Opioids and experiences that simulate the deadening effects of narcotics are mechanisms to keep us submissive and depoliticized. Desperate citizens in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel "Brave New World" ingested the pleasure drug soma to check out of reality. Our own versions of soma allow tens of millions of Americans to retreat daily into addictive mousetraps that generate a self-induced autism.

The United States consumes 80 percent of opioids used worldwide, and more than 33,000 died in this country in 2015 from opioid overdoses. There are 300 million prescriptions written and $24 billion spent annually in the U.S. for painkillers. Americans supplement this mostly legal addiction with over $100 billion a year in illicit marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. And nearly 14 million U.S. adults, one in every 13, regularly abuse alcohol.

But these monetary figures are far less than what we spend on gambling. Americans in 2013 lost $119 billion gambling, with an additional $70 billion-or $300 for every adult in the country-spent on lottery tickets.

Federal and state governments, reliant on tax revenues from legal gambling and on lottery ticket sales, will do nothing to halt the expansion of the industry or the economic and psychological toll it exacts on those in financial distress. State-run lottery games had sales of $73.9 billion in 2015, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. This revenue is vital to budgets beset by declining incomes, deindustrialization and austerity. "State lotteries provided more revenue than state corporate-income taxes in 11 of the 43 states where they were legal, including Delaware, Rhode Island, and South Dakota," Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic. "The poorest third of households buy half of all lotto tickets," he noted. Gambling is a stealth tax on poor people hoping to beat the nearly impossible odds. Governmental income from gambling is an effort to make up for the taxes the rich and corporations no longer pay.

Slot machines and other electronic gambling devices are engineered to draw us into an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole. They, like our personal computers and hand-held devices, cater to the longing to flee from the oppressive world of dead-end jobs, crippling debt and social stagnation and a dysfunctional political system. We become rats in a Skinner box, frantically pulling levers until we are addicted and finally entranced by our compulsion to achieve fleeting, intermittent and adrenaline-driven rewards. Much like what happens to people using slot machines, the pigeons or rats in Skinner's experiments that did not know when they would get a reward, or how much they would get, became the most heavily addicted to operating the levers or pedals. Indeed, Skinner used slot machines as a metaphor for his experiments.

The engineers of America's gambling industry are as skillful at forming addiction as the country's top five opioid producers-Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson, Insys Therapeutics, Mylan and Depomed. There are 460 commercial casinos, 486 tribal casinos, 350 card rooms, 55 racetracks and hundreds of thousands of gaming devices, many located in convenience stores, gas stations, bars, airports and even supermarkets.

The rush of anticipation, available in 20-second bursts, over hours, days, weeks and months creates an addictive psychological "zone" that the industry calls "continuous gaming productivity." Heart rates and blood pressure rise. Time, space, the value of money and human relationships hypnotically dissolve. A state of extreme social isolation occurs.

Gambling addicts, like many addicts, are often driven to crime, bankruptcy and eventual imprisonment. Many lose everything-their marriages, their families, their jobs, their emotional health and sometimes their lives. Gambling addicts have the highest rate of suicide attempts among addicts of any kind-1 in 5, or 20 percent-according to the National Council on Problem Gambling.

Donald Trump is in large part a product of gambling culture. His career has not been about making products but about selling intangible and fleeting experiences. He preys on the desperate by offering them escapist fantasies. This world is about glitter, noise and hype-Trump called the Trump Taj Mahal, his now-closed casino, "the eighth wonder of the world." The more money you spent, the greater your "value," the more you were pampered, given free hotel rooms and gifts, handed passes to special "clubs" with lavish buffets. Scantily clad hostesses hovered around you serving complimentary drinks. If you spent big, you were invited to exclusive parties attended by supermodels and famous athletes. Decorated chips-some featuring a photo of Donald Trump-turned cash into a species of Monopoly money. But in the end, when you were broke, when there was no more money in your bank account and your credit cards were maxed out, you were thrown back, in even greater financial distress, into the dreary universe you tried to obliterate.

