B-B-Block It!

Nobody is being serious about what's going on

There are number of upsides to the House blocking passage of the reconciled version of the Big Beautiful Bill, which Rep. Massie has just said he has the votes to do:

1. It will make President Trump really upset at Elon Musk
   
   We want them to fight. This one is very simple. The president will win, and Elon Musk is a foreign-backed traitor, so we want to make the president upset with him. Don’t worry, Thomas Massie will still win reelection.
   

2. Most of the DHS money will likely go to supercharging Israeli security scams
   
   Joe Lonsdale, in bed with a Russian gangster as he is, has joined a VC fund investing in Israeli security technology, presumably to make more Andurils, whose Sentry towers may not actually even be deployed at the Southern border. The American kitty is a cash machine for Israel in many ways, and access to a huge new pot of DHS funds is what a lot of these guys are counting on.
   
   One of the ways the Israelis make money is by pretending they have anything to offer our security services, police and military. Even though they don’t, lots of compromised legislators and people with authority to expend funds let them do this anyway. It happens from the top to the bottom of the stack, from pioneering anti-bias training, to sending sheriffs and police to Israel, presumably to learn how to shoot children at close range, to all the really sinister spyware. None of this is useful or necessary from a U.S. perspective, but it is from an Israeli one. So from this standpoint, there’s a strong national security rationale for tanking the bill.
   

3. President Trump doesn’t deserve a big legislative win before he’s stopped Netanyahu
   
   Prime Minister Netanyahu visits again next week. It would be best if President Trump jails him for giving the same security software Israel wants to sell to us to the Mexican drug cartels, but of course he won’t do that. At the very least he might uphold the dignity of his office and pretend to be angry with him. For his subservience to the Israelis, the president deserves to celebrate Independence Day on the heels of his first big legislative initiative going down in flames.

The other big story that dropped in the last day is CIA Director Ratcliffe’s postmortem on the Russian collusion business in 2016. Ratcliffe would not have gotten elected as a Texas House Republican without being a cringing Likud gimp, and he’s paid them back in the executive branch by backing the Israeli line on Iranian nuclear weapons over the assessments of the agency he leads. Naturally he can’t tell the real story of 2016 either, because he can’t defy the Israelis. This report more or less proves Russiagate is more about Israel than Russia, though nobody with a job that requires Senate confirmation will say so.

One thing we learned from this review is that the FBI encouraged the inclusion of the Steele Dossier, the law enforcement agency historically most compromised by the Israelis—Jim Comey told the ADL “we’re still in love with you”—and CIA Director John Brennan did basically nothing to push back on that.

There are a few unanswered questions about Brennan’s rise to being America’s most powerful Gus Hall voter. He was George Tenet’s Chief of Staff when he was scapegoated for the Iraqi WMD fiasco, and then duly ridiculed by IDF prison guard Jeff Goldberg in The Atlantic for noticing.

Brennan, we learn in this report, more or less cooked the Russian collusion report to cut out the Israeli angles, even though he probably knew full well Paul Singer’s network paid for the Steele research, aligned as it is with the Russian side of Israeli politics. The report says, “the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia argued jointly against including the “aspire” judgment,” which is to say, they didn’t even think Vladimir Putin aspired to help Trump win the presidency, but Brennan overruled them.

There is so little seriousness among our leaders about the U.S.-Israel relationship, and that Trump has not raised the obvious about this attack on him is a sign of weakness on the president’s part. The American people are quickly getting fed up, one hopes our leaders show some wisdom sooner rather than later, before things get out of control, but the status quo of covering it up and not talking about it is not tenable.