The irony of the Deep State's obsessive focus on "Russian meddling" in the precious bodily fluids of our hallowed democracy is so overwhelming that it's gagging. The irony is a noxious confluence of putrid hypocrisy and a comically abject terror at the prospect that the citizenry may be awakening to the terrible reality that America has lost its soul as well as its democracy.

The foul stench of hypocrisy arises from the long and sordid history of America's meddling in the internal politics of virtually every nation on the planet-- a deeply entrenched policy of meddling on such a vast scale that the Deep State minions tasked with projecting a wounded astonishment that some foreign power has the unmitigated gall to attempt to influence our domestic politics must have difficulty restraining their amusement.

America's foreign policy is one of absolute entitlement to influence the domestic affairs and politics of every nation of interest, which to a truly global empire includes every nation on the planet to the degree every nation is a market and/or a potential threat to U.S. interests.

Assassination of elected leaders--no problem. Funding the emergence of new U.S.-directed political parties--just another day at the office. Inciting dissent and discord to destabilize regimes--it's what we do, folks. Funding outright propaganda--one of our enduring specialties. Privatizing public assets to reward our cronies and domestic corporations--nothing's more profitable than a public monopoly transformed into a privately owned monopoly.

(If your nation hasn't been targeted for intervention and campaigns of hard and soft power influence, we apologize for the oversight. We'll get to destabilizing your political order and economy just as soon as the queue of pressing interventions clears a bit.)

One of our most effective means of meddling is economic. First we press the targeted foreign government and civilian power centers--universities, corporations, banks and other institutions--to liberalize the economy and banking system to allow foreign credit and investment in, under the guise of encouraging beneficial development.

Then we flood the economy with cheap, abundant credit, first to buy up natural resources and the most valuable assets, and secondly to fuel a consumption binge that feels like Utopia to credit-starved residents and enterprises: suddenly there's credit to buy almost everything consumers could hope for, and credit to expand production, tourism, etc.

The government is encouraged to borrow to fund large-scale infrastructure projects (which are of course built by foreign firms) and other development projects, with great big slices of the borrowed billions carved off for politicos, functionaries and others in line for bribes, fees and offshore accounts of stolen millions.

This monumental expansion of debt eventually undermines the nation's currency and its economy, as the addictive gush of credit quickly moved beyond sensible, productive projects into speculative ventures with little prospects beyond the initial profits earned by insiders.

As all these marginal projects default, the credit spigot is suddenly shut off, and waves of creditors who thought the good times would last forever go bankrupt.

This destabilization was not an unfortunate side-effect--it was the goal from the start. With the target nation's currency in a freefall and enterprises defaulting left and right, U.S. firms flush with U.S. dollars and banks with nearly unlimited lines of credit in dollars swoop in and offer to ease the pain by scooping up devalued assets for dollars, or extending credit denominated in dollars.

Compared to the scale of these interventions, $100,000 in Facebook adverts is like a pin prick. The indignation and outrage of America's power structure is a tell: how dare you give us a taste of our own medicine--only we're entitled to meddle and intervene as we see fit.

The other source of pungent irony is the failure of America's power structure to maintain the pretense of a functioning democracy and social contract. The nation we inhabit has strayed so far from the nation's founding principles and values that it is unrecognizable. In place of democracy, we have a permanent unelected, impervious-to-the-people Deep State and a pay-to-play system in which political power is auctioned off to the highest bidder.

A mercantile nation that sought to protect sea lanes and trade routes and avoid foreign entanglements has metastasized into an entitled Imperial Project, a Project that enriches domestic corporations and veritable armies of national defense / national security functionaries, think tank and university employees, philanthro-capitalist toadies, media factotums--a nearly endless profusion of beneficiaries of Imperial aspirations.

America's power elite isn't just entitled to intervene and meddle at will globally; it also feels entitled to select America's elected leadership. Elected leaders are anointed in the media, and the citizenry is expected to march to the drumbeat.

That the people failed to follow the directives of their betters was a shock that is still reverberating, hence the power elite's hysterical need to locate a source other than the power elite itself that can be publicly blamed and crucified.

Projection is a well-known psychological coping mechanism. That the loss of the nation's democracy and soul are the direct consequence of the self-serving power elite's own concentration and abuse of power--this is unacceptable. And so the responsibility must be pinned on some external demonic force.

The irony is the American social contract is in tatters due to the self-enriching extremes of the New Gilded Age: an era of unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power in which the citizenry has been reduced to dry tinder awaiting a spark.

Washington and the technocrats are aghast at reports that the opportunistic efforts of Russia-based groups to sow discontent ended up generating 300 million impressions says more about the corruption and abuses of power that have undermined the social order than it does about the diabolical effectiveness of amateurish front groups.

If the U.S. wasn't a nation of haves and have-nots, a nation stripmined by the few at the expense of the many, a nation befuddled by a grotesquely Orwellian media that goes into full propaganda mode if its group-think is questioned, a nation that until recently lauded tech giants whose profits flow exclusively from advertising aimed at users whose engagement is encouraged by just the sort of divisive, emotionally disturbing "news and opinion" that the Russian groups paid for--if the U.S. wasn't a rotten-to-the-core fake-news, fake-recovery, fake-democracy nation, then the modest efforts of the Russian interlopers would have been lost in a sea of legitimacy and authenticity.

The irony that is most gagging is that America's power elite is destroying the nation's social order by its concentration of wealth and abuse of power, yet this power elite claims a handful of social media sites undermined our democracy. How pathetic is that?

The correct question to ask is: what democracy?

This article was originally published by "Of Two Minds" -