Roger Caillois, the French sociologist, wrote that the pathologies of a culture are captured in the games the culture venerates. Old forms of gambling such as blackjack and poker allowed the gambler to take risks, make decisions and even, in his or her mind, achieve a kind of individualism or heroism at the gambling table. They provided a way, it can be argued, to assert an alternative identity for a brief moment. But the newer form, machine gambling, is an erasure of the self. Slot machines, which produce 85 percent of the profits at casinos, are, as the sociologist Henry Lesieur wrote, an "addiction delivery device." They are "electronic morphine," "the crack cocaine of gambling." They are not about risk or about making decisions, but about creating somnambulism, putting a player into a trancelike state that can last for hours. It is a pathway, as sociologist Natasha Dow Schull points out, to becoming the walking dead. This yearning for a state of nonbeing is what Sigmund Freud called "the death instinct." It is the overpowering drive by a depressed and traumatized person to seek pleasure in a self-destructive activity that ultimately kills the organism.

"It is not the chance of winning to which they become addicted," Schull writes in "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas," "rather, what addicts them is the world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm they derive from machine play."

Gamblers are closely tracked by the casino industry. The length of time gamblers spend on machines increases the profits for the casino. The science of keeping people in front of slot machines-called "time on device" within the industry-has led to the creation of ergonomic consoles, the appealing, warm screens on slot machines, seductive video graphics and surround-sound acoustics.

The industry also invests heavily in surveillance. Gamblers carry player or loyalty cards. They insert these cards into the slot machines when they play. These cards, linked to a central database, are used by the industry to build profiles of gamblers. The value and frequency of bets are captured, along with wins and losses. The industry knows when the players take breaks, where and what they eat in the casinos, what they drink and what hotel rooms they select. Slowly the traits and the habits of the gambler, triangulated with demographic data, are pieced together to allow the industry to build a personal profile. With the profile, the casino determines at what point a player will accumulate too many losses and too much pain and is about to walk away from a machine. A few moments before that pain level is reached, a hostess will magically appear with a free drink, a voucher for a meal or tickets to a show. Casinos can also use profiles to project how much a player will spend gambling during his or her lifetime.

The industry was the human laboratory for refinements now incorporated into the security and surveillance organs of the state. "Many surveillance and marketing innovations first used in casinos were only later adapted to other domains," Schull writes, "including airports, financial trading floors, consumer shopping malls, insurance agencies, banks, and government programs like Homeland Security."

"They have an algorithm that senses your pain points, your sweet spots," Schull told me. "The zone is a term that I kept hearing over and over again as I went to gamblers' anonymous meetings and spoke to gambling addicts. This really describes a state of flow where time, space, monetary value and other people fall away. You might say a state of flow, or the zone, sounds very different from the thrills and suspense of gambling. But what the casinos have hit upon is that [they] actually make more money when [they] design a flow space into these machines. People don't even know that they're losing. They just sit there. Again, it's time on machines."

"When you look at contemporary slot machines, they don't operate on volatility," she continued. "One designer of the mathematics and algorithm of these games said we want an algorithm that makes you feel like you are reclining on a couch. The curves, architecture and the softly pixelated lights, they want you to sit back and go with the flow. I just couldn't make sense of that for the longest time in my research. Gamblers would say, 'It's so weird, but sometimes when I win a big jackpot I feel angry and frustrated.' What they're playing for is not to win, but to stay in the zone. Winning disrupts that because suddenly the machine is frozen, it's not letting you keep going. What are you going to do with that winning anyway? You're just going to feed it back into the machines. This is more about mood modulation. Affect modulation. Using technologies to dampen anxieties and exit the world. We don't just see it in Las Vegas. We see it in the subways every morning. The rise of all of these screen-based technologies and the little games that we've all become so absorbed in. What gamblers articulate is a desire to really lose a sense of self. They lose time, space, money value, and a sense of being in the world. What is that about? What does that say? How do we diagnose that?"

