Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Enemy of my enemy.

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It’s not hard to see how Donald Trump’s presidency could be good for the war caucus that encompasses parts of both parties. The deep neocon types oppose some of Trump’s foreign policy decisions, thereby endearing themselves to centrist Democrats who are always eager to make new friends (on the right). Then if a Democrat wins the presidency next year, the neocons would hope, I’m sure, to ride into Washington with her or him. There are two, maybe three Democratic presidential candidates  who would say no, but the others … I’m not so sure. I have no doubt, though, that some of them would serve as a tunnel back to power for the hyper interventionists.

That’s not to say that Trump represents any alternative to an imperial foreign policy. A recent Nation editorial by Bob Borosage describes Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds in Syria as giving peace a bad name – this is a fair point, but the Trump foreign policy bears very little resemblance to anything the anti-war movement ever advocated. His abrupt policy change in northern Syria initiated violence rather than stopping it; moreover, he is simply moving troops to another part of Syria in violation of that country’s sovereignty, supposedly “guarding” their oil fields. That is textbook, old-school imperialism. Combine that with his movement of troops to Saudi Arabia, his tearing up of the Iran Nuclear Accord, his withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement with Russia, and his showering of the Pentagon with unprecedented billions, and you have a full-on militarist presidency, every bit as dangerous as the Bush II regime at its most bellicose.

Not too late for a come back, guys.

What is particularly problematic about this political moment is that Trump’s erratic behavior and lack of any definable ideology on foreign policy (or, apparently, any nuanced knowledge of the world in general) gives traditional militarists an opportunity to paint themselves as a more reasonable, stable alternative. This must be rejected. If we are going to make the herculean effort to defeat Trump in next year’s election, it shouldn’t be for the sake of merely replacing him with a Bush clone. We need a new, anti-imperial approach to the world; one that emphasizes cooperation and harm reduction as well as human rights. The urgent goal of turning back terminal challenges like climate change and nuclear war requires that we change course in this way, not simply tweak our current hegemonic policy around the edges.

In short, we need to ask more of ourselves and our leaders than simply ridding ourselves of this mad president.

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Political Rants

Song of Roland.

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ISIS has lost its leader. So … that’s that? When are the leaders of my country going to work this decentralized model of resistance out? It’s not that these are leaderless movements per se. Al-Baghdadi was a founder and a leader of his grisly movement. But the relationship between his organization and the broader base of jihadists across the region and around the globe is loose at best. As Ted Rall once put it, it’s a bit like the relationship between a Rolling Stones tribute band and the Rolling Stones themselves. And like Warren Zevon’s Roland, cutting off the head won’t kill it:

The eternal Thompson gunner still wanders through the night
Now it’s ten years later, but he still puts up a fight
In Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine and Berkeley …

Had enough in Iraq ... and Chile, and Lebanon, and ...

I feel somewhat the same way about the Trump presidency. Getting Trump out of office is not going to be some kind of magic bullet. I keep hearing pundits talk about people wanting to return to normal, go back to brunch with the gang, and have a few mimosas. All that means is a return to what they consider normal, which is the slow decline into destitution, destruction, and environmental degradation. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to suppose that we will be right back here, with a different proto-fascist president, in another four years if we don’t take the bold steps that are needed to support workers, promote peace, and save the planet from total ruin.

Let’s face it – we’re coming up against the first-world version of what we see people around the world resisting in the millions, in Chile, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Haiti, and elsewhere. As happened in the wake of the 2007-8 financial crisis, the neoliberal capitalist house of cards is falling in on itself again, failing an increasing number of people in profound and deeply unjust ways, particularly in these developing nations that have been subjected to structural adjustment policies for decades on end. The Lebanese have simply had it, as have the Iraqis, the Chileans, etc. When people can no longer afford to live day to day, there is nothing left but to link arms and demand change.

We need more than a little bit of that here. We can’t wait until people here feel the level of pain that’s being felt in Beirut. We need to get out and march like the Chicago teachers, carry Bernie to victory, and push a progressive agenda hard as hell. A million mutinies now!

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jp

Political Rants

Lookout, Buchanan.

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There’s no question but that Donald Trump is the worst president in my lifetime, and I’m fairly certain he’s a serious contender for the worst president in American history. In most of the surveys I’ve seen, that position is held by pre-Civil War POTUS James Buchanan (1857 – 1861), but I think Buchanan’s one distinction is under serious threat … he may be surging to second worst by the end of Trump’s current term.

