The more I watch TV talk shows, the more I realize that they live and die by a simple maxim: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That’s the principle that puts John Brennan, Norman Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and others of their ilk on centrist-liberal shows on MSNBC. I suppose it’s not all that surprising that the election of Donald Trump would result in the rise of a lowest common denominator resistance, such that open-throated advocates of the Iraq War and other disasters have spent the last three years nursing their reputations back to health, hour by hour, on Morning Joe and other platforms. I’m not the first, certainly, to point out that the left suffers under reactionary presidents as the broad opposition tends to focus all their energy on defense of existing policies under attack, at the expense of breaking new ground. That’s understandable … but do we really have to make common cause with Bill Kristol? Really?
Well, it’s worse than that. Because the corollary of this guiding principle is the notion that the friend of my enemy is also my enemy, and so, too, is the friend of that friend. We’re seeing that play out on the foreign policy front. This week, Rachel Maddow and others on MSNBC, in their desire to paint Vladimir Putin as this master manipulator, appear to have swallowed whole the ridiculous claim made by John Bolton and Mike Pompeo that Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro was set to flee his country, his plane idling on the runway, when Vladimir Putin told him to stay put. Maddow was chiding Trump for allowing himself to be duped by Putin; she almost sounded sympathetic to Bolton’s plight as yet another Trump administration principal who has been outflanked by his boss in public. I realize the whole bit is half played for laughs, but I fear irony is lost on today’s viewing public.
The same dynamic is playing out over North Korea. Bolton and Pompeo are obviously throwing a monkey wrench into the Korean peace process, while simultaneously trying to gin up conflicts and regime change in Iran, Venezuela, and ultimately Nicaragua and Cuba. Everyone on MSNBC, from commentators like Maddow down to newsreaders, are playing up claims that Kim Jong Un appears to be stepping away from any informal agreements regarding arms testing, suggesting that he’s taking Trump for a ride. So, in essence, they are advocating for returning to something like the confrontation of 2017, when we came within a whisker of war. That is insanity. Regardless of your opinion of Trump, we need to encourage a peaceful end to that confrontation and follow the lead of the South Korean president.
One can only hope that we can unseat Trump next year. If we fail, at the current rate, the hashtag opposition will likely go full-on neocon before 2022.
luv u,
jp
That said, the coverage of this series of incidents has been so over the top it’s almost dizzying. Mainstream center-left commentary has portrayed this performance as evidence of treason, selling out the country, proof that Donald Trump is a mere puppet of the nefarious Vladimir Putin. It’s a circumstance in which everyone from war hawks like John McCain to drone apologist John Brennan to Rachel Maddow is in full agreement: Trump should have been tougher on the Russians. He should have never held this summit. Our country was “attacked” by Russia. Their interference in our election was “an attack on American Democracy” of a magnitude similar to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. How many died in the battle of Election 2016? Ask these folks.