"It's the flip side to the incredible pressure, which is experienced as a burden, to self-manage, to make choices, to always be maximizing as you're living life in this entrepreneurial mode," she said. "We talk about this as the subjective side of the neoliberal agenda, where pressure is put on individuals to regulate themselves. In this case, they are regulating themselves, but they are regulating themselves away from that. This really is a mode of escape. It's not action gambling. This is escape gambling. You can see it on their faces. The consequences and ethics are distasteful. It's predatory. It's predation on a type of escape where people are driven to exit the world. They're not trying to win. The casinos are trying to win. They are trying to make revenue. They're kind of in a partnership with the gamblers, but it's a very asymmetrical partnership. The gamblers don't want to win. They want to just keep going. Some people have likened gamblers to factory workers who are alienated by the machine. I don't see it that way. This is more about machines designed to synchronize with what you want-in this case escape-and [to] profit from that."

Trump understands this longing for escape and the art of creating an updated version of P.T. Barnum's "Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome." Trump used his skills as a con artist to pull in hundreds of millions of dollars and then to achieve the presidency.

"People have called it a mode of ludo-capitalism," Schull said. "In a way, you can connect that to the ludo-politics that we see. Pleasure. To get what you want. What you want is to escape into a flow, to be taken away. We see this in the political domain a lot-in the rallies, in the surging of feelings, the distraction. If you look at the way a casino is designed, and you remember that Trump is a designer of many casinos, including his non-casino properties, they follow the same design logic of disorientation and trying to sweep people away from themselves, away from rationality, away from a position where they have clear lines of sight and can act as decision-making subjects. You see that on the floors of casinos, you see that in political rhetoric today."

Did you know that the Pentagon (aka "Murder Incorporated") has never been audited? And that over ten trillion dollars are missing from its budget? We would never let the Mafia get away with that.

Did you know that Russia has just invented a new super-missile that can do almost everything but sing the blues? How could Russia do that? Because Putin is investing Russia's money in education so it will have scientists who can work smarter not harder. America, on the other hand, is investing its money on murdering babies in the Middle East -- while our education system here at home only produces more and more dumb Americans. Shades of Sputnik and 1954.

And then these very same Americans turned around and elected people who would only make their miserable lives even more miserable. People like Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell -- and Donald Trump.

At first I too was actually dumb enough to think that Trump actually would "drain the swamp". But then I realized that yours-truly had just been naive and that Trump was draining the American swamp in the same way that Hurricane Katrina drained New Orleans.

Now, however, I actually think that electing President Trump might actually be a good thing after all. Why? Because, for far too long, America's guts have been tied up in knots by a blockage caused by mass murder world-wide and massive economic disaster and moral denial here at home. For the past 60-plus years, America has been economically, politically and morally constipated.

And now President Trump has come along and given us all that drastic enema we so badly need. And now Americans are finally starting to wake up -- and actually starting to feel some actual movement in their intestinal fortitude. At last!

Suddenly Americans are starting to realize that their education system sucks eggs, their infrastructure is wobbly at best, their jobs have fled overseas, their democracy is gone, their treasures have all been squandered in order to murder huge numbers of babies in the Middle East -- and that they have been constantly lied to since Franklin Roosevelt died.

Finally Americans are starting to do something more than just pass gas.

Americans are now waking up, becoming unobstructed and starting to demand life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness instead of just more and more butchery and dumbness. Thank you, Donald Trump!

PS: Lots of people tell me that Clinton would have been a much better president than Trump. I beg to disagree. While Trump has shamelessly thrown us Americans into the deep end of a caustic and toxic swamp where we at least have a chance to swim for our lives before it's too late, Clinton would have let us happily die of a thousand cuts like the proverbial frog who got boiled to death by having its temperature raised degree by degree -- and too late we would have screamed "Ouch!"

The mainstream U.S. media is never more unctuous and unprofessional as when it asserts that it alone must be the arbiter of what is true and what is not, regardless of what the evidence shows or doesn't show.

