“17 Moments of Spring” is very Russian. Very, very Russian. It was the most popular television serial since its release in 1973, and its broadcasts are typically associated with increased demands on power stations and severe drops in criminal activity. Everyone is glued to their televisions, fascinated by the KGB-produced spy thriller.

The main character, Maxim Isaev a.k.a. Max Otto von Stierlitz, is no James Bond. James Bond is far too jovial and carefree for the idealized KGB agent that Stierlitz exemplifies. The series focuses on minutiae, careful analysis of documents, meticulous interrogations, and has scenes where the main characters simply show facial reactions to replayed tapes of bugged meetings or where they exchange silent glances – one of those scenes goes on for six entire minutes. Americans would lose their mind with those kinds of demands on their attention spans. Russians can’t get enough of it.

This brings me to the events swirling around the Trump administration regarding members of his campaign making inappropriate contacts with Russians. One revelation has Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, working with Russian Ambassador to the USA, Sergey Kislyak, to create a back channel of communications to Moscow involving specialized Russian gear, designed to evade detection by US intelligence. Yet, the revelation came from Kislyak using a channel that US intelligence monitored. US Senator Lindsey Graham said that that doesn’t add up. Why would they go to all that effort to set up a back channel only to essentially announce it to US intelligence?

Watch “17 Moments of Spring”, Mr. Graham. In spite of numerous inaccuracies, it does nail down one key element – the mind of a Russian spy. It was, after all, produced by the KGB as a sort of “Top Gun”, entertainment designed to improve their image. Why would Kislyak do those things? To set a trap, of course.

Kislyak may even be reprimanded by his superiors, just to make things look even better, but it’s clear that they drew Kushner out, played him like the amateur he is, and then arranged for evidence of his being unfit to hold a security clearance to fall into the hands of US intelligence, thereby discrediting an advocate of neo-conservatism in Trump’s inner circle. The Russians are quite happy to have isolationist Steve Bannon whispering in Trump’s ear. That’s the guy that at least does not increase pressure on Russia, if not relieve it. Kushner, who the US media once seemed to look at as a moderating influence on Trump, was also more in alignment with neocons like Graham in keeping the USA involved on the global stage.

And now we see why Graham is scratching his head in public. He wants Kushner to stay close to Trump, so that he can keep Bannon at bay. But, leaked facts are facts… if Kushner has scored an own-goal with his zeal in setting up a back channel of communications with Russia during the transition period… he can’t have that security clearance… he can remain an advisor, sure, but he will have to read a lot of newspapers, because he won’t be getting any more security briefings.

When the USA meddled in Ukraine’s politics, it was obvious that the USA was toppling a pro-Russian leader and getting a pro-USA guy in there. It was so obvious, we even knew that Joe Biden’s son was on the board of directors of the fracking company that was about to set up operations in the Donbass region. Russia’s reaction was threefold: retake the Crimea and make it part of Russia; start a pro-Russian rump state in the Donbass, and; return the favor of election meddling to the USA.

Part of intelligence is the art of finding conaspirational individuals who will further some of your ends, even if they oppose your ultimate goal. In “17 Moments”, Stierlitz is able to play Martin Bormann against the influence of Heinrich Himmler. In real life, I’m sure Russian agents were able to influence men in the FBI and CIA to go down certain paths of action that served well their ends. That’s just what Russian agents do.

But this case with Trump is almost comical in its dimensions. It’s certainly a laughing-stock. And, sadly, jokes once used to mock the seriousness of the series and Stierlitz’ razor-thin escapes now fit perfectly on the Trump administration. I will close with one:

Donald Trump is meeting with his National Security Council. Sergey Kislyak enters the room with a cookie platter. Kislyak places the platter on the table, opens a safe, removes all the documents, waves bye-bye, then leaves.
Secretary of Defense shouts, “What the hell was that?”
Donald Trump says, “That was Sergey Kislyak, spying for the Russians again.”
Secretary of Defense: “Why didn’t you do anything about it?”
Trump: “I’ve tried in the past, but he always manages to wriggle out. Not worth the effort going after him… Must say, though, he did bring us all cookies…”

Trump intends to hire thousands more Border Guards. Ostensibly, that can be a good thing. More jobs in distressed areas, things like that. But there’s a cloud for that silver lining: whenever the US Government has a mass hiring program, standards for hiring are lowered. Background checks and polygraph tests are skipped and we wind up hiring some bad hombres that later make headlines for use of excessive force, diverting evidence for their personal use, or, worst of all, be involved as inside men for organized criminal activities.

We’ve already got a big problem with cartel moles in the US Border Patrol. Hiring people to go to remote places like Presidio, Texas, where the nearest grocery store is about 90 minutes away, increases the chance that someone way out there, alone in the dark, will fall victim to a bullet or a bribe.

