January 13, 2016
Source: Shutterstock
Lofgren points out that Our Woman in Kiev, Victoria Nuland, has presided over a policy of Bear-baiting that has ill served the American national interest, although it appears to have pleased Lockheed Martin. And yet, the notion of firing Nuland for America’s predictable setbacks in Ukraine simply haven”t come up.
Similarly, being objectively wrong about Iraq in 2002″03 damaged very few careers, and being right benefited even fewer: Barack Obama being a rare example, and he had the discretion to make only a single speech objecting to the Iraq Attaq.
On the other hand, Lofgren’s emphasis on the deep state’s permanent nature understates the importance of elections to the system. While they may not change policy all that much, they do churn the personnel, allowing several thousand individuals to get a few years of high-level federal-government experience on their résumés, thus permanently bucking up their net worths when they return to the private sector to cash in. (Lofgren points to the Clintons as epitomizing the current system of post hoc bribery in which government officials who play ball get taken care of by the system after they”re out of office.)
Interestingly, all that national-security largesse poured upon once-rock-ribbed Republican Virginia (which voted GOP in presidential elections from 1968 through 2004) seems to have made it Democratic. The state of Virginia voted for Obama twice, with Fairfax County, home of the CIA, giving Obama 60 percent of its vote and Arlington County, home of the Pentagon, giving him 72 percent in 2012.
A couple of interesting angles that Lofgren only briefly touches upon are gay marriage, which he sees as a “distraction” for voters, and immigration.
But there’s more to be said on the two issues. Gay marriage”what I call World War G after the Brad Pitt zombie movie World War Z“has become an important deep-state salient. The New York Times reported last month:
Since 2012, the American government has put more than $700 million into supporting gay rights groups and causes globally.
Over half that spending has gone to Africa, where the agitation mostly seems to have alarmed locals, who never much thought about homosexuality before, to decide they”d better pass some laws cracking down on it.
The more serious initiative has been to use gay rights to provoke Russia, as I pointed out in a December 2013 blog post entitled “World War G and the Military-Industrial Complex“:
America’s Global War of Terror has been a huge moneymaker for Washington’s Beltway, but it’s starting to get a little old. Looking to the future, why not a replay of a tried and true honeypot: an arms race with Russia?…
But to justify lots more spending we need some reason to be angry at the Russians….
I know, gays!
And Ukrainians, although they”re kind of boring…
Two months later, during the expensive Sochi Winter Olympics, American boorishness over gay rights in Russia and Nuland’s machinations in Ukraine helped bring out the ever-present bad side in Russia, inclining Putin to violate the post-1940s assumption that only Israel is allowed to change borders via conquest.
But Nuland still has her job.
Lofgren, an ex-Republican, is leery of alienating his newfound liberal audience by revealing too soon in his book that he finds mass immigration yet another part of the billionaires” strategy to defraud the American public. But he comes through forthrightly in the closing pages on America’s need for a more pro-American immigration policy.
Still, it’s worth adding that, as in the recent Ted Cruz ad hypothesizing how different the politics of immigration would play out if foreign lawyers and bankers were wading the Rio Grande to drive down the salaries of American lawyers and bankers, the influential members of the deep state are largely shielded from the economic consequences of mass immigration by their jobs” requirements of citizenship and security clearances.
Moreover, deep staters tend to see Inviting the World as a convenient way to mollify foreigners for our Invading the World.
Of course, all it really does is make blowback easier.
But hey, it’s a living.