Red Lines host Anya Parampil responds to ABC’s interview with former White House National Security Advisor John Bolton about his new book “The Room Where It Happened”.
TOM LUONGO—What we know now, thanks to Bolton’s unwillingness to keep his trap shut, is that things were as we suspected while he was in the White House. Every event that occurred was an excuse for Bolton to tell Trump to go to war. And every time Trump was led up to that trough to drink, he backed away causing Bolton’s mustache the worst case of sexual frustration.
JOHN HELMER—Kendall-Taylor is also Ritter’s source for his assessment of Ciaramella’s training and expertise. “As a junior analyst, the whistleblower worked alongside colleagues such as Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who joined OREA [Office of Russian and European Analysis] about the same time after graduating from UCLA in 2008 with a PhD is Slavic and Eurasian studies. A prolific writer, Kendall-Taylor wrote extensively on autocratic leaders and Putin in particular. Her work was in high demand at both the CIA and NSC, which under the Obama administration had undergone a massive expansion intended to better facilitate policy coordination among the various departments that comprised the NSC.”
MIKE SIEGEL—The proposed bill would create a broad definition of “domestic terrorism” to include any attempt to “affect” or “influence” government policy or actions. And it would include property damage—even attempted property damage—as a terrorist act subject to a 25-year prison sentence. In other words, if you opposed the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock and wanted the government to revoke the pipeline permit, you might be considered a terrorist. If you painted “Black Lives Matter” on a wall to advocate against police violence, that could be terrorism, too.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—For the rest of Trump’s speech he very tediously introduced all his loyal sycophants backing his Venezuela agendas, he bloviated repeatedly about the horrible horrifying terror of socialism, he kept referring to Venezuela’s elected leader as “Dictator Maduro” and some rando that fewer than one in five Venezuelans had even heard of until last month as “President Guaidó”, he tossed out nonsensical red herrings about Venezuela being controlled by Cuba, and he repeated his administration’s braindead talking point about the Venezuelan government refusing to let in US “humanitarian aid”, which the Red Cross, the UN, and even war-happy NPR recognize as a transparent ploy to foment regime change.