You're In Luck: In Most States, Your Vote Against Trump Doesn't Matter

That means you are free to vote for whomever. In CA, NY, NJ, CT, and other non-"battleground" states, there is no contest. Kamala Harris is going to win 100% of the Electoral College vote in those states. Every single Electoral College vote. 

In states that are a lock for Trump, the same logic applies. Trump will win no matter what, so voters there need not feel trapped inside the two-party straitjacket. Especially for people who would vote Democratic, which is futile.

In 2016, Donald Trump got 62,979,879 votes, but Hillary Clinton got 65,844,954 votes, 2.9 million more than Trump. So how did Trump become president? He won in the Electoral College, 306 to 232. Hillary Clinton got more votes than any other losing presidential candidate in US history. 

In 2000, George Bush got 50,456,002 votes, Al Gore got 50,999,897 votes, 543,895 more than Bush. Bush became president, elected by the Electoral College, 271 to 266. (Ralph Nader received 2,882,728 votes nationally, but ZERO Electoral College votes. That's fair, right?)

Except for Nebraska and Maine, every state gives ALL their Electoral College votes to the winner of the "popular" vote in the state. They do NOT divide their Electoral College votes among the candidates in proportion to how the PEOPLE of the state voted. 

So your vote for Harris does NOTHING to defeat Trump. Harris is going to get ALL the Electoral College votes in your state, the votes that actually elect the president.

You don't have to vote for an accomplice to genocide and horrific crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen, where Israel is attempting to create another mass starvation by bombing the sole port through which food enters Yemen that is the difference between life and death for the people there.

For as long as I've been alive, the Democratic Party has practiced a politics of extortion. You "have" to vote for them or you get something worse, the Republican. It has worked for decades to force people to vote for them, and then the Democrats most often turn around and betray the promises they made. 

We live in a two-party dictatorship, a cartel controlled by two parties that on the basic fundamentals are in agreement- support corporate oligarchy (each party has its billionaire supporters) and imperialism as foreign policy. Breaking the stranglehold on power this political cartel has is an uphill struggle. But for people in non-"battleground" states, the choice to break free is actually easy. YOU WON'T BE HELPING ELECT TRUMP IF YOU DON'T SUBMIT TO EXTORTION BY A SUPPORTER OF MASS MURDER.

I recommend you go on youtube and watch interviews of Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Stein and the Green Party represent decent human politics, which neither of the two parties of the establishment's political cartel do. An alternative can only be built slowly, with persistence.

[Five times in U.S. history, so far, the loser got to be president: 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, 2016. The U.S. is unique in the world. Yet it constantly boasts that it is the World's Best Democracy, indeed stands as the very SYMBOL of democracy.]

How Joe Biden and Donald Trump Are The Same

Both are aggressive bullies who fly into rages when challenged on sensitive subjects. In the case of Trump, the documentation could fill several tomes. With Biden we've seen it whenever a journalist has dared raise the subject of his son Hunter Biden's incredible deal with Ukrainian gas company Burisma, obtained while Biden was vice president of the U.S. and the Obama regime's point man on Ukraine. Hunter was appointed to the corporate board with "compensation" of $50,000 a month, "earning" a total of $3 MILLION over his five year term. The only reason Hunter left the board, by his own admission in a television interview, was because of the harmful appearance it created as his Dad ran for president. Father Joe bullies reporters by shouting them down until they drop it. We also have videos of BIden's reaction to citizens who raise the issue politely. He lashed into one such unfortunate gentleman by calling him a "liar" and "fat" and challenging him to a push-up contest. On another occasion a Democrat tried to broach the issue of climate change and Biden testily told him to vote for somebody else. This was a man who said he'd vote for Biden!

Both are chronic liars. Trump lies more frequently, and more obivously. But many of Biden's lies are also quite obvious.

Both lie consciously. Biden's staff has on several occasions that have been reported in power establishment media, privately told him things he was saying publicly were not true, and he just kept saying them anyway- proving he's a conscious liar. Here's one example:

 

And this from a guy who opposed school integration and whose best buddies in the Senate were the worst arch-segregationists of the Deep Southf! Most galling.

Biden has variously claimed to have been in Afghanistan and Iraq "28 times," "29 times," and "over 30 times." His staff, and thus definitely Biden himself, know those are fibs:

Joseph R. Biden, Jr., is a Great Storyteller in the mold of Ronald Wilson Reagan. That is to say, he shamelessly fabricates emotionally manipulative tales. Like Reader's Digest magazine, the stories are crafted to provoke certain feelings in the unsophisticated portions of the populace. Also like the aforementioned rag, and the fascist racist Reagan, there is an underlying reactionary agenda most of the time.

One story Biden has been feeding the credulous crowds of his supporters as he campaigns for president has a tenuous connection to reality. It involves his allegedly pinning a medal on a military member. Only the way he tells it, he either has a terrible memory, or he's a virtually uninhibited liar and bullshit artist. As the version he's been reciting in a heartfelt style has been consistent in each telling, we can exclude memory problems as the explanation.

Here the Washington Post gives priority to the fact that the tale Biden tells as he tries to manipulate people into making him president is "moving," but false. So they genuflect to the military, and give Biden props for telling a "moving" story. In other words, they praise the con. Because if someone is moving you with falsehoods, that's a con job. It's a cynical emotional ripoff, at the very least, and if he takes your money or your vote, he's adding iinjury to insult.

And the Man Who Would Be President is lying to get his hands on the levers of power. What might such an unethical and ruthless person do with the power? Clearly he cannot be trusted.

Except the power establishment WANTS Biden to win. He's "moderate," unlike the extremists Sanders and Warren.

In his self-aggrandizing War Story, Biden didn't just get one or two facts wrong, or some minor ancillary details. Every important fact was flatly false. 

NBC "News" is even worse in soft-pedaling Biden's chronic mendacity. They deem his cynical story "inaccurate," when the correct description is "pack of lies." Here, I'll show you:

"Appears to be incorrect." That's from the Post story. At least the headline wasn't so mealy-mouthed, and correctly called it "false." But it wasn't because Biden was honestly mistaken. You don't get EVERYTHING wrong by ACCIDENT unless you are in advanced senility. Here's some of what NBC and the Post deem to be "inaccurate" and (apparently) "incorrect":

[Washington Post, August 29, 2919.]

They put the most self-serving of Biden's lies last, "his own role in the ceremony." That's the most important part of the story Biden is flogging, in terms of Biden impressing those he's duping with his lies.

But with Trump, the Washington Post and various broadcast media (especially NBC's MSNBC) are willing to call a spade a spade and call many of Trump's lies "a lie." The Post even keeps a running tally of what it deems Trump's "lies." Although that list of putative falsehoods probably includes things Trump actually believes, which means they aren't lies, but are false.

Both men are egomaniacs. In Trump's case, there are also obvious narcissistic personality traits.

Both treat other people as inferiors whom they can abuse to indulge their own impulses. 

Trump has a record as a sexual predator, something he has even boasted about. Biden has a thoroughly documented history of molesting women by inappropriate touching, stroking, grabbing, and sniffing. He also does this to children of both genders.   [1]

Politically, both are reactionaries who completely support U.S. corporate oligarchy, bourgeois class dictatorship, U.S. imperialism, and a grotesquely swollen military industrial complex that enforces all of the preceding.

