These days, we are living through a real-life international spy thriller full of vast conspiracies, lawless rogue government agents, unthinkable betrayals all driven by stupendous greed and a blithe willingness to lie about absolutely anything.
It could be the latest HBO sensation or a binge-worthy hit on Netflix.
The first major wormhole moment came after a U.S. Border Patrol agent was murdered in 2010 and guns at the crime scene were linked to the U.S. government.
We are talking tinfoil-hat crazy conspiracy stuff. Many good people dismissed the claims as preposterous, the daffy product of overactive imaginations and overstimulated partisanship. Like monsters underneath a child’s bed.
Then we learned every bit of it was honest-to-God’s truth. Under the Obama administration, our federal government was arming some of our most savage and destructive enemies — purportedly in the name of “tracking” the bad guys.
Since that startling revelation, similarly appalling betrayals and conspiracies have become almost routine. The root causes of each scandal range from alarmingly reckless incompetence to treasonous betrayals of the American people.
There was the terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi. Rooted in lazy incompetence, the ensuing cover-up became a labyrinth of lies and false accusations that led to riots and mayhem around the globe.
Then the Democratic Party rigged its own primary to thwart the will of its own voters.
When then-candidate Donald Trump sounded the alarm, Democrats — and even some Republicans — called him a reckless kook and laughed him off.
Of course, stolen insider emails have since proved all of Mr. Trump’s hunches to be correct.
In fact, it was even worse than he predicted.
Every day now, we learn more and more about how Democrats, Republicans and self-serving bureaucrats inside the federal government worked to jilt the election out of Mr. Trump’s hands. Shamelessly, the Obama administration used our government’s most powerful intelligence apparatus to spy on his political opponents during the height of a presidential campaign.
That these vermin colluders failed has in no way deterred them. They remain as committed to undoing the Trump presidency today as they were before the election.
But the most sinister twist — the most brazen conspiracy caper of all — in this entire spy novel extravaganza we are now enduring has to be the eight-year scheme by the Obama administration to betray the American people and hand unbridled power to one of our most ardent and determined enemies.
An extraordinary and thorough report by Politico exposes a vast left-wing conspiracy at all levels of the Obama administration to collude with a terrorist organization in hopes of empowering a nation devoted to the death of America.
According to the report, Obama officials pressured federal investigators to back off investigations into huge money-laundering, weapons and drug trafficking operations by the terrorist group Hezbollah. The Obama administration offered this protection even as Hezbollah was raking in $1 billion a year and extending its murderous anti-American influence far beyond the Middle East.
All in the name of what? Upholding the U.S. Constitution? Fighting the war on terror? Peace in the Middle East?
Not hardly. It was all in the name of placating Iran — Hezbollah’s patron nation — so that the Obama administration could ink a ridiculously lopsided deal on Iran’s nuclear program. A deal that scored Iran hundreds of millions in cash and billions more in sanctions relief.
At the very, very, very end of the whole deal, Iran gets to weaponize its nuclear program anyway.
If that is not outright treason, then nothing is.
• Charles Hurt can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com; follow him on Twitter via @charleshurt.