The first thing you notice about Utopia for Realists, the new book that argues that money should be free and a 15-hour work week sounds about right, is its tone. Writer Rutger Bregman is cheerful, optimistic, imaginative, welcoming, funny and economical - the opposite of most of our political books, which tend to be fulminating, accusatory, combative and narrow-minded, and all of these things across far too many pages.

Bregman is Dutch, which will be a strike against him on these shores, and then there is the matter of his politics, which seem designed to infuriate the entire spectrum of current American thought. He is for open borders, which will make him an Antichrist to the Trump right, and he speaks warmly of neoliberalism, which will make Sanders liberals cringe.

At the same time, the entire thesis of his book seems aimed at the tepid incrementalism of mainstream Democrats, who reflexively dismiss all big ideas as "politically unrealistic" and the work of "purity testers." He will have few natural allies on this side of the Atlantic, which may be one of the reasons his international bestseller hasn't been reviewed in very many of our major newspapers yet.

But Bregman's book is both a fun read and a breath of fresh air to anyone who lived through the ghastly experience of last year's presidential election season, which turned into an angry referendum on the relentless narrowness of American politics.

Utopia for Realists is a book that argues, with humor and sympathy, that we've all suffered from forgetting how to dream of a better world. "We inhabit a world of managers and technocrats," he writes. "Political decisions are presented as a matter of exigency - as neutral and objective events, as though there were no other choice."

American writers continually made the mistake of trying to understand the upheavals of last year in terms of the usual left-right explanations of the world, instead of looking at more basic criteria. People everywhere were depressed and bored out of their minds. They craved something new. Polls consistently showed that people in both parties were unhappy with their choices and wanted a new direction almost irrespective of what that direction was.

People wanted big ideas and big dreams, but Democrats and Republicans both have been trained to imagine the future not as a better place, but one filled with horror and destruction. On the right, the fantasy future is overrun by benefit-devouring immigrants with scabies, while for the left the next decades are a hellscape filled with toxic greenhouse gases and overfished oceans.

What I saw on the campaign trail last year was an electorate so desperate for big dreams that they turned to lost paradises of the past.

Donald Trump promised to build walls to reverse the onslaught of multiculturalism and send us back to a Fifties nirvana that never existed - he literally promised Happy Days and even had Scott Baio as an opening-day convention speaker.

For Democrats, meanwhile, the most exciting future was presented by a septuagenarian socialist reintroducing the New Deal to young voters. Even a mildly radical idea like free college aroused not just derision but anger among "responsible" thinkers in both of the major parties and in the punditocracy, ostensibly the place where we play with ideas in this country.

Bregman argues that we are where we are because a century of bummerific experiences with utopian ideas - fascism, communism, Nazism, to name a few - have left us imagining that "dreams have a way of turning into nightmares" and that "utopia is a dystopia." This has left us with a world where "politics has been watered down to problem management" and "radical ideas about a different world have become literally unthinkable."

Even liberalism, Bregman argues, has become pessimistic, an ideology that is "all but hollowed out," with young people trained to "just be yourself" and "do your thing." That's probably an overstatement and a cliche. But there's probably also some truth to the idea that a lot of the controversies about safe spaces are the end result of a new emphasis on trying to make the individual feel maximally safe and accepted within the larger context of a world we've unconsciously come to accept as essentially unchangeable.

Government, too, Bregman argues, has mostly given up trying to make a better world, and has instead focused on policing it better. "If you're not following the blueprint of a docile, content citizen," he writes, "the powers that be are happy to whip you into shape" - with control, surveillance, repression.

The welfare state is where Bregman sees the ultimate perversion of the utopian instinct. It's become "a grotesque pact between left and right," in which conservatives have spent a generation making sure people getting aid are punished and villainized as lazy and work-averse, while progressives have used public assistance as a way to lever more control over the lives of poor people who aren't trusted to make the right life choices. Anyone who has covered the way the remains of the welfare bureaucracy works knows this is true, that we have made receiving any kind of aid to keep yourself or your children alive a humiliating, intrusive experience, one that invites an army of inspectors into your home, who examine everything from how many toothbrushes you have in your bathroom to whether your Facebook page shows you're spending your time wisely.

Bregman thinks we should just give people money, no questions asked, and let them sort it out. His prescriptions are humorously simple. He quotes economist Charles Kenny, who notes "the reason poor people are poor is because they don't have enough money." And he tells the fascinating true story of that time that Richard Nixon - Richard Nixon! - tried to implement a law guaranteeing a basic family income for all Americans.