This is the choice of candidates for president in 2020 that the Democratic Party poohbahs and the corporate propaganda system (aka "the media") want to force on the American voting public.

Unfortunately most people are sheep. Being ovine, they won't even vote for the alternatives on the ballot, such as the progressive Green Party or the Libertarian Party, the party of laissez-faire capitalism. Until that changes, there is no hope for improvement in the structure of U.S. society.

Meanwhile, the people in the rest of the world will have to establishment governments in their own nations committed to opposing U.S. global domination. Of course, where that has happened, the U.S. has made sure to overthrow such governments, as it has done in Bolivia and Ecuador most recently, and has it has been trying to do in Venezuela under the current president and his two predecessors. (Trump, Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, and George W. "The 9/11 Mass Murderer" Bush.) Too bad Europeans are too feckless to make the necessary changes in their own countries.

1] To watch video of just some of the many times Biden has used other people as objects for his own gratification, see Joseph Biden's Pedophiliac Impulses.

For more on Biden, see Latest Whopping Trump-Level Lie by Joe Biden (this one is truly unbelievable);"No One Is Above The Law," Except Untouchable Joe Biden; and Joseph Biden Is ACTUALLY Guilty Of What Adam "Shifty" Schiff Accuses Trump Of. For Biden's segregationist history, type the word "Biden" in the search box on my blog webpage.
 

 

Notre-Dame Fire a Great Gift for Neoliberal French President Macron

This couldn't be better for Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron, he of the pretentious rich person's two middle names.

For five months now, the Yellow Vest street protest movement has been pressuring Macron and his regime, ripping the facade off his political scam, exposing deep fissures in French society, and revealing the simmering discontent under his neoliberal rule.

Now the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, an iconic symbol of the French nation, will at least temporarily silence the protests as the nation unites as one. Rulers like nothing better than a populace in lockstep conformity. All dissent is for the time being squelched, something months of police violence, including blinding and maiming protesters and killing an elderly woman in her apartment from a supposedly errant police projectile, was unable to achieve. All will now "come together" in common cause, worshipping an old cathedral and watching the repair effort, an effort that will be led rhetorically and mediawise by- guess who?

So just as, in the immortal words of serial sex offender Leslie Moonves, Trump may be bad for America but he's great for CBS, so the cathedral fire may be bad for an old church and French pride, but it's great for one Macron.

Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron, President of the French Republic. 

Vive la Ruling Neoliberal Elite!

Republicans Implacably Determined to Implant a Second Sex Offender on the Supreme Court

We now have credible assertions that Brett Kavanaugh was involved in drugging and gang-raping young women. This is the fourth claim of sexual "misconduct" ("the" media's preferred euphemism for his crimes) against Kavanaugh.

When (or if) he joins Clarence Thomas on the high court, there will be two known sex offenders in effect making laws. Both Thomas and Kavanaugh are extreme misogynists who are champing at the bit to repeal what is left of the weak "right" that women have to terminate their pregnancies instead of being treated as chattel and forced to bear children against their will.

The GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) from their chief, Donald J. Trump, himself a known serial sex offender and adulterer, on down, have responded by attacking the accusers, calling their painful recollections "smears" (a word Trump used and was echoed by Senate boss, the loathsome Mitch McConnell of Kentucky) and avowing that they refuse to "ruin" Kavanaugh's "life" by NOT implanting him on the Supreme Court! (This from reactionary dog, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, on one of the Sunday morning bourgeois political propaganda TV shows September 23.)

So far, we've had Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who Kavanaugh and his crony Mark Judge tried to rape when she was only 15. This is documented by therapist's notes from 2012. We have a letter from an attorney to Judiciary Committee member Dianne Feinstein, the senior Democrat on the Committee, about complaints from Federal employees against Kavanaugh, which Feinstein suppressed, as she suppressed Dr. Ford's information, refusing even to brief other Democratic Senators when they asked for the information.

Then there was a woman who described Kavanaugh's drunken assaults at Yale University, which included him thrusting his exposed genitals in her face.

Now we have a sworn affidavit from Julie Swetnick, who has a security clearance which she would


lose if she committed perjury by making a false claim. She relates Kavanaugh's involvement in drugging and gang-raping women.

The Republicans' response with each new expose of Kavanaugh has been shriller and more vicious attacks on the accusers, smearing them as politically motivated liars. (Part of their smearing is accusing the victims of "smearing" Kavanaugh, inverting reality.)

Much of "the" media, and not just Murdoch's Minions at Fox "News," are slanting their "coverage" in a sexist, misogynist direction. I will have more on this later.

So the United States under Trump is forcefully erasing what social progress there has been in recent years. Meanwhile, Facebook, Twitter, youtube, and Spotify, in the name of cracking down on "divisiveness," are banning and censoring progressive voices (as well as Alex Jones, the only one banned that "the" media mention). But the divisions are not creations of critics. They are real and fundamental aspects of U.S. society. It is the aggressive attacks on human rights by the reactionary power structure that causes divisions in the U.S., NOT Russian trolls or botnets- contrary to Democratic Party, corporate media, and secret police absurd assertions. Recall that Obama's "Director of National Intelligence," James "Pinocchio" Clapper, commissioned a custom "intelligence report" attacking the likes of RT and Abby Martin for "creating division" in America! What demented, demonic scapegoating by a pathological system!

Your next Supreme Court Justice: Unconvicted Felon Brett Kavanaugh

"Why Didn't Someone Call the FBI 36 Years Ago?" Molester-In-Chief Asks in Smear of Kavanaugh Victim

Serial sex criminal and president of the United States Donald J. Trump asked that rhetorical question to rally his "base" of deplorables, louts, sexists and terrorist scum around Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican apparatchik Trump is trying to make a lifetime Justice of the Supreme Court.   He was speaking to his favorite propagandist and loyal shill, Sean Hannity, one of Murdoch's Minions at Fox "News" and a career radical reactionary and polemical TV bully. The "question" was directed at Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who at the age of 15, in 1982, should have gone to the FBI.

It shouldn't be necessary to point out the numerous things that are dumb about this. But in brief: rape is generally a state crime, not a Federal one, so the FBI wouldn't be involved unless local police asked for help. Second, then as now, the vast majority of rapes- like around 90%- are NOT reported by victims, much less teen ones, much less rape attempts.

And Trump knows this. He has had years of experience sexually assaulting numerous women with NONE of them filing criminal complaints against him! He's full of shit, and his bad faith is stunning.

This is a criminal who we have on video boasting of grabbing women's "pussies" and forcibly kissing them. "They let you get away with it," he said on that video. He has bragged about walking in on naked contestants in the Miss Universe pageant he controlled, to ogle them. He is also a known serial adulturer. He has an extensive history of sexual crimes and misbehavior.

But "the" media hasn't mentioned any of this in the Kavanaugh-Ford affair! I think it is QUITE relevant!

Trump had more idiotic, malign, and dangerous things to say on Twitter today:

"I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!"

"The radical left lawyers want the FBI to get involved NOW. Why didn’t someone call the FBI 36 years ago?"

Radical left lawyers. A classic "McCarthyite" smear, designed as a clarion call to the millions of reactionaries who are the core of Trump's "base."

