These honking memos! Is your intelligence insulted enough yet? [View all]

[bigtree]

Last edited Tue Jan 30, 2018, 03:18 PM - Edit history (2)

_________________________________

One memo is pure, contrived, partisan republican-written propaganda, basically a four page list of all of the lies republican defenders of Trump have been trying to insert into the national debate which they hope will discredit the FBI and the investigation of the President of the United States.

The other is a Democratic attempt to keep the discussion in the realm of reality.

Thing is, this Nunes campaign to publicize this self-generated memo only serves to deepen that impression that Carter Page (who a FISA court approved a wiretap on, and renewed it) is complicit in something Russian-related. Most people (who bother to care) aren't going to cast more suspicion on the FBI than on Russian-connected operatives like Page.

I have to stop hollering at the television every time newscasters bring up these 'memos' like they're some kind of bombshell sitting behind some fortress just waiting to explode the second they're revealed. The contents is not only old news, it's a basket of old and widely discredited lies dressed up as a legitimate investigative committee finding, all in the interest of diverting the FBI away from investigating the president and those around him (including from investigating Nunes, perhaps, as a member of Trump's transition team).

The fact that the Democratic rebuttal of the claims in the republican document was not approved for release by the republican-controlled committee makes this a partisan farce, almost identical to the last stunt with Nunes standing in front of the White House with documents they fed to him, looking even more bewildered than the rest of us looking on, trying to distract from and discredit the FBI early on in the investigation.

It was that stunt, in fact, that forced Nunes to recuse himself. Nunes breezed through the compromised House ethics committee, however, which cleared him of wrongdoing in the stunt, despite having been denied access to the underlying documents he was trying to manipulate.

Now he's back with another weak and bizarre diversion. It is absolutely infuriating listening to these media folks giving this dirt-dumb, hamhanded attempt at a smear of our intelligence agencies a whiff of credibility, but here we are, expecting us to be on the edge of our seats to read the contents of what's clearly nothing more than republican spin; most of their party complicit in obstruction of the investigation with this stunt, if you get down to the meat of the matter.

It's a dog and pony show, and it's been an uneven rollout by most of the press, who already have enough information to refute or define every stale point made in the republican document. Still, it's actually a good day for a Trump shitshow, on the day of his SOTU, with Trump and the Russia investigation front and center, thanks, almost entirely, to this simpleton's self-incriminating stunts.