Tag Archives: Trump

Political Rants

Week that was (5.0).

Leave a comment

It has been another one of those weeks, packed to the gills with news, mostly bad. Of course, this is not a bug but merely a feature of the times we live in, so I will make my usual lame effort at grappling with a small subset of what has been assailing us over the past few days in the final full week of the third year of Our Lord Trump, king of the chimps.

Debate #7. Not at all sure I see the point of these corporate exercises in superficial political sparring. The CNN questioners were clearly excited to dig in to their “breaking news” story about what Bernie said to Elizabeth a couple of years ago in a private conversation. The moderator who queried Sanders on this when straight to Warren with a question that assumed he was lying in his response. I am disappointed in Warren, frankly, for perpetuating this line of attack. It plays on the odious claim the Sanders and his followers were misogynistic in their race against Clinton in 2016 – something Clinton alumni cling to as one of the rationales for their loss. This is toxic, and I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to suggest that it could ultimately blow the election. WTF, people … time to put the movement above your personal fortunes. Knock. it. off.

When a billionaire has to intervene, you know there's a problem.

Impeachment. A historic week in terms of the delivery of articles of impeachment to the Senate for only the third time in American history, with respect to presidents, at least. It seems like a forgone conclusion that Trump will walk away from this, but not unscathed – impeachment without removal is a kind of accountability. If there is history after this presidency, this action will be indelibly recorded next to his grisly name. As for the trial, well … I expect a relative circus as compared to the already ridiculous Clinton impeachment. The G.O.P. has decayed considerably over the past 20 years, such that there’s some question as to whether all of them will keep their pants on for the entire proceeding. We shall see.

War lies. Bernie had it right Tuesday night: our two biggest foreign policy disasters in recent decades were spawned by lies – Vietnam and Iraq. Though with Vietnam, I’m pretty sure he’s talking about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that never happened, with the U.S.S. Maddox and Turner Joy. (There were a lot of lies that preceded that with regard to Indochina.) Of course Trump is lying about Iran … that’s the same as saying he’s speaking about Iran. We are in a similar boat with Iran as we were with Iraq back in 2001-03; elements within the the administration want to have a war for whatever reason, perhaps ideological, perhaps mercantile, likely some mixture of both. It appears that the general population is more against the idea than it was in the case of Iraq 2003, and that that opposition is broad-based enough to make Trump somewhat cautious. Ironic that this heightened tension is taking place in the immediate wake of the release of the Afghan papers, the DOD internal history of the Iraq conflict, and the big Intercept / NY Times scoop on the activities of Iran’s intelligence services in Iraq. (Of course, these were all one or two-day stories at best.)

Natural Disasters. Heartbreaking climate-fueled fires in Australia, earthquakes in Puerto Rico, volcanic eruptions in the Philippines. Jesus H. Christ, what next?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Dodging bullets.

Leave a comment

Fuck all, what a week this has been. The Suleimani assassination has turned Trump’s disastrous approach to foreign policy up past eleven, and that is a positive danger to organized society. Domestic president Bam-Bam is dangerous enough, but give him a war that he has started himself and god only knows where the hell we’ll end up. It’s like someone let a chimp loose in the oval office, and after months on the job he’s going stir crazy, pulling levers, pressing buttons, and randomly throwing feces at his political enemies. Does this kind of governance really work for anyone? It’s like living on a very active volcano. We may have temporarily dodged a bullet this time, but nothing has fundamentally changed.

Times like these I am grateful for podcasters, bloggers, and independent journalists. The mainstream press have been of very little use through this recent crisis. There is this insistence, for instance, on calling Suleimani a terrorist or a bad guy, over and over like a mantra. Usually tagged on to that is the claim that he was directly responsible for the killing of hundreds of Americans – I’ve heard talking heads put the number around 700 – during a certain phase of the Iraq war. This is total shit. I remember those days pretty well, as does the Progressive’s Stephen Zunes, who wrote a good treatment of this claim this past week. It is well to remember that the Bush administration, even in the face of their disastrous invasion of Iraq, still had Iran in the cross hairs and were working to build a public case for yet another regime change enterprise. They didn’t succeed, but what they did manage was to plant this notion in the heads of journalists and commentators that Iran was responsible for every EFP roadside bomb planted in southern Iraq, a vacuous claim that assumes every Shi’ite resistance fighter is subject to mind control by the Ayatollah.