This is about far more than just the case of Kavanaugh and Ford. The deep problem with what Trump is doing is he is pushing the U.S. backwards socially and culturally. He is promoting primitive, sexist, repressive male supremacist attitudes towards rape and women and the violent victimization of women. 

And he is determined to achieve his oft-stated goal of having the Supreme Court overturn Roe vs. Wade, thus abolishing the "right" to abortion. (More of a privilege that women have to struggle to get, especially poor women.) "It's going to happen," he has said repeatedly, cementing his tawdry alliance with the religious reactionaries of the U.S., the most hypocritical and sanctimonious mass of creeps in the country.

Wither the Democrats? As usual with reactionaries nominated for the Supreme Court, the dominant Democratic politicians surreptitiously grease the skids for the reactionary nominees, as I have explained in previous posts. (Just scroll down.) This time it was the awful Dianne "I love the secret police" Feinstein, who hid a letter from Ford she received in July. The excuse being peddled in "the" media for Feinstein is that Ford asked for anonymity. The trouble with that is that she also hid a letter from July from a lawyer notifying her of Federal employees with sexually derogatory information about Kavanaugh. There was NO request for anonymity in that letter. So "the" media simply ignores it.

Both political parties of the two-party cartel have been dedicated to making the U.S. more repressive throughout their history. The few "progressive" moves by them were done reluctantly and only because of intense public pressure. For example, what's so "progressive" about Nixon allowing Congress to create an Environmental Protection Agency? Polluters were destroying the environment and causing mass disease! That is objectively damaging even from the rulers' perspective!

In America, what is called "Liberalism" is merely pragmatism. What is called "Conservatism" is reactionaryism and even fascism.

"I really really LOVE women's HOLES. Believe me, I understand women.

                                              They say 'No' but they really mean 'Yes'!"

How the GOP and Trump Henchman Kris Kobach Stole the 2016 Presidential Election

The Gang Of Plunderers has been stealing elections for at least 20 years now. While the Democratic Party sleeps.

Well, not exactly. What the Democrats DO is turn a blind eye to the theft of elections and instead scream bloody murder at Ralph Nader (2000) and Vladimir Putin (2016)! Scapegoating irrelevant targets on which they unleash their wrath. They're afraid of the Republicans!

It's cowardly, and makes them accomplices to a rotten and corrupt and fraudulent system of pseudo-democracy. They would rather preserve the increasingly shabby and threadbare illusion of a fair electoral process then actually HAVE one! This makes them accomplices in their own victimization, as well as enemies of democracy.

But since the so-called Democrats are a front group for corporate oligarchy and global imperialism, why would they even care about democracy? Of course they wouldn't. And they don't. Democracy means power in the hands of the people, the precise opposite of corporate oligarchy and imperialism.

Aaron Maté of The Real News Network interviewed investigative journalist Greg Palast in August 2018 on some of the evil machinations of Kansas Republican Secretary of State and nominee for Governor Kris Kobach, and the theft of the 2016 presidential election. That makes three presidential elections stolen by GOP skulduggery- 2000, 2004, 2016. [1]

Seems they can't win anymore except by cheating.

Kobach has devoted his career to election theft. He has taken his underhanded methods of skulduggery national, as this video explains.

Palast describes systematic disenfranchising of tens of thousands of voters in "swing" states. The Democrats response? As in Florida in 2000, they don't defend the right of "minorities" to vote, Instead they gnash their teeth at the Green Party for daring to run in elections and "steal" the Democrats "votes," on the spurious assumption that every single voter for the Greens would be voting for Democrats instead. The other villain in the Democrats version of reality is that Internet memes spread by Russians induced people to vote for Trump who otherwise wouldn't have.

And according to Democratic Party astronomers, the moon is made out of green cheese.

The Republican apparatchiks who sit on the Supreme Court as the highest judges in the land have played their part in the election-stealing conspiracies of the Gang Of Plunderers (GOP), most infamously in 2000 when they banned Florida from conducting an accurate vote count, and by aiding and abetting Kobach's schemes. One method of covert disenfranchisement invented and spread by Kobach to the two-thirds of U.S. states the Republicans control, which these GOP operatives-in-judicial-robes have "legalized," is pretending that people with common black, Hispanic, and Asian-American last names living in different states are the same person, and if they fail to respond to a postcard mailed to them by election officials are automatically removed from the voter registration rolls without further notice to them. (As if people carefully read and comprehend every bit of seemingly insignificant mail, and mail never gets lost or misdelivered or stolen. And the phone hasn't been invented yet, so there's no way to call people.)

Here let me remind you that if it wasn't for Democratic Senators, these extremely partisan Justices would never have made it onto the Supreme Court. For the story of that betrayal, see footnote [2].

People who vote twice are subject to imprisonment for five years. Kris Kobach, who has conspired to deprive millions of the right to vote, should at least get life in prison. As a destroyer of democracy, he is subversive to the proclaimed values of America. Like a termite, he bores in secret, eating away at the foundational legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system.

The Man With the Crocodile Grin: Kris Kobach, anti-democratic reactionary 

white supremacist, GOP go-to guy for election-stealing.

1]  Watch "How the GOP and Trump Henchman Kris Kobach Stole the 2016 Presidential Election."

2]  For how the Democrats helped create a reactionary Supreme Court, see "How the Democrats Helped Create an Ultrareactionary Supreme Court- And Strip Women of Their Abortion Rights."

The Credo Of Donald J. Trump

Being the True Credo of Donald J. "Jackass" Trump:

Lyrics from "Cult of Personality" by Living Colour.

 

Steve Bannon's Delusions of Power Smashed Against Hard Rock of Reality

Bannon has been banished from the Land of Trump. Good King Donald is said to be mightily vexed that Sir Stephen did blaspheme against the Good Names of King Trump's Son, Donald the True, and on the husband of the King's Daughter, Princess Ivanka, who is married to Jared the Valiant, even uttering the vile vituperation that Prince Donald did commit Treason against the Nation. By such base effrontery did Sir Stephen author his own Fate and cause himself to be cast out from the charmed circle of The Elect(ed).

The indiscreet Bannon was too frank with a sneaky infiltrator of the Court, one Michael Wolff, known to be an inveterate peddler of rumor and inaccuracies, who took advantage of the King's good graces and, hidden behind a benign mask of faux friendship, came with mal-intent. Wolff is gleefully profiting from his treachery, peddling all over the Land with the help of sundry town criers a tome, whose title cheekily appropriates a quote from the King Himself, Who in defense of the Realm, righteously threatened a pipsqueak upstart Kingdom on the far side of the globe with "Fire and Fury." The underhanded Wolff has gone so far as to question the King's soundness of mind.

Our Noble King did immediately put to good use the rapier-like wit for which He is justly renowned, christening the fallen Bannon "Sloppy Steve," a mirthful jape not even the cleverest adolescents of the Land could best.

The Luckless Bannon, having fallen out of favor with His Majesty, is being ostracized by Respectable Society. His patron and benefactress, Rebekah of Mercer, has cut off the generous emoluments with which She favored him. The Accursed Bannon is no longer welcome even in his old haunt, the Breitbart Inn.

His political nemesis, Lord McConnell of the Senate, is understood to be experiencing a pleasurable feeling that in the lands of the Germanic tribes is dubbed "schadenfreude," said to refer to satisfaction occasioned by the misfortune of another.....