The story is one of those classic absurdist tales of history. Nixon's brain led him to this idea by means of some bizarre accident - he apparently thought "Tory men and liberal policies" are what "changed the world," and saw the plan as the ultimate marriage of conservative and progressive politics, something that would make his name ring out forever: Richard Nixon, guarantor of universal dignity.

But of course aides who hated the idea (including one who was an Ayn Rand fan) pushed him away from the plan, and it morphed into yet another plan to castigate the lazy poor by forcing them to work. Later in the Seventies, the idea vanished altogether thanks to another classic political reason - a typo, which mistakenly showed that experiments in this area revealed a 50 percent higher divorce rate, which naturally led men to worry that guaranteeing women a basic income would leave them with no reason to stay home. Years later it turned out that basic income experiments had shown no impact on the divorce rate.

One of the reasons the welfare state is so unpopular in America is because every aid program ends up being income-dependent. You can't qualify for aid here until you're poor enough, but we treat the poor as work-averse parasites with bad judgment who have to be monitored round-the-clock. But studies abroad show that the countries with the most universal programs are the most successful and engender the least hostility. "Basically," Bregman writes, "people are more open to solidarity if it benefits them personally."

Bregman's basic ideas are pretty simple. He thinks (and many scientists agree with him) that if you give people a basic income with no strings attached, they will make better decisions, work more, cost the state less in the areas of things like health care and incarceration, and be happier and feel less humiliated, scared, and insecure. He quotes Woody Allen, who pointed out that "money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons."

He also argues pretty forcefully that working longer hours makes us less productive and also more unhappy. At some point in the arc of industrialized countries, we end up working more and more hours just so we can acquire more and more stuff we don't need. More relaxing, less working and consuming - that's where we should be looking. So he proposes a 15-hour work week. I'm sure people here will hate the idea.

And who knows, maybe none of it works in practice. But what's so interesting about modern America is our hostility to the mere idea of trying to create an easier and happier life. We're a country that was once rich with social experimentation, from the Shaker colonies to Brook Farm to Oneida to New Harmony to the Fourierist experiments to the Octagon community of vegetarians to a long list of others, many of them amusingly crazy, who tried to use the accident of plenty as an excuse to build a better way to live.

Now we don't really even try, and mostly just scream at each other on the Internet. That doesn't seem like it will get us there. Maybe free money and a three-hour work day won't, either, but it sure seems like it would be more fun to try.
(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.

THE PRESENT Israeli government coalition consists of 67 (out of 120) members of the Knesset.

Each member wants to be elected again (and again and again).

In order to be reelected, he or she must attract the attention of the public.

How? The simplest way is to propose a new law. A bill so outrageous, that the media cannot possible ignore it.

This sets up a natural competition. To draw attention, each new bill must be a bit more outrageous than the last. The sky is the limit. Perhaps.

THE LAST bill, concocted by a Member who is an ex-secret service chief, is called "Israel - the National State of the Jewish People."

In general parlance, the Jewish People consists of all the Jews in the world, more than half of whom live outside Israel and are citizens of other states. They are not asked if they want the State of Israel to represent them. Goes without asking.

Indeed, Israeli ambassadors everywhere are considered by many a kind of unofficial overlord of the local Jewish community.

What about the Arab citizens of Israel, who constitute slightly more than 20%? Well, they remain citizens, but the state does not belong to them.

SO WHAT does the proposed bill say?

First of all, it abolishes the status of Arabic as an "official language", a status it has enjoyed since Israel was founded. Hebrew will reign supreme - and alone.

Israel has no written constitution. The Supreme Court has created a kind of virtual constitution, resting on several "basic laws". A Knesset majority can overturn any of these at any time.

The basic legal assumption until now has been that Israel is a "Jewish and Democratic State", both attributes of equal status. The new law will change that. Both attributes will remain intact, but "Jewish" will become more important than "democratic" and trump it if there is a contradiction, as there frequently is.

This week Binyamin Netanyahu announced that he has adopted this bill and will push it through the Knesset in two months time. No problem.

WHY IS there no problem?

Because, basically, there is no ideological opposition.

There is, of course, an Arab faction (split into three sub-factions: nationalist, religious and communist). But most Jewish opposition members would rather be seen in the Knesset cafeteria in the company of a rabid fascist Jewish member than an Arab one.