Of course, Trump doesn’t see it that way. His ranging, incoherent cabinet meeting this past Monday gave him the opportunity to crow about the greatest economy in American history, his single-handed defeat of ISIS, his deal-making acumen, and so on. Sure, he got Turkey mixed up with Iraq at one point, but who’s counting? He claims to be fulfilling a promise to bring American troops home, and one wishes that were true, but of course this claim – like everything else that comes out of his festering gob – is a cheap, transparent lie that wouldn’t fool a five-year-old. Like previous failed presidents, he sold the Kurds down the river, and they are paying a heavy price for his carelessness and self-dealing. (Trump freely admitted prior to the 2016 election that he had a conflict of interest with regard to Turkey, referencing his signature twin towers in Ankara; he still makes a lot of his money there.)

Look out, Jim. He's gaining on you.

You would think it would be easy to compare Trump unfavorably to other recent presidents, but the picture does get kind of complicated kind of fast. There was a discussion of this on Morning Joe this week, wherein Joe, Mika, and historian Jon Meacham talked about leaders putting the nation ahead of their own narrow political interests. Sounds good, but the example Joe gave was that of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in 1998, at the height of the impeachment conflict, working together to find a way “to contain Saddam Hussein.” I think what he’s referring to is the Iraq Liberation Act, passed in October 1998 and signed by Clinton, which provided the foundation for the 2003 war. This act came through at the peak of our sanction regime against Iraq that cost the lives of 300,000 Iraqi children, conservatively – a cost Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described as worth it. In other words, bad example.

Self-dealing and corruption are bad things, to be sure. They are not the only bad things, however, and we do ourselves no favor by forgetting the failed policies of past leaders in an attempt to single out the current president. It is obvious where he comes from, and we must beat him  next year. But we must also accomplish so much more than that one goal. Status quo ante is not enough.

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Political Rants

No half measures.

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Yes, I watched the Democratic presidential debate on CNN this past week, god help me. The best thing I can say about it is that CNN dropped the dramatic WWF candidate intro segment and went straight into the questions. That said, the fact that there were twelve candidates on stage made the event a ridiculous parody of an actual debate. Candidates are given 75 seconds to respond to a question, and 45 seconds for rebuttals. It is simply impossible to grapple with the complex issues facing our nation in any meaningful way within those time constraints. The format drives a kind of Twitter-like approach to discourse, complete with the trolling. Seventy-five seconds is something like 125 words. Try talking a nation out of decades of for-profit healthcare or a century of oil dependence in that little time. It’s a format that greatly favors the status quo.

About seven too many.

And the status quo had many defenders last night. As was predicted the previous week by talking heads and broadcast journalists, undoubtedly briefed by opposing campaigns, Elizabeth Warren was targeted repeatedly throughout the proceedings, with the most pointed attacks coming from “Mayor Pete”, Amy Klobuchar, Kamela Harris, and of course, Joe Biden. Buttigieg came after her on single payer health insurance, claiming that she was being disingenuous by not providing her opponents with sound bites of her saying taxes will go up on middle class families. I will say that Warren needs to come up with a better way of talking about the funding mechanism for single payer. She stuck to her position, but it was kind of the same phrases over and over, and though true, they lose their salience on repetition.

The most ridiculous attack came from Kamela Harris, who was trying to get Warren to take a position on compelling Twitter to delete Donald Trump’s account. Mind you, this was in the section of the debate that focused on holding social media and other big tech companies accountable through anti-trust measures, etc. Warren has proposed breaking Facebook up, and I can’t say as I disagree. But somehow Harris thought it might be politically advantageous to reduce this entire conversation to a simple question of whether or not the President should be allowed to tweet like your drunk racist uncle.  As if deleting Trump’s Twitter profile would address the antitrust issue … or, really, accomplish anything substantive. Just strange.

Bernie was set up in advance to fail, the media constantly harping on his heart trouble. He put in a very strong performance, I thought, but again … the format is so limiting it just barely makes a difference. Klobuchar, Buttigieg and the half-measure chorus were crowed about by the talking heads, but will this debate move the needle at all? I doubt it. This party’s just getting started.

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jp

Political Rants

Bus hat.