The King Points Out That He Is Sound Of Mind

 

Meanwhile, in the 21st Century...

 

Bannon's high-speed plunge from a lofty, privileged  peak of influence and power into the gutter of public opprobrium has been as rapid as that of Harvey "Come Up To My Hotel Room So I Can Show You My Script" Weinstein. It turns out that  Bannon's power was always wholly derivative, not organic to himself. Outside of TrumpWorld, he is merely another extreme reactionary crank, bigot, white supremacist, anti-Semite, sexist, militaristic hypernationalist who likes to run his mouth. In other words, a guy who is a dime a dozen.  

Bannon was encouraged in his delusions of political potency by the U.S. media, which obsessively treated him as if he were powerful. They did this in part due to his proximity to Trump, and in part because they took him at his word that he really was the representative of millions of racist reactionaries, his self-anointed role. There was much excited speculation about whether candidates running in GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) primary elections, which he endorsed, would unseat candidates of Bannon's sworn enemies, the Republican "establishment," which he publicly reviled.

I haven't heard any retractions or admissions of error by the establishment media for getting Bannon's true position so wrong, or for promoting him, nor by the media of that U.S.-toady nation, "Great" Britain, which aped the line of the American media.

Bannon's very energetic ego met the immovable mountain that is reality, and the ego wilted. All his life, Bannon has been a pushy, arrogant, abusive bastard (and violent towards women- brave man!). He made a mint from his ownership stake in the Seinfeld TV hit, and was paid the big bucks as an "investment banker." His reactionary ideology no doubt opened many doors for him, as the U.S. establishment is reactionary to its core, notwithstanding the masks it wears to dupe the rest of us. But the reality of power is that Trump is president, and Trump is a major celebrity with millions of enthusiastic fans. Bannon is not. And Bannon openly declared himself an enemy of the Republican Party, which is squarely aligned behind Trump. When crunch time came, Bannon had no friends or allies with any clout on his side. Indeed, his avowed aim to "overthrow the establishment" made enemies of every Republican politician, even "insurgents" who would rather nail their flag to Trump's mast than to that of Bannon's rapidly sinking ship.

 

  A Bummed-Out Bannon Mulls His Future

 

As for Wolff, he's long been a man on the make. A habitue of New York City media circles, during one period he kept trying to promote himself as a would-be media mogul. (Bannon and Trump aren't the only people in this saga with delusions.) He now boasts that his book will lead to Trump's downfall. Of course it won't. It's just more anti-Trump noise in the relentless anti-Trump campaign that most of the media, the Democratic Party, and the secret police agencies of the Deep State have been waging since Trump's election and with increased intensity after he was sworn into office. (The FBI has taken the lead in the covert side of this campaign to oust Trump or at a minimum tie him up and force him to carry out policies to the liking of the power structure as a whole, such as the new Cold War against Russia, but it is also no accident that top former secret police apparatchiks like Obama's CIA chieftain John Brennan, former NSA and CIA chieftain General Michael V. Hayden, and Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, have all publicly denounced Trump at various times.)

 

Wolff praised Bannon as a great strategist and "a man who can see two steps ahead." Maybe those are baby steps. Bannon couldn't see that badmouthing Trump's son and son-in-law wasn't a brilliant political chess move? [1]

 

Wolff's book contains numerous factual errors, errors readily apparent. Wolff's publisher, like all major U.S. publishers, disavows any responsibility for the accuracy of what they sell as non-fiction, even though they commission the books, edit the books, print the books, publish the books, market the books, and sell the books. Wolff's book taps into a ravenous appetite for dirt on Trump. Since everyone involved is making boatloads of money, all is forgiven. And since most of the media is determined to Get Trump, they've pretended that Wolff's credibility isn't an issue, despite all the obvious factual errors. His portrait of everyone in Trump's orbit being horrified by him is surely nonsense. But Wolff cleverly wrote his story to conform to the contours of the negative image of Trump which has already been established. I largely agree that the image is true, except that calling Trump "unstable" is ridiculous. Trump's personality has been firmly fixed since adolescent. We have decades of a public record of his behavior. He's a narcissist, egomaniac, con man, rip-off artist, hustler, and inveterate liar. His personality is extremely stable. His character as an amoral charlatan is unchanging. He has robbed workers, contractors, banks, and "students" of his sham "university." Oh, and he's a confirmed racist.

 

The inexplicable thing about the Trump phenomenon is that this loathsome character has admirers, indeed millions of them. Or rather, it's only explicable if we grant that there are millions of dumb asses out there who are ethically defective, as is their idol- not an unreasonable assumption based on much evidence besides the popularity of Trump. This is a truth leftists are unable to face, as "the people" is their idol. But it is a fact that demagogues and despots, as well as run-of-the-mill politicians, have long exploited, in many times and places. It is a huge barrier to the evolution of a rational, humane, normal human civilization.

 

Janet Malcolm (named Jana Wienerova at birth) is a very privileged writer with a sinecure at The New Yorker magazine (hence very privileged) who wrote a two-part article for that magazine in March 1989, which she also peddled as a book, The Journalist and the Murderer. It's basic message is conveniently conveyed in the first sentence: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." What she meant, in part, was that journalists trick people into trusting them, and then frequently betray that trust. Michael Wolff perhaps would meet with her disapproval- except that The New Yorker is a main cannon lobbing shells into TrumpWorld in the ongoing campaign to oust him from office. So Malcolm perhaps is in line with The New Yorker consensus. That would make Wolff an ally.

Unfortunately, Malcolm's piece was an extended attack on and denunciation of journalist Joe McGinniss, for what she viewed as his reprehensible act of gaining the trust of the Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald, and then accurately portraying him as the murderer he is. MacDonald had murdered his entire family, and claimed that LSD-crazed hippies had done the deed (sparing MacDonald himself for some odd reason). This blood libel against hippies by a trained killer was sickening. One of the main attributes of hippies was pacifism and non-violence. (No, Charles Manson wasn't a hippie, he was a psychopathic career criminal, and his cult followers were just a criminal gang.) Malcolm finds McGinniss morally despicable. MacDonald apparently not so much. There was great controversy over the MacDonald case because reactionaries preferred to believe the imaginary hippies did it.

Interestingly, Malcolm is completely blind to her own moral hypocrisy. She did exactly the thing she condemned McGinniss for. Her victim was a psychoanalyst named Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. This project also started out as New Yorker articles and became a book,  In The Freud Archives. This was also back in the 1980s. I remember the articles well even today. They read as objective, descriptive accounts of Masson and doing at the Freud Archives, then suddenly near the end became a savage attack on Masson. I thought at the time, Gee, sure didn't see THAT hatchet coming! It was so over-the-top, and apparently unprovoked. Masson sued Malcolm for libel, but after a ten year legal battle, he lost, even though Malcolm was unable to offer written or recorded evidence for various "quotes" she put in Masson's mouth that made him sound like a sexual swinger who wanted to turn the Archives into something like the New York City sex swingers club Plato's Retreat. [2]

So Malcolm actually is what she reviled in McGinniss, someone who gains a subject's trust only to betray it. Well, journalism is a dirty business, but a gal does what a gal's gotta do, I guess. The rest of us should only care if the result is truthful and accurate. And that is why Russia deserves a salute for providing us all with accurate information about Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, and the DNC in 2016, making the American electorate better-informed voters. Thus the Russians strengthened American democracy!! 

