Washington Post columnist calls for intervention of the “deep state”
By
Andre Damon
21 July 2018
The media hysteria surrounding US President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki has become the occasion for a radical shift to the right in the US ruling elite and media apparatus. Thinly-veiled calls for police state measures and the intervention of intelligence agencies into state affairs that would have been considered beyond the pale just a week ago, are now rife within the editorial pages of US newspapers.
On Friday, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson published a column entitled “God Bless the Deep State,” in which he presents the “public servants derided by Trumpists as the supposed ‘deep state’” as an antidote to a treasonous president and an ineffectual Congress.
Robinson never defines precisely what he means by the “deep state,” but he cites Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats as among those high-ranking officials who have countered Trump’s assertion that Russia did not “meddle” in the 2016 elections. It is to such intelligence and military officials that the Post columnist is appealing.
The “knowledgeable and experienced” professionals that make up the state and intelligence bureaucracy “are not participants in any kind of dark conspiracy,” he writes. Rather “they have spent years—often decades—mastering the details of foreign and domestic policy.”
“God bless them. With a supine Congress unwilling to play the role it is assigned by the Constitution, the deep state stands between us and the abyss.”
He concludes, “Democrats in Congress are powerless; the Republican leadership, spineless. Experienced government officials know that their job is to serve the…