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Roger Stone-like most of the Trump hacks, like Trump himself-never knows when to shut up. If he did, he probably wouldn’t be in the predicament he finds himself in today: in his own words it’s very likely that he will be indicted. Stone’s co-conspirator, Jerome Corsi has now begun singing the same sad song-while like Stone, Corsi is also asking for money for his ‘legal defense fund.’

UPDATE: Apparently Corsi wasn’t charged after all-I say apparently as there are up to 18 ongoing investigations and spinoffs from Muller. Why he wasn’t is yet another very good question for Mueller-when we finally hear from him-perhaps he will have to be subpoenaed. 

End of UPDATE

But so much of trouble that Stone is in, was caused by his own big mouth. It’s all the prima facie evidence: Soon it will be Podesta’s time in the barrel. With that in mind, why does Stone talk so much, and way too much? Because for him, a fate worse than going to prison seems to be being ignored. For his dark Nixonian arts and dirty tricks to go unacknowledged.

As he says in this interview with the Washington Post, worse than being wrong is being ignored. 

One criticism Republicans sometimes make against us Democrats is, sure we don’t think Trump is legitimate, but we also didn’t believe W was legitimate. Well is that because Democrats have a propensity to not believe Republican Presidents are legitimate or because Republicans tend to be willing to do anything to win Presidential elections-wether collude with Russia or forcibly shutdown a legal recount in Florida?

Which brings us to Roger Stone who’s gotten into turf wars with other GOP dirty tricksters on the question of who really deserves credit  for the Brooks Brothers riot that shutdown the Florida recount in 2000-setting stage for the GOP Supreme Court to say ‘Sure, Florida law requires a recount with a vote this close, but it’s December 12, and we’ve decided that’s ‘too late’ so just disregard the law and name the Republican nominee President.’

It would soon after that emerge that Sandra Day O’Connor was overheard declaring ‘this is terrible’ when it was first reported that Gore won Florida.

More recently, in 2016 Stone and Chuck Johnson got into a turf war for who deserves credit for getting the Clinton accusers to all show up at the debate two days after the Hollywood Access video came out.

Again-the thesis of this book is that the post New Deal GOP is on the wrong side of history-as we saw in (Chapter A) on the one hand the GOP has known and acknowledged since the New Deal that most Americans disagree with them-yet they’ve chosen not to adjust or adapt in any meaningful way, or as William F. Buckley put it they’ve chosen to stand athwart history and yell stop-that is to say, they’ve chosen to be not just a conservative party but a true party of reaction. Regarding the New Deal, they’ve chosen not containment but rollback. And they’ve gotten not less conservative but more-each GOP Administration since Eisenhower has been a little more conservative than the previous one.

Think about it-Ike essentially did choose containment. Nixon his VP was essentially in the same vein but was compared to Ike more conservative. Reagan unlike Ike-Nixon truly seriously rolled back much of the New Deal legacy-certainly in his union busting and unlike Ike-Nixon, even philosophically Reagan declared ‘government isn’t the solution it’s the problem.’

With the rise of Newt and the Contract of America-after 40 years and 60 of 64 years of Democratic rule, the GOP aspired to broadly rollback the New Deal.

W. Bush was even more conservative than Reagan-Bush-Bush Sr. can safely be absorbed in a 12 year ‘Reagan-Bush Administration.’

But Trump- the media wrongly fell for Trump’s ruse of being ‘a different kind of Republican’ or even ‘a Democrat most of his life’ has been the most conservative and blatantly partisan Administration since the 1920s; W. Bush did make gestures towards bipartisanship both in policy and who in terms of his cabinet.

So what does a party who has become even more stubbornly reactionary over the past 85 years-since the rise of FDR-do? They become very good at achieving minority rule. As they don’t have the facts on their side-or the law-they’ve become very good at table pounding-and cheating in all manor of ways up to and including election rigging,. with the collusion of hostile foreign powers if need be.