 

 

A Wolff In Sheep's Clothes

1] Wolff in radio interview, WNYC-New York City, January 10, 2018, noon program. "Midday On WNYC."

2] Some of this is summarized in the Wikipedia entry for Janet Malcolm.


 
 

 

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.

Hurricane Harvey Weinstein Continues to Blow Powerful Men Off Their High-Status Pedestals

Matt Lauer- grossly overpaid (over $20 million per year) morning TV entertainer. Fired by NBC after years of covering up his sexual abuse, including at least one rape, just as Variety and the New York Times were about to expose him.

Charlie Rose- smarmy chatster of U.S. imperialist apparatchiks and nomenklatura members.
Creep pretends his gross sexual harassment was welcomed by his victims, claims "shared feelings." Canned by PBS, CBS, Bloomberg News. Finally, relief from his unctuous propaganda!

John Conyers- superannuated Democratic Party hack and "progressive" burlesque performer. (He's 88 years old and as of this writing is belligerently refusing to resign, despite calls to do so by his party "leader," House Minority Leader and multimillionaire Nancy Pelosi, and by the Speaker of the House, Republican Paul Ryan.)

Russell Simmons- music biz mogul who like all music biz moguls is a capitalist super-exploiter. (How do you think they get so rich?) Stepping down from his company after second rape victim names him.

Mark Halperin- hack "political analyst" who indoctrinates the public with corporate political outlook. Purveyor or garbage "election analyses" that ignore reality of voter suppression, crooked voting machines, etc. Discarded by media and disgraced for now. Spawn of Kissinger accomplice Morton Halperin.

Michael Orestes- former reactionary propagandist at New York Times, then propaganda overseer at NPR. After being protected for years by fellow male bosses, forced out.

The "A Prairie Home Companion" guy, what's his name. NPR dumps his shtick. (Oh yeah, Garrison Keillor. Weird name, hard to remember. Shouldn't that be Garrison Fort?)

Oh, too much schadenfreude for one day! I'm overdosing!

Still untouched: known rapist and groper, the second Teflon President, Donald J. "Jackass" Trump. Remarkable.

BONUS CONTRIBUTION TO "THE CONVERSATION" ABOUT SEXUAL HARASSMENT: Nobody needs to be "trained" to not rape, grab people's breasts/asses/vaginas, forcibly kiss, expose oneself, etc. They already know it's wrong- that's why they do it in secret, lie about it, intimidate and threaten victims into silence and pay them hush money ("settlements" with "non-disclosure agreements") etc. Instead here's a simple therapy treatment that is quick and immediately effective:

U.S. Bourgeois Political and Media Elites In A Tizzy Because Trump Said Mean Things About One Of Their Number

Tongues are clucking and fingers are wagging at Donald Trump, the current president of the U.S. (and thus the man in charge of maintaining and expanding U.S. global dominance and preserving the hegemony of billionaires everywhere possible) for insulting Mika Brzezinski.

For something like 99.999% of the world's population, Mika Brzezinski is an unknown person. But U.S. political and media elites, who genuinely feel themselves to be at the center of the universe, have the attitude that they are "everybody." In fact, the words "everyone" and "everybody" have been used in regard to this pathetic contretemps.

For days on end now, if you turn on a radio or television, or look at a news website, you're deluged with the scandal du jour, Trump's Meanness to Mika. The U.S. media actually thinks this is something Important. (Apparently any club, or stick, or twig, with which to beat on Trump, will do.) The Washington Post, the hometown "news"paper of the capital city of the global U.S. empire, has numerous articles on its homepage devoted to this trivial story, all breathless in their outrage, shock, and indignation at the caddish, "inappropriate" (the mildest term of condemnation being used in the deluge of denunciations against Trump) behavior of Trump.

Brzezinski is where she is because her Daddy was the notorious imperialist apparatchik Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish emigre who harbored a lifelong hatred for and grudge against Russia. Brzezinski was the Man with the Plan to sucker-punch the Soviet Union by luring it into invading Afghanistan. In fact, it  is true to say that if it hadn't been for U.S. machinations, the Soviet Union probably would never have invaded that country. The U.S. conspired to place a regime hostile to the S.U. in power in Afghanistan. Brzezinski, who was the "National Security" Advisor to U.S. president James Earl Carter, advised Carter that the Soviets could be sucked into a war in Afghanistan to bloody their nose, as it were, and as "payback" for the U.S.' self-inflicted Vietnam War (really Indochina War, as the U.S. devastated Cambodia and Laos in addition to destroying Vietnam) debacle.

Brzezinski is the co-host of a pointless TV show on MSNBC, hosted by her lover, Joe Scarborough, called, modestly, "Morning Joe." Scarborough was previously a Republican Congressman, so of course he is a right-winger. This ego trip program is centered around Scarborough spouting his opinions- and he has opinions on every topic, free of any special insight or edifying analysis- with others sitting around a table on a studio set to chat, and with power-system guests, meaning various politicians, polemicists, and what passes for "experts" in the pantheon of the U.S. propaganda system.

Scarborough was a Trump enthusiast and booster, but once the bourgeois elite turned against Trump with a vengeance, Scarborough duly sailed his little media boat with the tide and turned against Trump. So both he and his lover/co-host turned into harsh critics of Trump.

Eventually Trump responded as he always does when he perceives hostility or even resistance, with insults. He called Dear Mika "dumb," and this was taken as something beyond the pale by the blatherariat and various politicians. He claimed she turned up at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's personal Florida Xanadu, with her paramour, bleeding from her face from recent plastic surgery. Trump says the duo repeatedly sought admission through the Magic Gates, and were repeatedly turned away. The media elite were duly aghast at the unflattering comments about one of their own. Republican politicians weighed in, harrumphing that Trump should can the trash talk, as it was unseemly, beneath the dignity of the president (it's certainly not beneath Trump's personal dignity!) and, of course, "a distraction" from important matters, like gutting Medicaid for millions of people, lavishing billions in tax reductions on the ultra-rich, neutralizing the Environmental Protection Agency, increasing the military budget by 11%, and so on. (In that case, let's hope the "distractions" continue for however long Trump remains inflicted on the world as U.S. Emperor.)

Scarborough/Brzezinski then retailed a story asserting that Trump's minions threatened them with a hatchet job in the so-called "National Enquirer," controlled by Trump's longtime friend, admirer, and ally, David Pecker, unless they apologized to Trump and called him to beg him to spike the story. The Washington Post helpfully provided an op-ed slot for Joe and Mika to feed this story to the public.

Pecker rules a stable of pseudo-newspapers, burlesque versions of actual newspapers, that are placed weekly in racks right at tens of thousands of supermarket checkout lines. Thus millions of people see their covers and lurid headlines every week, and are at least subliminally influenced by them. Pecker's rags, with their drumbeat of Trump-boosting covers during the campaign for the presidency, no doubt aided Trump's "victory." (He actually lost to Clinton by 2.9 million votes, but under the bizarre system of U.S. "democracy," he won in the so-called Electoral College, which is what counts, not who people actually vote for.) [1]

Trump's side denied the Scarborough/Brzezinski extortion story, but it seems credible to me.