So if Netanyahu wants to ram the bill through, it will indeed become the law of the land.

WHAT DOES "Jewish" mean? Is it a national or a religious designation?

The average Israeli will answer: both, of course. It can be used in the one sense or the other, as expedience demands.

Zionism was basically a process of attempting to transform an ancient ethno-religious community into a modern nation. When the bill says that Israel is the "nation-state of the Jewish people" it means all the Jews around the world. "Nation" and "people" (and religion) are considered synonyms. We are all Jews, aren't we?

What about the US Jew who feels he belongs to the American nation? What about the Canadian Jew who is a complete atheist and treats his Jewishness as a quaint reminder of his grandparents? Or a hypothetical black South-African whose parents have been converted to Judaism by their white Jewish master? Or a Russian Jew, whose parents have adopted the Orthodox Christian faith?

They are Jews, all of them. Jewish religious law says that "a Jew, even if he commits a sin, is still a Jew." Adopting the Christian - or any other - faith is certainly a sin, but the convert still remains a Jew, whether he wants it or not.

The Nation-State of the Jewish People belongs to all of them. Or, rather, they all belong to the Nation State of the Jewish People.

ALL THIS has very little to do with the original Zionist ideology.

Theodor Herzl, a thoroughly naive person, believed that all the Jews in the world would come to the Jewish State. Those who did not would cease to be Jews.

Even to David Ben-Gurion, an early Zionist, the idea that an American Zionist leader could continue to live in the USA was an abomination. His colleagues had a hard time convincing him that it was bad policy to tell that to the American Jews when you need their money.

Ben-Gurion would certainly not have agreed to a definition that would have turned Israel - his Israel! - into the state of these Jews, and turned them into quasi-citizens of the Jewish National State. God (in whom he did not believe) forbid.

WHAT ABOUT secular Jews in Israel?

Well the first question is whether there really are "secular" Jews in Israel.

All the Jews who grew up in Israel are products of the Jewish educational system, based on the Bible. This produces in their mind a set of ideological certitudes that cannot be eradicated.

The People of Israel was born in a conversation between God and Abraham in a place located in today's Iraq. This is of course a legend, like a large part of the Hebrew Bible, including the forefathers, the exodus and the kingdoms of David and Solomon. (Their existence is disproved, inter alia, by their total absence from the voluminous correspondence of Egyptian rulers and spies in the Land of Canaan.)

But historical evidence is unimportant here. The fact is that every Jewish child in Israel carries the Bible deep in their consciousness. Meaning: Jews are special. Jews are unique. It's "them" and "us". The whole world against us.

My friend Reuven Wimmer has sent me a list of the basic beliefs of the average "secular" Israeli. It goes a follows:

He does not observe the Shabbat. He uses his car, buys, travels and goes to the seashore on the Holy Day.
But he believes in God.
He does not eat kosher, but prefers kosher restaurants.
He goes at least once a year- on Yom Kippur - to synagogue
He marries and divorces at the Rabbinate.
He does not like Arabs very much.
He does not want to be identified as a Leftist, but does not vote for the Right.
He is not in favor of separation between state and religion.
He has served in the army, loves the army and is proud of the state.
He is for Two States for Two Peoples, provided this does not harm the settlements.
He does not take part in demonstrations or any other political activities.

WHAT ABOUT the close to two million Arabs who are citizens of the National State of the Jewish People?

Up to now, no attention-hungry Member of the Knesset has yet concocted a bill to take away their citizenship.

So they will remain citizens of the state, which belongs to another people. For the time being.

We will have a National State for the Jewish people, in which the majority of the world's Jews are not citizens, and in which two million non-Jewish Arabs will be citizens, in whose "eternal capital", Jerusalem, there live some hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants who are not citizens, which militarily occupies the West Bank with some 22.5 million Arabs, and which indirectly controls the lives of another two million Arabs in the Gaza Strip.

Altogether, there live now in historical Palestine some 7 million Jews and some 7 million Arabs.

The corporate media feed us fake news and the lawyers provide us with fake legality. A group of former Obama White House lawyers -- the same guys that defended the U.S. bombing of Libya, drone wars, and the "proxy" war against Syria -- say Trump has not legally justified his attack on a Syrian airbase. The truth is, the U.S. has waged illegal wars with impunity for most of its existence. Obama's former lawyers want only to whitewash the crimes.

