The hearing on Russia's involvement with the American electoral process began with an army of reporters swarming 'round the committee heads: Republican chair Devin Nunes of the Fresno area, and Democrat and ranking member Adam Schiff of Los Angeles.

The two witnesses were top dogs from the "IC" (everyone in America seems to be using this irritating acronym now). One was FBI Director James Comey, who at various times has been both revered and hated by both Democrat and Republican camps over the years. The other was NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers, who until recently was probably best known for refusing to identify Edward Snowden as a foreign agent. A few notes:

10:05 a.m. It's a small issue in the grand scheme of things, but the effort to describe the Russia Today network as diabolical propaganda without mentioning Voice of America and Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe continues to amaze. Apparently Russia is the only country that funds a media network intended to influence foreign audiences.

Nunes in his opening statement characterizes RT as a disinformation effort that "traffics in anti-American conspiracies," rivaling Soviet propaganda. Here it is hard not to think of the joint intel report that cited the network's reporting on Occupy Wall Street, "corporate greed" and fracking as evidence of its anti-American nature. It also decried the network's use of the term "surveillance state" to describe the U.S., which will be pretty ironic considering the content of today's hearing.

Again, it's a small point, but by these standards pretty much any alternative media outlet is "anti-American," and it's alarming to hear Democrats later ape this language in reference to RT.

Rep. Adam Schiff

10:20 a.m. Schiff delivers a long speech that essentially lays out the Trump-Russia conspiracy. Twitter seems to be unanimous that it's a powerful piece of rhetoric.

Among other things, he unblinkingly cites the Christopher Steele's "golden showers" dossier as a source. This seems like a pretty intense political calculation given that Michael Morell, who would have been Hillary Clinton's CIA director, basically called the dossier useless just last week. The dossier "doesn't take you anywhere, I think," Morell said. But it's all over this hearing, with multiple Democratic members citing it. What that means, who knows, but it's interesting to see that level of commitment from the Democrats.

10:32 a.m. Comey creates the big headline of the day by saying, "I have been authorized ... to confirm that the FBI is investigating" the Russia story.

This both is and isn't big news. Although it's the first time it's been stated publicly, the existence of this investigation has been common knowledge for a long time. Most of the leaked reports on the topic have included this information.

For instance, The New York Times story from February 14th, about Trump officials having had "contact" with Russian intelligence, spoke definitively of an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Putin government.

Still, that doesn't mean Comey had to do what he did today. Is this payback to Trump for accusing the FBI of illegally wiretapping him? Is it a good-faith effort to square the ledger in terms of his previous highly controversial decision to out the Clinton email investigation? It's curious and bold either way. One wonders if Trump might fire him.

The true newsworthy detail, of course, isn't that Comey disclosed the existence of an FBI investigation into Trump - as Democrats should know better than anyone, that doesn't necessarily mean anything - but that Comey is doing this now and didn't do so earlier, before the election. Obviously, he made a different choice with regard to the Clinton email story, and the Democrats rightfully should be furious about that.

10:36 a.m. Nunes asks Rogers if Russians hacked vote tallies in Michigan. Rogers answers no, noting that the NSA doesn't do domestic surveillance. Nunes goes on to ask about Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin, knowing Rogers won't answer. It's a totally meaningless exchange, but instantly becomes Twitter fodder. This is what these hearings are for, primarily. Except for very rare occasions when mega-careful witnesses like Comey and Rogers decide to give up tidbits, for the most part these hearings are held so that House members can ping-pong talking points off witnesses, and then circulate clips of themselves asking questions to which they already know the answers.

10:39 a.m. Florida Republican Tom Rooney asks Rogers about incidental collection of data about "U.S. persons" under the Section 702 program. Admiral Rogers' explanation for how they use that data, and how they protect the rights of U.S. companies and citizens - redacting or "masking" identities, for instance - is almost comically non-reassuring.

Reading between the lines, the NSA seems to have basically unrestricted ability to snoop on foreigners. When their targets are speaking to American persons or communicating with American companies, the agency also seems to have an absurdly permissive mandate to listen to whatever they want to listen to. Only later, it seems, do they figure out how to justify it legally.,P> This is an example of how the hyper-partisan nature of these hearings spoils American politics. Liberals especially should be seriously concerned about such surveillance overreach by the intelligence agencies, and also about leaks directed against individuals by intelligence officials. Similarly, conservatives should be mortified by the possibility of foreign interference in our electoral process.