The Epitome of Elegance: the very debonair David Pecker

Even though Trump is besieged by hundreds of media voices and political hacks, he apparently never tires of punching back, and indeed of picking new fights, gratuitously, as when he speciously attacked the Mayor of London in the wake of a terrorist attack there on June 3. [2] I don't see Trump tiring of the constant conflict, because he thrives on it. Unlike what is often said about bullies, he is no coward. In fact, he's a lot gutsier than his predecessor, Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, who always, always, shied away from taking on the GOP, and made numerous attempts to appease them. Likewise he rewarded Israeli prime minister Binjamin Netanyahu for heaping years of abuse and insults directed at him with a 10-year, $38 billion dollar gift of U.S. weapons, paid for by American taxpayers. [3]

One could expect no end to the media's high dudgeon against Trump's rudeness to Mika until another factoid comes along for Trump's power establishment enemies to wax indignant and outraged over. Sure enough, something came along, in the form of a dopey 28-second video of Trump tackling someone at a burlesque "professional wrestling" show, with a CNN logo superimposed on the "victim's" head. Trump tweeted the video (allegedly the work of a known white racist) and the media were off to the races again. CNN issued a pained statement about Trump inciting violence against journalists and neglecting the duties of the presidency.

 And all the while, the major propaganda offensive, "Russian meddling/interference in Our Democracy" has been non-stop political theme music for months now. The Democrats and most of the corporate media (and the prime movers behind this campaign, the secret police agencies FBI, CIA, and FBI that are the beating fascist heart of the Deep State) hope to build that into a crescendo that will oust Trump from the White House.

We shall see. This should be interesting. For the objective, perspicacious analysis that reveals the hidden truth, check back here regularly.

Poor Mika and Joe! Bullyboy Donald keeps PICKING on them!

MEANEST President EVER! He hurt Mika's feelings! And he exterminated Native Americans! And lots of Filipinos! And overthrew governments and imposed murderous fascist regimes in those countries! And he NUKED two defenseless cities! And laid waste to Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos! And... Oh wait, that was other presidents. Never mind.....

1]  An example of Pecker using the rags he controls to help Trump was his publication during the GOP presidential primaries of a photo of Ted Cruz's fascist fanatic father next to CIA agent (not CIA officer) Lee Harvey Oswald, with the imputation that Cruz senior was involved in the JFK assassination, for which Oswald was the fallguy. When Trump picked up on this, he was roundly denounced by much of the media blatherariat, who are ever-alert and allergic to any examination of that assassination. (The picture proves nothing about Cruz senior's involvement with the JFK hit, of course.) Ted Cruz was also running for the GOP nomination for president at the time.

For a timely description of Pecker, his "career" as a purveyor of media garbage, and his intimate ties to Trump, see "The National Enquirer’s Fervor for Trump ," The New Yorker, July 3, 2017 issue.


2]  See "Anti-Muslim Bigot & Demagogue U.S. President Trump Slimes London Mayor After Terrorist Attack," June 5, 2017.

3]  Two caveats to the Obama Cowardly Bully thesis. One is that he was a reactionary, who never had any intention of even trying to enact progressive policies. All his campaign rhetoric to the contrary was standard  Democratic Party deception, perfected over several decades by that vile gang. Second, one wonders if he was trying to "triangulate" in the manner of his predecessor as president, fellow accomplished-con-man Bill "Mass Murderer Times 4" Clinton. Clinton outflanked Congressional Republicans on their right, gutting welfare and instituting 60 new Federal death penalty crimes, among other things. Then-leader of the House GOP, the political mountebank Newt Gingrich, felt compelled to go along. Obama tried something similar with his healthcare "reform," devised originally by the far-right wing Heritage Foundation. To his surprise, the Republicans in Congress adamantly refused to provide even a single vote for it. Apparently Obama hadn't read the news reports of Senate GOP Boss Mitch McConnell stating the Republican priority for the Obama regime- to ensure its "failure." The fact that the Gang Of Plunderers announced in advance their plan for total obstructionism wasn't enough to stop Appeaser-In-Chief Obama from repeatedly trying to craft rightwing legislation they would support. And when Obama was first elected, the Democrats held majorities in both Congressional chambers, and could have enacted progressive legislation. But then, this is a party that has had ample opportunities to repeal the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which is a key factor in the destruction of labor unions in the U.S. Yet they never had.

Unions that continue to support the Democratic Party are the equivalent of abused wives who never leave their abuser.

Still, the thesis stands. Obama consistently kow-towed to the powerful (like the financial industry) and took out his wrath on the weak, such as when he ordered the assassination of the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki (who was driven into exile by the FBI and became a propagandist for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) and arranged for the Egyptian secret police to break the arm of peace agitator Medea Benjamin in retaliation for interrupting one of his orotund, mendacious speeches. Or keeping political prisoner and then Army soldier Chelsea Manning naked for a year in a Marine Corps brig prior to being railroaded for revealing U.S. crimes to the world via a document transfer to WikiLeaks. Or the incredible persecution of Julian Assange. Or many more examples. For an excellent documentary on some of the lengths the U.S. has gone to "neutralize" Assange, using Britain and Sweden (and even Assange's native Australia) as willing puppets, see "Sex, Lies and Julian Assange," by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation 4 Corners Program. It used to be available free on youtube, but now you have to pay. I downloaded it before that happened.

For Medea Benjamin, See "Obama Has Egyptian Military Regime Break American Peace Activist's Arm," March 8, 2014, and "Medea Benjamin’s Arm 'Wakes Me Up Every Single Night in Pain,'*" July 2, 2014.

Slow-Motion Coup Against Trump Takes The Obvious Next Step

Well, who couldn't have seen this one coming?

"Special Counsel" Robert Mueller, who was head of the dreaded secret police agency, the FBI, for 12 years, has expanded his criminal investigation to include obstruction of justice charges against the president of the U.S., Donald Trump. Ostensibly he was appointed to "investigate" possible collusion between Russian "meddling in Our Election" and the Trump campaign. In short order, the "investigation" has been "expanded" and the true target has been made manifest.  [1]

We learned this not through any official announcement, but by the usual method, the surreptitious planting of "news" in complicit media organs.

This latest step in the campaign to neutralize/remove Trump follows the pattern of so many of the previous steps. Elements of the Deep State illicitly "leak" (plant) a story with cooperative media of choice, this time the Washington Post, the hometown newspaper of the power elite of the capital city of the U.S. empire,  with damaging information aimed at Trump. (The other favorite receptacle of the secret police for their excretions is the New York Times. The media pack of running dogs then take the stories from those papers and run with them.)  Next, the Trump camp, often Trump himself, futilely issues an ineffectual verbal counterattack, which is always brushed off by the media.  In this case, Trump's lawyer shrieked his outrage about the leak. (Many of the leaks have been criminal acts under U.S. law, namely the providing of classified information to people not authorized to receive it- namely "journalists. The criminals are either secret policemen of the FBI, CIA, or NSA, or polticians with security clearances.)

So now, for the first time, Trump is a target of a criminal probe. This shortly after Trump finally got public acknowledgement that he hadn't been under investigation all along, before now. (He could never get the FBI boss he recently fired, James Comey, to public state that Trump wasn't under investigation, even though he wasn't. Comey speciously justified keeping a black cloud like this over the head of the president of the U.S., in his recent orchestrated testimony before the Senate "Intelligence" Committee.)

