Perhaps the likelihood of a Donald “Make America Great Again” Trump presidency receded a bit three days ago when FBI Director James Comey made his blockbuster announcement that he would not recommend an indictment of Mrs. Clinton for her illegal and inappropriate use of a private email server to conduct government business when she was Barack Obama’s warmongering Secretary of State. An indictment would have sunk Hillary’s candidacy, energizing Bernie Sanders before the Democratic National Convention and possibly sparking establishment Democrats to cobble together an emergency Joe Biden-John Kerry ticket.

Still, Comey’s statement bluntly contradicted her Nixon-like deceptions on the matter and left no doubt that she engaged in scandalously criminal behavior. (Nothing new for the Clintons: scandals follow them around like stink on shit). It gives Trump and the Republicans plenty to throw at “Crooked Hillary” through the general election. More

The war on Iraq won’t be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as “weapons of mass destruction” and “rogue state” were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.

To understand the Iraq war you don’t need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit. Consider the picaresque journey of Tony Blair’s plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad student’s website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister’s bombastic speech to the House of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who looted whole passages from Blair’s speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely through the tempest. Why? More

Hillary Clinton’s email scandal may go down as one of the most superficially reported events in recent history. Aside from the poor quality of most news coverage, journalists also obscured the broader lesson of how political elites manipulate national security laws for their own benefit. Most all news stories in recent days relied on the comments of FBI Director Comey that Clinton communicated classified information by email, even if (as she has long stated) most-all the information she drew upon was from State Department briefings and documents that were never marked as classified (Politico, “FBI Findings Tear Holes in Hillary Clinton’s Email Defense,” July 6, 2016). A July 5th report from the New York Times (“What We Know about Hillary Clinton’s Private Email Server”) stated that of “30,000 emails” examined, “8 chains included top secret information,” while “36 included secret information” and “8 included confidential information” – totaling 52 classified emails. A July 5th report from FactCheck.org recounts that “more than 2,000 of the 30,490 emails Clinton turned over to the State Department contained classified information, including 110 emails in 52 email chains that contained classified information at the time they were sent or received.” More