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It’s probably best for me to start by saying that I was always against U.S. military involvement in the Syrian civil war – this was the case during the Obama administration and it remains the case now. But because our troops have been there in numbers exceeding 1,000 for years now, and that we have worked them into Syria’s complex web of security guarantees, alliances, and bitter enmities, it seems only right that we should consider the consequences of whatever decisions we make, whether it means pulling troops out or putting more in. This is a situation in which every power is in it for its own gain, and that includes the United States. That’s why the goddam war is still going on … and thanks to Trump this week, it’s likely to move into a new and more deadly phase.

The Syrian Kurds, who made the mistake of fighting for us as part of the conflict in their country, are now in the crosshairs of a massive military operation by Turkey – an incursion into northern Syria with the aim of establishing a buffer zone between the Turkish frontier and the Kurdish population, which Erdogan considers an enemy. Trump has chosen to throw the Kurds under the bus, so he has proven that he is, after all, an American foreign policy traditionalist. Our foreign policy establishment has been arranging bus hats for that dispossessed people since the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. (See Jon Schwarz’s article in the Intercept for a thumbnail history of our various betrayals of the Kurdish people.) It’s a little mystifying as to why mainstream foreign affairs talking heads are so unhappy with Trump right now. He just pulled a Kissinger.

Trump's expandables

The only fortunate thing for the Kurds of Syria is that a broad swath of American articulate opinion supports them. The trouble is, Trump doesn’t, and apparently Erdogan has something the fat boy wants, hence the policy about-face. Or maybe it’s because, as Trump incoherently said, they didn’t help us during World War II. In any case, Americans tend to love Kurds when they are useful, like they’ve been in Syria, like they were in Iraq in 1991 and after. They also hate and undermine them when they stand in opposition to friendly countries, like the Turkish Kurds in the 1990s. But that’s half a loaf, at least – other stateless peoples, like the Palestinians, don’t even get that.

Like so many others we have on our heads, this bloodbath could have been avoided.

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Political Rants

Required reading.

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I don’t read a lot of books these days, given my lack of personal time, but right now I’m reading a book I think every American should read. It’s called Kill Anything That Moves, by Nick Turse, it’s a few years old (maybe five or six), and it lays out the systematic slaughter of the U.S. war in Vietnam in sickening detail. Meticulously researched and documented, this book is a really useful guide to archival sources on what was certainly one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century and one that the United States has never come to terms with.

The "things" we killed for moving.

Here is a brief excerpt that describes what was done in the American effort to pacify the Binh Dinh region of South Vietnam in 1966:

During the six weeks of [Operation] Masher/White Wing, from late January to early March 1966, the 1st Cavalry Division fired 133,191 artillery rounds in to Binh Din’s heavily populated An Lao Valley and Bong Son Plain. The navy added 3,213 rounds from its ships. The air force launched 600 tactical air sorties, dropping more than 427 tons of general-purpose bombs, 265 tons of fragmentation ordinance, 165 tons of napalm, and 80 tons of white phosphorus, which damaged and destroyed more than 600 huts and other structures. Of course, troops on the ground also laid waste to many other homes at the same time. 

Bear in mind that this took place in one small area of South Vietnam over the course of six weeks. Turse concentrates a great deal on the retail violence of the war, chronicling attacks on villages by Army and Marine units. Probably the most disturbing part of this narrative, aside from the wanton bloodshed, is the familiarity of the tactics. Our troops in Vietnam would profile Vietnamese in much the same way that drone pilots profile their targets – what decides your fate is where you happen to be standing, whom you’re hanging around with, what you look like, etc. It also recalls stateside police tactics.

Our media and our political leaders spend a fair amount of time criticizing other governments for not owning up to their crimes against humanity. For decades I have heard commentators decrying the strange resistance the Japanese have toward being honest about their imperial past, for instance. But what we have done with regard to our own imperial history is at least as impressive. This war that killed millions is barely known to us, except in broad strokes. This important book takes a major step towards remedying that little issue.

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Political Rants

Fire hose 3.0.

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Like so many weeks during the Trump era, this one has been dizzying. It started with the massive climate change resistance marches led by Greta Thunberg and other young people, and it’s ending with what appears to be the most brazen example yet of Donald Trump self-dealing in the conduct of his office. Whoa, momma … it’s like drinking from a fire hose …. again.

