One of my favorite…oh, hell, why shade it, my totally favorite…Townhall columnists is Kurt Schlichter. Because of Kurt’s inspiration I’ve decided to show solidarity with my fellow rednecks and I’ve convinced my wife to let me buy a knockoff FN/FAL, aka L1A1, in .308 and teach my 15-year-old daughter to shoot. Today Kurt has an interesting article that has crystallized some divergent thoughts that have been kicking around in my mind for several months. From Trump Is Derailing The Elite’s Gravy Train

Like the garbage French elite of long ago, our American garbage elite of today has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. For four years, it has been focused entirely on deep sixing Donald Trump for his unforgivable crime of demanding that our ruling caste be held accountable for its legacy of failure. Instead of focusing on not being terrible at their job of running America’s institutions, our elitists have decided that the real problem is us Normals being angry about how they are terrible at their job of running America’s institutions. So, let’s imagine that they finally vanquish Trump, though every time they come up against him they end up dragging themselves home like Ned Beatty after a particularly tough canoe trip.

What happens then?

What happens then is that it’s back to business as usual, and for decades, business as usual for our garbage elite has not merely been running our institutions badly but pillaging and looting our country for power, prestige and cash.

I think most of us have become more and more sure over time of the existence of a Deep State that puts the protection of its prerogatives above all else. I use Deep State advisedly because I am more of the view that rather than a Turkish style Deep State, we have a network of self-perceived elites who work behind the scenes to ensure they are taken care of. They rotate through government and think tanks and, on occasion, the private sector and believe that it is their right to make policy that benefits them. We saw this with this Vindman character. He was upset at Trump’s actions ostensibly because “he was deeply troubled by what he interpreted as an attempt by the president to subvert U.S. foreign policy.” Think about that for a moment. Trump makes the foreign policy of the United States. While Trump’s actions might have gored some particular ox of interest to Vindman, it was Vindman who was trying to subvert US foreign policy as setting that policy is Trump’s prerogative. What might that ox be?

Closer to the subject, last week a couple of the prime movers in the Russia Hoax, former CIA Director John Brennan and former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, were joined by veteran CIA appartchik John McLaughlin on a panel discussion at George Mason University. (See Nickarama’s Two Former CIA Directors Admit: ‘Thank God For Deep State’ Involvement Pushing Impeachment)

Former CIA director John McLaughlin on Trump’s impeachment: “Thank God for the deep state” pic.twitter.com/t4pQhFOBuj

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 31, 2019

Over the weekend, I saw McLaughlin surface again with an article about the inevitable reemergence of ISIS: NO LONGER WORRIED ABOUT ISIS? THINK AGAIN. In it McLaughlin throws about a bunch of statistics that are nearly five years old to take a shot at Trump for killing off al-Baghdadi.

Not to put too fine a point on it, ISIS may exist as a philosophy for some people for some time to come but it’s days as a movement are long past and its ability to reappear as it did under Obama are gone.

and we have a one-man jihad carried out by the Blow Job King of Baghdad (if you don’t understand the reference, read this) to keep US troops in Syria

Despite this new force, we apparently stand helpless to deter war crimes and population displacement our sudden retreat across NE Syria unleashed. That’s happening under airspace the US reportedly still controls. Totally incoherent, indefensible, immoral. https://t.co/loOC6dEzxN

— Brett McGurk (@brett_mcgurk) October 31, 2019

What would cause this?

Back when the Berlin Wall came down, I was on the Army Staff. There were a lot of policy briefings and working groups on what was happening in Eastern Europe–and I don’t think anyone truly appreciated what they were seeing unfold until it actually happened. The overriding theme puzzled me. I’d spent my career training for Armageddon on the North German Plains or in the Fulda or Hof Gaps. I was perfectly happy to put my bootheel on the windpipe of the USSR and bear down. Me and guys like me were in a minority. The focus of these policy discussions were how to we prop the USSR up? What sort of aid could we render to keep Gorbachev in power? How could we keep the Warsaw Pact alive? We were lectured on the importance of not being celebratory over the fall of our adversary. All kinds of reasons were given, but in the fullness of time the real reason became pretty obvious. If you’d made your mark as a Soviet specialist and there was no longer a USSR, then you were pretty well rogered.

What if our Deep State is not, like the Turkish variety, focused on perpetuating its power? What if it is simply a grift participated in by a large number of people who see government service…and, in some cases, military service…as a way of having influence, being the center of attention, and getting paid damned well in the bargain. If ISIS goes away, no one is going to care about your expertise on them. If Endless War ends, no one needs a bureaucrat to go on sex charged expeditions to our embassies. If Ukraine is brought under control, it is no longer a crisis and a speaker of an obscure language with expertise in a conflict that has abated will no longer have a fat cat job in the National Security Council. He’ll be in the bowels of the Pentagon doing whatever.

What better way of explaining the unreasonable metastasis of Trump Derangement Syndrome than people having their pockets picked? No more think tank “fellow” positions. No more highly paid lectures to college students on what “true conservatism” is. I’d be whizzed off, too. I’d be mad enough to actually lie to impeach the guy.

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