But if any one man today would seem to personify and represent what I call the morally and intellectually bankrupt GOP of today, it’s Roger Stone-who has a huge tattoo of his mentor, Tricky Dick on his back.

In answer to the question poised above-why does Roger Stone-and other Trump Deplorables-talk so darn much-way more than is even remotely prudent-the answer is: Stone-like all Trump Deplorables, like the most Deplorable of Them All-so-called ‘President Trump’-would rather anything than be ignored-perhaps he’d even rather prison which is now a live possibility for Stone unless he does a Michael Cohen-that is to say a 180-on his insistence that he’d never turn on ‘President Trump’ no matter what.

Still the way he puts it is not entirely categorical:

“Roger Stone, the political consultant who served as informal adviser to the Trump campaign, said it is “conceivable” that special counsel Robert Mueller will “bring some bogus charge against me,” but he can’t think of any circumstance in which he’d testify against President Donald Trump.”

Is saying ‘he can’t think of any circumstance’ leaving the door open if only just a little? After all, logically speaking that could mean there is a circumstance Stone hasn’t thought of. 

In an interview with Variety‘s “PopPolitics” on SiriusXM’s political channel POTUS, Stone said, “it is possible the special counsel could bring an action against me that is designed to make me testify against Donald Trump, who I have known on an intimate basis for almost 40 years.”

He added, “I do not work in the Trump White House. There are some things he has done as president that I do not agree with, and other things that he has done as president that I do agree with. But that said, I can’t think of any circumstance under which I would be willing to testify against him.”

What Stone does here is classic-there are some things he’s done I don’t agree with. I argued in (Chapter A) that Trump is neither ‘a different kind of Republican’ or even ‘a Democrat most of his life’ but what he is a a pretty decent agent provocateur. While he’s neither of these things, the fact that many people believe it-including some on the Center Left and Left-is certainly quite helpful. Many of the Congressional Democrats even now speak as if they really took Trump’s word on an infrastructure plan which is puzzling when you consider:

1. He’s a pathological liar who lies about 73% of the time. So almost anything he says i likely to be false. Indeed, with al the talk of Hillary Clinton somehow not be ‘trustable’-Trump continues to get the benefit of the doubt-when he says things many still give him the benefit of the doubt.

2. He had total GOP  control the last two years-if he had wanted any kind of ‘infrastructure’-I also strongly suspect what he and the Democrats mean by this are very different-he’d have passed it with the GOP Congress. Trump has made some requisite noises on doing something now-though again, if he had wanted it, he could have done it with his captive GOP Congress who would give him anything he demanded.

But both Trump and Stone are very skilled agent provocateurs-as unpopular as the modern GOP ideological agenda is no one in the party actually has a choice.

Similarly when Stone makes these vague claims about things Trump does that he doesn’t agree with, he’s concern trolling-attempting to give himself more credibility to some of the left leaning ‘independents’-those liberals who insist on treating the Democratic party if anything more skeptically than the Republicans, perhaps Randy Credico liberals? who actually set up a Bernie Sanders supporters for Trump group in 2016.

UPDATE: Find link Mike on Credico’s Trump group.

The Intermediary Between Roger Stone and Wikileaks Was a Sanders Supporter

The idea is that many will credit Stone as therefore not being a GOP hack and shill-even though he clearly is one. For instance-he claims to be a libertarian in support of things like drug legalization and gay marriage. Yet, all the dirty tricks he pulled in 2016-with Wikileaks and Podesta, Credico, and Jerome Corsi-the protesters he paid to picket Hillary Clinton rallies with signs calling Bill a rapist, his proud fomenting of the unproven allegation that Bill Clinton fathered an illegitimate Black son-this is a great twofer for a dirty trickster like Stone as it both outrages Clinton’s own African American supporters who will assume it’s true and the White anti Clinton voters who will assume it’s true. AAs will be incensed that Clinton-allegedly but they will assume it’s true-ignored his own Black child and White voters will be disgusted by the idea that Clinton has a Black child-which they too will presume-to his part in bringing the Clinton accusers to Hillary Clinton’s debate two days after Hollywood Access; and we haven’t even got to Stone and Corsi’s role in Comeygate-all these dirty tricks of his have the effect of making Jeff Sessions the Attorney General of the United States.

