Well, it happened again … the neocons and the Petersen Institute have lost their candidate. The only real pleasure I derived from last Tuesday’s primaries was to watch them have their asses handed to them yet again, this time with even greater finality. They really don’t have any even marginally viable candidates left. Cruz makes some of the right noises for them, but he’s from a different stream of reactionary politics and no one can stand the guy. Kasich is basically finished, unless he discovers some way to earn 110% of the remaining GOP primary delegates. Rubio was the last worthy vessel for that extremist clown car, and that fucker and his retrograde cold war revival worldview is out. Good riddance.
With that out of the way, I am sure the imperial war machine party is looking for another tin car to drive around in. It’s quite possible that they would settle on Trump. Someone, after all, is going to populate his foreign policy establishment – thousands of them, keeping the gears of empire turning day by day. That’s kind of what makes him dangerous, though not so much as a Rubio or a Bush. It is also just conceivable that the neocons at least might begin to look favorably on a Clinton presidency. She is bellicose, obviously, and her differences with the Bill Kristol crowd on regime change are relatively minor. They might not overtly support her, but I could see them not vehemently opposing her if the alternative is Trump.
Many of the folks I know who have been involved in the Sanders campaign found Tuesday night to be very discouraging. I really think that, aside from the fact that Sanders would make a good president, an important function of his campaign and the movement associated with it is to push forward progressive policy positions that have never really seen the light of day in the institutional Democratic party. Win or lose, he can accomplish this, and it may be our best defense against neocons and paleo-imperialists (like Kissinger) looking to find a new political home. I support Sanders’s decision to continue fighting for that reason as well as the simple fact that a Bernie victory is still mathematically possible (unlike Kasich, though it’s hard to discern this fact from the news coverage – neither MSNBC nor any of the other cable outlets played Sanders’s speech Tuesday night, though they did cover Kasich’s).
So, fight on, Bernie people. We owe it to the country and to the millions around the world who are sweating out this scary superpower election.
luv u,
jp
Matt’s always been a very prolific crackpot. Myself? Less so, though my cumulative output over the years is less well-documented. Matt recorded practically from the very beginning of his songwriting days, whereas many of my songs floated around in my head and never got much farther (nor, frankly, deserved to). To this day, Matt writes about six or seven songs to my one. Not sure how he does it with that day job of his – tramping around the wilderness, feeding beavers, chasing falcons, snapping photos of butterflies, etc. My songwriting habits are pretty bad. Sometimes on a weekend I’ll pick up a guitar and play the same chords I always play, except in a different order. (One of these days I’m going to run out of orders.)
Korea is potentially the most volatile of these. There are literally millions of people living under the gun there, and while the North’s leadership is ultra paranoid and appears irrational, they have been driven to this point by the presence of an existential threat: us. We have scores of military bases in South Korea. The South Korean military is under the operational command of our Pentagon. On top of that, we engage in the annual provocation of our joint exercises with Seoul, which amounts to a massive mock-invasion of North Korea. Given our troubled history with Pyongyang (and the memory of a war that cost 3 million Korean lives), you might think we would try to err on the side of diplomacy. North Korea wants direct bilateral talks with us because we are their principal adversary. They are not a direct threat to us, but they can do a lot of damage to Seoul, so for the sake of all those people we should ratchet down this conflict now.