Let me start with these amazing young climate activists. I have to say, if anyone is going to be able to save our sorry asses, it’s these folks …. and I don’t mean that we should sit back, fold our arms, and wait for them to deliver us from climate catastrophe. I mean that their activism can be the catalyst for real change. It is impossible to argue with people who will inevitably inherit the world that we are so actively wrecking. Their outrage is justified, and we should follow their lead. There have been times when I have fallen into resignation on this issue, I will admit, but they give me reason to rise again.

Our last hope,people.

This week’s convening of the UN General Assembly featured some tough talk by bigots and fascists, not least of which being our cheap-hair POTUS. He called for, in essence, a coalition of the willing against Iran, called out Venezuela yet again, and called himself a “nationalist” while deploring globalism. Strange speech, read haltingly by a man who sounded like he just scaled five flights of stairs. Then, of course, the was Bolsonaro, Brazil’s little wannabe autocrat, who suggested that stories about the burning of the Amazon were “fake news”. This, of course, bears on the first story, which is necessarily the most important story on Earth.

Then, of course, there’s Trump’s Ukraine scandal. Probably the most amazing part of this story is the transcript of his phone call with Ukrainian president Zelenskyy. “The United States has been very good to Ukraine. I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good,” Trump said to the leader of a besieged, small country dependent on foreign aid from the U.S. that was being held up by the President. “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” He then goes on to babble about how Zelenskyy should talk to Rudy Giuliani and implied that Biden and his son had been involved in something that needed investigating. It’s a bit like listening to the Nixon tapes … “Blow the safe!”

That’s the kind of week we’ve had. Whatever will next week bring?

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jp

Political Rants

What’d they say?

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All right, so, I watched most of the debate last week, and the thing I came away with was something like what Anand Giridharadas said the weekend after – that I had watched what should amount to Joe Biden’s retirement party. The odd thing about that phenomenon is that almost no one on mainstream television appears to agree with that. In fact, some of the usual pundits were saying that this was Biden’s best night of the three debates. I have to scratch my head when I hear this stuff – did they see the same show I saw? Or is it just that they have lowered the performance bar for Biden to such an extent that he basically can do no wrong. That is not the Biden I saw.

His worst moment, namely his response to the question about the legacy of slavery in America, was aptly dissected by the Majority Report crew, who I think nailed it on the head. In his halting way, Biden began his response by talking about his fight against segregation, then pivoted quickly, recalling that this was a trouble area for him. He then talked about education, specifically poor kids in inner city schools, and once again he equated black kids with being poor. His solution sounded positively draconian: let’s send social workers into these kids’ homes, because their parent(s) don’t know how to handle them. What? Kind of astonishing, but that’s where the guy is coming from, so he was doing a public service of sorts.

Get off my lawnism.

The health care debate was probably the most contentious that forum got. This is probably where the usual pundits got the notion that Biden did better than usual. He was old man-splaining Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as to why Medicare for All can’t work and is too expensive. The questioning, of course, sought to support Biden’s case – It will raise taxes, right? Right?? The ABC team, like their predecessors at CNN and MSNBC, are trying their best to generate a soundbite of Warren saying “Yes, I’m going to raise your taxes!” If they ever succeed, they’ll probably blow some kind of ship horn. Biden seemed to think that $1,000 out of pocket was no big deal. Not surprised that that wasn’t the headline.

I think the biggest threat on that stage is the possibility of Biden becoming the nominee. I don’t know how to tell centrist Democrats this, but nominating him would be like rewinding to 2016 and running it again. We’ve already seen that show – let’s get someone on that ticket who will inspire the masses, not grab a couple of centrists here and there. That didn’t work out real well in the last election, and it won’t this time either.

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Political Rants

The line up.

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Bolton’s gone. We survived Bolton. That’s something to celebrate, at least. When Trump hired him, I honestly didn’t see how we would avoid a precipitous war with Iran, but thus far it hasn’t happened and now Johnny Mustache has died and gone to Fox. Good riddance.

Now that I’ve got THAT out of my system, just a head’s up that I’m going to do another debate night notebook this week. The major Democratic presidential candidates will all be on one stage this time around, and I’ll be tapping random stuff into my tablet as they spar. It’s either going to be really interesting or the usual bland corporate show we’ve gotten previously. Really a much stronger chance of the latter, but we’ll see.

First comment: What the hell corporate network is this debate on? This is the problem with this model of campaign debates. They become proprietary content, and as such, none of the other networks will talk about the details until the program’s over.