Once again, let’s be clear – the people responsible for the deaths of the more than 4,500 U.S. service members killed in Iraq are named Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. We can try to blame the people we invade for resisting our armed forces, but doing so doesn’t hold a lot of water. We should never have been in Iraq in the first place; anything that proceeded from that criminal decision is the responsibility of our own decision-makers. It took virtually no time for the same crop of insane leaders to exploit the deaths of the people they sent over there and attempt to utilize them as a means of starting yet another needless war. And now the current incarnation of the Republican regime change machine is working overtime to make war with Iran inevitable. That includes most prominently that overstuffed geiser of pig shit – a veritable Old Faithful of rancid manure – Mike Pompeo, who is in many ways worse than Trump.

Arrgh. I could go on, but my main point is, agitate for peace. Make your voice heard. Don’t think someone else will do it. This is like the election – you need to participate and encourage others to do the same. That’s the only way out of this shithole.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Happy new war.

Leave a comment

President Bam-Bam has started off the new year with incoherent threats against Iran, and it appears as if the entire corporate media establishment is pretty much on the same page as him. I was greeted on New Year’s morning by the usual cavalcade of retired generals (e.g., Barry McCaffrey, etc.) and inside-the-Pentagon correspondents (e.g. Hans Nichols, etc.) that MSNBC (a.k.a. “the liberal news channel”) trots out whenever someone challenges the U.S. empire somewhere in the world. This time it’s Iraqis, and of course Iran is to blame … because we seem to want war with Iran. That’s why whenever they talk about our opposition in Iraq, these Iraqis are termed “Iranian-backed militias” or “Iranian-backed extremists,” though they would never call the forces we fund and train “American-backed militias”. Yes, Iran has substantial influence in Iraq – they share a long border and a troubled history with Iraq, so it’s no surprise. We, on the other hand, come from the other side of the Earth, and yet somehow we consider our enormous influence on Iraqi affairs more legitimate.

The Trump administration decided last week that it was a really, really good idea to conduct air strikes on an Iraqi Shi’ite militia group Kata’ib Hizbullah, killing 45 of them in supposed retaliation for mortar attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq that recently killed one U.S. contractor. (See Juan Cole’s blogpost on this for details.) The protests and intrusions at the U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad were a predictable response to what General McCaffrey and others consider a proportionate use of force. (That was quickly followed by their assassination by drone of the Iranian Quds force leader Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad, a major escalation by Trump.) Not being a member in good standing of the American Empire Positive Propaganda Force, my first question is … just what the hell are we doing in Iraq in the first place? In all fairness, I think that question is on the minds of many Iraqis right now.

Okay, this isn't going so well.

In my humble opinion, there are a couple of things going on here. Of course, Trump likes to look tough, hence the drunken threat tweets and the rushing of 3000 more U.S. troops to Baghdad. But despite the fact that these threats are directed at Iran, I think deep in his tiny lizard brain he understands, albeit tenuously, that war with Iran would be a disaster for his presidency far worse than his impending impeachment trial or his failing trade war. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why. No modern president has had as high an approval rating as George W. Bush did in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and yet just a few years after invading Afghanistan and Iraq, his presidency was in tatters. His wars are still going on, metastasizing again and again into new, more toxic cycles of violence. And Bush’s wars were against one nation that was totally destroyed (Afghanistan) and one that was partially destroyed and starved to death (Iraq); we have essentially lost both of those wars. Iran would be harder to beat, and the events of this week demonstrate part of the reason why – the exercise of power by proxy, to put it in terms an imperialist might understand.

