IF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION CONTINUES TO IMPLODE, THE RIGHT WILL LEARN NOTHING FROM THE FAILURE

The hottest opinion piece in the right-o-sphere at this moment is "The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn" by Eli Lake:

It's possible that Flynn has more ties to Russia that he had kept from the public and his colleagues. It's also possible that a group of national security bureaucrats and former Obama officials are selectively leaking highly sensitive law enforcement information to undermine the elected government.

Flynn was a fat target for the national security state. He has cultivated a reputation as a reformer and a fierce critic of the intelligence community leaders he once served with when he was the director the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama. Flynn was working to reform the intelligence-industrial complex, something that threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.

He was also a fat target for Democrats....

[Representative Devin] Nunes [the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee] told me Monday night that this will not end well. "First it's Flynn, next it will be Kellyanne Conway, then it will be Steve Bannon, then it will be Reince Priebus," he said. Put another way, Flynn is only the appetizer. Trump is the entree.

The guilty parties are Democrats and "the national security state." The notion that Flynn might actually have done something that genuinely disqualified him for government service is barely addressed in Lake's column.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line writes, "The media-intelligence community pipeline is a swamp that needs to be drained. But can it be?" At Instapundit, Stephen Green writes,

The chatter against Flynn -- and it has come from Democrats, Republicans, and the intelligence community -- has been longstanding, intense, and in the end, effective. The motives for it also seem to come from across the spectrum: Partisanship, #NeverTrump, and for those concerned about his Russian ties, honest patriotism. It would also be too kind to say that Flynn is unloved by the I.C. following his troubled tenure as head of D.I.A.

But what really happened? It’s impossible to say, but if the intelligence community is still at war with the Trump Administration even after collecting Flynn’s scalp, then we we’ll know at least part of the answer.

And Trump himself, of course, is more concerned with how Flynn was exposed than with how Flynn might have endangered national security:

The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2017

It's all of a piece with the voter-fraud excuse for Hillary Clinton's Electoral College victory, and with claims that anti-Trump protesters are paid agents, probably of George Soros. Nothing is ever a justifiable reaction to something Team Republican does. Any attack on Republicans is a back-alley mugging of holy innocents.

If the Trump administration continues to be one faceplant after another, angry right-wingers will continue to offer a one-size-fits-all explanation for the administration's failures: sabotage, sabotage, sabotage. They never do anything wrong -- period. And that will be the right's official narrative of the Trump years forever.