For instance, New York Times columnist Charles W. Blow declared on Monday that the public can longer debate whether Russia leaked to WikiLeaks the emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta despite the failure of the U.S. government or private researchers to present evidence that establishes that claim as fact.

Blow acknowledged that "We are still not conclusively able to connect the dots on the question of whether there was any coordination or collusion between members of Donald Trump's campaign and the Russians... but those dots do continue to multiply at an alarming rate."

But Blow also asserted that "It is absolutely clear that the Russians did interfere in our election. This is not a debatable issue. This is not fake news. This is not a witch hunt. This happened."

Blow chastised people who still wanted evidence of this now non-debatable issue, seeing them at fault "because this fact [of the Russian meddling] keeps getting obscured in the subterfuge of deflection, misdirection and ideological finger-pointing about what has yet to be proven."

So, if you insist on asking for proof of the core allegation in Russia-gate, you are guilty of "subterfuge..., misdirection and ideological finger-pointing."

And if that indictment doesn't quiet you up, there's the column by The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne Jr. who explains that the real victims in Russia-gate are the accusers who have promoted this guilt-by-association scandal that has impugned the integrity of a growing number of Americans who either talked to Russians or who expressed doubts about the investigation.

While the Russia-gate accusers have essentially deemed these Americans "traitors" or the Kremlin's "useful idiots" or some other derogatory phrase, Dionne sees the much greater offense coming from the people so accused who have complained about what they see as McCarthyism. Dionne writes:

"These days, any liberal who raises alarms about Trump's relationship with Russia confronts charges of McCarthyism, hysteria and hypocrisy. The inclination of many on the left to assail [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is often ascribed to partisan anger over his success in undermining Clinton's candidacy.

"There's no doubt that liberals are angry, but ask yourself: Shouldn't everyone, left, right and center, be furious over Russia's efforts to inject calumny and falsehood into the American political bloodstream?"

Blacklisting Journalists

And, that campaign indeed has been replete with McCarthyism. You even have The Washington Post promoting a blacklist of 200 Internet news sites (including Consortiumnews.com and other prominent independent-minded outlets) as guilty of "Russian propaganda" for reporting skeptically on some State Department claims about the New Cold War.

But Dionne also is dishonest in claiming that the alleged leaks blamed on Russia are false. The central allegation in Russia-gate is that the Russians obtained two batches of Democratic emails and released them to the American public via WikiLeaks. Even if that is the case, nothing in those emails was fabricated.

The emails represented real news including evidence that the DNC displayed improper bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders's insurgent campaign; excerpts of Hillary Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street that she was trying to hide from the voters; and revelations about pay-to-play aspects of the Clinton Foundation's dealing with foreign entities.

So, even if the Russians did give the emails to WikiLeaks - although WikiLeaks denies that the Russians were the source - the core reality is that the emails provided real information that the American people had a genuine right to know. But Dionne and the mainstream U.S. media have conflated this truth-telling with cases of "fake news," i.e., made-up stories that investigations have shown had no connection to Russia, simply to sleazy entrepreneurs seeking to make some money via lots of clicks. In other words, Dionne is lying or engaging in "fake news" himself.

Such phony journalism is reminiscent of other shameful chapters of the mainstream media's history of serving as propaganda conduits and marginalizing independent reporters who displayed professional skepticism toward the dangerous groupthinks of Official Washington.

A pivotal moment in the chaos that is now consuming the planet came on Feb. 6, 2003, when The Washington Post's editorial and op-ed pages presented a solid phalanx of misguided consensus that ruled out any further dissent about the existence of Iraq's WMD after Secretary of State Colin Powell presented his slam-dunk case before the United Nations the day before.

The Post's editorial board - led by editorial page editor Fred Hiatt - judged Powell's WMD case "irrefutable," an opinion echoed across the Post's op-ed page.

"The evidence he [Powell] presented to the United Nations - some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail - had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them," wrote Post columnist Richard Cohen. "Only a fool - or possibly a Frenchman - could conclude otherwise."