But because both of these issues are tied in highly specific ways to the political fortunes of Donald Trump, each issue will be ignored by one side and thundered over by the other.

11:03 a.m. Schiff asks both men if Obama wiretapped Trump as Trump claimed. "I have no information that supports those tweets," Comey says. Asked if he engages in McCarthyism, Comey says he tries "not to engage in any isms of any kind, including McCarthyism." He gets laughs. Comey is a very, very slick witness, difficult to read.

An interesting development in this hearing is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are treating these witnesses as hostile. And both Comey and Rogers are in their own ways giving both Nunes and Schiff what they want so far. They're allowing members of both parties to make speeches and ask their suggestive questions, while giving them next to nothing.

Rep. Trey Gowdy

11:19 a.m. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, last seen spending two expensive years stepping on his weenie in a pathetic effort to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton through the Benghazi probe, comes on to the delight of, well, nobody. Gowdy is the first to cross over into open unfriendliness. Ominously, he starts trying to get Comey to say reporters could be held criminally liable for disclosing secret information.

Gowdy later scores a point by getting Comey to explain a hypothetical: how he would go about investigating the leak of a U.S. citizen's name that appears in a newspaper. (He's clearly talking about Flynn.)

Comey, with the caveat that he's not talking about anyone specific, lays out how he would do that, talking about identifying the "universe" of people with access to that information and then using investigative techniques to further narrow the field. Indirectly, Comey confirms Gowdy's interpretation of a "felonious" disclosure to a newspaper that must be prosecuted. It sets up a demand that Comey investigate and prosecute that leak.

Gowdy does in fact go on to make such a demand. But Comey cockblocks Gowdy and says he "can't" promise that he will investigate the leaks.

Gowdy looks like someone just stole his box of Mike and Ikes. He seems surprised, like he didn't expect Comey's answer. Comey smiles and glares at Gowdy like the third-rater he is.

11:43 a.m.Jim Himes asks Comey if Ukraine used to be part of the Soviet Union. Comey says yes. Glad we cleared that up.

11:52 a.m. Mike Conaway of Texas points out that determining the source of a hacking campaign is a forensic enterprise, but asks how they determine intent. In the process, he pins down Rogers as saying he had a "lower level" of confidence in the idea that the Russians preferred Trump to Clinton.

Conaway then plunges into a bizarre metaphor about how his wife went to Texas Tech, so he roots for the Red Raiders and dislikes the Longhorns, or something. Conaway seemed to want to ask if it is possible to root against Texas without liking the Red Raiders, or the opposite, but pretty much everyone watching instantly loses track of whether Hillary Clinton is Texas or Texas Tech in the metaphor.

Comey confidently goes with it. "Wherever the Red Raiders are playing, you want them to win and their opposition to lose," he says. He goes on to elaborate on the metaphor, talking about how the Russians later in the year knew the Red Raiders were going to lose, "so you hope key people on the other team get hurt so they are not as tough an opponent down the road."

The substantively interesting thing here is Comey's sly disclosure that the Russians late in the game expected Trump to lose the election. But his deft handling of Conaway's bumbling hypothetical overshadows the answer.

12:21 p.m. Nunes tries on a new rhetorical line: It's absurd to say Russians prefer Republicans, because Reagan! This is silly, of course, because Trump is a different animal from Reagan, but then Comey and Rogers do something equally silly. On the question of whether the Russians preferred Romney or McCain over Obama, they both look at each other like it's crazy to suggest they ever considered the question. Isn't it their job to know things like that? They're clearly dissembling.

Rep. Peter King, right Samuel Corum

"Is there any way you can comment on whether or not Mr. McCabe told that to Mr. Priebus?" King asks.

