Yet Another Trumpworld Grab-Bag

For some reason, I just can't make a blogpost that treats Carter Page having handed off documents to a Russian spy in 2013,  Blackwater founder Erik Prince setting up a Trump/Putin backchannel, and Sebastian Gorka being, well, still one odd duck (in the "If it quacks like a fascist?" mode, perhaps) into separate posts because, well--wow! It's almost as if the campaign of, followed by the administration of, one Donald J. Trump is completely filled with dodgy characters who, you might think, would generate no small amount of attention and concern just by being themselves.

There's something that fails to look entirely coincidental about any of this.

This is why the unmasking thing doesn't really strike me as suspicious--or even really a thing. See, if NSA Susan Rice requested that the name of a US person referenced in a piece of electronic surveillance of another person, it would mean she...didn't know who that person was to start with? So she had to see something else that seemed like a possible national security risk, and asked if that name could be revealed. How would she know in advance if there even was any political use for the name? And then--did that result in any leak?

It's seems like a finger-pointing distraction on the part of team Trump that doesn't really negate that there's a serious inquiry into the Trump/Russia connection. Trump wants to be viewed as the victim of some kind of terrible action on the part of the Obama Administration that has devastated him by...not being used during the election pretty much at all. After, in news that raised even my jaded eyebrows, there was a story that FBI Director James Comey wanted to write an op-ed about the Russian tampering which had been quashed. Although the op-ed would not have mentioned the Trump campaign at all, it would have been clear at the time which campaign was favored by Russian ops. The Obama Administration preferred a joint statement--not that it helped Clinton's campaign in anyway, just that it would show a less-contestable consensus (which Trump and his biggest fans still denies exists, I guess).

The "wiretap" complaint really strikes me as being about whether Trump feels like he's being singled out--but sometimes, when all the dots are connected, even if one wasn't looking for him, the resulting picture starts looking like a very Trump-like thing.