Yesterday, there was some buzz on politics Twitter about an interview, The Obama Factor, of a historian, David Garrow, who wrote a biography, Rising Star, about former President Obama in 2017. I don’t recall a lot of talk about this biography in 2017, but then again our political media was in complete #Resist mode and 24/7 meltdowns about how President Trump was going to destroy the world.
I realize that most people don’t have time to read a lot and this interview is a long piece. It covers Obama’s life, his writings, and a lot of other topics beyond the part that caught my attention the most – the weaponization of the federal government. Here’s the paragraph that stuck out:
“But while the attention of Republicans in Washington turned to questioning the FBI, more careful observers could not fail to notice that the FBI had hardly acted alone. After all, Russiagate had not originated with the Bureau, but with the Clinton campaign, which having failed to get even sympathetic mainstream media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post to bite on its fantastical allegations, was reduced to handing off the story to campaign press apparatchiks like Slate’s Franklin Foer and Mother Jones’ David Corn. The fact that the story only got bigger after Clinton lost the election was due to Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who in November and December of 2016 helped elevate Russiagate from a failed Clinton campaign ploy to a priority of the American national security apparatus, using a hand-picked team of CIA analysts under his direct control to validate his thesis. If Brennan was the instrument, the person who signed the executive order that turned Brennan’s thesis into a time bomb under Trump’s desk was Barack Obama.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/david-garrow-interview-obama
Brennan has become a permanent “Trump/Russian Collusion” mouthpiece on CNN and MSNBC since Trump took office in 2017 and yet this interview points out that Obama has pretty much disappeared from being in political news a lot, other than the stories of the Obamas fancy mansions and hobnobbing with the ultra-rich elites. Obama’s people are everywhere though – in the media and in the White House, but Obama wasn’t out there ranting about Trump or politics. This interview mentions that, unlike other former presidents, the Obamas live mostly in their home in Washington DC, yet the press never talks about what they’re doing in Washington or who visits them.
This other paragraph was illuminating too:
“That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office. “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony,” he told Steven Colbert in 2015, “I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.””
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/david-garrow-interview-obama
Well, the Biden White House is filled with Obama’s people and it’s been obvious since that Locked In The Basement 2020 campaign that Joe Biden isn’t running things. Obama had initially tried to generate political momentum for his friend and ally, Deval Patrick, former Massachusetts governor in the 2020 Democratic primary, but that effort failed. Biden won the Democratic nomination and there seemed to be a bit of a power struggle within the Biden circle.
I didn’t know the Obamas still live in Washington DC, because the media only mentions their other mansions and their vacations. However, I’ve suspected Obama was running the Biden White House and this interview bolsters that opinion.
In recent months, Hunter Biden has moved into the White House and is by his father’s side constantly. I’ve wondered if the top Dems (Obama and his peeps) are working to orchestrate a “dignified exit” for Biden to drop out of the 2024 race and if Hunter’s there to squash a palace coup. Who is really running the Office of the President right now, Hunter or Obama? At this point it’s hard to tell. What is clear is Michelle Obama and Gavin Newsom keep getting liberal media buzz as alternatives, not Kamala Harris, if Joe Biden drops out of the race.
Before ending this blog post, I wanted to touch on my own waffling about the focus of my blog. I started this blog in 2012 blabbing about politics, foreign affairs, military matters and assorted culture war topics, but as the polarization and “politicization of everything” in America escalated, I’ve thought about skipping the politics and writing about less controversial topics and about other things I think are important – like emergency preparedness. However, I really do enjoy reading through articles and books and reports hunting down information and I’ve been writing about how America’s political and culture war are being fought out via a corrupt, media-driven spin information war, long before most politicos even talked about the weaponization of news. In an information war – digging for reliable or accurate information is vital, because the spin efforts create walls of lies and deliberate misdirections.
Words really are the weapons in spin war. Back in 2016, I wrote a blog post, The “War about Words” (Part 1), and here’s a bit from that:
“Trying to explain this dichotomy of Americans who boldly proclaim their principles and independent-thinking, then become devoted followers of obvious con men and demagogues, I remembered this book by Brian Burrell. He relates DeTocqueville’s observations on Americans from 1831 and perhaps this American characteristic still gets passed on in our cultural DNA. DeTocqueville identified the American reliance on “experts”, that still persists today:
“On his visit to the United States, Tocqueville noticed that the Americans he encountered tended to exhibit two opposing tendencies: they did not want to be told what to do or think, and yet their collective will could easily be rallied behind certain carefully chosen words, to which he gave a name. “In the United States, Tocqueville concluded, “the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of the individuals who are thus relieved from having to form opinions of their own.””
pages 4-5, The Words We Live By: The Creeds, Mottoes, And Pledges That have Shaped America, by Brian Burrell”
There’s still a great deal of truth in DeTocqueville’s observation that Americans tend to rally behind the loudest “public opinion” and the architects of our American spin information war use many tools driving public opinion to con the American people. They eagerly use repetitive messaging bombardments in the media, where the liberal media jump on repeating the same inflammatory and/or deceptive words to incite mob type behavior and fuel the latest cancel culture trends. At this point the Trump circle effectively borrowed the same Dem/liberal media spin tactics too and they’re using the polling spin game against DeSantis – hyping “winning in all the polls” to con Republicans into believing that polls reflect the will of the GOP voters. In reality polls are only a momentary snapshot of the opinions of only a very few people. When the media hypes the majority in polls they’re trying to convince people that if you aren’t in the majority your views are “out of the mainstream” of the group being polled. Many people don’t want to be called fringe and they will move to be part of the mainstream. This media/political effort to drive public opinion by hyping polls creates opinion cascades to push public opinion in a certain direction. It’s fascinating to realize that DeTocqueville in 1831 recognized this culture trait in America.
The traditional terms “disinformation and misinformation” are pretty meaningless at this point, because Democrats and their vast liberal media sphere have called just about everything “Russian disinformation” to attack Trump or during the pandemic calling information that differed with their experts’ views as “COVID misinformation” and working to silence them, so I’m going with “deliberate misdirections” (LIES). I’m hoping providing links to information I come across might help others be aware of this information and be encouraged to do their own research.
I continue to work on my own preparedness, but I feel there are loads of better preparedness sites and videos online than what I can write or create. In my own life I get frustrated when people I care about don’t seem to take my preparedness advice seriously and ignore my warnings about how if they wait until there is a serious crisis to prepare for an emergency, it’s too late.
Along with natural disasters, the constant growing threat in America continues to be the polarization and politicization of everything,” fueled by our media and social media. Most of the spin war hits us daily through controversies that seem like trivial, stupid stuff – like the Jason Aldean song or arguing about pronouns. However, all of these culture war media/social media controversies are part of the larger political war, being waged constantly via the 24/7 spin information war. While it’s understandable to try to ignore these ridiculous controversies and the partisan dramas, as American citizens we all should at least be aware of the partisan divides and about how media and social media play a major role in the political and culture war swirling constantly.
In the words of the Aaron Tippin country song, “You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything.”
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