Comey gives a classically Comeyish answer:

"I can't, Mr. King, but I can agree with your general premise. Leaks have always been a problem. I read over the weekend [about] George Washington and Abraham Lincoln complaining about them. But I do agree in the last six weeks and months there apparently have been a lot of instances of conversations appearing in the media, and a lot of it is dead wrong. Which is one of the challenges, because we don't correct it. It's made it difficult because people are talking, or at least reporters are saying people are talking, in ways that have struck me as being unusually active."

Although the hearing has generated tons of headlines before it hits the halfway mark, it's really a giant tease.

Both Comey and Rogers indicated from the start that they will reserve their more candid testimony for a later classified hearing with these same members. For the public, this means one thing: we'll continue to get no real answers, and a heavily partisan and politicized version of events, no matter what happens. So long as the investigations aren't closed, and the real information is kept behind closed doors, both parties can pursue their rhetorical campaigns unchecked. And the testimony of people like Comey and Rogers will be useful only for driving interest in the reading of tea leaves.

There should probably be three entirely separate investigations. One should concern the question of whether, or to what extent, the Russians interfered with the election. That's a non-partisan question, really, one everyone should care about, but Republicans won't do anything about it because they will perceive the entire issue as a partisan attack on Trump.

A second inquiry could deal with the question of illegal/politicized leaks of secret surveillance data coming from the "IC." Again, in reality this is a non-partisan concern. Were congressional Democrats really interested in getting at whatever the intelligence community has on Trump, a bipartisan inquiry of this nature would be an excellent pressure point.

Lastly, you could have a completely separate set of hearings into the question of whether or not the Trump campaign engaged in anything untoward in its dealings with Russians last year. If there's anything to this, the public needs to hear it, and it all needs to be public.

But don't expect answers anytime soon. Hearings like today's only add to the frustrating strangeness of this scandal, and it looks like this will continue for quite some time.
(c) 2017 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire. .

A FEW days ago I happened upon an excellent British movie, "Testament of Youth", based on the memoirs of Vera Brittain.

Vera tells her story, the story of a British girl who grew up in a bourgeois family without worries or sorrows, when World War I put an end to that paradise. Her brother, her friends and her fiancee were killed one by one in the terrible mudscapes of France. She enlisted as a nurse near the front and dealt with hundreds of wounded and dead. The tender country girl turned into a hardened woman.

The scene which impressed me most occurs when she is posted to a hut full of wounded Germans. A German officer, not so young, is dying. In his delirium he sees his beloved, catches the hands of Vera and whispers "Is that you, Clara?" and Vera answers in German "Ich bin hier", I am here. With a happy smile on his lips, the German dies.

On the morrow of the war, an English crowd demands a vengeful peace. Vera takes the stage and tells of this experience. The crowd falls silent.

THE MOVIE brought me back to the affair of Elor Azaria, the soldier who killed a seriously wounded Arab attacker lying helpless on the ground. He has been sharply condemned by the military court but punished with the ridiculously light prison term of a year and a half. His publicity-grabbing attorney has appealed.

Killing a wounded or captured enemy is a war crime. Why?

For many people, this is a mystery. War is the realm of killing and destroying. Soldiers are decorated for killing. So why is it suddenly a crime to kill a wounded enemy? How is it possible to talk about a law of war when war itself breaks all laws? An army that trains its soldiers to kill, how can it demand from them to show mercy?

From the beginnings of humankind, war has been a human condition. It started from the primitive tribe, which defended its limited resources of food from preying neighbors. Neighbors killed were resources gained.

The limits to the ravages of war were fixed after one of the most awful conflicts in history - the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). Its main battlefield was Germany - a flat country in the center of Europe, without defensible borders. Foreign armies entered it from all sides to fight it out between themselves. Armies devastated entire cities, killing, raping and looting.

It started as a war of religion, but became a war for supremacy and gain.

Millions died. In the end, two thirds of Germany was devastated, one third of the German population exterminated. One of the results was that the Germans, lacking any natural, defensible borders like seas and mountains, created an artificial border: a powerful army. It was the beginning of German militarism, which reached its climax in the Nazi frenzy.

WITNESSING THE atrocities of the Thirty Years' War, humanists pondered ways to limit warfare and create a core of international law. The outstanding proponent was a Dutchman Hugo de Groot ("Grotius"), who laid the foundations for the rules of war.