It is as if the Gambino and Genovese crime families were arguing their turf disputes in the courts and the news media. The Democrats are screaming bloody murder over President Trump's firing of FBI director James Comey, whom Hillary Clinton still blames for her defeat at the polls and who the bipartisan War Party has never forgiven for Comey's earlier hesitancy to blame the Russians for the same offense. Now that Trump has cut Comey loose -- ostensibly for his handling of the Clinton emails scandal, according to three letters sent by Trump and his two top Justice Department officials - the Democrats have stepped up calls for a special prosecutor to continue the evidence-less crusade against the Kremlin.

It's the Saturday Night Massacre all over again, cry the Democrats, harkening back to the weekend in 1973 when President Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. But this is not about the rule of law -- quite the opposite: it's about continuing the momentum of the U.S. military offensive begun in 2011 under President Obama, a wholly illegal aggression that has destroyed Libya, killed half a million Syrians, delivered vast regions to the control of the two feuding factions of al-Qaida, and brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis.

The War Party is determined to make the offensive permanent, to keep up the pressure on the ultimate targets, Russia and China, until they break or capitulate to U.S. domination of the world. The current, rabid anti-Russian hysteria adds another layer of fake news on top of the wholly fictional U.S. "War on Terror" scenario. But these mega-lies can no longer mask the great obscenity of the 21st century: that the U.S. is allied with al-Qaida, whose jihadists act as imperialism's foot soldiers in the Middle East. Donald Trump thought last month's attack on Syria had bought him immunity, or at least a respite, from the wrath of the War Party, which was determined to burn him at the political stake -- not for his raging racism and hostility to civil liberties, but for his previously stated opposition to "regime change" and never-ending tensions with Russia. Trump's 59-missile salvo against a Syrian airbase was supposed to wipe the slate clean and forgive his heresies against the extralegal rights of the "exceptional" U.S. empire. But apparently, there is no statute of limitations on even the suggestion of peaceful coexistence with targeted states. And now, in an almost laughable legalistic perversion, a group of lawyers from the Obama White House, of all places, is suing the Trump administration for failing to provide sufficient legal rationale for last month's Tomahawk hit on Syria. The lawyers at United to Protect Democracy claim their insider knowledge of "how the federal government works" gives them unique insights on "implementing and enforcing the norms that have constrained presidential power for decades" - although they never constrained Obama from his own lurch towards apocalypse, in 2011. Indeed, these legal hit-men for empire acknowledge as much, admitting (or bragging?) that "we defended past presidents against legitimate oversight and illegitimate attacks." The self-styled "watchdog" group does not list its board or members on its website, but their admission implicates them in Obama's legal defense of his regime change assault on Libya. The U.S.-NATO bombing campaign, which killed an estimated 50,000 people, destroyed the country's infrastructure, resulted in the murder of its chief of state, empowered jihadist militias, and unleashed a torrent of arms across Africa and the Middle East, nevertheless did not violate the War Powers Act because "U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops," wrote Obama's lawyers. When challenged by Congress, Obama maintained that the war on Libya was not a war at all, because no Americans were killed.

Like synchronized dancers, the U.S. and its allies pivoted immediately to Syria, where they attempted to use much the same formula -- jihadists + arms + financing + CIA training + political protection at the UN -- to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad government. This "proxy war," which involved U.S. military and intelligence personnel on the ground from the very start, was never a secret and was always a clear violation of the United Nations Charter, which the U.S. is legally obligated to uphold. Nations are forbidden to use force against other nations except in self-defense or with the authorization of the UN Security Council. Unlike in Libya, the U.S. did not have the fig leaf of enforcing a UN-authorized "no-fly zone" in Syria. Yet, there was hardly a peep from any but a handful of Democrats, and therefore no need for Obama's in-house lawyers to defend their Chief against charges of aggressive war, the most serious of international crimes.

In 2013, after Syria was falsely blamed for a chemical attack on civilians, Obama threatened to directly bomb Syrian forces. His lawyers were prepared to argue that an attack on Syria could be justified - like Bill Clinton's bombing of Kosovo in 1999 - on vague grounds of eliminating a threat to peace. But of course, the greatest threat to peace is aggressive war, of which the United States was already -- and chronically -- guilty. In the end, Obama decided to ask Congress for authorization to bomb, and then changed his mind when the Russians offered to broker destruction of Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles. But, like all U.S. presidents, and with no grounds under international law, Obama insisted that Commanders-in-Chief have the right to bomb other countries to defend U.S. "national security" based on their own judgment -- another legal nonsensicality.