The Post's senior foreign policy columnist Jim Hoagland then demanded the surrender of any WMD-doubting holdouts: "To continue to say that the Bush administration has not made its case, you must now believe that Colin Powell lied in the most serious statement he will ever make, or was taken in by manufactured evidence. I don't believe that. Today, neither should you."

This enforced WMD consensus contributed to arguably the most disastrous U.S. foreign policy decision in history as President George W. Bush launched an illegal invasion of Iraq that got nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers killed along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and spread bloody chaos across the Middle East and now into Europe. There was also the problem that no hidden caches of WMD were discovered.

So, you might assume that editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt and other prominent mainstream journalists who pushed the bogus WMD claims and pushed the few dissenters to the fringes of the public debate, received some appropriate punishments - at least being unceremoniously fired in disgrace. Of course, if you thought that, you don't understand how the U.S. mainstream media works. To this day, Fred Hiatt is still the editorial-page editor of The Washington Post.

Slandering Dr. King

One might note, however, that historically the mainstream U.S. media has performed no better than it has in recent years.

Fifty years ago, on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave one of the most important speeches in U.S. history, taking to task American militarism and the Vietnam War. Famously and courageously, King denounced his own government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

King, whose life was increasingly at risk, was then put at even greater risk by being denounced by The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Post blasted King for spreading what today we might call "fake news," accusing him of "sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy." The Times chimed in that King's words were "facile" and "slander" while urging him to focus instead on "the intractability of slum mores and habits," i.e. those lazy and immoral black folks. (Exactly a year later, King was shot dead.)

But you might ask, don't the Post and Times at least get the big investigative stories right and thus warn the American people about abuses to their democratic process? Well, not exactly.

Take, for example, the case of Richard Nixon conspiring with South Vietnamese leaders to sabotage President Lyndon Johnson's Paris peace talks in fall 1968 so Nixon could eke out a victory over Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Nixon's manipulation of that election - while half a million American soldiers were in the war zone - was treated by the Post and Times as a conspiracy theory for nearly half a century, even as honest journalists chipped away at Nixon's denials by uncovering evidence of the deal that continued the war for another four years.

Some reporters, such as the Christian Science Monitor's Beverly Deepe, were onto the story in real time. Others, including Seymour Hersh, advanced knowledge about these events over the decades. Five years ago, I uncovered a top secret file that Johnson's National Security Adviser Walt Rostow dubbed "The X-Envelope" which contained wiretap proof of what Johnson called Nixon's "treason." Besides writing up the details, I posted the documents on the Internet so anyone could see for themselves.

Yet, as recently as last October, The New York Times ignored all this evidence when referencing the supposed "October Surprise" of 1968, citing - instead of Nixon's peace-talk sabotage - the fact that Johnson had ordered a bombing halt of North Vietnam. In other words, the Times was still promoting Nixon's version of the story nearly a half century later.

Only early this year, when a scholar uncovered some cryptic notes by Nixon's chief of staff H.R. Haldeman that seemed to reference Nixon's instructions regarding the sabotage did the Times finally deign to acknowledge the reality (because the Times published the finding on its op-ed page, which I guess makes it true). But the Times did so without acknowledging all the hard work that journalists had done over the years so the cryptic notes would fit into a complex puzzle that made sense.

Nor did the Times acknowledge its own role in obscuring this history for so long.

Rumor-Mongers

To add insult to the historical injury, the Times pretended that it was right to have ignored the earlier work. Times columnist Nicholas Kristof dismissively treated those decades of investigative journalism by writing: "Nixon's initiative, long rumored but confirmed only a few months ago, was meant to improve his election chances that year."

"Long rumored"? The reality was that Nixon's perfidy had long ago been proven by independent-minded journalists but their work was ignored by The New York Times and pretty much everyone else in the mainstream media until the self-proclaimed truth monitors decided that the discovery of one new piece of the mosaic was the appropriate time to proclaim that the reality could now be accepted as a reality.

To explain the near half-century gap in the Times' failure to investigate this historic act of treason, the Times then smeared the journalists who had done the investigating as rumor-mongers.