How can a war be limited? How can arms be "pure", when their very purpose is to kill and destroy? Grotius laid down a simple principle: nothing can be done to limit the means and practices necessary for winning a war. No army will respect such limitations.

But in war, terrible things happen which have nothing to do with victory. Killing civilians, prisoners and the wounded does not contribute to victory. Sparing their lives is good for all sides. If I spare the lives of captured enemy soldiers and the enemy spares the lives of my own soldiers who are captured, everybody wins.

Thus the modern laws of war are not only moral and humane, they are also sensible. All civilized nations recognize them. Breaking them is a crime.

At the beginning, the law forbidding the killing of the captured and the wounded applied only to uniformed soldiers. But in recent generations, the dividing line between uniformed soldiers and fighting civilians has become more and more blurred. Guerrillas, partisans, underground fighters, terrorists have become a part of recognized warfare. International law was widened to include them, too.

(What is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? I am proud of having discovered long ago the only scientific formula: "Freedom fighters are on my side, terrorists are on the other side.")

Thus we come back to Elor Azaria. Killing a wounded, neutralized enemy "terrorist" is a war crime, pure and simple. Wounded "terrorists" have to be treated. They are not enemies anymore, they are just injured human beings. Like the dying German in the movie.

SARAH NETANYAHU, the widely unpopular wife of our Prime Minister, recently said in an interview: "I believe that the Israeli Army is the most moral army in the world!"

She was only quoting an Israeli article of faith, repeated endlessly in all Israeli media, schools and political speeches.

Some might think that a "moral army" is an oxymoron. Armies are immoral by their very nature. Armies are there to make war, and war is basically immoral.

One might wonder how war has survived all these millennia. Humanity has made enormous progress in all fields of endeavor, yet war has endured. It seems that it is too deeply entrenched in human nature and human society.

When two citizens quarrel, they are no longer allowed to kill each other. They have to go to court and accept the verdict, based on a law accepted by all. Common sense would say that the same should apply to nations. When two states have a quarrel, they should go to an international court and accept its judgment peacefully.

How far are we from such a reality? Centuries? Millennia? An eternity?

In the 17th century, war was conducted by mercenaries, who fought for gain. Regiments sometimes changed sides on the battlefield. Soldiers were out for loot. The "Sack of Magdeburg" during the Thirty Years' War lives in German history to this very day. It was an orgy of looting, killing and rape in that town, west of Berlin.

A century later, war was conducted by professional national armies, and became a bit more civilized. The wars of Louis the 16th and Friedrich the Great left the civilian population largely unmolested.

With the French revolution, the modern mass armies came into being. General conscription became the rule, and is still in force in Israel and some other countries.

Conscription means that almost everybody serves side by side - the good and the bad, the normal and the depraved. I have seen well-educated sons of "good families" commit terrible war crimes. When I met them again a few years later, they were law-abiding citizens, proud fathers of families.

My own observation was that if, in an ordinary squad, a couple of stable, moral soldiers face a few bad apples, with the majority of the soldiers in between, there is a chance that the better ones would set the tone.

But there is also the possibility that the better ones assimilate to the others, and in the end the whole lot become dehumanized. That is one good argument for conscientious objection.

(I must admit that I am torn on this issue. On the one hand, I would like morally sound men and women to serve and influence their units, on the other side I deeply sympathize with those who follow the call of their conscience - and pay the price.)

WHEN I see a soldier who shoots a wounded enemy in cold blood, I ask myself: Who are his parents? In what home did he grow up? Who are his commanders?

The major blame must go to the officers, from company leader up to front commander. In an army, the commanders must always bear the main responsibility. Everything depends on the moral standards they impress upon their subordinates. I always blame them first and foremost.

Right at the beginning of this affair I proposed sentencing Azaria to a harsh prison term, for all to see. Then I would pardon him, but only on condition that he publicly admits his crime and asks for forgiveness. Until now, he has refused to do so, and suns himself in the glow of his status as a hero to some parts of the population. So do his parents, who visibly enjoy their public exposure.

SO HOW moral is the Israeli army?