I have no doubt Trump’s foreign policy establishment is working towards war with Iran, whether or not that is their full intention. Smarter presidents than Trump (a category that includes every other president) have blundered into disastrous wars that have essentially destroyed their presidencies. Whatever Trump’s intentions may be regarding Iran, this escalation in Iraq may be the start of his ultimate undoing if he’s not careful. And the entire establishment – Trumpist and faux resistance – will wave him on into the catastrophe.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Clueless Rudy.

Leave a comment

Impeachment is now officially under way. That’s not what I’ll write about today, however, because you are most likely hearing about that absolutely everywhere else, and I have little or nothing to add to what’s being said elsewhere. Today I’ll opine on the career and slime trail of former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose evident losing battle with dementia is being televised nightly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people ask, what happened to Rudy? The answer is simple: nothing. Like Trump, he’s just as nasty as he ever was, only older and more scrambled.

Because of the nature and the timing of the 9/11 attacks, many people remember Giuliani fondly as “America’s Mayor”, I think mostly because he didn’t run up the street screaming when the towers fell. What he was then, of course, was a failed mayor at the end of his term, a man with the blood of many people of color on his hands, and an immensely corruptible individual whom Jimmy Breslin once famously described as a small man in search of a balcony. Well … he found that balcony, and then some. Anyone who remembers Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, and Abner Louima knows something about what policing was like in NY City under America’s mayor. His personal abuses were legendary. At one point during his tenure, I remember a random cab driver (unofficial one; the 90s equivalent of an Uber driver) complaining about how Giuliani’s lover’s kids would run wild in the driver’s apartment building, bragging that they had mayoral protection. But I digress …

Why pick this photo? Because he effing deserves it.

After achieving hero status in the wake of 9/11 (despite his placement of the emergency command center up a few precarious floors in the World Trade Center after the 1993 attack and his sweetheart contract with Motorola for emergency communications that failed on the fateful day), Giuliani went out into the world, proffering his supposed expertise in security and anti-terrorism, helping police agencies, despotic governments, and corporations keep the rabble in line … for a steep consulting price. I suspect he thinks of Trump as just another despot who needs his services, and he would be right. Now, in his dotage, Giuliani may make a lot less sense, but he is still treated with some deference in foreign capitals, and more so thanks to his close association with the president of the United States.

Let’s be clear: in 2016, Giuliani openly bragged just days before the election about the New York office of the FBI having the goods on Hillary Clinton. A short time later, the story broke about Anthony Weiner’s laptop and the revival of the email probe, effectively torpedoing any chance of a Clinton victory. He and Trump relied on this tactic to get candidate Trump over the electoral finish line. It worked then, and it may work again without some real effort on the other side.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Standing upright.

Leave a comment

This one is for Ilhan Omar, who is currently bearing more than her share of attention from Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic campaign to re-elect his sorry ass on the bodies of brown people everywhere. It’s hard to know where to begin, but I think it needs to be said first that Trump appears to be deliberately inciting violence with his various ignorant statements and tweets regarding this first-term congressmember. He may be an ignoramus, but I suspect he knows what effect his words can have on the disturbed, the deranged, and the prone to violence among his supporters and admirers. We have seen the results in Pittsburgh, in Florida, and elsewhere. Targets of Trump’s tirades are descended upon by legions of social media trolls, including some trigger-happy bottom-dwellers like would-be pipe-bomber Cesar Sayoc.

Rep. Omar is an ideal target for Trump, as many have pointed out. She’s (1) a Muslim, (2) black, (3) an immigrant / refugee, (4) someone from “a shithole country”, (5) a woman, and (6) defiant, outspoken, and unafraid. He is on a hyper-tear regarding Israel-Palestine, probably owing to the recent election campaign in Israel, so Ilhan Omar’s comments about AIPAC – nothing the likes of which hasn’t been said by Thomas Friedman, without sanction – become a source of joyous rebuke for the orange-faced menace. When he hits Rep. Omar, he’s hitting all of these things at the same time. The fact that his venomous denunciations are further amplified by Murdock-owned media should come as no surprise. Neither should the pusillanimous behavior of many of Ilhan’s colleagues in the Democratic party.