Next, health care. This exchange reveals what tremendous douchebags the so-called moderates are.  They roll out the same tired conservative arguments about people loving their health insurance. I can tell you, I’ve had what was described as a “cadillac” plan, and it was no great shakes. Why anyone would love their policy is beyond me. All I can say about the centrist plans is this: a public option is going to end up being an insurer of last resort, which is essentially what we have now. The only justification for it is preservation of profit.

Still too many ... but better.

Forty eight minutes in, I would say that Harris is doing herself some good. Bernie sounds hoarse, unfortunately – probably a lot of rallies. I haven’t heard a lot of Warren in the last half hour, which is annoying. Booker has gotten a few good comments in.

Lots of praise for Beto on stage for his time with victims in El Paso. Kind of a competition. O’Rourke gave a good speech on assault weapons, credit where credit is due.

Bernie and Warren have their hands up. Finally, another question for Warren, more than an hour in. Both she and Bernie make impassioned arguments against gun violence from a systemic perspective.

Some short takes:

  • Andrew Yang on immigration: “The water’s great.” What
  • Someone should elect Mayor Pete the next Bayer aspirin man.
  • Beto is speaking Spanish again. He’s makes some sense on immigration.

First foreign policy question is a trade question: tariffs on China. They seem to be attacking Trump more this time around. Warren is asked about trade policy, and she tilts against corporations. Good answer. Bernie takes a shot at both Biden and Trump on trade. Booker takes a shot at Trudeau’s hair. Harris makes a short joke to Stefanopolis. Warren argues for leaving Afghanistan, pretty eloquently. Mayor Pete argues for a 3 year sunset on every AUMF. Booker talks about veterans.

Bernie swats back a cheap shot about socialism and Venezuela. Climate change question: Warren gets specific and concise. Yang asked about education, gets some cheers. (Still no tie. Good on him for that.) Warren talks about universal pre-K.

Bernie makes an argument for more investment in education, debt cancellation via a tax on Wall Street speculation. Biden grinds out a response, muddled as hell.

Where was climate change? In the margins … again. I’ll post more on the reactions next week.

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jp

Political Rants

Do no harm?

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Former secretary of defense under Donald Trump James Mattis has a book out, so he’s making the rounds of all the talk shows, talking about leadership, acting as though his reluctance to criticize the president is somehow rooted in personal integrity. What he won’t talk about on the book tour is how his “leadership” responded to policies that any person of average integrity would take issue with. Mattis sat still when Trump started banning Muslims from entering the country. He said nothing when Trump began separating children from their parents at our southern border and putting them in cages. He was silent as Trump praised white supremacists as “good people” in the wake of Charlottesville. When did he finally throw in the towel? When Trump decided to remove troops from Syria. That tells you much of what you need to know about Mattis.

Steve Inskeep’s fawning interview on NPR had few high points. Somehow Mattis saw fit to claim:

“From a Roman general, I used no better friend, no worse enemy. We were going in to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam. We were not going in to dominate them. I didn’t want triumphalism. I wanted to go in with a sense of first do no harm.”

First do no harm? Seriously? He has a funny way of showing it. One of Mattis’s bragging points was always his pivotal role in the various battles of Fallujah, a bloody massacre in which the U.S. military’s first act was to commandeer the city hospital. It’s kind of ridiculous to refer to such operations as “battles”, when the enemy they are fighting are so outgunned. In any case, the Iraqi casualties in Fallujah were so high that the city was left out of the Johns Hopkins study of Iraqi deaths caused by the 2003 invasion because they felt it would skew the numbers. That study, first published in 2005 I believe, numbered Iraqi deaths at more than 500,000 as a result of the war. It was revised later to something like 650,000. Do no harm?

Mr. Kindness himself.

The example he gives of a young officer choosing not to shoot up a building in Baghdad in order to spare civilians sounds apocryphal in light of the stories that have come out of that war. Robert Fisk described the U.S. tank shell that destroyed the building that housed Reuters journalists, among others. That was more along the lines of common practice, frankly. The U.S. military doesn’t exactly walk around on tip-toe. How any senior commanding officer attached to this atrocity can have the gall to speak proudly about his humanity in the context of imperial war is beyond me.

Save your leadership lessons, mad dog. You lost all credibility the moment you signed on to the criminal enterprise that was the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

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