There was a former ambassador to Russia on NPR this morning, who said that the big deal was lying to Mike Pence, and making him go on TV to defend Flynn. What struck me, of course, was the hypocrisy -- lying to the American people is fine, but not to the boss. If this doesn't prove the egotism and lack of principle in the Trump regime, I don't know what will.
Deceiving the public is very much modern governance doctrine. That should not be news but of course a component of implementing this doctrine is pervasive propagandizing of the public by established media, entertainment industry, alternative media (99.9% fake alt imo), and various "ex-" whatevers. Flynn will not be missed. He demonstrated that he is too stupid, too careless, to merit his position. But that is not the story here. The story here is that the unaccountable spook community is a modern day Praetorian Guard and that our republic is effectively dead. What remains to be seen is whether we transition to an actual empirial regime, or, whether the "deep state" is in fact working for/with transnational entities that wish to proceed with the program of cutting down the sole superpower down to size. Were we an educated nation not susceptible to trivial manipulation that set us against one another the corrective recourse, however painful, would be possible. But we are not (by design) an educated nation, and we are (by design) programmed from craddle to grave to manifest the required 'response' to the provided 'stimilus' and are deeply divided (again by design).
I'm waiting for the fallout, because it should be a lot nastier. How do you think Pence is feeling about all this? So Flynn lied to him (which we're assuming is true for the moment), but do you think that Flynn was acting without the boss's blessing? So now Pence is in the position of all of a sudden being aware that he's not part of the inner circle, and that he isn't in on the joke (con) that Trump, Inc is playing on America. Add to that the blind rage with which Flynn has shown to be consumed when he feels slighted (he loves Trump specifically because he hates Obama for firing him), and we've got ourselves a stew going.
A journalist friend of mine:One explanation that fits the facts is that Trump told Flynn to sweet-talk the Russians in the first place and lie to Pence about it. Trump still thinks he's conning other grifters in the real estate game. But this ain't real estate or reality TV, and his sheer ignorance is already catching up with him. Maybe they both assumed that if push came to shove, Pence could be rolled.
Another very intriguing aspect to this is that it was only made public because of the efforts of Acting AG Sally Yates. Now that Nathan Bedford Forest is the AG, we have to assume that cover up of misdeeds is going to be the default. Is there any way Trump supports an independent investigator to investigate his own direction to Flynn to give Putin a back massage and lie to the VP?