I liked what the great Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch had to say about the heavily redacted 400-page DOJ document dump regarding the FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page. It is, he said, a “self-licking ice cream cone.” The image is appropriately surreal.

But the more I think about it, the more I think it is only partially applicable to the whole RussiaGate melodrama we’ve been witnessing for the last year and a half.

Wikipedia defines this autogleipsimous activity as “a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself.”

The Mueller investigation and its attendant pseudo-pods in the media and “intelligence community” are indeed self-perpetuating.

But they exhibit a purpose that goes far beyond their own self-perpetuation.

No, in this safari, big game is the object, the end, the purpose, to wit: the destruction of the president of the United States.

That is the true purpose of this charade: not the truth about “Russian meddling,” not alleged wrong doing by Paul Manafort in 2005, not a lack of candor under FBI questioning by George Papadopoulos (who?) or Michael Flynn. The one true purpose (in addition to the welcome subsidiary effect of helping out the ratings of the MSM) is to hobble Donald Trump, a prelude to removing him from office.

There have been hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of words expended on trying the explain the “Russia collusion” narrative. It’s hard to get a handle on because its prime elements keep, er, “evolving.”

Absent any new revelations, I’d say that commentators like Kimberley Strassel and Lee Smith have it right. The whole show started with John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA director and Gus Hall-voting Trump hater. It was Brennan, operating on an erroneous tip, who cobbled together rudiments of the Trump-Russia narrative. He couldn’t get anyone to act on his story at first, but he then went to Harry Reid, former Senate majority leader, who lit a fire under James Comey, the disgraced former director of the FBI.

Brennan, I believe, is the terminus a quo, the weaponized paranoid nugget from which the giddy Trump-Russia narrative in all its peacock-like efflorescence originally flows.

It really is hard to keep the story straight —I mean the real story, what actually happened, not “the Narrative.” Saturday’s document dump was a help here because it showed that the FISA court warrant to spy against Carter Page was authorized, against FBI rules, on the basis of unverified information (gossip, really). Carter Page, remember, is an American citizen against whom no criminal charges have been brought. Why, then, was the full power of the “intelligence community” mobilized against him? Because, having been named part of Trump’s foreign policy team in March 2016, he was an entry point to the Trump campaign.

I am not, by the way, suggesting that the Russians did not work to meddle in the 2016 election. Indeed, I am confident that they did, just as they aways seek to meddle in our elections. (And just as, by the way, we seek to meddle in the elections of other countries—just ask Benjamin Netanyahu.) It’s not mentioned in any of Mueller’s indictments, but the Russians endeavored to hack GOP servers as well as those maintained by the DNC. But here’s the thing to bear in mind. The Russians were not trying to influence the outcome of the election. They knew, or thought they knew, what the outcome was going to be. It would be Hillary Clinton by a mile. What the Russians sought to do was sow discord and distrust among the electorate, to undermine the people’s faith in their institutions. With a large helping hand from the American media, they succeeded brilliantly in that task.

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words. This amusing compilation of cartoons and pictures offers a brilliant explanation of what has happened over the last year and a half. I’ll just recapitulate one series of observations:

When did the alleged Russian collusion take place?

2016. Who was President then?

Barack Obama. Who was Director of the CIA?

John Brennan. Who was Director of National Intelligence?

James Clapper. Who was Director of the FBI?

Robert Mueller, then James Comey. Who is to blame in 2018?

Donald Trump! Really?

Are we finally nearing the end of the road in this emergency defensive maneuver by the deep state? I think so. Gertrude Stein once rudely observed of Oakland, California, that “there is no there there.” More and more people are waking up to the fact that the same thing is true of Muellerville. I suppose the most pressing question is how many more lives that evil fanatic will be allowed to ruin before he is cashiered and dismissed with some portion of the obloquy he deserves.