This week’s revelations that President Donald J. Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vermont, got intelligence briefings telling them Russia was interfering in the U.S. presidential election on their behalf reminded me of a story from Islamic history.
In Makka, before the revelation, Muhammad was a well-respected man. A fire had damaged the Ka’aba, the cube shaped house purported to have been built by Abraham and his son Ishmael to worship the One true God, and it was being rebuilt. The Black Stone, a meteorite claimed by legend to have been given to the first man Adam and made black through all the times it had been touched and venerated, had been moved, and as the Ka’aba work was finished, the stone was going to be moved back.
But carrying the stone was such an honor! Who then, among all the ruling clans of Makka, would carry the stone? They argued and argued, and clan leaders eventually decided to ask Muhammad what to do.
The Praised One’s (the literal meaning of Muhammad) solution was simple — he grabbed a blanket or a cloth of some kind, told the leaders of the clans to grab corners or sides, and then he took the stone in his hands and placed it on the cloth. That way, he said, all of the clans of Makka got the honor of carrying the stone to the Ka’aba, and none of them were honored more than the others.
Of course, left unstated, was that it was Muhammad himself, and only Muhammad, who got to touch the stone in this story.
Yes, the intel community has apparently warned an election-seeking president and the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination to oppose him in November that Russia is seeking (yet again) to tip the scales in favor of chaos and disruption.
But as Glen Greenwald pointed out, what the two revelations also make clear is that the intel community itself is busy intervening in this year’s presidential election. And has done so by giving briefings and leaking about those briefings in ways that are non-specific and reveal nothing about the actual nature of the intervention.
These are not Adlai Stevenson’s thorough UN briefing on missiles in Cuba, or Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s lengthy presentation on the downing of KAL–007 by Soviet fighter jets. This isn’t even Colin Powell’s highly detailed but largely fictional presentation on Iraqi chemical and biological weapons production. Russian meddling has always been a mere assertion, with little substance and even less evidence. You’d think if there was real substance to any of it, real evidence of actual interference, someone could leak something substantial.
The leaks are, I suspect, the latest in a tawdry game employees of the so-called intel and federal law enforcement agencies are playing. Bernie and Trump are supported by the dreaded Vladimir Putin, they are the anti-American candidates who sow and profit from division, so no good American can support them. I suspect under better circumstances, these folks would stage a coup against President Trump. That is, after all, the sort of thing they are allegedly skilled at. At least some of them.
But we don’t live in an age of successful coups. Any attempt to depose Trump would end as badly as the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev or the attempt to depose Turkey’s leader in 2016. The intel community folks simply don’t control enough of the government to pull such a thing off, as much as they might want to. At least not against Trump. Should Sanders win in November, and eventually take the oath of office, it might be easier to mobilize disaffected national security liberals as well as the more centrist elements of the Democratic coalition — the upper middle class denizens of Wokeistan who seem to be most bitterly opposed to Sanders’ candidacy — along with frightened Chamber of Commerce Republicans to easily oust Sanders. In much the same way Muhammad al Morsi was ousted by a combination of liberal street revolt and military action.
This is not a prediction. It is merely musing. But I don’t expect The Resistance™ to stop resisting simply because Trump is sent packing. Especially if the attempt to restore the neoliberalism of the Bush/Clinton/Obama era is unsuccessful.
Nor do I expect much self-reflection on failure from our elites. I’ve noticed some carping among centrist Democrats that the incumbent and his primary opponent both seem to be drawing the most foreign support, and tut-tutting that too many Americans are apparently okay with that. I have not seen anyone ask what this might mean for the alleged centrism that is supposedly a superior governing idea, and why it is so many Americans no longer want it.