So, the legal mercenaries of United to Protect Democracy, veterans of Obama's 2011 military offensive, have no problem with violating international law. Their beef with Trump appears to be that he did not provide sufficient legal rationale for his bombing Syria - which is different than actually obeying international law. Trump's people issued what are described as "talking points" to explain his actions against Syria. But former White House lawyer Justin Florence, the group's legal director, wrote that this is not enough: "The U.S. government must publicly articulate its legal theory in order to uphold the international legal framework we have relied on for so many years as a constraint on other states."

The UN Charter is clear on what constitutes aggression. Trump is an aggressor. So were Obama, and Bush (the UN Secretary General said so), and so was Clinton. Since the U.S. is a superpower and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the UN will never authorize the international community to punish the U.S. for its crimes. But, that does not absolve the U.S. of criminality -- and humanity's collective memory and conscience will never forgive the United States for the crushing of nations and the death of millions. The Democratic Party hacks with law degrees at United to Protect Democracy are concerned, not about peace, but that U.S. presidents go through the motions of rationalizing their imperial crimes. Say something that sounds good, they urge. Convince the American public that it's OK for the U.S. to claim life and death powers over the rest of humanity. Make an effort, why don't ya?

These "watchdogs'" real problem with Trump is that he has not bothered to commission creative lawyers like themselves to provide lofty wordage to justify the indefensible. He has not taken care to skillfully market U.S. imperial aggression to its home population. This may not be impeachable, but it is embarrassing and unbefitting of an "exceptional" empire.

Ajamu Baraka, the 2016 Green Party vice presidential candidate and an editor and columnist at Black Agenda Report, wrote in this issue of BAR:

"The absence of any real opposition to the reckless use of U.S. military force -- the attack on Syria, the macho demonstration bombing in Afghanistan, the provocations toward North Korea -- exposed once again the unanimity among the U.S. ruling class and the state on the use of military force as the main strategy to enforce its global interests."

Where is Stanley Kubrick when we need him? If he hadn't died in 1999, he would be the perfect director to transform today's hysteria over Russia into a theater-of-the-absurd movie reprising his Cold War classic, "Dr. Strangelove," which savagely satirized the madness of nuclear brinksmanship and the crazed ideology behind it.

To prove my point, The Washington Post on Thursday published a lengthy story entitled in the print editions "Alarm at Russian in White House" about a Russian photographer who was allowed into the Oval Office to photograph President Trump's meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The Post cited complaints from former U.S. intelligence officials who criticized the presence of the Russian photographer as "a potential security breach" because of "the danger that a listening device or other surveillance equipment could have been brought into the Oval Office while hidden in cameras or other electronics."

To bolster this alarm, the Post cited a Twitter comment from President Obama's last deputy CIA director, David S. Cohen, stating "No, it was not" a sound decision to admit the Russian photographer who also works for the Russian news agency, Tass, which published the photo.

Boris and Natasha, the evil spies from the Rocky and Bullwinkle shows.

One could picture Boris and Natasha, the evil spies in the Bullwinkle cartoons, disguised as photographers slipping listening devices between the cushions of the sofas.

Or we could hear how Russians are again threatening to "impurify all of our precious bodily fluids," as "Dr. Strangelove" character, Gen. Jack D. Ripper, warned us in the 1964 movie. Watching that brilliant dark comedy again might actually be a good idea to remind us how crazy Americans can get when they're pumped up with anti-Russian propaganda, as is happening again now.

Taking Down Trump

I realize that many Democrats, liberals and progressives hate Donald Trump so much that they believe that any pretext is justified in taking him down, even if that plays into the hands of the neoconservatives and other warmongers. Many people who detest Trump view Russia-gate as the most likely path to achieve Trump's impeachment, so this desirable end justifies whatever means.

Some people have told me that they even believe that it is the responsibility of the major news media, the law enforcement and intelligence communities, and members of Congress to engage in a "soft coup" against Trump - also known as a "constitutional coup" or "deep state coup" - for the "good of the country."

The argument is that it sometimes falls to these Establishment institutions to "correct" a mistake made by the American voters, in this case, the election of a largely unqualified individual as U.S. president. It is even viewed by some anti-Trump activists as a responsibility of "responsible" journalists, government officials and others to play this "guardian" role, to not simply "resist" Trump but to remove him.

