No good guy
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No good guy is the shorthand for a position John Kiriakou has held consistently since at least 2018: that the choice being offered between Donald Trump and the intelligence agencies is a false one, and that accepting it costs the citizen the ability to criticise either.

The argument

He states it as an instruction rather than an analysis:

> "You don't have to pick a side. You have a scenario where there's no good guy. We don't have to love Donald Trump and hate the CIA, or vice versa. You can not like Donald Trump and not agree with Donald Trump's policies, but then not throw your lot in with the deep state and the CIA and the FBI and the likes of John Brennan."

The context in which he first gave it was the 2018 dispute over Trump's revocation of John Brennan's security clearance, and the trap he identified was specific: that in seeking to damage Trump, "many liberals will endorse anybody who is challenging him", including figures whose actual records, torture, extraordinary rendition, the secret prisons, the surveillance of the Senate committee investigating them, are the reason he opposed them in the first place.

The remedy

What distinguishes the position from mere even-handedness is that he attaches a course of action to it, and it is an electoral one rather than an institutional one: "Our democracy is broken right now. We need to take it back at the grassroots. We need to throw the bums out of Congress, and we need to elect people who are going to exercise real oversight. But we don't have to throw our lot in with either."

See also

- John Brennan
- Phil Mudd
- Deep state
- Donald Trump
- Treason