Even before the State of Israel was founded, the underground paramilitary organization (the Haganah) which formed its base prided itself on its morality. "The Purity of Hebrew Arms" was the slogan then, and still is. It was true then as it is now, but It created the belief in the "Most Moral Army in the World." There is no such thing as a really moral army. Unfortunately armies are necessary in this world, but their morality is always questionable.

If I were to grade our army, I would guess that it is more moral than the Russian army and less moral than, say, the Swiss army.

The Democratic Party acts like it owns Black America. It certainly owns most of the Black political (Misleaderhip) class, who "have used their local, state and national offices to facilitate the mass Black incarceration regime at every stage of its deployment." These servants of the police state and war need to be challenged by candidates that reflect the left-leaning politics of Black America. The Black Is Back Coalition is seeking candidates.

The Black Is Back Coalition, having last year produced a 19-point National Black Agenda for Self-Determination, is now exploring ways to field or support Black radical candidates willing to run for office on a self-determinationist platform. To kick the project off, the Coalition will hold a two-day Electoral Candidate School on April 8 and 9, in St. Petersburg, Florida. The event is also in sync with discussions taking place at the Black Left Unity organization. I'll be one of the presenters at the Black Is Back electoral school, and will emphasize the importance of contesting the hegemonic influence of the Democrats -- a Wall Street party of austerity and war - in Black electoral politics. Blacks are the most left-leaning, anti-war ethnicity in the U.S., but you wouldn't guess that by tallying the voting records of their representatives on Capitol Hill.

However, that's not strange. U.S. duopoly party politics is in general disarray, a reflection of the crises of capitalism.

The Democrats point fingers a world away, at Moscow, as the source of instability in the U.S. political system. Donald Trump persists in claiming to fight for the little (white) guy, while gathering around him the richest Cabinet in the governmental history of the planet.

Electoral politics in the United States has become more removed from reality than at any time in living memory. The two corporate parties have nothing to offer the people, because their corporate masters are determined to strip mine the public sector of everything that can be turned into profit, and to concentrate all effective decision making in the hands of the Lords of Capital. In the corporate game plan, those public functions that are not directly privatized will be placed under the control of quasi-public boards and agencies led by business executives whose mission is to tailor the infrastructures of cities and whole regions in the service of capital. That means moving resources and populations across the landscape -- or out of the region, entirely -- at the whim of the moneyed classes.

You should recognize important aspects of this scenario, since, to a very large degree, it already exists. Blacks have been expelled from U.S. cities in huge numbers since the dawn of the 21st century.

To the extent that the Rulers feel compelled to justify their capital-centric engineering of society, they will describe the dictatorship of the One Percent as "rational governance" - when, in fact, this period represents the final triumph of the irrationality of late stage, casino capitalism, with the fate of whole nations and peoples riding on the roll of the dice on Wall Street. Inevitably, Wall Street will crap out, but at every stage of the game, through speculative highs and lows, the impoverishment of the masses will increase in more or less direct proportion to the concentration of power and wealth among the ruling circles.

The Lords of Capital know full well where their system is heading. It's not a runaway train, but an omnivorous engine of what evil men call "creative destruction" that amasses fantastic riches for the ever-dwindling few at the controls. (An Oxfam report shows the world's eight richest men control as much wealth as half of Earth's population. At least five of them are identified with the Democratic Party.) It is no wonder that the rulers have gone apoplectic in denouncing "fake news," since all of the facts point to a bleak future for everyone but themselves under the global capitalist yoke.

The corporate imperative in the 21st century is, therefore, to eliminate all vestiges of effective democracy. Nobody is to be allowed to tamper with the rich man's infernal machinery -- not in Sao Paulo, Damascus, Pretoria or Detroit. In the United States, overlapping layers of bourgeois law -- the legal sediment of more than two centuries of rich man's rule - render voters all but helpless to affect fundamental change in relationships of power. Property is sacred; corporations are people; checks and balances are designed to keep democracy in check and maintain the balance of power to the moneyed classes' advantage. Yet, vestiges of suffrage rights remain. More importantly, the capitalists cloak their dictatorship in the rhetoric of "We, the people," to legitimize their rule. They are compelled to invoke "national security" emergencies (Russians, Muslims) and crime and drug threats (Blacks) to justify their escalating assaults on the very limited democratic rights that remain.

