Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Political Rants

State of it, 2019.

I would be remiss not to comment, first of all, on the style and delivery of Trump’s second State Of The Union address this past Tuesday night. Plainly, he is terrible at reading from a teleprompter. I don’t know whether it’s a vision issue or some pathology further back in that thick skull of his, but man goddamn, what a horrible read. Beyond that, though, he obviously did not rehearse the speech to any significant degree. It was a rocky road, prosody-wise, for little lord Trump-leroy from beginning to end. An embarrassing performance all around.

As for the content, just a couple of points:

Really cares about those kids.Immigration. Beyond the same lies, distortions, and barely concealed bigotry that usually erupt from his festering maw, Trump used the well-worn SOTU practice of using guests as rhetorical human shields in his argument for the Wall, greater immigration enforcement, and so on. This time it was family members of a U.S. citizen victim murdered by an MS13 member. Of course, Trump could bring in dozens of such cases if he can find them, and it would no more prove his case than this sorry demonstration. People get murdered in America, including a relatively small number at the hands of immigrants. Crucially, his “get tough” policy makes these victims less safe. By rounding up undocumented aliens by the thousands, Trump’s agents are creating a strong disincentive for members of that community to call the cops when they either witness or become victimized by gang activity. Just more evidence that bigotry is not only wrong and immoral – it’s just effing dumb.

Iran Deal. Trump had just told an interviewer a few days ago that he wanted to keep troops on an American base in Iraq to “keep an eye on Iran” – something he apparently failed to discuss with the Iraqi government. Then, in this remarkably poorly-wrought SOTU address, the old man railed against the Islamic Republic, calling it the most prominent state sponsor of terror and accusing it of doing “bad things” in the region. He has adopted the broadly-used imperial rhetoric on Iran, attributing every action carried out by Hezbollah to Tehran. And, of course, they hate Hezbollah because it is an effective fighting force that restricts Israel’s ability to strike  Lebanon at will. That’s what we and the Israeli government call “terrorism”.  Of course, his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord just scotches what was a great deal for the U.S. – a pledge to restrain themselves while we continue to occupy countries on either side of them and threaten them daily. What’s to complain about there?

Oh, right. Obama did it. And John Bolton wants war. How could I have forgotten?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Standoff.

[Blogger’s Note: The shutdown ended a day after I wrote this. I’m posting it anyway because we’re likely to take this circus ride again sometime soon … and because I’m too damn lazy to write another post.]

There’s little light I can shed on the ridiculously long Trump government shutdown that hasn’t already been tossed around on the corporate media over the past 30-odd days (and they have been very odd indeed). I’ve got a handful of things to say about it, and here they are.

  1. This is an asymmetric battle. For the most part, the stuff being shut down is stuff the Republicans despise anyway and don’t mind seeing derailed or dismantled. This is just another avenue to the same ends they’ve been working towards since they came to power. They have nothing but contempt for government workers. They want to slash food stamps. They hate regulations and are glad to let corporate America run wild without even the nominal constraints that government imposes upon them. They pretend to care about securing the nation against attack, but their policies do the exact opposite. They simply don’t care if the country falls over backwards – arguably, that’s their core mission as a party.
  2. The Dems can’t back down. Seriously, if Donald Trump (aka President Drunk Uncle Twitter Troll) gets anything out of this shutdown, he will use this tactic again and again.  We know that’s the case … the man simply cannot be trusted to keep his word and he is incapable of telling the truth. We may as well have this out now … because if we don’t, it will just need to be dealt with later (and not much later).
  3. Labor may need to stop this. I don’t make a habit of telling working people what they should or should not do – they should do whatever works for them. But it occurs to me (and many others as well) that one way out of this impasse would be for the TSA and air traffic controllers to walk out. That would bring air travel and transport to a screeching halt, and my guess would be that the president would deflate like a punctured tire if that were to happen. Just saying – solidarity is an effective weapon.

What he looks like when he loses.High school standoff. Re this controversy about the standoff between Catholic anti-abortion protesters and Native Americans at the Lincoln Memorial this past weekend, I agree with Sam Seder that (1) young men can act like tremendous assholes when they gather in large numbers without proper supervision, and (2) where the hell were the supervising adults anyway, and how did they let this get so far out of hand? Despite all the hand wringing about misinterpreting the incident based on fragments of viral video, it’s obvious that these kids are mocking the Native Americans. I know that smirk anywhere. But I don’t blame them … just their minders, who shouldn’t be allowed to supervise children ever again.

Political Rants

Empire redux.

There were some hair-on-fire moments on talk television this week about Trump acting as a Russian “agent” or “asset” or something similar. I have my own thoughts on this issue, which I’ve shared previously on this blog, but what I find kind of interesting about this discourse is the degree to which it reveals the state of mainstream opinion on national security issues. Mind you, I don’t mean popular opinion; rather, “articulate” opinion of the kind you find on Morning Joe and other similar platforms. The ability of the American imperial project to repackage itself in such a way as to appeal to another generation of gullible subjects has always fascinated me, and we’re seeing it play out again on screens large and small all across the nation.

One of the points of outrage regarding Trump came from a newspaper piece that reported on the president floating the idea of pulling the U.S. out of NATO. The reaction went beyond just the usual tropes about NATO’s vital mission of keeping the peace in Europe since the end of the last war and how Russia is dedicated to pushing it back and splitting it up. Some commentators suggested that the idea of ending NATO is something so outlandish and outside of the mainstream that it simply had to come from Russia. Of course, unless these people are all younger than they look, they might all recall that at the end of the cold war many Americans questioned whether NATO still had a mission. People can disagree on that, but it isn’t outlandish to raise the question, particularly in that context.

NATO expansion since 1945

What’s more, it doesn’t take a Putin apologist to suggest that the Russian government has a more than defensible reason to be suspicious of the NATO expansion that has taken place over the past three decades. For one thing, Russia was promised by the U.S. – George H.W. Bush specifically – that NATO would not expand one inch to the east. That was a lie, of course. Why would Russians care about that? The biggest reason is that they have been invaded by foreign alliances three times in the last century, the last time at the cost of 20 million lives. When the Soviet Union ceased to be a thing, I’m sure their expectation was that NATO would go away. It didn’t, and like any hammer looking for something to do, it sees everything as a nail.

As Trump prepares another generation of phony missile defense weapons, one can only hope that these aren’t coffin nails.

luv u,

jp