Tuesday, December 05, 2017

Trump Loves To Create Sensation- Media and Politicians Still Don't Get That

They keep looking for a "strategy" and parsing his words to divine "what he means." He's just jerking your chains, you dupes.

It's natural to try to read the intentions of the president of the U.S., a position with far too much power for the good of humanity. But Trump is mercurial and capricious, so trying to predict his future actions is a fool's errand. What needs to be done is to put barriers in the way of his taking destructive actions, such as launching a military attack on North Korea.

Trump dropped one of his mini-bombshells regarding North Korea on October 5th, saying this is "the calm before the storm." What could he have possibly meant by that cryptic, ominous statement?

He had just publicly rebuked his own Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, for "wasting time" trying to arrange negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, thus torpedoing that option for a resolution of the issue that avoids war. (Unless the U.S. simply accepts North Korea's new capabilities, which is almost unthinkable, given the aggressive nature of U.S. imperialism.) Asked what he meant by "the calm before the storm," Trump replied in typical high-handed fashion, "You'll see."

The next day, Trump's reliably sycophantic press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, (spawn of one of the most loathsome U.S. politicians, Mike Huckabee), when asked by reporters desperate to learn the meaning of Trump's taunting tease, replied dismissively, "We're never going to say in advance what the President is going to do. You'll just have to wait and see," she lectured the roomful of reporters like a teacher talking down to a class of children.

Oh, great. So the "policy" of the Trump regime is to keep everyone guessing, always. That fits a Trump lifelong existential modus operandi, keeping other people psychologically off-balance. That in turn is part and parcel of his hyper-aggressive, solipsistic personality.

It's not an accident that Trump's allies have been gangsters (including Russian ones) and political gangsters like Roy Cohn, one of the most malign creatures who ever existed in the interstices of the U.S. power structure. From his work as a key henchman of Senator Joseph McCarthy, to his role in the murderous inquisition against the Rosenbergs, scapegoated for "causing" the Korean War (according to the judge who sentenced them to death, Irving Kaufman, whom the New York Times spent years running puff pieces on, slathering on thick layers of treacly propaganda to create a false reputation in a smarmy attempt to rescue the judge from deserved opprobrium) to his operations as a political fixer and obstructer of justice in New York courts, Roy Cohn left a trail of social wreckage and slime behind him. A raving homophobe in public, he was a homosexual libertine in private who ultimately died, ironically and perhaps with poetic justice, of AIDS, apparently acquired sexually.

There is a saying: Birds of a feather flock together. Likewise, pathological personalities clump together, forming nodes and knots of social pathology within a society, to destructive effect.

But since when are the politics of an empire founded on the twin pillars of slavery and genocide ever not anti-human? At least with Trump, there isn't the mask of benignity, as with his predecessor, The Drone Assassin and Perfecter of the Surveillance State. Ogres like Trump are perfect grist for the Democratic Party's "we're the lesser of two evils" mill, that political extortion racket they use to "force" progressives and decent people to vote for them. So the two-party political cartel continues its malign monopoly of power, preventing any real reform of the vicious U.S. system. (They won't even convict a single cop for murdering an African-American citizen, no matter how egregious the circumstances. THAT is a country that is incorrigible! And after a mass murderer gunned down 58 people and wounded or caused injuries to another nearly 500 in Las Vegas, the topic of gun control can only be broached gingerly.)

There is supposedly a Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." Well we sure do.




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