The bigot-in-chief and his principal target

Seriously, people like Senator Schumer, Speaker Pelosi, Max Rose, and to some extent even my own recently elected representative, Anthony Brindisi, act as enablers in this hate campaign against Omar. They roundly criticized her over the AIPAC comments, and went so far as to draft a resolution condemning antisemitism that was clearly aimed at her. Even now, as she receives credible death threats from crackpots worked up by Trump and his allies, they say little or nothing. Max Rose complained about the CAIR speech on MSNBC, sounding as though he roughly agrees with the president that Ilhan was somehow being disrespectful of those lost on 9/11, a claim based literally on nothing. When they do this shit, they open the door to demonization and death threats.

This isn’t about politics in the narrow sense. This is about standing up for what’s right. And in that sense, #IStandWithIlhan all the way.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Bad pennies.

Leave a comment

You’ve heard me mention this before (if you’ve been following this blog long enough), but our former president George W. Bush was a big believer in accountability for the powerless; for the powerful, not so much. It’s up to us to apply that principle to those in power, no matter how lofty their position. That’s why it’s particularly galling to see war criminal Elliott Abrams ascend to high office once again. Bush’s father H.W. pardoned this creature, giving him a new lease on life as a decision maker – a lease he has exercised more than once in the years since his heyday during the Reagan administration.

He was pardoned, but not his hairAbrams was an essential player in Reagan’s war on Central American peasantry throughout the 1980s. He worked to cover up the hideous El Mozote massacre in El Salvador at the end of 1981, then went on to flak for that murderous government for the balance of his tenure. He defended the mass murderer Rios Montt in Guatemala during that period under the banner of anti-communism – a position he has proudly owned up to ever since, even though the former Guatemalan dictator was posthumously convicted of genocide in his home country (and the United States was called out by the court for supporting him). He was convicted as part of the Iran-Contra prosecution, then pardoned by pappy Bush so that he could soldier on into junior’s administration and make a mess of our policy toward Haiti, Israel Palestine, and everything else he could get his greasy hands on.

This is like getting the old band back together, frankly. Bolton, Bush Jr.’s asinine United Nations Ambassador, now Abrams. Where the hell are Secord and Poindexter? (For that matter, where is Abrams’ hair? Is it still in jail for his crimes?) For all his incoherent rhetoric about breaking longtime Republican orthodoxy regarding foreign interventions like Afghanistan and Syria, Trump is assembling a cadre of proven war criminals who are working on a new conflict, most likely with Iran, though it’s possible they will attempt a warm-up with an attack on Venezuela first. People like Bolton, Abrams, and Pompeo have found in Trump the perfect vehicle to achieve their interventionist aims. He’s a kind of Trojan Horse through which neocons can climb back into the driver’s seat and take us over the cliff, once again.

All I can say is, resist. These people have been discredited multiple times and they keep coming back. The only way we can stop them is by resisting, voting, speaking up.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Closing the circle.

Leave a comment

Confirmation hearings for President Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee began this week, and while it’s clear that there is strong resistance to the idea of a lifetime appointment for Bret Kavanaugh, it is also clear that there is little we can do about it beyond making noise, pushing our senators, and demanding justice. I credit people in that hearing room for giving it a try. Linda Sarsour and many others were dragged out and arrested for raising their voices up against an extremist appointment by an illegitimate president and a confirmation process that has lost all credibility since the blocking of Obama’s appointee Merritt Garland in 2016. Why the Republicans on the senate judiciary committee are bothering to run through this pantomime is beyond me. They have nothing but contempt for the process, so why not go straight to the vote?

