For all the criticism that's leveled against the FBI for its elaborate and often lawbreaking ruses against President Trump, the pattern of acts against Trump apparently coming from the Pentagon is worth a look, too.

Unlike the FBI with its tangled "insurance policies," phony dossiers, jigged up kidnapping plots, altered emails, and false statements to judges, what seems to be coming out of the Pentagon against Trump has a crude, simple template in the way it employs lies against him, in a pattern so simple that it's now recognizable.

Item A: Three Chinese balloons were deployed against the U.S. during the Trump presidency, and he did nothing.

Item B: Trump knew about Russian bounties placed on American soldiers in Afghanistan, and he did nothing.

Item C: Trump disrespected the American war dead with disparaging words and a refusal to visit their graves in Europe.  Again, Trump did nothing.

See the pattern?  First, an outrageous lie around a military matter.  Then a claim that Trump did nothing.  Then the witnesses come forward and debunk the whole thing.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Remember these?

Balloons similar to the one that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina this weekend flew over the U.S. at least three times during the Trump administration, according to a senior U.S. defense official.

As Republicans spent the past few days criticizing the Biden administration over its response to the suspected Chinese spy balloon that flew across the country, an official revealed during a briefing on Saturday that the U.S. was aware of three other instances during the prior administration and one instance earlier in the Biden administration that such an apparatus "transited" the country.

"PRC [People's Republic of China] government surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration but never for this duration of time," said a senior defense official.

...and...

Before a planned visit to honor the American dead at a French cemetery just outside Paris in 2018, President Trump called the U.S. service members who were buried there during World War I "losers," sources told The Atlantic.

At the time, Trump was expected to arrive at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, but he canceled last minute, stating that due to the rain, the helicopter could not fly to the location and noted that the Secret Service could not drive him. 

However, according to four sources with knowledge of the incident, Trump was reluctant to travel to the cemetery because he was concerned that the rain would dishevel his hair, the Atlantic reported. 

He also did not think it was important to honor the dead there, according to the sources. 

"Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers," Trump reportedly told aides before canceling the trip to Belleau, France.

In another conversation Trump reportedly said that the 1,800 marines who lost their lives in the battle of Belleau Wood were "suckers" for getting killed.

...and...

WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.

The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.

Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House's National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

It's almost always on a defense matter, which makes me think it's someone in the Pentagon doing it (the "s-hole countries" lie, which happened quite a bit earlier, was an exception, as it involved Congress), because the defense lies since always have this same pattern, the same watermark, the same perpetrators, surely.

What follows from there happens exactly the same way every time: eyewitnesses come forward, not all of them on friendly terms with Trump, many pointing out that they were there in the room when whatever it was that supposedly happened happened, and they declare that that didn't happen.

We saw it here, here, and here.

The Pentagon and its press allies are then left with egg all over their faces as the story is debunked, though many on the left try to repeat and extend the lies even after that, like the half-life of radioactive waste.

With this latest China spy balloon incident, we see that the pattern of anonymous outrageous military lies, then eyewitness debunkings, then nobody punished afterward, still going on.

It's as if someone has a template, a briefing book, a recipe book for smears and calumny.

That's one thing, and it's disgusting stuff (and certainly not all the Pentagon has done against Trump), but the amazing thing is that on the mendacity front, it's the same pattern every time, a pattern so simple and crude that everyone can see that it's done by a certain book.

Psy-ops are effective only if people don't know they are being played.  When your psy-ops operation becomes nakedly recognizable as part of a pattern, it loses its effectiveness.

But whoever it is on the defense side with this johnny-one-note psy-op against Trump doesn't care.  He keeps going to that well despite the futility of it.  In the true P.R. spirit, the Pentagon-linked liar just throws the same old bad spaghetti against the wall and sees what sticks.  Truth is not a factor here, nor is it even to avoid being caught lying.  Whoever's behind this just lies first and set the leftist liar army of the internet out to keep up the good fight.

Perhaps that's the plan — not even caring if the disinformation operation against Trump gets debunked or found out because it's going to get spread anyway.  Because it sure is crude and primitive, yet it happens again and again, and nobody ever seems to get punished.

A lie can travel a thousand times around the Earth before truth can get its boots on, as the old adage goes.  So it seems with whoever is spreading this same template of lies ad nauseam, as the same kinds of lies get thrown out.  People can see what's going on at this point, and that's bad news for whoever can't stop spreading the same fake stories.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.