While Mueller, the designated hatchetman du jour, violates ethical an legal standards by sneakily planting a story in the complicit press, we are simultaneously subjected to a propaganda campaign extolling the same Mueller as a paragon of virtue and uprightness, a man of sterling integrity. J. Edgar Hoover himself didn't have a more fawning press.

The upshot of the campaign to get rid of Trump is that the secret police are made ever more supreme in the hierarchy of U.S. power. This is latest contribution of the Democratic Party to constructing the U.S. police state. Starting with Woodrow Wilson, the man who initiated the modern U.S. police state, imprisoned anyone who dared voice oppostion to World War I or the draft and gave us the hated Espionage Act, through FDR, then Truman, who created the CIA and NSA, then LBJ, who unleashed every element of the secret police state on the anti-war and black power movements, to Obama, who perfected NSA total domestic electronic surveillance and used the Espionage Act bequeathed to him by Wilson to terrorize and persecute whistleblowers, the Democratic Party, far from being "liberal," has proven itself a politically repressive menace.

But it must be noted in passing that Donald Trump is one of the most monumental assholes that has ever existed.

1]  The list of crimes against human rights committed by Mueller when he was boss of the FBI is way too extensive and detailed to adequately summarize here. There was a systematic campaign of entrapment operations to create fake "terror plots" which the FBI then "smashed." Books and articles have been written exposing this fraudulent political theater. And the FBI of course continued  the practices it has throughout its existence, of warrantless burglaries, planting of spy devices, harassment, sabotage, theft, and overall persecution of all manner of political dissidents of a progressive persuasion and people the FBI just doesn't like. The use of illegal NSA intercepts to bring criminal cases became institutionalized under Mueller. See "Robert Mueller Arrogated To Himself Sweeping Power To Ignore U.S. Constitution."

Anti-Muslim Bigot & Demagogue U.S. President Trump Slimes London Mayor After Terrorist Attack

The city of London just experienced a rampage by three Islamofascists who murderously drove a van into people, then attacked bar-goers just enjoying life, with long knives, killing seven people and wounding 48, 18 grievously enough to be listed in critical condition.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq  Khan, a Muslim, naturally spoke to reassure the citizenry and to vow that terrorism wouldn't intimidate the people of London. One thing he said was this:

“You will see an increased police presence today, including armed officers and uniformed officers,” Khan said on Sunday, June 4th. “There is no reason to be alarmed by this.”

The U.S. president, rather than showing solidarity and support, instead attacked Khan in a thoroughly dishonest fashion.

Trump deliberately distorted what Mayor Khan said by pretending he was telling people not to be alarmed by terror attacks (which actually would have been fine if he had said that):

“At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’” Trump verbally ejaculated.

The mayor’s office responded to Trump's gratuitous attack that  Khan “has more important things to do than respond to Donald Trump's ill-informed tweet that deliberately takes out of context his remarks urging Londoners not to be alarmed when they saw more police — including armed officers — on the streets.”

Thus the mayor took the high road, saying he had more pressing matters to attend to than to respond to Trump's slur. He's right- getting into a pissing match with a dishonest skunk like Trump is a bad idea. (Witness the fate of the other Republicans who ran for president against Trump. Trump's entire strategy was to personally insult them in juvenile terms. And it worked. Then he did it to Clinton, who won, but lost, because under the rules of the World's Greatest Democracy, sometimes the person with fewer votes wins.)

But Trump wasn't through. He launched another attack on Khan in reaction to the statement from the Mayor's office that responded to Trump's initial assault:

“Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his ‘no reason to be alarmed’ statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!” Trump tweeted in his usual dignified fashion, perhaps sitting on the toilet at the time.

Trump has been holding a grudge against Khan since 2016, when Khan declared Trump "ignorant" about Islam (a factually true statement) and was quoted in  Time magazine saying, “I’m confident that Donald Trump’s approach to politics won’t win in America.”

So Trump went on British television to issue an ominous threat: "I think they're very rude statements and frankly, tell him, I will remember those statements,” Trump growled.  “They're very nasty statements.”

I'll tell you who makes nasty statements... well I don't have to, do I?

FUCK Common Decency!

 London Mayor Sadiq Khan: Looks like a tempting target for Bullyboy Trump.

Memo To Trump Impeachment Pushers: Be Careful What You Wish For

Who do you imagine will succeed "The Donald" if you succeed?

Mike Pence, the religious fanatic and extreme reactionary, becomes president.

Pence's domestic policies will be every bit as bad, and probably worse in some areas (such as the war against abortion rights) than Trump's.

On foreign policy, at least Trump is internally divided. He has "isolationist" (noninterventionist) impulses, so part of the time you get that, while at other times you get a violent lashing out, as the attack on the Assad regime airfield in Syria after the sarin attack by that regime- my only complaint about that Trump attack is that it was ineffectual. Plus, Trump isn't particularly interested in foreign policy. Therefore U.S. imperialism under Trump would probably be less focuses, less intense, and less assiduously imposed everywhere possible at all times than is the norm. Which is a MAJOR REASON the power establishment (political, media, and Deep State, which includes the military and secret police organizations) is so intent on hamstringing or, if possible, ousting Trump.

Pence can be expected to be much like Reagan and the Bushes on foreign policy; aggressively violent, employing the military and CIA very extensively.

Even worse, is that Pence projects a low-key, non-threatening, friendly and placid demeanor. In a word, he comes across as amiable. Thus he will be the more effective evil. Just as Obama was the more effective evil than Bush II, or than McCain or Romney would have been. Simply put, the "nice guy" personas of state criminals like Obama and Pence simply don't arouse the public opposition that Republicans generally and especially politicians who come across as intense do.

So Trump is a horror, but Pence would be worse.

By the way, Obama was a horror, Bush the Younger was a horror, Clinton was a horror, Bush the Elder was a horror, Reagan the fascist was a horror, Ford helped Indonesia invade East Timor and exterminate a third of the population (with Kissinger at his side, a policy continued by Clinton), Nixon (enough said), Johnson sent a 550,000 invasion force into Vietnam, and invaded the Dominican Republic to reverse an election he didn't like, and arranged for military dictatorship in Brazil, a U.S. plot begun by Kennedy, who created a U.S. torturer-training program in Latin America under the rubric of the "Alliance for Progress," and Eisenhower was responsible for the CIA coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) which ushered in two of the world's most murderous dictatorship, a quarter million people murdered in each case, and the consequences still being suffered by the peoples of those countries to this day. Truman, the man who atomic-bombed two cities, enough said- and I could go back and back, indeed all the way to Washington, but there are too many, and the crimes are literally in the tens of thousands. because imperialism is a criminal enterprise, and  the U.S. was imperialist from the beginning, when white colonizers "discovered" the Western Hemisphere, and  eliminated in North American over 90% of the people whose ancestors predated the Europeans' arrival by 15,000 years, in order to seize the land and resources.