Kavanaugh counts how many anti-choice votes there will be on SCOTUSThe sad fact is, as Matt said in his song “See For Yourself,” we have nothing to defend with, as we on the left have failed to turn the issue of Supreme Court appointments into one that lights a fire under progressive voters. When Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, we lost the ability to confirm or deny Supreme Court appointments without the cooperation of the GOP, which simply is not a possibility. We  expend all of our energy trying to convince Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski to vote against this nominee, while attempting to keep red state Democrats like Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly, and others in line a few weeks before they face an election. Perhaps we can delay the proceedings until after the mid-terms, but that seems doubtful without the requisite votes.

Make no mistake about how consequential this appointment will be. This amounts to closing the circle on the Republican project that has been underway full-bore since the George W. Bush administration, when party leaders were focused on building a permanent majority. With five solid reactionary votes on the Supreme Court, the Republicans will have a veto over any progressive policies that may come to pass in the coming years. Even if we manage to wrest control of a gerrymandered House and a lopsidedly unrepresentative Senate from the GOP, even if we then win the presidency, there will be severe limits on what can be accomplished. Legal challenges to, say, single payer health coverage will almost certainly find success before a Supreme Court with Judge Kavanaugh on board.

Once again, elections matter. Whatever else you do, go out and vote, and encourage friends and strangers alike to do the same. We neglect this right at our peril, as the current catastrophe clearly demonstrates.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Friends and enemies.

Leave a comment

Our friends the Saudis are planning to execute a woman for being a dissident. It’s a little hard to imagine how you can be a woman in Saudi Arabia and NOT be considered a dissident, but there you have it. The method will be beheading, which, as I recall, Trump decried furiously during the 2016 campaign as an aberrant ISIS tactic drawn from the middle ages – no one has seen this in centuries! Actually, it’s the preferred method of execution in one of your favorite dictatorships, Mr. Trump. Still, it’s hard to blame the president for this relationship; we’ve been cozy with the Kingdom for decades, regardless of what they do, often bending our own foreign policy to suit their tastes (as long as it remains within the narrow limits of our own imperial policies).

New leaders, same old handshakeWhy? Is it just oil? Well, that’s a complicated issue. Sure, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t have been the center of attention for so long if their chief export had been nutmeg. Their ample supply of easy-to-extract, cheap-to-process crude oil was famously described by our policymakers as a source of enormous strategic power and perhaps the greatest material prize in the history of the world. But it’s that “strategic power” that is the key, as I’ve mentioned previously in these pages. We didn’t need Saudi oil in the 1950s and we don’t need it today, but we do need to have influence and a potential veto over it to maintain our leverage over other nations.

So Saudi is our “friend”, despite the fifteen 9/11 hijackers, and Iran is our “enemy”. Iran is Saudi’s enemy for a range of reasons, not least among them the fact that Saudi has a sizable Shia minority which they fear may be emboldened by a strong Iran. So that puts the Kingdom on the side of the U.S. government and the Israelis (another “friend”). Both Israel and Saudi would love to see us send our troops into Iran … because that’s what friends are for? It sounds chaotic to describe in this brief fashion, but there is a cold imperial logic to this framework – one that opposes secular Arab nationalism, opposes Shia resistance in all of its forms, and supports the enrichment of key U.S. based industries; namely fossil fuels and military technologies, both heavily subsidized by American taxpayers.

So it should come as no surprise that Trump supports an extremist state that beheads its citizens and flies planes into our buildings. In this sense, he’s a real traditionalist.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Long division.

Leave a comment

Some good news (or at least not bad news): The U.S.-led airstrikes in Syria obviously haven’t led to a terminal nuclear conflict; not yet, anyway. That said, this was another loathsome destructive exercise by three imperial powers intent on maintaining at least symbolic dominance over their erstwhile colonial possessions. We’ve heard all the flimsy justifications for this action – the need to enforce the prohibition on use of chemical weapons, the need to alleviate the suffering of innocents, etc. None of it holds any water.