There are obvious counter-arguments to this view, particularly that it makes something of a sham of American democracy. It also imposes on journalists a need to violate the ethical responsibility to provide objective reporting, not taking sides in political disputes.

But The New York Times and The Washington Post, in particular, have made it clear that they view Trump as a clear and present danger to the American system and thus have cast aside any pretense of neutrality.

The Times justifies its open hostility to the President as part of its duty to protect "the truth"; the Post has adopted a slogan aimed at Trump, "Democracy Dies in Darkness." In other words, America's two most influential political newspapers are effectively pushing for a "soft coup" under the guise of defending "democracy" and "truth."

But the obvious problem with a "soft coup" is that America's democratic process, as imperfect as it has been and still is, has held this diverse country together since 1788 with the notable exception of the Civil War.

If Americans believe that the Washington elites are removing an elected president - even one as buffoonish as Donald Trump - it could tear apart the fabric of national unity, which is already under extraordinary stress from intense partisanship.

That means that the "soft coup" would have to be carried out under the guise of a serious investigation into something grave enough to justify the President's removal, a removal that could be accomplished by congressional impeachment, his forced resignation, or the application of Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to judge a President incapable of continuing in office (although that could require two-thirds votes by both houses of Congress if the President fights the maneuver).

A Big Enough 'Scandal'

That is where Russia-gate comes in. The gauzy allegation that Trump and/or his advisers somehow colluded with Russian intelligence officials to rig the 2016 election would probably clear the threshold for an extreme action like removing a President.

President Donald Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017.

There's not even any public evidence from U.S. government agencies that Russia did "meddle" in the 2016 election or - even if Russia did slip Democratic emails to WikiLeaks (which WikiLeaks denies) - there has been zero evidence that the scheme resulted from collusion with Trump's campaign.

The FBI has been investigating these suspicions for at least nine months, even reportedly securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Carter Page, an American whom Trump briefly claimed as a foreign policy adviser when Trump was under fire for not having any foreign policy advisers.

One of Page's alleged offenses was that he gave a speech to an academic conference in Moscow in July 2016 that was mildly critical of how the U.S. treated countries from the former Soviet Union. He also once lived in Russia and met with a Russian diplomat who - apparently unbeknownst to Page - had been identified by the U.S. government as a Russian intelligence officer.

It appears that is enough, in these days of our New McCarthyism, to get an American put under a powerful counter-intelligence investigation.

The FBI and the Department of Justice also reportedly are including as part of the Russia-gate investigation Trump's stupid campaign joke calling on the Russians to help find the tens of thousands of emails that Hillary Clinton erased from the home server that she used while Secretary of State.

On July 27, 2016, Trump said, apparently in jest, "I will tell you this, Russia: if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."

The comment fit with Trump's puckish, provocative and often tasteless sense of humor, but was seized on by Democrats as if it were a serious suggestion - as if anyone would use a press conference to seriously urge something like that. But it now appears that the FBI is grabbing at any straw that might support its investigation.

The (U.K.) Guardian reported this week that "Senior DoJ officials have declined to release the documents [about Trump's comment] on grounds that such disclosure could 'interfere with enforcement proceedings'. In a filing to a federal court in Washington DC, the DoJ states that 'because of the existence of an active, ongoing investigation, the FBI anticipates that it will ... withhold all records'.

"The statement suggests that Trump's provocative comment last July is being seen by the FBI as relevant to its own ongoing investigation."

The NYT's Accusations

On Friday, in the wake of Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey and the President's characterization of Russia-gate as "a total hoax," The New York Times reprised what it called "The Trump-Russia Nexus" in a lead editorial trying to make the case of some fire behind the smoke.

Former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

Regarding Carter Page, the Times wrote: "American officials believe that Mr. Page, a foreign policy adviser, had contacts with Russian intelligence officials during the campaign. He also gave a pro-Russia speech in Moscow in July 2016. Mr. Page was once employed by Merrill Lynch's Moscow office, where he worked with Gazprom, a government-owned giant."

You might want to let some of those words sink in, especially the part about Page giving "a pro-Russia speech in Moscow," which has been cited as one of the principal reasons for Page and his communications being targeted under a FISA warrant.