Some Congresspeople have said we could skip background checks by hiring former veterans, but that’s not such a cheerful idea when one realizes that already we have issues with former veterans getting hired by cartels to penetrate organizations that skip background checks for veterans.

So what good is a wall that’s manned by people that are paid to look the other way and to turn off the cameras when criminals want to cross it? At that point, it’s no longer a wall, no matter how high it may rise. It’s just a particularly nasty speedbump.

To say that we’ll deal with that via more stringent controls is dangerously naive. We’ve already got endemic corruption along the border that our current stringent controls were supposed to deal with. And shouldn’t the stringent controls be applied at the time of hire, not afterward? Remember, in this scenario, we got people to work in desolate regions of the US border precisely because we lowered standards. No lowered standards, no people to watch the wall, which potentially saves the cartels some money that would have otherwise been spent on bribes or ammo.

I’m not presenting a bleeding-heart, think of the children reason to not have a border wall because other people have put forward those stories and, frankly, folks most in favor of the wall don’t care for such stories. But I know that they do care about security and fiscal conservatism. To spend billions on a wall that produces a false sense of security is a massive fault against both such standards. That money can be better not spent and thereby not increase the deficit. Or, if the border is in dire need of reinforcement, then it is imperative to use funds to strengthen, not weaken, the Coast Guard, increase controls at the border and for heaven’s sake, repair relations with Mexico, which is only fighting the War on Drugs – La Guerra Contra Narcotrafico – as a favor to a nation it considers to be its friend. If Mexico is not our friend, then it does nothing to stop the flow of criminal activity and those trucks roll north, past bribed guards who see nothing, nothing at all.

And before you suggest something like legalizing heroin to take away those profits from criminals, ask yourself, “If I was a criminal and couldn’t make money smuggling heroin, what else could I profit from smuggling into the USA?” That’s the thing that will fill the trucks instead of what you just legalized.

In my view, the solution along the border has more to do with improving the way we handle immigration and drug addiction. I’ve been to a rehab near me many a times to find solution for the latter, and have gotten pretty good opionions. These are tough problems and saying that building a wall will solve them is only a fool’s escape from realities. Building that wall is a form of giving up, like saying, “There’s a wall and, therefore, no problem.” But, as I’ve illustrated above, this border thing is so complicated that the wall soon becomes part of the problem.

So, who exactly pays the ultimate price of this wall?

Yes, I know Trump said he’d get Mexico to pay for “The Wall.” I’ll believe that when the Treasury of Mexico cuts the check. In the meantime, Trump’s people are proposing moving some budgets around to pay for that big, useless wall. One such proposal is to cut the Coast Guard budget by 14%. Link: The Independent

The Coast Guard is our floating wall, some of the most involved people in the security of America’s borders. In fact, quite a lot of the USA borders a major body of water. And if there’s a big wall and a closed border crossing at Brownsville, then that smuggler of drugs and/or people is going to load everything and everybody on a boat and sail it past an overworked, understaffed Coast Guard. That’s just stupid, cutting the Coast Guard budget to pay for a wall that will block the places where most of the illegal traffic isn’t going.

Remember my example? I stipulated that the border crossing was actually closed. That’s not likely to happen. It’s those border crossings where most of the trucks roll across with their loads, legitimate and otherwise. If one wants to stop the otherwise stuff, then there has to be better searching and control on those crossings. Next up is the sea traffic, which is where our Coast Guard comes in.

Face it, some of the easiest ways to move bulk goods involve trucks and boats, not mule trains crossing the Sonoran Desert or the Sierra Madres. If I was in charge of blocking illicit traffic, I’d put money into searching trucks and boats and kick a few bucks more towards intercepting small aircraft. A wall? Please. That’s totally useless. I don’t care who you voted for or what human rights are or are not violated by a wall. A wall is stupid, especially if, in order to get it, we practically invite everyone to travel by sea instead of land.

As I write this, President Trump is now 25.75 days into his administration. In that time, there has been a major court challenge to one of his executive orders, an ethics violation by his chief of staff, massive acrimony between his press secretary and the White House press corps, a resignation of his National Security Advisor, and a number of security breaches as unvetted civilians mingled with the Japanese Prime Minister’s state visit to the USA. Normally, stuff like this takes much longer to develop and unfold in an administration, but this is the worst presidential honeymoon I can imagine.

Democratic resolve to resist everything Trump is doing and his acrimonious relationship with GOP insiders aside, there’s another force that seems to be working to undermine President Trump: the intelligence community.

We’ve had presidents and advisors with questionable, shady dealings in the past that didn’t get anyone canned because the intel community in the USA was either involved or favorable to those dealings. But when Nixon passed over Hoover’s #2 at the FBI to head that agency when Hoover died, that man became Deep Throat and he brought down a president. It didn’t have to be Watergate, that just happened to be a topical scandal that presented itself. There were a number of other crooked things that Nixon’s administration was involved with: if Watergate hadn’t happened, one of those would have sufficed.