While it’s good that a class of weapons is at least nominally banned, it’s hard to see a substantive difference between gassing people and blowing their legs off, or piercing their skulls with fragments of depleted uranium shell casings, or dropping white phosphorus on them, or enforcing a medieval siege that results in more than a million contracting cholera (i.e. biological warfare). And if Trump, May, and Macron are concerned with the suffering of innocents, they can start addressing it by not supporting Saudi war crimes in Yemen or Israeli executions of Palestinian protestors. Then there’s the legal question. I can’t speak for Britain or France, but Trump has no legal authorization to attack the government of Syria. It appears as though their argument on this issue is might makes right; that’s transparently illegitimate.

The result when every power pursues their own interests.Restraining a Trump administration powered by John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is going to be difficult. It isn’t made any easier by internal divisions evident on the left. Clearly we don’t need to agree on everything to agree that American intervention in Syria is a bad idea and shouldn’t be done. There’s a natural tendency to turn conflicts of this type into a kind of zero-sum game between bad players and good players; this is not unique to the left, obviously. There are people on the left who support the rebellion in Syria and those who think it’s populated entirely by terrorists. Likewise, I’ve heard leftists essentially align themselves with the Assad regime and others call for its overthrow.

There are bad players on all sides of this conflict, obviously, and every power is pursuing their own interests. I don’t have to agree with Assad’s rapacious military assaults to agree that we shouldn’t attack his government, largely because American intervention has such a bloody history. (I would say it always fails, but that would entail the assumption that our military policies are intended to do our victims some good … which is never the case.) I’ve never been a fan of Vladimir Putin, but I understand Russia’s decision to intervene in the wake of previous regime-change efforts on the part of the U.S., all of which have resulted in failed states, hundreds of thousands of dead, and worsening political turmoil. I haven’t seen convincing evidence one way or the other with respect to who used chemical weapons two weeks ago, but the question is irrelevant – the solution to this conflict does not involve American military force. Period.

If the left (and center-left) can coalesce around the basic principle of non-intervention, grounded in solid legal, moral, and historical arguments, we will have a better chance at holding off the Bolton-Trump assault on the Middle East.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Take a memo. Please.

Leave a comment

The reverberations of Trump’s rampaging State of the Union speech had barely faded before he started tweeting like an arrested tween. His wild claims about the Nunes memo, reflective of the fevered rhetoric proffered daily by his favorite network, were contradicted by the content of the memo itself, a selective, shabby attempt to draw the public’s attention away from the Mueller investigation with an almost laughable claim of concern for Carter Page’s civil liberties. Why do major modern political scandals always turn on weak spindles like Page and – for Hillary Clinton – Weiner? Maybe that’s the only kind of spindle we’ve got.

Porter sighted with two notorious racists.This, again, feels like a big distraction from what the administration and the congressional majority are actually doing. If we’re obsessing over one or the other revealing memo, we’re not thinking about recent surveys – including one by CNBC – that indicate that the vast majority of large businesses have no intention of spending their tax savings on hiring people. That’s no big surprise, but it’s probably worth mentioning once in a while, right? After all, misguided workers who voted for Trump should be given the opportunity to understand that you can’t trust the rich to help anyone but themselves, and that tax cuts are a poor investment in job creation.

Still, the administration will trot out the handful of examples that seem to fit their narrative, even if they don’t. I’m sure they’ve crowed about AFLAC, even though practically none of their sales workforce is eligible for the bonuses they promised so loudly. This is what they do with immigration and other issues – they essentially hold up the exception and claim it’s the rule. Doesn’t matter … think about the memos! The last few days they have been pushing this story about the FBI agent texts suggesting Obama was “keeping tabs” on the Clinton email investigation – subgenius senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) is their wingman on this conspiracy theory. My guess is that they are using this to distract attention away from the fact that one of Trump’s chief aides is a serial spouse abuser who can’t get security clearance to save his life … and yet he STILL handles top secret, burn-after-read briefings for the President. In other words, they don’t want you to think about what an insufferable ass General Kelly is, not to put too fine a point on it.

Just another week in paradise. Is it November yet?

luv u,

jp