I've actually read Page's speech and to call it "pro-Russia" is a wild exaggeration. It was a largely academic treatise that faulted the West's post-Cold War treatment of the nations formed from the old Soviet Union, saying the rush to a free-market system led to some negative consequences, such as the spread of corruption.

But even if the speech were "pro-Russia," doesn't The New York Times respect the quaint American notion of free speech? Apparently not. If your carefully crafted words can be twisted into something called "pro-Russia," the Times seems to think it's okay to have the National Security Agency bug your phones and read your emails.

The Ukraine Case

Another Times' target was veteran political adviser Paul Manafort, who is accused of working as "a consultant for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine and for Ukraine's former president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was backed by the Kremlin."

Left out of that Times formulation is the fact that the Ukrainian political party, which had strong backing from ethnic Russian Ukrainians - not just Russia- competed in a democratic process and that Yanukovych won an election that was recognized by international observers as free and fair.

Yanukovych was then ousted in February 2014 in a violent putsch that was backed by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. The putsch, which was spearheaded by right-wing nationalists and even neo-Nazis, touched off Ukraine's civil war and the secession of Crimea, the key events in the escalation of today's New Cold War between NATO and Russia.

Though I'm no fan of U.S. political hired-guns selling their services in foreign elections, there was nothing illegal or even unusual about Manafort advising a Ukrainian political party. What arguably was much more offensive was the U.S. support for an unconstitutional coup that removed Yanukovych even after he agreed to a European plan for early elections so he could be voted out of office peacefully.

But the Times, the Post and virtually the entire Western mainstream media sided with the Ukrainian coup-makers and hailed Yanukovych's overthrow. That attitude has become such a groupthink that the Times has banished the thought that there was a coup.

Still, the larger political problem confronting the United States is that the neoconservatives and their junior partners, the liberal interventionists, now control nearly all the levers of U.S. foreign policy. That means they can essentially dictate how events around the world will be perceived by most Americans.

The neocons and the liberal hawks also want to continue their open-ended wars in the Middle East by arranging the commitment of additional U.S. military forces to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria - and perhaps a new confrontation with Iran.

Early in Obama's second term, it became clear to the neocons that Russia was becoming the chief obstacles to their plans because President Barack Obama was working closely with President Vladimir Putin on a variety of projects that undermined neocon hopes for more war.

Particularly, Putin helped Obama secure an agreement from Syria to surrender its chemical weapons stockpiles in 2013 and to get Iran to accept tight constraints on its nuclear program in 2014. In both cases, the neocons and their liberal-hawk sidekicks were lusting for war.

Immediately after the Syria chemical-weapons deal in September 2013, key U.S. neocons began focusing on Ukraine as what National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman called "the biggest prize" and a first step toward unseating Putin in Moscow.

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland,
who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.

Gershman's grant-giving NED stepped up its operations inside Ukraine while Assistant Secretary Nuland, the wife of arch-neocon Robert Kagan, began pushing for regime change in Kiev (along with other neocons, including Sen. John McCain).

The Ukraine coup in 2014 drove a geopolitical wedge between Obama and Putin, since the Russian president couldn't just stand by when a virulently anti-Russian regime took power violently in Ukraine, which was the well-worn route for invasions into Russia and housed Russia's Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol in Crimea.

Rather than defend the valuable cooperation provided by Putin, Obama went with the political flow and joined in the Russia-bashing as key neocons raised their sights and put Putin in the crosshairs.

An Unexpected Obstacle

For the neocons in 2016, there also was the excited expectation of a Hillary Clinton presidency to give more momentum to the expensive New Cold War. But then Trump, who had argued for a new detente with Russia, managed to eke out an Electoral College win.

Perhaps Trump could have diffused some of the hostility toward him but his narcissistic personality stopped him from extending an olive branch to the tens of millions of Americans who opposed him. He further demonstrated his political incompetence by wasting his first days in office making ridiculous claims about the size of his inaugural crowds and disputing the fact that he had lost the popular vote.

Widespread public disgust over his behavior contributed to the determination of many Americans to "resist" his presidency at all junctures and at all costs.

Peter Sellers playing Dr. Strangelove as he struggles
to control his right arm from making a Nazi salute.

However, besides the risks to U.S. stability that would come from an Establishment-driven "soft coup," there is the additional danger of ratcheting up tensions so high with nuclear-armed Russia that this extreme Russia-bashing takes on a life - or arguably many, many deaths - of its own.