all he only ended up making more money. Now he’s the president of the most powerful nation on earth, and the first six weeks of his presidency have shown us that his good luck is holding. Trump is his own worst enemy, stepping on good press with tantrums and gaffes. His obvious unfitness and lack of preparation for the job becomes clearer every day. Somehow, something always intervenes to save him.

We don’t know what will happen with what Breitbart has dubbed “DeepStateGate.” The latest Wikileaks publication of secret CIA spying tools is morphing into a Bizarro World scandal in which the question of the hacking of a presidential campaign and possible connections between the president’s men and shadowy Russians is now about former President Barack Obama running a clandestine CIA “false flag” operation to pin the hacking on the Russians and implicate Trump.
Congressional investigations will now perhaps include both the Russian hacking and the possible Obama wiretapping which is another lucky break for the president. Republicans run those committees, and will be happy to flog whatever storyline will help their president.

This raises the question of whether people should get their hopes up about the Russian scandal revealing something impeachable. Of course there is enough evidence to investigate. A foreign government interfering in a democratic country’s election is a big problem. (And yes, I know the U.S. has done this as well. I think that’s a big problem too.)

But in my view investigators should devote as much time and energy as possible into following the money, since the conflicts of interest in Trump’s business career are unknown and he refuses to be even slightly transparent about his financial dealings anywhere in the world, including Russia. The Russian connection in that regard is compelling, independent of any collusion with the Putin government before the election.

For instance, Trump has said repeatedly he has no business in Russia but his son Donald Jr. gave an interview in 2008 that has been quoted widely and understood to mean that the Trumps have a lot of business in Russia. He talked about how difficult the business practices are there and how you can never be sure if you’re going to get your money back. The quote that’s made the rounds is this: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

But that’s truncated. This is the whole quote:

And in terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say, in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia. There’s indeed a lot of money coming for new-builds and resale reflecting a trend in the Russian economy and, of course, the weak dollar versus the ruble.

In other words, when he said that Russians make up a disproportionate cross-section of their assets, he wasn’t talking about assets in Russia, he was talking about Russians investing in Trump properties in the U.S.

There may no direct espionage or collusion with Vladimir Putin that is likely to lead to impeachment, but the issue of corruption and conflict of interest is ripe for investigation and the Russian connection may lead to Trump being forced to release more information about his holdings. Remember, suspicious email server management was not the original purpose of the Benghazi investigation either. But it led to the FBI director tilting the election to Donald Trump, so you just never know what might happen.

Anyway, it’s really not necessary to believe that Trump is under Putin’s thumb to be concerned about Trump’s weird affection toward the Russian president. It seems weird for a man like Trump to be so dewy-eyed about an adversary, which is one of the main reasons people are suspicious. But the fact is that Trump has long admired strongman leadership.

His worship of the generals Patton and MacArthur, his compliments toward North Korea’s Kim Jong-un for his ability, despite his youth, to “take out his rivals,” his kudos to the Chinese Government for being “strong” by perpetrating the Tiananmen Square massacre, and even his alleged compliments to the murderous Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines are all examples of his admiration for authoritarian leaders. In the revised history of Trump’s supposed opposition to the Iraq war, he claimed it was because Saddam was a tough guy who knew how to fight terrorists. He seems to have a similar respect for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, whom he called “much tougher and much smarter” than President Obama.

But there’s nobody over whom he’s been more moonstruck than Putin. Back in 2007, Trump appeared on Larry King’s CNN show and slammed George W. Bush hard, in comparison to the man he believed was showing great leadership. He said, “Whether you like him or don’t like him,” Putin was doing “a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period.” In 2008 he told a Russian magazine, “I really like Vladimir Putin. I respect him. He does his job really well. Much better than our Bush.”

A few years later he told CNBC that a Putin op-ed for the New York Times was “tough and amazingly well-written,” a “masterpiece for Russia and a disaster for the U.S.,” and that it made Obama look like “a schoolchild.” He went on and on, culminating with a paean to Putin’s grand ambition: “He really becomes with this letter, almost the world leader … He really looks like he wants to take over the world.” Trump of course meant that in a good way.

Whether or not it turns out that there were back-channel deals with oligarchs, blackmail or collusion with the Russian government, our fundamental problem is that this country just elected a man who worships authoritarian strongmen. Throughout the campaign his “Make America Great Again” riff was used in service of a message of “toughness” and “strength,” and it brought forth huge cheers from his audience. What that means is that the millions of Americans who voted for him want an authoritarian strongman too.