So, in light of the mainstream media's dismal performance over the decades, what is one to make of the dictate now that we must accept that the Russians did leak the emails to WikiLeaks even if no one is showing us the evidence? It also appears that we are supposed to dismiss the contents of the emails as "fake news" (even though they are genuine) so that will buttress the narrative that Russia is undermining our democracy by disseminating "fake news."

Perhaps getting people to accept this false narrative is crucial to giving credibility to the Times' full-page ads professing the newspaper's undying love of the truth and to The Washington Post's new melodramatic slogan, "Democracy Dies in Darkness."

While there's no doubt that truth is important to an informed electorate, there is something scary when the mainstream media, which has such a checkered history of misreporting the truth, asserts that it is the one that gets to decide what the truth is.
(c) 2017 Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

My biggest concern is not the embarrassment of a U.S. public afraid of the tiny impoverished nation of North Korea. If that embarrassed me, how would I survive what U.S. culture makes of ISIS, or -- for that matter -- the election of Donald Trump? My biggest concern is that U.S. war profiteers may end up using Korea to get us all killed.

The United States bombed the living hell out of North Korea, and -- in hopes that nothing would survive -- dropped diseased insects on the place, hoping to start plagues. One bit of later collateral damage was the release of Lyme disease in Lyme, but Hollywood came out of it with the concepts of brainwashing and Manchurian candidates, so some might call it a fair trade.

The United States has thus far refused to ever end the war, sign a peace, or allow reconciliation. Southern and Northern efforts toward peace have been thwarted. Northern proposals (echoed by China) to halt nuclear testing if the U.S. will halt the "exercises" in which it practices for the nuclear bombing of the North have been mocked and scorned. North Korea has committed to no first use, as has China. The U.S. has proposed first use and made plans for it, while heavily militarizing South Korea, building a new base on Jeju Island, sending armed drones to the border, and installing THAAD.

Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, formerly Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), is part of what the United States calls "missile defense" and much of the world thinks of as missile offense. The U.S. calls it a (highly profitable) tool to protect South Korea from the attack that the North is not threatening. China sees it as part of U.S. efforts to encircle China and to be prepared to strike first and to minimize the Chinese response.

Giving not a rat's rear what China or North Korea or even South Korea has to say, distracted by its efforts to stir up World War III with Russia, and obsessed with prolonging its numerous wars in the Middle East and Africa, the United States simply pushes ahead.

On Wednesday, April 5, a group of South Koreans plans to demonstrate against the current course in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. One of them, Rea-kyung Lee, Chairman of the board of the Tomorrow Association, provided me with a statement that I paraphrase thus:

"The Korean people will be closely watching how U.S. President Trump and the Chinese National Chairman Xi Jin Ping deal with the deployment of THAAD onto the Korean Peninsula when they meet in the United States on April 6 and 7.

"The United States is unilaterally imposing THAAD deployment without any normal and proper agreement with South Korea. The former Korean president who initiated the process has recently been impeached for corruption. A new election is planned for early May. Meanwhile, China is imposing sanctions on South Korea in retaliation.

"The United States must halt THAAD deployment. China must end sanctions.

"The democratic citizens of South Korea have ousted a corrupt president using peaceful, non-violent candlelight demonstrations. The hurdles still faced are long-standing. Following the period of Japanese imperialism, the Korean people desired to establish an independent and unified nation, but were frustrated by the U.S.-Soviet military occupations of the peninsula, and the war between the United States and China.

"The residents of the Korean peninsula have been being forced to undergo the tragic status of national division, while constantly experiencing daily life under the threat of war for more than 70 years. The U.S. and China, in fighting for supremacy over the Korean peninsula, should not repeat such historical crimes."

It's deja vu all over again.

As the Trump Russia story continues to stutter forward, comparisons to Watergate are everywhere - and justifiably so. The revelations and denials, the slow unraveling of deception, the critical role of a free and independent press challenging the cover-up and digging for the truth are all very familiar, especially to those of us who actually were in Washington back during those peculiar days and nights of Richard Nixon.