9/11 provided an excuse/opportunity for a sweeping rollback of civil liberties and democratic rights and for vastly expanded global surveillance and social mapping systems. The rulers have every intention of making the hyper-security regime permanent and further shrinking democracy. However, they are compelled to describe the steady loss of democratic rights and civil liberties as domestic "emergency" or "wartime" measures, in order to maintain the legitimacy of actual corporate governance. This is a central political contradiction of the Ruler's project. The people continue to feel entitled to the social space and democratic rights, including an effective franchise, that are purported to make the U.S. an "exceptional" country -- the national mythology. The Lords of Capital must maintain the fiction that capitalism is the nurturing and necessary environment for government "of the people, and by the people," while constantly creating "emergencies," including structural shocks that demand suspension of democratic rights and the destruction of public institutions. (For example: Detroit's "bankruptcy" and the wholesale charterization of public schools in Black and brown districts -- near-instantaneously in New Orleans after Katrina.) The steady march towards direct corporate rule is depicted as a series of anomalies, exceptions and emergency measures, rather than the logic of the system, itself. This duplicitous game unfolds, in ways big and small, across the nation and the world, as rapidly consolidating cliques of capitalists scheme to eliminate all impediments to their accumulation of wealth, by any and all means available.

The socialist's job is to tell the truth about the nature of the capitalist system, to point out its most salient contradictions and weaknesses, and to build a people's movement to overthrow the class that is creating the disaster -- also by any and all means available. That includes taking advantage of those electoral possibilities that are useful to the ultimate destruction of the capitalist class, whose continued rule threatens all life on Earth.

The revolutionary Black nationalist -- who must also be a socialist, or she is no revolutionary, at all -- fights for achieving self-determination for Black people in the United States and for the emancipation of all humankind from the rule of organized capital. She is fully aware that any socialist movement that does not address Black self-determination is doomed to fail, as is any Black self-determinationist movement that does not seek socialist transformation of society.

White supremacy -- the founding principle of the white settler colony that became the United States -- has always been the greatest impediment to the development of a genuine social contract among the peoples of the United States. Simply put, white majorities reject a social contract (solidarity) with Blacks -- which is why white "backlashes" are a permanent part of the American political cycle. Over the centuries, white refusal to accept a social contract with Blacks resulted in the African American population becoming a separate and distinct polity -- a "nation within a nation" with its own institutions and worldview.

As descendants of people who were denied all human rights, Blacks hunger for every stitch of democracy they can get -- social, economic, and the narrower electoral political variety -- a history that has made them the most progressive ethnicity in the U.S., and the most prone to rebellion against the political order.

More than two generations ago, Blacks in the U.S. won recognition of their citizenship ("civil") rights," allowing them to elect local and national representatives to government. However, the struggle for Black self-determination -- the autonomous, collective power to shape the communities in which Black people live, including providing security for those communities -- was brutally crushed by the U.S. State, which imposed a mass Black incarceration regime that has devastated every aspect of Black life and created the world's biggest Gulag. In the intervening decades, a Black political class firmly allied with the Democratic Party has come to dominate political discourse in Black America. This Black Misleadership Class is bereft of any vision for national social transformation, or genuine Black self-determination, or a just world order. Most damning, these Black politicians have used their local, state and national offices to facilitate the workings of the mass Black incarceration regime at every stage of its deployment. They are, in sum, the Black representatives of the white ruling class -- the internal enemies of Black liberation and self-determination.

The legitimacy of this Black Misleadership Class must be contested at every opportunity, and in all forums, including in the electoral arena. The Black Left must wage the most intense internal Black ideological struggle, a contest for political supremacy in Black America between advocates of true social transformation, Black self-determination, and anti-imperialism, versus accommodation with the capitalist oligarchy and its domestic police state and global war machine.

How many times in the last two months have we all woken up and wondered what the hell Trump is going on about now?

