Intelligence does not equal wisdom. The Senate Intelligence Committee uses the term “intelligence” in reference to the dozen or so official agencies that function as covert gatherers of information about potential enemies, which means virtually everyone on the planet, and perhaps the planet itself. Transparency is anathema to the core work of so-called intelligence gathering, making it ripe for lack of accountability, outright corruption, and rampant conspiracies. In their latest desperate public attempt to display that they are doing something, they have resorted to a favorite bipartisan whipping gal, Jill Stein, two-time Green Party presidential candidate [though “presidential” is being redefined daily basis]. This all harkens back to a now infamous gala hosted by RT, a Russian media outlet, that Jill Stein attended.  As everyone knows, public galas are prime territory for suspected covert operatives to do their thing — whereas truly powerful men make it a practice to do their thing in front of unsuspecting women in places such as private hotel rooms. The Senate Intelligence Committee is foolishly focusing on minutiae and cheap political shots with McCarthyite requests for information from political opponents. This free political poster is a tribute to the Senate Intelligence Committee looking deep within themselves and finding far too little worthy of being called intelligence. Please feel free to share this free political poster: Senate Intelligence Committee Disbands After Finding None.

For one take on the summoning of Jill Stein, read McCarthyite Witch Hunt Comes For Jill Stein, with excerpts here:

This is what Russiagate has come to. This psychotic conspiracy theory is now so desperate to turn this endless fountain of nothing into something that it is rifling through the documents of a campaign which received one percent of the popular vote because its candidate had dinner in Russia two years ago.

What else can I say about this besides what I wrote the other day? Jill Stein gave a perfectly reasonable explanation of the dinner she had in which she was photographed at a table with Michael Flynn and Vladimir Putin, and not one shred of evidence has ever been produced anywhere contradicting it. The Green Party necessarily has to run a presidential candidate every election in order to secure party viability; if they hadn’t run Stein they would necessarily have run someone else. The existence of third parties is a perfectly legitimate, legally sanctioned and desirable part of the American electoral process, and in the rest of the world they are considered normal. There is no legitimate reason whatsoever to suspect that Stein’s candidacy had anything to do with a Kremlin conspiracy.

And yet US empire loyalists everywhere are having another one of their notorious online “bombshell” parades about this document search as though it means something…

…And yet there is nothing to this report other than a deeply disturbing political stop-and-frisk meant to punish a political candidate for daring to defy the neoliberal neoconservative one-party system and make this fact-free McCarthyite feeding frenzy look legitimate.

But it isn’t legitimate. If Russiagate was legit, it wouldn’t be advancing profoundly stupid conspiracy theories about third party candidates which require such a suspension of disbelief that you need to forget the entirety of the Green Party’s recorded history in order to believe them. If Russiagate was legit, the people selling it to us wouldn’t be caught lying about it over and overand over again. America’s power establishment is using Russiagate to cover up last year’s revelations about the rigged Democratic primary process and to manufacture public support for new cold war escalations with China’s right arm. There is no truth backing it up.

Last year we learned that one of America’s two major political parties actively sabotages candidacies which don’t perfectly kowtow to establishment agendas, and this year we’ve seen this same establishment running relentless punitive character assassination campaigns against any leftist candidates who dare to run outside the rigged Democratic party system.

Which of course is why it’s so funny when people claim that Russia attacked American democracy. In order for anyone to attack American democracy, democracy would have to exist in America.