If you really cared about gay rights and drug legalization would you support much less move Heaven and earth to put Jeff Sessions in as AG?

This is because Stone’s entire ‘libertarian shtick’ is a poise. What he and Trump do so successfully is pretend to be anti establishment Republicans ‘ different kinds of Republicans’ in the service of establishment Republicans. As Mark Ames warned on August 11, 2015-just when Trump-and Stone-were first gaining traction in the GOP primary: anti-establishment politics is a racket.

That Ames’ piece came so early gives it an almost prescient feel.

In (Chapter A) we looked at howTrump and Stone’s real objective in Trump’s 2000 Presidential campaign during the primaries on the Reform party ticket was to take out Pat Buchanan-who otherwise stood to Ralph Nader George W. Bush’s vote just as Nader himself Ralph Nadered Al Gore’s.

That was a fascinating case because when Stone and Trump went after Buchanan hard-calling him a Nazi sympathizer it was a quite fitting reunion for alumni from Nixon’s CREEP. The attacks on Buchanan were very effective-Trump kept up the attacks on Buchanan as a Nazi apologist-who defends Hitler? Of course, as it happens…

“Donald Trump ‘kept book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches in his bedside cabinet’

In a 1990 interview, the billionaire businessman admitted to owning Nazi leader’s ‘Mein Kampf’ but said he had would never read speeches.”

And to think of the hell they gave Bill Clinton for saying I didn’t inhale… Of course, this is one time you can believe Trump-I don’t think he’d ever read anything. But, you know, secondhand smoke. And I’ve long since said Trump is Hitler in the American context and:

UPDATE: In this vein let’s hope Pelosi doesn’t turn out to be America’s Neville Chamberlain.

But the attacks on Buchanan for being a Nazi sympathizer-based on Buchanan’s book that did offer up an apologia for Hitler-were inspired. And Stone in his book on the 2016 election-the same one he also divulged what he and Corsi knew/did in Comeygate-too credit for telling Trump to call Buchanan a Nazi. Again, what a reunion. Back when Stone was the youngest member of CREEP at the tender age of 19 in 1972,  Buchanan was everything Stone could dream of being. And, of course, they Stone and Buchanan were co-conspirators in rigging that election for Nixon.

As noted in (chapter A) it’s another piece of serendipity that both Stone and Buchanan had new books lionizing their mentor and idol, Tricky Dick, in 2014. Almost as if they knew one even more corrupt and criminal was coming. And Stone, of course, did know. 

That the 1972 election was also rigged-just like 1968 is understood by very few. Stone for his part actually made the game winning shot that ‘won’ the game for Nixon and Creeps-the ball was fed to him, of course, by Don Segretti himself.

As I argued above, Stone’s claim to be an ‘anti establishment Republican’ is just a poise; indeed, as unpopular as the ideological agenda of the modern GOP is by definition all establishment Republicans have to poise as anti establishment Republicans.

This is what Stone and Trump have mastered to a T:

“I don’t think Stone ever says what policy he is for in this memoir, and he might well consider a focus on policy a distraction. There is only winning and losing an election, and five methods for achieving a victory recur again and again in races that Stone is involved with, four methods that create a mirror maze of confusion, misdirection, and elimination. The first is through association, by having a candidate receive an endorsement from a person or group who potential supporters of the candidate are predisposed to view as an opponent, or through association with something unquestionably malevolent made via protesters, pamphlets, or other means funded by Stone’s campaign but without any fingerprints. The second is by having a group, funded by allied interests, oppose a candidate or policy due to some larger moral principle that everyone can agree on – the issue is not candidate A versus B, but opposition to crime, gambling, or child abuse. The third is the smear, saying your opponent is corrupt, weak, racist, a rapist, a murderer, a pedophile, always helpfully done not through you, the opponent on which this tar might stick, but through a phantom proxy. This last is used very, very often by Stone. The fourth, and one of the most effective, is through fragmentation of the vote. There is, say, overwhelming support for candidate A, who will raise the minimum wage, versus candidate B, who won’t. You split this overwhelming vote by funding another candidate, who wants to raise the minimum wage even higher, and who chastises candidate A for compromising their principles and being beholden to business interests for not asking for a higher wage. Through a vote split, candidate B, the one who says he believes the condition of workers must be improved, but not through easy sounding solutions like a higher minimum wage, scores a victory. At the same time, you make great efforts to keep the votes for your own candidate or issue from being fragmented. The fifth is vote suppression, of black and latino voters, who tend to poll democrat. The first four have been employed in elections that Stone has been involved in, with Stone often taking credit. The fifth has been employed alongside Stone’s efforts, though perhaps without the collusion of Stone.”