But another inside-the-Beltway, historic parallel struck me last week when reports emerged of House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) suddenly jumping from his Uber car into another and covertly racing to the White House grounds, where he met with who-knows-who about who-knows-what. (The New York Times reported on Thursday that White House officials Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis gave Nunes access to "intelligence reports that showed President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies." Early Thursday evening, The Washington Post added to the list John Eisenberg, legal adviser to the National Security Council.)

When it comes to paralleling Nunes and his car switcheroo, there hasn't been such noteworthy bolting from a vehicle in the District of Columbia since a South American stripper named Fanne Foxx dashed from the limousine of House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills and jumped into the Tidal Basin. That was in 1974, just a couple of months after Nixon's resignation. Foxe and Rep. Mills were having an affair and soon after his companion's 2 a.m. dip, Mills, who was considered by many to be the most powerful man on Capitol Hill, had to give up his chairmanship. Foxe had her 15 minutes of fame, during which her exotic dancer sobriquet was changed from "The Argentine Firecracker" to "The Tidal Basin Bombshell."

No word as to what Rep. Nunes' stripper name will be, but I'm open to suggestions. Certainly Devin "D for Dumb" Nunes is a real possibility. Which brings to mind another congressional highlight of 1974, and I'm not talking about the superb work of the House Judiciary Committee passing articles of impeachment against Nixon. It also was the year that a start-up magazine, New Times, made a splash with its cover story naming, "The 10 Dumbest Members of Congress." It was written by Nina Totenberg, now NPR's star legal affairs correspondent.

No. 1 on her list was Sen. William Scott, Republican from Virginia, a one termer whose stupid-is-as-stupid-does behavior reportedly included racist and anti-Semitic remarks.

During a defense briefing that included information about missile silos in Russia, Scott is alleged to have said, "Wait a minute! I'm not interested in agriculture. I want the military stuff." Nor did he seem to know the difference between the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf, so thank God he never was anywhere near the nuclear codes.

To make matters worse, when the article appeared, Scott called a press conference in his office to angrily denounce the story, giving it even wider coverage and proving once and for all that he really was exactly who Totenberg and the magazine said he was.

Which brings us back to Devin Nunes. Certainly, in this current Congress he already has a lot of competition for dumbest. The Texas House Republicans alone include an impressive array of top-tier candidates. (And I say that as a Yankee who nonetheless received half his chromosomes from a smart and capable Texan.)

Or maybe Nunes is dumb like a fox. Between his feckless dashing about Washington like a barely housebroken Scooby-Doo and his postponement of more open hearings that might further reveal the administration's culpability, he has done his best to obfuscate and obstruct. He's certainly a tool, his fumbling mistakes and misrepresentations thoroughly mucking up his committee's investigation, probably beyond redemption. Which doubtless is just what his White House pals wanted.

Hard to believe he wants to go out this way (and he should resign, recuse himself or be replaced by House Speaker Ryan). There are even those who say that when the committee room doors are closed, in private he has been a helpful colleague - until now.

Apparently, Nunes been played and played big-time, a cog in the Steve Bannon machine designed to subvert the current investigations. That classified - and said to be anonymous! - information about which Nunes insisted he had to brief President Trump but at the same time hide from the eyes of his committee turns out to have been leaked to him by the supposedly leak-averse White House itself. In other words, he was briefing the White House on documents he got from the White House. Huh?

And what was in those documents? According to The Times:

"The intelligence reports consisted primarily of ambassadors and other foreign officials talking about how they were trying to develop contacts within Mr. Trump's family and inner circle before his inauguration, officials said...

"Mr. Nunes has acknowledged that the incidental intelligence gathering on Trump associates last year was not necessarily unlawful, and that it was not specifically directed at Mr. Trump or people close to him. American intelligence agencies typically monitor foreign officials of allied and hostile countries, and they routinely sweep up communications linked to Americans who may be taking part in the conversation or are being spoken about."