The point is, Trump is not uniquely bad. That's the establishment line, because he's unpredictable and not anchored to their ideology. That means there are possibilities for cracks in the system to open. That is one reason people instinctively voted for him- on the hope he would "shake things up." Of course he won't deliver on his promises, but he IS a destabilizing presence in the White House. If nothing else, the attention of the criminal rulers is somewhat diverted by their obsession with demonizing, "investigating," undermining, neutralizing, and ultimately ousting him. That gives the world's population a bit of breathing space, or a lessening in the intensity of U.S. attacks (including perhaps domestic dissidents, with the FBI and CIA and NSA prioritizing their conspiracies against Trump).

The U.S. is a nation founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery, which has, with the immense power it has amassed, a world-historic opportunity to change the nature of civilization, but instead is simply repeating the same millenia-old game of domination, exploitation, and oppression. (By the way, committing genocide has been a very good way to get to the White House. For example, Andrew Jackson, exterminator of the Creek Indians, got to be President, as did William Henry Harrison, who destroyed the Confederacy of Northwest Tribes and oversaw the elimination of the charismatic native leader Tecumseh.)


In America now, we see a colossal waste of power and the squandering of a world-historic opportunity to change the world for the better.  And what a lack of ambition this bespeaks. The ambition to do something truly great and world-changing. With its unparalleled power, the U.S. could put humanity on a truly civilized path. Instead Americans prefer to delude themselves that their nation-state (and by extension, themselves) are "great" simply because they are powerful. But since the power is largely (not entirely) used for evil, their "greatness" is of a piece with the "greatness" of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. It may be awesome, but it is not admirable. It is anti-human, as we see even today, yet again, with President Trump and his Secretary of State, Rex "Gusher" Tillerson, praising the Saudi oppressors, among the very worst in the world, while simultaneously, with the maximal hypocrisy typical of the U.S. government, slamming Iran for its repression and "terrorism." (Trump and his gang talk as if IRAN is behind ISIS and Al-Qaeda, not Saudi Arabia!)

The blather and bullshit sure gets repetitive after awhile.

Too bad so many of the fellow travelers of the Democratic Party, who should know better, are mindlessly parroting the propaganda lines of that Party and its secret police temporary allies-of-convenience. (Rather stunning to hear Democracy Now boss Amy Goodman repeatedly saying the phrase "Russian meddling" in the U.S. election!)

Maybe putting things in historical and political perspective would help them think more clearly. No need to take sides in a battle between Godzilla and Mothra.  (Trump and his establishment enemies.) The proper response is to illuminate what is happening, including the real causes of the conflict, to report objectively and demystify the show that is being presented in the Bourgeois Media Theater.

Typical victims of U.S. "Defense of Freedom"

American Heroes with captive Woman

 

Trump Merely Carrying Out Obama's Bombing Policy in Mosul, Iraq

It should come as no surprise to deluded supporters of the Democratic Party, yet it would if they'd ever let the facts into their brains (which they won't), but Trump is just continuing Obama's bombing policy in Mosul, a policy that slaughters dozens or more civilians for each ISIS sniper "taken out" (as U.S. slang for kill has it).

Anand Gopal of The Nation Institute (a project of The Nation magazine) let this particular cat out of the bag in an interview on Democracy Now! Gopal had recently returned from iraq.

Here is a key quote from Gopal:

"What Trump has been doing in Iraq is essentially carrying out Obama's policy. It seems from here like it's an escalation but it's actually not an escalation....Obama actually relaxed the rules of engagement a number of times including most recently in late December, when he made it easier for forces on the ground to call in airstrikes, and I think this is actually the biggest cause for the spike in civilian casualties nothing that Trump has done." [My emphasis.] [1]

Yet Obama is still allowed to shelter his brutal butchery behind his mask of benignness, thoughtfulness, and sham progressivism.

This strategy is totally unnecessary militarily. Instead of employing countersnipers to kill ISIS snipers, or using a more appropriate ordnance to do the job, the U.S. drops heavy explosives from the air, demolishing buildings and slaughtering scores of civilians sheltering in basements. These airstrikes are often called in by U.S. “Special Forces” on the ground in Mosul. All the while, the U.S. military piously parrots its guff about how much they try to minimize civilian casualties.

Another way the U.S. shifts responsibility is using the Israeli line when the Israelis exterminate Palestinians civilians- their intended targets used the victims as “human shields.” Two points: if you know there are civilians in the way, and you kill them anyway, that's on YOUR head. Second: if you DON'T know civilians are there, then the “enemy” DIDN'T employ them as “shields.” To be “shields,” the enemy would have to announce it, make it obvious, conspicuously put the civilians in harm's way. Of course, in neither the case of the repeated Israeli assaults on Gaza (“mowing the lawn,” in the blood-chilling phrase the Israelis use among themselves to refer to these periodic “cleansings”) nor the U.S. case of bombing mosques and homes and whatever is it true that civilians were used in this way. The U.S. claims to be unaware of the presence of civilians in the targets it bombs.

And we know the U.S. has competent snipers it could use instead of aerial bombing- surely better-trained ones than those ISIS can deploy. The late racist killer Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL sniper, boasted of killing hundreds of Iraqis. During the Vietnam War, Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese. One of the most chilling things I ever read was in a celebratory book describing how he exterminated a company of badly-led teenage soldiers in Vietnam. Horrible. Alvin York was a self-taught sharpshooter who killed 25 German soldiers in a single attack in World War I. By now, the U.S. military has refined sniping to an advanced science, enabling their killers to eliminate enemies from distances of over a mile away. They are also highly trained in created hidden positions from which to observe and snipe.

Meanwhile, in Syria, according to Gopal, Obama assiduously avoided bombing assets of the Assad regime. This in utter contradiction to his announced policy that "Assad must go," and alleged U.S. support for Syrian rebels. Obama's bombing concentrated on bombing jihadist groups. Trump's one-off attack on an Assad airbase following the sarin attack that killed children and adults was the first U.S. airstrike against the Assad regime. (Unfortunately it was largely ineffective as the base was operational within a day and more air attacks on the Syrian population followed.)

Cynical and immoral, the U.S. avoids yet another opportunity to use its force wisely in ways to help those they pretend they want to help.

1] “Trump Carrying Out Obama's Bombing Policies in Iraq, Sacrificing CiviliansTo Kill ISIS Snipers”-Videoclip here. From Democracy Now! 4/20/17 program. Democracy Now! airs a one-hour program Monday through Friday, the audio of which is broadcast on radio stations. The television show, with additional segments, is available free on their well-constructed website, democracynow.org, along with transcripts. It is a good source for information that the corporate oligarchic media (aka “the media”) either barely mentions or blacks out entirely. Also people who rarely or never get to speak in establishment media have a platform here. Unfortunately the politics of democracy now! Is rather muddled and naive. For example, since they adamantly oppose any use of U.S. military power ever, (this being “pro-peace,” apparently) their response to such things as ISIS atrocites, the murderousness of the Assad regime, etc., is limited to handwringing, bleating ineffectual “demands,” and calls for “a diplomatic solution,” apparently not realizing no such thing is possible with the likes of ISIS, Assad, etc.

Perhaps worse, they are also in effect accessories in major crimes of the Deep State by refusing to air the facts about them, such as the three major U.S. Domestic assassinations (the Kennedys and King- they never mention who killed King for example, despite frequent references to his assassination) and the nanothermite demolition of the three buildings at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001.

Still, the website/program is valuable for what it offers.