Stock up on popcorn
by Tom Sullivan

Reading through the House draft Obamacare replacement bill, don’t get eye strain looking for the “something terrific” Trump promised. It’s not there. Nor is it likely to be as the bill advances as it did in the wee hours this morning:

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans scored a pre-dawn triumph Thursday in their effort to scuttle former President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, but it masked deeper problems as hospitals, doctors and consumer groups mounted intensifying opposition to the GOP health care drive.

After nearly 18 hours of debate and over two dozen party-line votes, Republicans pushed legislation through the Ways and Means Committee abolishing the tax penalty Obama’s statute imposes on people who don’t purchase insurance and reshaping how millions of Americans buy medical care.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee was still in session at 5 a.m. EST this morning, the Hill reports:

The committee had only made its way through five amendments as of early Thursday morning, meaning Democrats could drag the markup through the rest of the week.

Democrats complained that Republicans are marking up the bill without a score from the Congressional Budget Office, which will indicate how many people may lose coverage under the GOP plan and how much it will cost.

Republicans shot down amendments from Democrats that would have removed a provision defunding Planned Parenthood, kept ObamaCare’s patient protections and change the title of the bill to “Republican Pay More For Less Act.”

Republicans expressed confidence that once it scores the bill’s impacts the CBO will conclude the bill will not throw millions off their health insurance.

Democrat Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts was not hearing any of it. “I was struck last night by a comment that I heard made by Speaker Ryan, where he called this repeal bill ‘an act of mercy.’ With all due respect to our speaker, he and I must have read different Scripture,” Kennedy said. “There is no mercy in a system that makes healthcare a luxury.” Like one of Al Pacino’s characters, he was just getting warmed up, calling the bill “an act of malice.”

“With all due respect to @SpeakerRyan, he and I must have read different scripture.” – @RepJoeKennedy 🔥 #TrumpCare

pic.twitter.com/r16bClKbDF

— justin kanew (@justin_kanew) March 8, 2017

Kennedy will have friends. Major players are lining up against the bill, including the American Medical Association, AARP, the American Nurses Association, the American Hospital Association, and others. The New York Times reports:

House Republicans have been left scrambling to marshal support from businesses and other interests that stand to benefit from lower taxes if the bill passes. Insurers are on the fence, and other powerful forces like pharmaceutical companies remain largely on the sidelines.

Squeezed between wary health care providers and angry conservatives who believe that the bill leaves too much of the Affordable Care Act in place, the Republican leadership and President Trump appear to be facing an uphill climb.

E.J. Dionne writes that it should not come as a surprise that Republicans will make things worse:

This is what their replacement of Obamacare would do. Democrats have quickly labeled the bill “Trumpcare,” and why not? Trump described it as “wonderful.” What’s interesting about his embrace is that the proposal fails (forgive me) bigly in living up to the joyous health-care future Trump envisioned.

“Everybody’s got to be covered,” the magician of Mar-a-Lago said on “60 Minutes” in September 2015. “I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.” Trump’s campaign pledges were so sweeping that Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), his then-rival for the Republican presidential nomination, cast Trump as a fan of a single-payer system.

Dionne reminds readers of Trump’s fondness for “truthful hyperbole” as “an innocent form of exaggeration.”

But exaggeration is not innocent when it means depriving the old, the sick and the poor of health insurance. If there is one beautiful thing about the health-care proposal House Republicans released this week, it is that it exposes how much untruthful hyperbole Republicans engaged in about Obamacare and what they would replace it with.

Why should they care about the well being of others? There’s no cure for what they’ve got. #GOPdontcare

by digby

This is all I can handle about the Obamacare repeal today. Start at the 2 minute mark if you need a quick belly laugh:

Here’s his riff on Ben Carson:

By the way:

You’ll be happy to note that Colbert has remained the dominant force in the late night TV landscape for the fifth week in a row—and that’s reportedly pressuring Jimmy Fallon to adjust his own show in response.

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Staring down the bull

by digby

Staring down “bull” is a useful metaphor for International Women’s Day in more ways than one.

Here’s the official reason for the statue:

For decades, a bronze statue of a charging bull has stood in New York City’s Financial District, representing the strength and power of the American people. Now the sculpture has a companion: a statue of a young girl, representing the future, the company who put it there said.

Boston-based State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) commissioned the statue from artist Kristen Visbal for International Women’s Day to call on companies around the world to address gender inequality and the gender pay gap. The company said that one in four of the 3,000 largest traded US companies don’t have a single woman on their board.

“A key contributor to effective independent board leadership is diversity of thought, which requires directors with different skills, backgrounds and expertise,” SSGA President Ron O’Hanley said in a statement. “Today, we are calling on companies to take concrete steps to increase gender diversity on their boards and have issued clear guidance to help them begin to take action.”

SSGA isn’t immune to these problems. According to BBC, just three of its 11 board members are women.

These companies aren’t alone, with gender equality remaining a big problem around the world. In the US, women still earn about 79 cents for every dollar that men make for the same amount of work. And according to the United Nations’ 2015 report on the progress of the world’s women, the gap between women and men remains particularly stubborn on issues of work globally: Women do more unpaid household work than men, and get paid less when they do work in the formal economy alongside men.

by digby

I think promising people they’ll all be millionaires is one way to explain Ryan’s weird health care plan:

The director of the Office of Management and Budget said Wednesday that Republicans wouldn’t use insurance coverage numbers as the ultimate metric for the success of the proposal to replace Obamacare. 

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Mark Halperin asked Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump’s OMB director, for a “range of estimate of how many fewer people will have health insurance” under House Republicans’ proposed Replacement for Obamacare. 

“We’re looking at it in a different way, Mark, because insurance is not really the end goal here, is it?” Mulvaney responded. “It’s one of the conservatives’ – one of the Republicans’ complaints about the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning: It was a great way to get insurance and a lousy way to actually be able to go to the doctor.” 

“So we’re choosing instead to look at what we think is more important to ordinary people: Can they afford to go to the doctor? And we are convinced it will be possible for more people to get better care at the doctor under this this plan than it was under Obamacare.”

So, is the argument going to be that Trump is going to make everyone so rich that they won’t need health insurance because they can pay for their health care out of their pocket? How else can we explain the fact that they are not interested in whether people have insurance? To a normal person this is gobbldygook.

Sadly, their voters won’t know the difference until they start getting the bills. Then the Republicans will blame it on Obamacare and more than a few of them will be happy to go along. They will not want to blame their man Trump and changing their minds about Obama is probably impossible. But they might take it out on their GOP congressman who “failed” to stop Obama from ruining everything. That’s Tea Party logic.

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QOTD: A Trump transition member

by digby

This is what a lackey looks like:

“The president is a neophyte to politics — he’s been doing this a little over a year. I think a lot of the things he says, I think you guys sometimes take literally. Sometimes he doesn’t have 27 lawyers looking at what he does which I think is t time refreshing and at times can also lead us to have to be sitting at a press conference like this answering questions that you guys are asking.”  —Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif.

He went on to say that he thinks tweeting is good and the president shouldn’t be attacked for it but that he shouldn’t have to be “lawyered up” before he tweets. Apparently it’s just accepted by everyone that the president is a childish cretin with no common sense.

Devin Nunes was a member of Trump’s transition team and is now the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

So we have congressman who is charged with oversight of the intelligence community excusing the president’s lunacy by saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing and blaming the press for taking him at his word.

This is how far we’ve gone down the rabbit hole, people.

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They’re calling it “DeepStateGate”

by digby

I wrote about the GOP history of ginned up scandals for Salon today. It’s the one thing they do well:

You have to feel a little bit sorry for Sean Spicer. Being the spokesman for an unbalanced man with a bad temper and an early morning Twitter habit is a tough job. During Tuesday’s press briefing, MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson asked Spicer a perfectly logical question: Why would the president want Congress to investigate a crime when he already has the evidence?

After all, as Kellyanne Conway on Monday morning, “He’s the president of the United States. He has information and intelligence that the rest of us do not.” So why wouldn’t he give it to the Congress so they don’t have to spend time and resources trying to dig it up? Spicer merely mumbled something incoherentabout it being a separation of powers issue, which doesn’t make any sense.

But what could he say? It has been widely reported that Trump’s “information” came from talk show host Mark Levin’s rant on Breitbart, not from any classified briefings. The president needed to relieve himself of his pent-up anger last Saturday morning, so he blasted Obama on Twitter and it’s taken on a life of its own.

Trump is no master strategist but he does have a strong feral survival instinct and a bottomless reservoir of personal good fortune. That combination often leads him to inadvertently luck into a strategy that will help him out of a mess he’s made for himself. His temper tantrum last weekend may very well end up being one of those times. After all, the Republicans may have no idea how to write coherent legislation or deal with angry constituents, but they do know how to do one thing very, very well: gin up a phony scandal. The president just handed them the excuse to pursue a bogus investigation of a Democratic president, and that has to be a great relief to a caucus that is clearly in over its head trying to actually govern.

You can already see the scandal machine being warmed up. The old Clinton nemesis Judicial Watch got on the case immediately with a lawsuit against the CIA, Department of Justice and Treasury for their failures to provide information about the calls between former national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador. Their press release included this comment:

President Trump is on to something. The Obama-connected wiretapping and illegal leaks of classified material concerning President Trump and General Flynn are a scandal.

FBI director James Comey has let it be known that no such “Obama-connected” wiretapping occurred. But facts have never stopped Judicial Watch from using FOIA and the courts as a partisan bludgeon. Back in the 1990s the group was relentless in its pursuit of Bill and Hillary Clinton, playing a substantial role in the harassment campaign that dogged the administration for eight years.

Regarding Trump’s overwhelming conflicts of interest and potential for corruption, however, Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton had this to say:

As we said in our recent New York Times op-ed, it would be unfair to insist that Mr. Trump destroy his business to become president. This ethics plan follows many of Judicial Watch’s recommendations and reasonably addresses pressing concerns about separating Mr. Trump’s private business from the public’s business.

Some ethical watchdog.

But the serious players in this game are members of Congress. We’ve just been through the inanity of the eight Benghazi committee investigations and months and months of garment-rending over Hillary Clinton’s email server, so everyone is familiar with their propensity to make a federal case out of absolutely nothing. But they’ve been even crazier in the past. “Filegate,” “Travelgate,” “Troopergate” and, of course, Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky affair were just some of the scandals Congress investigated in the 1990s.

Congressional Republicans even spent years torturing the family of former deputy White House counsel Vince Foster after his tragic suicide. Rep. Dan Burton delivered a notorious speech on the House floor in August of 1994 in which he said he had conducted forensic tests in his backyard proving that Foster couldn’t have fired the gun himself:

We, at my house, with a homicide detective, tried to re-create a head, and fired a .384-inch barrel into that, to see if the sound could be heard from a hundred yards away.

The head he “re-created” was widely reported to have been a watermelon, although some have said it was a pumpkin or a cantaloupe.

And here you thought the Republicans had only gone completely crazy in the last couple of years.

So far the current Congress has been treading rather lightly on the Trump allegations of Obama’s criminal wiretapping. Most likely the FBI and the intelligence community’s obvious pushback against the notion that they are involved has made Republicans cautious. But that hasn’t stopped some from taking it to the next level anyway. Commentator Hugh Hewitt threw out a thinly-veiled threat in his Washington Post op-ed on Tuesday, suggesting that calls for a special prosecutor to investigate Russian interference in the presidential election must also include more harassment of Hillary Clinton over her email server. (He offers no reason why, but the history I just described shows that there’s no need to show any connection between various witch conservative hunts.) No doubt the Trump voters would be thrilled to bring back “Lock her up!”

Congressman Steve King of Iowa may have found the hook that will allow Congress to allay the intelligence community and the FBI’s concerns over their reputation being sullied by intimations that they conspired with Obama to spy on Trump in his golden tower. King told the Sioux City Journal that such denials don’t “necessarily prove that there wasn’t a rogue intel operation going on that wasn’t encumbered by, or just decided not to be encumbered by, the legalities.”

There’s no evidence of that, of course. But it’s a pretty good bet that’s what Trump wants people to think happened, and one can certainly see how such a suspicion could be parlayed into a full-blown investigation. If Congress and the Justice Department don’t do what the White House clearly wants them to do, which is to drop the Russian investigation altogether, it’s likely we’ll be hearing about Obama’s alleged illegal wiretap operation for a while.

If that doesn’t work, Trump will instinctively find another way to project his problems on to his political enemies. He’s tried turning the press into the “enemy of the people,” and that really hasn’t worked. Now he’s gone after Obama. Let’s just hope he doesn’t wake up one morning in a snit and decide to start a real war to make himself feel better.