Since its founding by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in 1996, Fox News has managed to act as an informal propaganda ministry and ideological enforcer for the Republican Party, even as it simultaneously masquerades as a reputable news organization. Impressed by its profits and the career opportunities it afforded, most journalists participated in the scam by refusing to call it out, no matter how often Fox transgressed the most basic rules of honest reporting. Both in style and in substance, Fox presaged the Trump administration and what my last column called its "Upside-Down Day" method of news management. When journalists did honest reporting on corporate and conservative power, they were accused of "activism" and "liberal bias." When Fox concocted fake facts and then demanded political fealty to them from politicians and pundits, the network claimed to be presenting news that was "fair and balanced."

Judged by almost any measure save those relating to professional ethics, Fox has been a spectacular success. Not only has it earned Rupert Murdoch and his fellow shareholders billions of dollars, but it has also permanently altered the media landscape. Today, conservative politicians need not worry about being caught lying so long as they tell the right lies. Fox doesn't only provide the script; it happily manufactures additional lies as needed in order to sustain the original ones. The net result is usually a media-driven "dispute" in which citizens are invited to choose between genuine and "alternative" facts depending on their own prejudices.

Shortly after it was reported that Preet Bharara was investigating Fox News, Trump fired him, effective immediately.

This ideological and intellectual swindle has run through countless manifestations over the past two decades. But only recently has the charade been reinforced by the diminutive thumbs of the president of the United States. How many times in the last two months have we all woken up and wondered what the hell Donald Trump is going on about now, only to learn about some lunatic rant on Fox that aired 10 minutes before the time stamp on his latest tweet? One of the clearest examples of this tendency, however, came not in a tweet but during Trump's Nuremberg-style rally in Melbourne, Florida, on February 18, when he flummoxed much of the Western world with this question: "You look at what's happening last night in Sweden, who would believe this?"

Who indeed? Nobody, including his own staff, had any idea what Trump was talking about. The president himself later clarified that he had caught wind of a segment on Tucker Carlson's show in which a filmmaker named Ami Horowitz claimed, without evidence, that there's a connection between an alleged increase in Swedish crime rates and the rise of the refugee population in the country. But this was no clarification at all, as no one on Carlson's program had mentioned anything that had happened the previous night. Later, two of the law-enforcement sources cited in Horowitz's film complained to the real journalists who contacted them afterward that their work had been misrepresented.

"The president made stuff up by misrepresenting our own baseless reporting?" said the folks at Fox. "No problem." Bill O'Reilly came to Trump's rescue by booking a fellow named "Nils Bildt," whom Fox billed as a "Swedish defense and national security advisor." Bildt came on O'Reilly's show to back up Trump's bizarre accusation with intimations of a conspiracy to suppress the truth. "These things are not being openly and honestly discussed," he intoned. In fact, Bildt himself was a kind of walking alternative fact. He was not any kind of adviser to anyone in Sweden. Actually, he was an immigrant himself, having moved from Sweden to the United States in 1994-and, even more ironically, he was a criminal: Convicted of assaulting a police officer, Bildt was sentenced to a year in a Virginia prison in 2014. When questioned, Bildt told reporters that he had no memory of being in prison that year, but that may have been because he was then living under another name. He also says he has no memory of telling Fox he had the qualifications the network pretended he had.

Recall that in addition to the public crimes against truth and democracy described above, Fox also appears to have acted as an actual criminal organization in private. According to myriad witnesses and alleged victims, its CEO, Roger Ailes, had long tried to treat the place as his own private bordello and used stockholder cash to pay hush money to his unwilling victims. And he was hardly alone: Bill O'Reilly has also cost the company millions of dollars to settle charges of his sexual harassment of his underlings. Most recently, the company paid out yet another multimillion-dollar settlement to a woman who, according to court papers described in The New York Times, was forced to give blow jobs to yet another Fox executive, Francisco Cortes. (For the record, everyone denies everything, except the payoffs.)

Now consider the news in late February that Preet Bharara, then the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was investigating Fox for potential criminal charges related to the secret payoffs. It's public knowledge that former anchor Gretchen Carlson netted a reported $20 million alone, but it was the secret payoffs with shareholder money that inspired the investigation. Lo and behold, shortly after that report appeared, Donald Trump-a friend to both Murdoch and Ailes and a big fan of Fox News-fired Bharara, effective immediately. True, Trump summarily fired 45 other US Attorneys at the same time, but both Bharara and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer had received assurances from Trump himself that Bharara would keep his job.