Citizens and journalists alike, we live in chaos by design. For a decade, the coalition of grifters and politicians who seem to dominate our politics and culture have deployed Generaloberst Steve Bannon’s strategy of “flooding the zone with shit” so successfully that news stories which once would have been on everyone’s lips now go unremarked.
That’s why we’ve been asking The Google about the phrase “$10 million.” We were immediately introduced to “a 19-year-old British garbage man [who in 2002] won 10 million pounds (approx $15 million) on the lottery. He spent it all on drugs, gambling and prostitutes and 8 years later was back working as a garbage man again.”
Entertaining, but not what we were seeking. The next item brought us closer to our goal, with this quote from Mike Davis: “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents. We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious.” He seems to think that if #45 becomes #47, he’ll become Attorney General. And why not? Nixon appointed John Mitchell.
This charming gentleman—a former law clerk for Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, who is listed as a “Contributor” by the Federalist Society—now heads the Article III Project. Its goal: pack the courts with right wing judges. Naturally, its website says the opposite: “Democrats and the far left are weaponizing the courts to undermine the Constitution. We exist to protect the rule of law.”
Davis is clearly following in the footsteps of Grover “Drown the Federal government in the bathtub” Norquist. Both men created, and put themselves in control of, non-profit organizations carefully designed to draw fat donations from rich right wingers.
In the end, we had to get more specific, asking Le Google, “Did Donald Trump pocket a $10 million bribe from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi?”
It was a reasonable question. The Washington Post’s original August 2nd headline was, “$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt.” The subhead read, “Political appointees rejected efforts to search for additional evidence investigators believed might provide answers, then closed the case.”
So, here we are: a major U.S. paper ran a story credibly suggesting that former A.G. Bill Barr may have quashed yet another an investigation—about a $10 million foreign bribe—and it just vanished, like Roy Batty’s tears in the rain.