But it wasn’t just Nixon that went down. It was a large part of his top staff that fell from grace, even including his vice president. He had crossed the FBI, and he paid a dear price.

It’s now 2017, and Trump is finding out what happens when one angers the CIA in one’s presidential campaign. It’s not just that he insulted the agency. Trump campaigned against much of what the CIA is involved in and placed himself as an enemy to the agency. In return, they let him set himself up for a fall.

If the CIA were loyal to Trump, they could have let him know it was best to steer clear of a National Security Advisor with questionable contacts with Russia. Instead, they let Trump go with his choice and then, in just under 25.75 days, they provided enough evidence to torpedo the guy. Who else have they let slip through, only to destroy later?

Trump represents more than just a personal threat to the intel community. Because his populist, nativist movement is hostile to the CIA, they can’t just take down Trump and be done with it. Before they destroy the man, they have to destroy is ideas. As Trump’s staff have their failures made known, watch for the national media to educate one and all of the folly of their ways. Watch for stern, disapproving lectures from GOP senators that are close to the intel community – McCain and Graham come to mind – about the sad things that Trump and his associates are involved in.

The opposition he faces in the Democratic party will have its own day of humiliation, should they dare to support Sanders or anyone like him again. Clinton was undone by the FBI and it seems to me that Trump’s undoing is a quid pro quo agreement with the CIA, who finds him as odious to their ends as Clinton was to the FBI’s.

Mr. Trump has begun to carry out his campaign threats to ban all Muslim immigration to the USA. In a limited move based mostly upon states being identified as being highly conducive to the development of terrorists by previous administrations, including the Obama administration, Trump issued an executive order that basically revoked visas of persons currently in transit from those nations: Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, and Iran.

Unlike other travel bans, which were phased in and allowed people in transit to complete their journeys, this ban cut travelers off at the knees. Although they were not singled out in the executive order as being Muslims, that is the de facto reality of the order. Given the context of Trump’s overt campaign statements and covert winks and nudges towards white supremacist groups during his campaign, one has to interpret this as only the beginning of his plans, not as a complete implementation of such.

While the logistics and diplomatic gyrations that would result from banning travel from NATO ally Turkey or the strategically important Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have yet to be realized, there is yet another disturbing element in Trump’s executive order, and it is one that speaks of fascism.

When courts ruled for a stay in the implementation of the executive order, there were persons in DHS that continued to implement it in defiance of the courts.

Let me repeat that in another way: when the judicial branch exercised one of its checks on the power of the executive, the executive chose to ignore the rule of law, which is most certainly a form of tyranny.

The greatest alarm should not be in the President calling for such an order, but for the persons that were determined to continue implementing it in spite of such implementation being illegal. These people do not support the Constitution or the laws of the United States of America, but the ideology of fascism and the doctrine that might makes right. Both are contrary to the spirit of America and certainly the latter is contrary to the law itself.

We live by laws in the United States and when we have disputes, we are to dispose of them via legal means. The courts can give a hearing on the executive order and, based upon the courts’ rulings, implement or withhold it as appropriate. Anything less than that is despotism, and we cannot have that.

While Trump was within his rights as President to issue an executive order, it was also the right of federal judges to rule on the constitutionality of such executive orders. It is NOT within the rights of DHS personnel to continue enforcing the executive order after the courts ruled for a stay on its enforcement.

A quick note to all the Republican partisans complaining about possible voter fraud: where were you in 2000 and 2004? Chickens come home to roost in politics. Remember how the GOP leaders said that Diebold voting machines being made by a strong GOP backer wasn’t an issue? Remember how the GOP leaders said that the claims of black voters being incorrectly identified as felons was overstated? Remember when a few Florida ballot boxes turned up with plenty of Republican votes, sometimes more than were registered in the precinct? Chickens coming home to roost.

Sure, this election is on track to be pretty much handed to Clinton, maybe even in a big way – Texas might go purple, if not blue. A lot of that is Trump’s fault, plain and simple. He’s highly offensive to a majority of Americans, more so than Clinton. But if the Democrats do anything shady or even illegal to slant the results in their favor, don’t come crying to me about it. The way 2000 and 2004 played out basically condoned mild to moderate voter fraud from the top on down.

I’m an independent voter that has been hugely disappointed with both major parties since the 1990s, and it sickens me how they have allowed the political process to be increasingly criminalized and the politicians to be telemarketers selling their votes to the biggest donors. I’ll agree that Clinton’s campaign has been doing some awfully sleazy things, but to any Republican – you have met the enemy, and she is y’all.