 

The repellent ugliness of most of these tactics has been forgotten, and so I’m grateful to Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland for recording them. Black protesters suddenly showed up in front of the hotel room of democratic candidate Edmund Muskie, calling him racist for having said that a Democratic ticket with a black running mate couldn’t get elected. An ad suddenly appeared in a Miami Beach Jewish newspaper: “Muskie, Why Won’t You Consider a Jew as a Vice President?” Muskie hadn’t excluded the possibility. Flyers appeared in Jewish neighborhoods: “Remember the Warsaw Ghetto…Vote Right on March 14.” Muskie was of Polish descent15. A letter was sent to a New Hampshire paper, filled with outrage at what happened when Muskie had been asked how he could understand the problems of minorities given the lack of minorities in Maine, Muskie’s home state. A Muskie aide had supposedly replied that they did have minorities in Maine, the very same minority that was there in New Hampshire: “Not blacks, but we have Canucks.” Muskie had supposedly laughed16. The next day, Muskie’s wife was indicted in an editorial in the same paper of telling dirty jokes to reporters, and having two cocktails before dinner. Something in all this broke Muskie, and when the candidate defended his wife in front of television cameras, he began to weep17. Muskie’s tears destroyed his candidacy. Muskie was a target, but all the Democratic candidates were targets. Two hundred dollars was donated to Pete McCloskey by the Young Socialist Alliance, the receipt for the donation helpfully sent to a right-wing news editor. A mole, code named Sedan Chair II, was hired to go inside the Herbert Humphrey campaign and relay strategic information18.

It would eventually be established with certainty that the man who’d written the “Canucks” letter, the man who’d hired the black protesters in front of Muskie’s hotel room, was Donald Segretti, who handled a secret, separate black ops campaign team for CREEP. The man who’d actually sent the letter to McCloskey, who’d hired the Sedan Chair II mole, was a nineteen year old operative named Roger Stone. It was because of this that he makes a brief appearance in the Watergate testimony.”

But who was the brains behind CREEP? Buchanan himself:

It was Pat Buchanan who laid out the Nixon ‘72 strategy in a memo titled “Muskie Watch,” advising that the GOP attacks should “focus on those issues that divide the Democrats, not those that unite Republicans.” Buchanan argued:

 “It should exacerbate and elevate those issues on which Democrats are divided—forcing Muskie to either straddle, or come down on one side or the other.”

Another 1971 Buchanan memo reads,

“Maintain as guiding political principle that our great hope for 1972 lies in maintaining or exacerbating the deep Democratic rift.”

:That “deep Democratic rift” referred to the far-right populist wing of the party in the South, led by George Wallace; and the left multiracial wing of the party, represented then by black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and by McGovern, who wound up winning the nomination.”

“Buchanan argued that having Wallace—Alabama’s symbol of segregation—run from the far-right in the 1972 Democratic primaries (but not run in November as a third party candidate, which would hurt Nixon) would divide the Democratic Party, and turn voters off. Lo and behold, they succeeded in convincing Wallace to run in the Democratic primaries in a dirty quid pro quo, and Wallace was doing a good job of dirtying and dividing the Dems until a real-life Travis Bickle stuck his pistol out from a crowd and popped Wallace’s spinal cord.”

“Another Nixon strategy was funding a black left run against the Democrats and against Muskie. Thanks to an amazing, deep-researched piece on Roger Stone on a site called italkyoubored.com, I came across some incredible passages that are a kind of open black box for contemporary politics—unless of course you think Nixon was an exception, and all those bad folks were punished and banished from our peaceable kingdom.”

UPDATE: Note this fascinating deep dive into Roger Stone and the rest of the GOP co-conspirators was written in February, 2014-still well over a year before the start of Trump’s colluding campaign-with both Russia and the rogue anti Clinton pro Trump agents at the FBI.

But when you’re talking about Roger Stone style GOP dirty tricks-everything is always new again.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/06/house-dems-are-planning-to-investigate-giuliani-for-seeking-foreign-help-interfering-with-us-politics-report/

 

As documented in chapter A  Pat Buchanan had some pretty interesting-and misleading-testimony before the Watergate Select Committee:

“For the record, Mr. ChairMan, let me state the following: I did not recommend or authorize, nor was I aware of, any on‐going cam paign of political sabotage against Senator Muskie, or any other Democratic candi date.

I did not recommend, either verbally or in memoranda, that the Re‐election Committee infiltrate the campaigns of our opposition, I have never met nor spoken with, nor can I recall ever having heard the names of, Messrs. Hunt. Liddy, Mc Cord, Ulasewicz, Ragan, Barker or Segretti until those names appeared in the public press.

“Nor have I ever heard, until the terms were made public, the code names of Ruby 1, Ruby 2, Crystal, Sedanchair 1 and Sedan chair 2, or Fat Jack. Even today, I could not testify with certitude to whom these terms refer.”

FN: Some of the letters in the words on this old transcript were  broken up and I simply corrected it.

Of course, he doesn’t have to know them: those who craft military strategy often don’t know the faces and names of the foot soldiers who execute their battle plan. It’s usually preferable that those who plan the attack don’t know anything about the foot soldiers-for plausible deniability first and foremost.

Foot soldiers like: Roger Stone. While Stone also testified before the Watergate Committee he avoided prison in the first Watergate largely due to his young years-19. Unlike Segretti who went to prison for six months. Speaking of which, right now in Watergate 2.0 George Papadopolous just begun his 14 day sentence-which he surely did nothing to try to lessen with his recent smears against Mueller, the British, Alexander Downer, etc.

He is clearly doing everything he can to ingratiate himself with Trump and his co-conspirators.

Sounds like remorse to me.

Segretti for his part attempted to run for office in the 1990s but even after 20 years the Watergate wounds had not lessened. 

“In 1995, Segretti ran for a local judgeship in Orange County, California. He quickly withdrew from the race when his campaign awakened lingering anger over and memories of his involvement in the Watergate scandal.”

UPDATE: Speaking of everything old is new again Papadopoulos has also tweeted about running for Congress in California-is there a constituency for traitors?

Will he succeed where Segretti failed? If so that would underscore how far we’ve fallen as a country.

Comparatively then, Stone should thank his lucky starts he avoided prison in the first Watergate. Yet, what Stone has always craved most of all is recognition as one  American’s greatest -if not the greatest-GOP dirty tricksters. While Stone may not want to go to prison worse for him is to be ignored. Like Daffy Duck, he needed an encore. 

But like Daffy,  while this will prove to be the ultimate crowd pleaser-it will also necessarily be his last act.

UPDATE: While Mueller is now done Stone is not his trial starts in November. After threatening  Amy Berman Jackson-his own judge-on Instagram earlier this week he threatened John Brennan on Instagram.

While he’s been charged with perjury-I know it’s a ‘process crime’ like Bill Clinton was impeached over-it’s clear that Russian collusion is at the heart of his trial. 

 

 

 

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/19/17479060/roger-stone-russian-meeting-mueller

 

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/25/17380212/spygate-trump-russia-spy-stefan-halper-fbi-explained

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October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

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