The Anti-Idiot Idiot

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

Anyone who's read Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot knows that it's an ironically-titled classic. The titular character, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, is actually Dostoevsky's ideal of what the perfect man is, someone imbued with all the good qualities of true, Christian love. He is considered an idiot by the supporting characters who misconstrue his innate goodness, sweetness and seeming simplicity for simple-mindedness, hence an idiot.

     And then there's Donald Trump, the exact analog, a mere useful idiot who unfailingly parrots the Kremlin's talking points and weakens the United States for Putin's own gain and who, ironically, never even got his Trump Tower Moscow OK'd by the same man he now obsequiously obeys and serves.

     Donald John Trump, accused child molester, philanderer, rapist, tax dodger, welcher, serial liar and draft dodger, a man who cherishes loyalty provided it's unconditionally given to him on demand without the burden of reciprocation, is the perfect, exact analog to Prince Lev Myshkin. His supposed Christian goodness is a mere projection thrust upon him by evangelicals who see in Trump a mere actuator, a shaky hand on a lever of the End of Days. His evangelical supporters viciously defend Jews and Israel while secretly looking upon them as another means to that end, the gathering of Jews for an Apocalypse for which they ceaselessly slaver in the interests of converting the last 144,000 of God's "chosen children."

     The Mueller report, now out for four days yet not out, thanks to the odious likes of the always furtive Mitch McConnell, who just yesterday blocked a non-binding resolution in the Senate to release the Mueller report in full, is still an unexploded land mine. Bill Barr, an obvious plant who has already played his part and is now just taking up space in the Justice Department, last Sunday delivered a four page Cliff Notes condensation of the 74 page Mueller report, one that took 22 months and 25,000,000 taxpayer dollars to assemble, to the Senate Intelligence Committee that has since been widely touted by the right as vindication, even though the still-hidden Mueller report doesn't come close to saying that. Even Barr himself had admitted that the report does not exonerate Trump. We just don't know in what way and against which charges he's not exonerated.

     And Barr's own simple-minded reaction to the Mueller report merely raises more questions than answers among those of us who still care to ask questions and be skeptical of so-called official findings. Former Attorney General Eric Holder recently asked what legal methodology did Bill Barr use in his ridiculous usurpation of the powers of judge and jury. It's like the latter day Joseph Smith and his Golden Bible, "Yes, my flock, I have seen the Golden Bible but you cannot. Trust me, it's... somewhere."

     Of course, there's always the possibility that the Mueller probe didn't find actionable evidence of collusion (and, don't forget, it was understood from the beginning the DOJ has a rule that a Special Counsel can't indict a sitting president, so him not recommending Trump's indictment shouldn't be a surprise) because the Trump campaign didn't need to collude with Russia. After all, Raymond Shaw, the Manchurian Candidate, didn't need to collude with the Communists who'd brainwashed him. And Trump simply didn't need to reach out to them because he knew the Russians already had his jiggling back.

"Russia, if you're listening..."

Russia certainly was listening. Consider how truly corrupt the Republican presidential field was in early 2016. There were 17 candidates. Between crooks, con men, political hacks, feeble-minded idiots and nonentities, the Russians chose Donald Trump to support through their own GRU. Now, if Trump was the one they chose, hence the one over whom they exert the most leverage, think of how corrupt Trump truly is to stand out in a field comprised of, at one point, a Bush, a former Canadian rebranded as a white supremacist, an intellectual bantamweight from Florida, a mannequin from Indiana and the narcoleptic Ben Carson.

     Yes, Russia was indeed listening, knowing all too well that Trump wanted to build a tower across the street from the Kremlin not just in 2013 but way back in 1987. It was also during that time when, with his trademark brainless megalomania, he thought he could sign the Soviets to a deal that would lead to denuclearization, forgetting that Reagan had already done that. Now, Trump has "evolved" to the point where he no longer wants to put any constraints on Russia ramping up its nuclear arsenal by simply walking away from the INF treaty.

     Putin is smart enough to know a stooge when he sees it and he latched onto a rube in the throes of dementia who honestly never thought he'd win the 2016 election and, by all measurable standards of psychological sanity and political science, shouldn't have. But Putin also was quick to spot the racism, xenophobia, misogyny and general rage and anger of 62,000,000 Americans still infuriated over a black man running their country for eight years and wanted one of their own to put things right.

     If there's no actionable evidence that Trump conspired or colluded with the Russians, it's because Putin had his hands on the wheel the whole time. Trump was just the moron in the back seat whining, "Are we there, yet?" In July 2016, he openly begged for the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton's emails because he knew they already had and, in an absurd game of One Degree of Separation, established plausible deniability in funneling the stolen cache of data through Wikileaks while Julian Assange cowered in the Equadorean embassy.

     Donald Trump is not the rightful president. He's not even an accidental president like Gerald Ford because everything Russia did on his behalf, and the scores of indictments and half a dozen prison sentences prove there was something going on between Team Trump and the Russians, was entirely deliberate.

     With the unwitting or perhaps witting aid of Wikileaks and tech giants such as Twitter and Facebook, Putin's intelligence services and hundreds of paid trolls put together the slickest hacking and disinformation campaign ever seen in the history of the internet. Trump may be hopelessly demented, screaming, "No collusion!" to people instead of "Hello". But he was certainly with it enough to know that Russia was helping him for its own ends. It's no accident that nearly everything Trump has decided has benefited Russia in some way, shape and form. He is the perfect analog of Prince Myshkin if Dostoevsky's Idiot had an evil twin.