Now, how about the men who allegedly handed off the info to Rep. Nunes? There's Michael Ellis, who's in the White House Counsel's office. He used to work for Nunes at the intelligence committee and now reports to the aforementioned National Security Council attorney John Eisenberg.

And you may remember Ezra Cohen-Watnick - he's the guy who national security adviser H.R. McMaster recently wanted to bounce from his position as the National Security Council's senior director for intelligence. Cohen-Watnick, 30, went running to his protectors, Steve Bannon and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. They then went to Trump, who overruled McMaster and saved the kid's job. After Trump sent his scurrilous tweets about wiretapping, Cohen-Watnick apparently wanted to pay his debt to the boss and seems to have set about trying to find something, anything, that might be interpreted as supporting his president's fantasy.

Cohen-Watnick is a protege of McMaster's short-lived predecessor as national security adviser, the notorious Michael Flynn, who lost his job for, among other sins, purportedly lying to Vice President Mike Pence and others about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. At least that was the cover story. He also may have been involved in a private, half-baked scheme to kidnap Turkish opposition leader Fethullah Gulen from exile in Pennsylvania and turn him over to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and certain death, thus avoiding formal extradition.

Still with me? Earlier reports had indicated that Flynn might be cutting a deal with the FBI, copping a plea in exchange for telling everything he knows about Donald Trump's team and Russia, including possible collusion in that country's interference with the 2016 election. Now The Wall Street Journal reports that according to officials, Flynn has offered to be interviewed by the agency and the congressional intelligence committees in exchange for immunity, "but has so far found no takers." His lawyer wrote, "Gen. Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit." I'll bet, but it may take a while; no one seems anxious to grant Flynn's request anytime soon. And it's pretty funny coming from a fellow who last September told Meet the Press, "When you are given immunity, that means you probably committed a crime."

Which brings us back to Watergate. When Woodward and Bernstein started writing their articles in June 1972, there was frustration, because while they were on the front page of The Washington Post almost every day, their reporting was buried in other newspapers around the country and the story got little traction - much as the Russia story has been ignored or denied by Trump's base. Richard Nixon won re-election in a landslide.

In my memory, Watergate finally began to really crack open months later when the burglars appeared for sentencing in March 1973. One of them, James McCord, had written a letter to Judge John Sirica and then met with him in chambers, begging for a deal and singing like the Vienna Boys Choir about who at the Nixon White House had asked the burglars to take the rap and remain silent in exchange for a payoff.

So maybe now a similar agreement eventually will be reached with Flynn. Add to that the seeming seriousness of Republican Richard Burr, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who as of this week - and unlike the hapless Nunes - seems committed to getting honest answers, much as his fellow North Carolinian, Democrat Sam Ervin, sought when he chaired the Senate Watergate Committee. (That said, the apparent commitment of Burr - and Democratic vice chair Mark Warner of Virginia - does not yet negate the real need for an independent, bipartisan inquiry and a special prosecutor.)

Senators of both parties serving on the intelligence committee were stunned Thursday when Clinton Watts, a senior fellow at the George Washington University's Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, told them in a public hearing that not only had Russia hacked Hillary Clinton but also other GOP presidential candidates who ran against Trump in the primaries, including Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham. What's more, Watts said, "the commander in chief has used Russian active measures at times against his opponents."

In part, he noted, that's why Russia was so successful - Trump played such a willing (if possibly unwitting) role in their scheme: "... Part of the reason these active measures work, and it does today in terms of Trump Tower being wiretapped, is because they [Trump's associates] parrot the same lines."

Sure, there's a chance this will all lead to naught. But we have to find out. Every piece of this puzzle inexorably leads us to the big looming questions one longs to ask Trump and his cohort under oath: If there's really nothing going on, why are you working so hard to keep the truth from coming out? What exactly are you hiding?

Dear Uberfuhrer Flake,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your success gathering the last bit of information on all Americans with the ability to sell it all to the highest bider, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 05-27-2017. We salute you Herr Flake, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence