Today, the last day of 2015, the absurdest political year I've ever witnessed, Ben Carson, one of several ridiculous presidential candidates, lost two top aides, his campaign manager and communications director, to resignation. I don't like to look at situations in a singular manner, but this development says one thing to me: Ben Carson will not win the Republican nomination. Americans and the billions of the world don't have to fret about Carson becoming president. The prominence of those two positions in a campaign shouldn't be underestimated. They concern organization, and dissemination of a candidate's message. Carson's men lacked confidence in the cause, so they stepped off a train rolling to a dead end.
Last August, Donald Trump lost his campaign manager, Roger Stone, because the latter thought the former's "food fight" with Megyn Kelly blanketed important issues (another way of saying, "Trump is petty.") Stone nevertheless insisted he felt no rancor for Trump. Carson's fed-up men also wish the best of luck for the neurosurgeon they've invested so much time and patience in. They don't have to deal with him anymore, so they wish him well (my cynical take).
Just recently, Carson did well against Trump, poll-wise. He released a book. His unwavering ability to not respond negatively to Trump's typical nastiness, but to demonstrate turning "the other cheek," in imitation of Jesus's instructions on how to deal with aggression, should've been practiced more by other candidates vulnerable to the front-running shit-throwing orangutan billionaire, since bullies require reactions. Carson seemed unflappable, even when he fucked up. Video was dug up revealing Carson's belief that the Giza Pyramids were grain storage buildings, a statement that makes most people think, "You're fucking crazy," but he doubled down on the conviction when confronted about it by journalists.
Carson, rivaling Trump in vagueness, told the Republican Jewish Coalition, "The world is complicated; the Middle East is even more complicated."
Yes, the world needs leaders who think like this. It's as if he said, "I like bread, but I don't like stale bread."
Maybe I'm wrong, though. Carson, perhaps, will find a miracle-working campaign manager and a solid pro communications director and overtake Trump and the others. We'll forget about his lack of knowledge of foreign policy, his bizarre nearly prehistoric ideas about the past. Americans have embraced mediocrity in past elections (Coolidge, Reagan--yes, I wrote it--George W. Bush) so why not embrace irrationality? The choices before us on the Republican side talk like what used to be regarded as lunatic fringe political thinkers, all of whom had little or no chance of gaining power because of the extremity of their views. Now, extremity is embraced in a world increasingly used to its attention-getting depredations. Carson's "complicated" Middle East has Islamic fundamentalist extremists saying insane shit, while America has political high office seekers saying insane shit. It's a poker game with two players refusing to say, "Call," and neither has a winning hand.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Donald Trump will reportedly start spending big money on his campaign in relation to the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary. Popular news media wisdom settles on Senator Ted Cruz winning in Iowa, while Governor Chris Christie has the backing of New Hampshire conservatives, the kind of Republicans who don't want a flashy trash talking egomaniac winning anything.
Trump's own narrative presents himself as a winner. If he loses in Iowa, and then even in New Hampshire, how will he spin that? We're used to his whining tweets, but how great will the torrent of petulance be if he loses in even one of those states, making him, by his own definition, a loser?
He will, if it comes to his defeat in Iowa and/or New Hampshire, have no trouble assigning blame for his loser status. Current targets of Trump's ire, like the news media (which strokes him generously with free coverage), the Republican and Democratic Parties, the Establishment, sane people, the Bushes, the Clintons, President Obama, people capable of logic, immigrants legal and illegal, Muslims, decent human beings, and women, would feel the withering Trump grump. He would be able to feed off of his rejection for many years. I think he's wanted to be president for a long time. The August 2004 Esquire Trump cover story (in which he stated, unimpressively after the fact, his displeasure with the Iraq War) expresses his desire to lead the country, and that he would (of course) do it "better." We only have his word on that, and his word is shit.
Psychologically, how would a defeated Trump feel? After Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte spent the last six years of his life imprisoned on the remote South Atlantic island, St. Helena, guarded distantly by British soldiers, living in a small house with a few servants in an environment of constant and maddening wind. He spent some of his time going over that last battle of his, thinking of actions he should've taken that may have turned it the other way. I mention Bonaparte because he's the only person I've ever read about with a colossal ego comparable to Trump's. In the end, the great world leader and conquerer on his naked island surrounded by undrinkable nowhere, ended his life babbling manically, asking hundreds of questions without waiting for answers, the content of the queries quite mundane, concerning in one instance the price of apples in England compared to the price of apples in France.
I don't think madness or exile lie in Trump's future, but I do hope, if he loses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and elsewhere, culminating in a denial of his presidential wish, that, like Napoleon, he experiences a deep depression, enough to shut him up for years, removing his grotesque blaring light from public consciousness so that his disgusting personality ceases to abuse the great country he falsely claims to care about.
Vic Neptune
Sunday, December 20, 2015
The prospect of a Trump administration beginning in January 2017 generates nervous grimaces among the punditry. Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, a man who doesn't shrink from bold statements pertaining to bombing and invading other countries, looks limp when he condemns the persistent Republican presidential frontrunner. Kristol's permanent sneer, though apparently unaffected by the formerly unthinkable possibility of President Trump, looks more threatened now by the political success of a billionaire reality TV man who won't be polite, such as when he condemns George W. Bush and his neoconservative allies (including Kristol) for advocating and carrying out the bombing, invasion, and occupation of Iraq.
Donald Trump, using what should now be a familiar tactic to anyone who understands English, likes to claim he was against the Iraq War from its beginning in March 2003. "About a week after" the war began on March 19, according to a Washington Post reporter who "approached him at an Oscar after-party, [Trump]" said the war was "a mess."
In July 2004, soon after Iraq's virtual viceroy L. Paul Bremer ended his year long mishandling of a country in civil war, Trump told an Esquire reporter that the war was a "mess." By this time, a growing number of Americans had lost enthusiasm for the war. Trump likes to cite this Esquire interview, supported by a cover photograph of himself looking like he's got someone's cock in his mouth. On August 10, 2015, Trump phoned Morning Joe and said, "I didn't want to go into Iraq in 2004 and we went there. So now we totally knocked out the balance. What we've done in the Middle East is incredible."
He's repeatedly cited 2004 as the year he's so proud of in regard to his ability to perceive national mistakes. No evidence of Trump opposing U.S. military involvement in Iraq prior to March 19, 2003, exists. I offer my own opposition to that war; what I wrote in an unpublished manuscript, The War File, on March 6, 2003, thirteen days before the first missiles flew:
"I cannot support this upcoming war with Iraq. Cloaked with lies, it is exploitation, degradation, humiliation, and a savage mismatch between a twenty-first century army against a twentieth century army. It will go badly. America's reputation for insensitivity towards the complexity of the world will increase. More hatred will flare up. Acts of terror will multiply worldwide. Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and their corporate sector associates will profit. America will be regarded as an ogre. Babies will be bisected by chunks of shrapnel. Wildlife will vanish. The atmosphere will be poisoned. The antichrist will come through and Bush may someday be surprised to discover that he, in a Jungian sense, is it...
Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, and the other Project for the New American Century ideologues want war. Getting a grip on the Middle East has been a dream in the ambitions of these arrogant cocksuckers for a long time. Their desires are about to happen."
Insisting on one's prophetic ability, as Trump does, isn't impressive when the remarks on the subject come sixteen months after the war began. After the Iraq War got ugly, from an American perspective, pundits, politicians, Trump, started viewing the catastrophe as a fuck-up, though many of these people didn't look at it from the humanitarian viewpoint of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, wounded, missing, and displaced. Iraqis jailed under false pretenses and mistreated in confinement translated in America to "some bad apples among Army guards in Abu Ghraib prison have disgraced their country and their uniforms." Controlling the Iraqi populace amid civil chaos by making mass arrests and stamping down heavily on civil rights, enabled by the American virtual viceroy's orders, meant nothing to those in America, like Donald Trump, viewing human rights abuses carried out as policy as simply a failed war effort.
Shame on Bush and Cheney for fucking up the Iraq War!
Bill Kristol doesn't approve of Donald Trump. The neocon co-editor of The Weekly Standard probably doesn't like Trump's loose cannon style. Kristol likes well-aimed cannon, as long as he can agree on the targets. On one of the Sunday morning talk shows he frequents, Kristol said of the so-called ISIS capital, Raqqa, that it would simply be a matter of sending in "fifty-thousand" troops to "clean it out."
A 2012 census of that city puts the population at 220, 268 people. ISIS members there probably don't account for more than a small minority, so "cleaning out" a city of around 200,000 people means homes and civilians getting in the way of Kristol's fantasized urban warfare. Stalingrad, site of a five month battle between German and Russian troops in 1942-1943, showed in a 1939 census a population of approximately 445,000 people. By the time the battle began the city's population had swelled by many thousands of evacuees fleeing German advancement. Over the course of the battle, lost finally by the Germans, the city was virtually destroyed. Since I assume Bill Kristol is smart enough to be a pundit and magazine editor, I must conclude that he just doesn't give a shit about what would happen to Raqqa's civilian population if it's ever the site of an urban campaign. Nor, apparently, does he give a shit about U.S. troops involved in such a horrific battle.
"Clean it out," he said, and Trump might add, based on what he actually proposed, "Kill the children and wives of ISIS fighters." Since it would be hard to discern who's who in such a (overused phrase) "fog of war," many women and children in Raqqa unconnected to ISIS fighters would die.
Kristol, appalled by the prospect of a Trump presidency, nevertheless has in common with the Republican frontrunner a heartfelt advocacy of mass murder. Their voices (Trump's especially) are believed in by an alarming American minority I declare to be void of morality. Trump and every other race-baiting, foreigner-hating, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, pro-war asshole in news media and politics do not speak for me, or millions of other Americans not enchanted by the desire to blame the unknown for their personal difficulties.
Vic Neptune
Donald Trump, using what should now be a familiar tactic to anyone who understands English, likes to claim he was against the Iraq War from its beginning in March 2003. "About a week after" the war began on March 19, according to a Washington Post reporter who "approached him at an Oscar after-party, [Trump]" said the war was "a mess."
In July 2004, soon after Iraq's virtual viceroy L. Paul Bremer ended his year long mishandling of a country in civil war, Trump told an Esquire reporter that the war was a "mess." By this time, a growing number of Americans had lost enthusiasm for the war. Trump likes to cite this Esquire interview, supported by a cover photograph of himself looking like he's got someone's cock in his mouth. On August 10, 2015, Trump phoned Morning Joe and said, "I didn't want to go into Iraq in 2004 and we went there. So now we totally knocked out the balance. What we've done in the Middle East is incredible."
He's repeatedly cited 2004 as the year he's so proud of in regard to his ability to perceive national mistakes. No evidence of Trump opposing U.S. military involvement in Iraq prior to March 19, 2003, exists. I offer my own opposition to that war; what I wrote in an unpublished manuscript, The War File, on March 6, 2003, thirteen days before the first missiles flew:
"I cannot support this upcoming war with Iraq. Cloaked with lies, it is exploitation, degradation, humiliation, and a savage mismatch between a twenty-first century army against a twentieth century army. It will go badly. America's reputation for insensitivity towards the complexity of the world will increase. More hatred will flare up. Acts of terror will multiply worldwide. Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and their corporate sector associates will profit. America will be regarded as an ogre. Babies will be bisected by chunks of shrapnel. Wildlife will vanish. The atmosphere will be poisoned. The antichrist will come through and Bush may someday be surprised to discover that he, in a Jungian sense, is it...
Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, and the other Project for the New American Century ideologues want war. Getting a grip on the Middle East has been a dream in the ambitions of these arrogant cocksuckers for a long time. Their desires are about to happen."
Insisting on one's prophetic ability, as Trump does, isn't impressive when the remarks on the subject come sixteen months after the war began. After the Iraq War got ugly, from an American perspective, pundits, politicians, Trump, started viewing the catastrophe as a fuck-up, though many of these people didn't look at it from the humanitarian viewpoint of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, wounded, missing, and displaced. Iraqis jailed under false pretenses and mistreated in confinement translated in America to "some bad apples among Army guards in Abu Ghraib prison have disgraced their country and their uniforms." Controlling the Iraqi populace amid civil chaos by making mass arrests and stamping down heavily on civil rights, enabled by the American virtual viceroy's orders, meant nothing to those in America, like Donald Trump, viewing human rights abuses carried out as policy as simply a failed war effort.
Shame on Bush and Cheney for fucking up the Iraq War!
Bill Kristol doesn't approve of Donald Trump. The neocon co-editor of The Weekly Standard probably doesn't like Trump's loose cannon style. Kristol likes well-aimed cannon, as long as he can agree on the targets. On one of the Sunday morning talk shows he frequents, Kristol said of the so-called ISIS capital, Raqqa, that it would simply be a matter of sending in "fifty-thousand" troops to "clean it out."
A 2012 census of that city puts the population at 220, 268 people. ISIS members there probably don't account for more than a small minority, so "cleaning out" a city of around 200,000 people means homes and civilians getting in the way of Kristol's fantasized urban warfare. Stalingrad, site of a five month battle between German and Russian troops in 1942-1943, showed in a 1939 census a population of approximately 445,000 people. By the time the battle began the city's population had swelled by many thousands of evacuees fleeing German advancement. Over the course of the battle, lost finally by the Germans, the city was virtually destroyed. Since I assume Bill Kristol is smart enough to be a pundit and magazine editor, I must conclude that he just doesn't give a shit about what would happen to Raqqa's civilian population if it's ever the site of an urban campaign. Nor, apparently, does he give a shit about U.S. troops involved in such a horrific battle.
"Clean it out," he said, and Trump might add, based on what he actually proposed, "Kill the children and wives of ISIS fighters." Since it would be hard to discern who's who in such a (overused phrase) "fog of war," many women and children in Raqqa unconnected to ISIS fighters would die.
Kristol, appalled by the prospect of a Trump presidency, nevertheless has in common with the Republican frontrunner a heartfelt advocacy of mass murder. Their voices (Trump's especially) are believed in by an alarming American minority I declare to be void of morality. Trump and every other race-baiting, foreigner-hating, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, pro-war asshole in news media and politics do not speak for me, or millions of other Americans not enchanted by the desire to blame the unknown for their personal difficulties.
Vic Neptune
Friday, December 18, 2015
Jeb Bush's hapless campaign let it be known that their man is contemplating hitting Trump hard. Bush apparently hasn't decided yet if it's a good idea to announce he's not going to endorse the asshole billionaire, who has his own growing cadre of stormtrooper followers. He has to spend time wondering if he should endorse a nominated Trump? It isn't clear to Bush by now that the piece of shit who ruined his chances of becoming president, browbeating him for months even unto the present day, shouldn't receive his endorsement?
Republican politicians view Trump carefully, not speaking harshly of him. Most of them condemned his insane idea to prevent Muslims from entering the United States, but they also didn't condemn the man who uttered the unethical proposal. Finally, Congressman Reid Ribble of Wisconsin spoke out against Trump, saying he will not support him if he's the nominee. Ribble is the only Republican politician in Congress I know of who's had the guts to say, in effect, "Fuck you" to Trump.
I've heard often the phrase, "They're afraid to go after Trump," referring to Donald's opponents who struggle for second, third, fourth, fifth places in the polls. Trump does slam whoever criticizes him. His impulse control is like that of a hyperactive child. He tweets compulsively, literally phones in interviews to cable news programs, the hosts of which listen to his narcissistic Napoleon complex fantasy talk as if they're hearing the golden sentences of a respected historian.
Vladimir Putin, Russia's strongman, praised Trump, calling him "brilliant" and "colorful," and the "absolute leader" among Republicans running for president. This has been interpreted in American news media as an endorsement by Putin. I see nothing saying "endorsement" here. Trump, calling in to Morning Joe on MSNBC, said he liked being called "brilliant" by Putin. He praised Putin in turn, calling him a "strong leader."
"Strong" in the Mussolini sense?
Joe Scarborough, the show's eponymous co-host remarked to Trump that Putin has had journalists killed who disagreed with him. He said it twice to Trump, who doesn't like to respond to issues involving the real human cost of violence.
"America kills people, too." He seemed blasé about the subject. There may have been a time ten years ago when I would've disagreed with anyone stating that Trump would like to order the deaths of millions, but now I accept that idea readily.
There may be another reason why Trump likes Putin: the latter's wealth. Reportedly, Putin is the world's richest man, an achievement brought about by decades of calculated graft. The figure I heard by one Putin expert puts the Russian leader at around a hundred billion dollars in net worth, compared to Trump's self-claimed eight plus billion. Trump's praise of Putin fits with a relatively insignificant billionaire nestling inside the rectum of the world's wealthiest man.
The last Republican debate showed the usual collective hard-on for war, the military, and killing "bad guys." They say this crap because they think they have to. None of them have any military experience. None of them have been shot at. Some of them want a no-fly zone over Syria, speaking about that as if Russia would go for it, and Governor Christie insisting he would order the shooting down of Russian planes violating the zone. He and the others seem to have missed Aristotle's ideas about cause and effect.
Living in America now, watching the money-corrupted political process unfold, feels like waiting for something uncomfortable to end. Ten and a half months until the election. Citizens United made this prolongation of capitalistic democracy possible, and its supposed benefactors, the candidates, show strain. Bush looks like he's trapped in a cave. Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Lindsay Graham, Rick Santorum for God's sake, none of them, and a few above them in the polls like Fiorina, have no chance of gaining the nomination. Why don't they stop? Trump, meanwhile, doesn't have to surf the Citizens United wave, due to his own cash. He gets free publicity every day on cable news. He campaigns with Twitter. He doesn't give a shit about the American people, or the people of the world. He's a negative zone where those who don't want to hold their worst natures back anymore can enter and feel good about themselves because their leader is a nihilistic shit, like the man who runs ISIS.
"Political correctness" is supposedly, in Trump's view, "destroying America." Horseshit. He uses the term in the same way some of his hate-monger predecessors like Joseph McCarthy used the word "Communism." He's not the only one of his fellows on debate stages who condemns political correctness. One of the candidates (I can't remember who) said we've been fighting "politically correct wars," a meaningless sentence, except that it contains the words "politically correct," sounds that stimulate the non-thinking reptile brain. I suppose that Chris Christie's idea of a politically incorrect war would be one with Russia.
I'm not unconvinced that some tenth graders would make smarter and more humane presidential candidates than most of the line-up we're faced with.
As Devo put it, "Are we not men?"
Republican politicians view Trump carefully, not speaking harshly of him. Most of them condemned his insane idea to prevent Muslims from entering the United States, but they also didn't condemn the man who uttered the unethical proposal. Finally, Congressman Reid Ribble of Wisconsin spoke out against Trump, saying he will not support him if he's the nominee. Ribble is the only Republican politician in Congress I know of who's had the guts to say, in effect, "Fuck you" to Trump.
I've heard often the phrase, "They're afraid to go after Trump," referring to Donald's opponents who struggle for second, third, fourth, fifth places in the polls. Trump does slam whoever criticizes him. His impulse control is like that of a hyperactive child. He tweets compulsively, literally phones in interviews to cable news programs, the hosts of which listen to his narcissistic Napoleon complex fantasy talk as if they're hearing the golden sentences of a respected historian.
Vladimir Putin, Russia's strongman, praised Trump, calling him "brilliant" and "colorful," and the "absolute leader" among Republicans running for president. This has been interpreted in American news media as an endorsement by Putin. I see nothing saying "endorsement" here. Trump, calling in to Morning Joe on MSNBC, said he liked being called "brilliant" by Putin. He praised Putin in turn, calling him a "strong leader."
"Strong" in the Mussolini sense?
Joe Scarborough, the show's eponymous co-host remarked to Trump that Putin has had journalists killed who disagreed with him. He said it twice to Trump, who doesn't like to respond to issues involving the real human cost of violence.
"America kills people, too." He seemed blasé about the subject. There may have been a time ten years ago when I would've disagreed with anyone stating that Trump would like to order the deaths of millions, but now I accept that idea readily.
There may be another reason why Trump likes Putin: the latter's wealth. Reportedly, Putin is the world's richest man, an achievement brought about by decades of calculated graft. The figure I heard by one Putin expert puts the Russian leader at around a hundred billion dollars in net worth, compared to Trump's self-claimed eight plus billion. Trump's praise of Putin fits with a relatively insignificant billionaire nestling inside the rectum of the world's wealthiest man.
The last Republican debate showed the usual collective hard-on for war, the military, and killing "bad guys." They say this crap because they think they have to. None of them have any military experience. None of them have been shot at. Some of them want a no-fly zone over Syria, speaking about that as if Russia would go for it, and Governor Christie insisting he would order the shooting down of Russian planes violating the zone. He and the others seem to have missed Aristotle's ideas about cause and effect.
Living in America now, watching the money-corrupted political process unfold, feels like waiting for something uncomfortable to end. Ten and a half months until the election. Citizens United made this prolongation of capitalistic democracy possible, and its supposed benefactors, the candidates, show strain. Bush looks like he's trapped in a cave. Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Lindsay Graham, Rick Santorum for God's sake, none of them, and a few above them in the polls like Fiorina, have no chance of gaining the nomination. Why don't they stop? Trump, meanwhile, doesn't have to surf the Citizens United wave, due to his own cash. He gets free publicity every day on cable news. He campaigns with Twitter. He doesn't give a shit about the American people, or the people of the world. He's a negative zone where those who don't want to hold their worst natures back anymore can enter and feel good about themselves because their leader is a nihilistic shit, like the man who runs ISIS.
"Political correctness" is supposedly, in Trump's view, "destroying America." Horseshit. He uses the term in the same way some of his hate-monger predecessors like Joseph McCarthy used the word "Communism." He's not the only one of his fellows on debate stages who condemns political correctness. One of the candidates (I can't remember who) said we've been fighting "politically correct wars," a meaningless sentence, except that it contains the words "politically correct," sounds that stimulate the non-thinking reptile brain. I suppose that Chris Christie's idea of a politically incorrect war would be one with Russia.
I'm not unconvinced that some tenth graders would make smarter and more humane presidential candidates than most of the line-up we're faced with.
As Devo put it, "Are we not men?"
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Earlier tonight the Republican presidential candidates assembled on a stage in a Las Vegas casino owned by Sheldon Adelson, a man who in 2012 so believed wholeheartedly in the suitability of cynical fuck Newt Gingrich as president that he spent millions of dollars on that ridiculous lost cause, overwhelmed eventually by Mitt Romney's backers, another batch of money-wasting fools.
The main debate was preceded by the "kids' table" debate, featuring four sad-looking candidates who will not be president: Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, and Rick Santorum.
Rick Santorum? He's running for president? When I saw him talking about something it occurred to me that I didn't even know he was a contender. I knew about Pataki and the other two, but hearing Santorum talk about terrorism and war made him seem like a caller phoning a right wing radio program.
The main debate on CNN was presented as if we were watching a trailer for a Rocky film blended with hype for the Independence Day sequel. These candidates, and their lunacy, increasingly blend our world's reality with the fictions of meddling minds subjectively projecting their contents into the public mind, conning many into believing in ideas with no basis in fact. Donald Trump's power fantasies of mass deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, culturally-based surveillance of Muslims, of muscular and punishing warfare, advocacy of torture and the banning of all Muslims from entering the U.S., make him the loudest and most extreme voice among his colleagues seeking the Oval Office. The others, though, in their stridency and enthusiasm for sometimes inhuman solutions (like eliminating the Affordable Care Act, thus sticking it to millions of formerly uninsured poor and lower middle class Americans saved by Obama's best accomplishment), sound like baby Trumps, willing to fuck over millions here and abroad for the sake of satisfying the powerful interests and individuals who seek to place their marionettes in the White House.
The parts of the main debate I saw had Trump, when he did get to speak, often insulting the other candidates, ripping into Jeb Bush at one point after the latter criticized his proposals, making fairly reasonable comments about a dangerous piece of shit standing a few feet away. As Trump predictably dismissed and denigrated Bush, I felt a little sorry for Florida's former governor, a rare emotion for me in the case of a Bush family member. He's got lots of money behind him, but he doesn't have a chance against the upstart Trump, who bullies Bush even after having bullied him relentlessly in past months. Trump does kick a man when he's down.
He also reignites petty differences. It should serve as an example of what kind of president he would be when we consider his resurgent enmity toward Megyn Kelly of Fox News. Recall that Trump resented her question about his attitudes towards women at a debate last August. He tweeted ridiculous, silly, and insulting things about Kelly, suggesting she was menstruating at the time of the debate. Kelly held her tongue, proving herself capable of something Trump has none of: dignity.
In the past few days, Kelly on her weeknight program misquoted Trump's latest poll number as fifteen, when it was actually twenty-seven. Trump (I imagine him tweeting while sitting on his favorite toilet in Trump Tower) went after Kelly--"She said it's fifteen!" An emotionally disturbed child might voice similar complaints. He went on in his tweets, attacking Kelly and CNN, too, hoping that in the debate, "...they treat me fairly." This kind of petulant tweet-speak appeals only, I suspect, to Trump's unthinking followers, who grow increasingly angry toward their Fuhrer's detractors. Someone holding up a Black Lives Matter sign and shouting protests at a recent Trump rally was escorted out amid vicious cries and a shout of "Sieg heil" from someone. The Brownshirt-like activity at these gatherings seems to be escalating, while in America at large, the fulfillment of Trump's hate rhetoric against Muslims can be seen in the fire bombing of a San Bernardino mosque, of vandalism against mosques and Islamic centers elsewhere in this country, and threats against individual Muslims. Those who think this isn't serious and reminiscent of a northern European country in the early 1930s need to take their heads out of their asses.
Trump, a voice fomenting this intolerance, blithely gets away with it--condemned by critics in the news media, yes, but still not treated as a growing threat to peace here and abroad. He and his fellow Republicans running for president, all of them with varying degrees of hard-on for power at the expense of the disenfranchised, look like a row of dolts pointing guns at America's, and the world's, head, all believing they're doing good works.
Not that I believe in the Devil, but the Devil is a clever son of a bitch.
Vic Neptune
The main debate was preceded by the "kids' table" debate, featuring four sad-looking candidates who will not be president: Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, and Rick Santorum.
Rick Santorum? He's running for president? When I saw him talking about something it occurred to me that I didn't even know he was a contender. I knew about Pataki and the other two, but hearing Santorum talk about terrorism and war made him seem like a caller phoning a right wing radio program.
The main debate on CNN was presented as if we were watching a trailer for a Rocky film blended with hype for the Independence Day sequel. These candidates, and their lunacy, increasingly blend our world's reality with the fictions of meddling minds subjectively projecting their contents into the public mind, conning many into believing in ideas with no basis in fact. Donald Trump's power fantasies of mass deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, culturally-based surveillance of Muslims, of muscular and punishing warfare, advocacy of torture and the banning of all Muslims from entering the U.S., make him the loudest and most extreme voice among his colleagues seeking the Oval Office. The others, though, in their stridency and enthusiasm for sometimes inhuman solutions (like eliminating the Affordable Care Act, thus sticking it to millions of formerly uninsured poor and lower middle class Americans saved by Obama's best accomplishment), sound like baby Trumps, willing to fuck over millions here and abroad for the sake of satisfying the powerful interests and individuals who seek to place their marionettes in the White House.
The parts of the main debate I saw had Trump, when he did get to speak, often insulting the other candidates, ripping into Jeb Bush at one point after the latter criticized his proposals, making fairly reasonable comments about a dangerous piece of shit standing a few feet away. As Trump predictably dismissed and denigrated Bush, I felt a little sorry for Florida's former governor, a rare emotion for me in the case of a Bush family member. He's got lots of money behind him, but he doesn't have a chance against the upstart Trump, who bullies Bush even after having bullied him relentlessly in past months. Trump does kick a man when he's down.
He also reignites petty differences. It should serve as an example of what kind of president he would be when we consider his resurgent enmity toward Megyn Kelly of Fox News. Recall that Trump resented her question about his attitudes towards women at a debate last August. He tweeted ridiculous, silly, and insulting things about Kelly, suggesting she was menstruating at the time of the debate. Kelly held her tongue, proving herself capable of something Trump has none of: dignity.
In the past few days, Kelly on her weeknight program misquoted Trump's latest poll number as fifteen, when it was actually twenty-seven. Trump (I imagine him tweeting while sitting on his favorite toilet in Trump Tower) went after Kelly--"She said it's fifteen!" An emotionally disturbed child might voice similar complaints. He went on in his tweets, attacking Kelly and CNN, too, hoping that in the debate, "...they treat me fairly." This kind of petulant tweet-speak appeals only, I suspect, to Trump's unthinking followers, who grow increasingly angry toward their Fuhrer's detractors. Someone holding up a Black Lives Matter sign and shouting protests at a recent Trump rally was escorted out amid vicious cries and a shout of "Sieg heil" from someone. The Brownshirt-like activity at these gatherings seems to be escalating, while in America at large, the fulfillment of Trump's hate rhetoric against Muslims can be seen in the fire bombing of a San Bernardino mosque, of vandalism against mosques and Islamic centers elsewhere in this country, and threats against individual Muslims. Those who think this isn't serious and reminiscent of a northern European country in the early 1930s need to take their heads out of their asses.
Trump, a voice fomenting this intolerance, blithely gets away with it--condemned by critics in the news media, yes, but still not treated as a growing threat to peace here and abroad. He and his fellow Republicans running for president, all of them with varying degrees of hard-on for power at the expense of the disenfranchised, look like a row of dolts pointing guns at America's, and the world's, head, all believing they're doing good works.
Not that I believe in the Devil, but the Devil is a clever son of a bitch.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, December 10, 2015
I will never write a book about the Trump presidential campaign, but if I were to do so, it would be called Logrolling With the Devil.
Due partly to a need to disengage mentally from musings on American politics, if only for a few days, and partly to an energy-draining sinus infection, I didn't feel like writing, although I absorbed the latest domestic and foreign news.
The massacre in San Bernardino, California, perpetrated by a husband and wife team; one, an American citizen, the other from Pakistan originally but later from Saudi Arabia, bore hallmarks of "Huh?" and "What the fuck?" They met through an online match site. He traveled to Saudi Arabia, they married in Mecca, returned to California. The FBI investigation into the massacre and its creators revealed, to some surprise in the news media and in the vocal cords of some government authorities, that the couple, one of them dubbed by a terrorism "expert" on MSNBC as "the Black Widow,"--even though that term applied to the wife makes no sense--planned their attack for a year, building IEDs and modifying weaponry in their garage, sometimes late into the night with accompanying loud music.
Syed Farook, the husband and all-American terrorist, worked as a food inspector, making a decent salary for a middle class family of three. He and his wife were allegedly "radicalized" into close sympathy with anti-West/American groups, i.e. spawn of al-Qaeda, in 2013, a year before news broke in America of the existence of ISIS, itself a child of al-Qaeda in Iraq, itself inspired by al-Qaeda, itself originally Mujahideen fighters financed by the CIA and Osama bin Laden's construction family-based fortune with business ties to powerful groups and individuals worldwide, including members of the Bush family.
The Farooks, committing themselves to fucking over at least a small part of America as early as two years ago (and Syed discussed with a friend the perpetrating of a massacre in 2012), before ISIS became known as a social network success, inspiring and recruiting through newer media that perhaps make irrelevant and pointless old methods of aerial bombardment and invasion, did not "fit the profile" of those in the West who might be disaffected targets of ISIS propaganda. Young alienated Muslim men, rather, would more likely fit the profile. The Farooks, however, got going with their violent plans in the midst of marriage, with pregnancy and baby thrown in. The husband had what many would consider a good life: a good job, a faithful wife, a child, extended family support, American citizenship. These elements do not add up, rationally, to people wanting to annihilate others and then themselves.
Were the Farooks life-loving enough to provide their baby with a decent car seat? Yes. What is, as some young people used to say, "totally whack" about this couple, apart from their murderousness, is their act of leaving their six-month old baby with Farook's mother, and telling her they had a medical appointment. True in a way, because what they did after that caused a lot of people in San Bernardino to require help from doctors.
The example of a pregnant woman plotting with her husband a crime involving blasting the shit out of a lot of people with guns and bombs does not "fit the profile." It makes no sense from what we think of as the nurturing archetype of the mother. It does, perhaps, make sense in terms of what war, oppression, tyranny, terrorism by individuals and by states, does to some people and their descendants who often witness and feel the horrors.
The Arab Spring happened in response to decades of U.S. and other western state-supported dictatorships pushing down on their peoples, until finally a time came of social media allowing the possibility of getting messages and images out to the world that made it difficult for U.S.-supported bastards like Hosni Mubarak to maintain power (bright flashlight beam on cockroach). The same social media also became useful to malicious people with determination, guns, bombs, seized land from severely weakened states and the oil underneath (due ultimately to the acquisitive and inhumane decisions of Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and others, all of whom were retroactively pardoned by President Obama to prevent them from ever facing war crimes charges in the Hague, making Obama an accessory after the fact as one aiding and comforting war criminals).
The world seems to be trying to become one. With the fulfillment of the Information Age, new technologies in communication are making everybody's business known to everybody. It is a time of bloody birth struggle, but trying to fight the malign forces growing within it using nineteenth and twentieth century invasion methods and believing those tactics will "destroy ISIS," is ignoring San Bernardino, Paris on November 13, and the indefatigable sometimes evil spirit of humanity to adapt to new situations, inventing new tactics and strategies while hidebound minds in the Pentagon and equivalent mass-death-to-others mentalities in governments around the world believe, like the Farooks, the Paris and Bamako, Mali, attackers, that shooting and blowing up people will solve humanity's problems, and not, as Jesus knew, cause more violence, which will cause more violence.
Donald Trump's recent proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States has been condemned even by Benjamin Netanyahu, a prolific killer of Muslims. Trump's poll numbers orgasmed after he declared his anti-American, unconstitutional, and illegal proposal. Within twenty-four hours of his cheered (by supporters) comments, a person in Philadelphia tossed from a moving car a pig's head at a mosque. Trump stimulates hatred of Muslims, of Mexicans, of women, even of himself. He also, from a national security standpoint, alienates Muslims generally around the world. The frontrunner of the Republican party's struggle to regain the White House has proposed murdering families of ISIS members (a war crime, for deliberately targeting civilians is regarded thus by those who try to enforce international law, and it's also a practice of terrorists, making Trump a self-admitted advocate of terrorism).
Trump now wants to close the borders to all Muslims, telling MSNBC's Willie Geist that everyone trying to enter the U.S. will be asked, "Are you a Muslim?" Leaving it there, he didn't acknowledge that simply replying "No" to that unconstitutional question would defeat his method of filtering out all Muslims. One need only lie to get into the country. Trump knows about lying, but Geist didn't bother to press him on the epic stupidity of his proposed identification method.
Trump's alienation of Muslims plays into the hands of ISIS recruitment. Numerous politicians, security and intelligence experts, and retired military officers in America have acknowledged this. Given this widely held view, why hasn't the Secret Service-protected Trump been visited by the FBI? Aiding and abetting ISIS recruitment would get a normal American investigated, possibly arrested and prosecuted, resulting perhaps in prison. Trump, with his bullhorn-style, has more influence than some schmuck operating at a low level in favor in ISIS. Is Trump not helping ISIS? Is ISIS America's declared enemy or not?
If this dangerous new rhetorical bigotry won't dislodge Trump from his side of the log, we should acknowledge that even wealthy traitors, if their ratings are high enough, can walk freely, saying whatever they want, polluting their own countries with lies about innocent citizens, about faiths not their own, all for the glorification of the one true God, Donald J. Trump.
Vic Neptune
Due partly to a need to disengage mentally from musings on American politics, if only for a few days, and partly to an energy-draining sinus infection, I didn't feel like writing, although I absorbed the latest domestic and foreign news.
The massacre in San Bernardino, California, perpetrated by a husband and wife team; one, an American citizen, the other from Pakistan originally but later from Saudi Arabia, bore hallmarks of "Huh?" and "What the fuck?" They met through an online match site. He traveled to Saudi Arabia, they married in Mecca, returned to California. The FBI investigation into the massacre and its creators revealed, to some surprise in the news media and in the vocal cords of some government authorities, that the couple, one of them dubbed by a terrorism "expert" on MSNBC as "the Black Widow,"--even though that term applied to the wife makes no sense--planned their attack for a year, building IEDs and modifying weaponry in their garage, sometimes late into the night with accompanying loud music.
Syed Farook, the husband and all-American terrorist, worked as a food inspector, making a decent salary for a middle class family of three. He and his wife were allegedly "radicalized" into close sympathy with anti-West/American groups, i.e. spawn of al-Qaeda, in 2013, a year before news broke in America of the existence of ISIS, itself a child of al-Qaeda in Iraq, itself inspired by al-Qaeda, itself originally Mujahideen fighters financed by the CIA and Osama bin Laden's construction family-based fortune with business ties to powerful groups and individuals worldwide, including members of the Bush family.
The Farooks, committing themselves to fucking over at least a small part of America as early as two years ago (and Syed discussed with a friend the perpetrating of a massacre in 2012), before ISIS became known as a social network success, inspiring and recruiting through newer media that perhaps make irrelevant and pointless old methods of aerial bombardment and invasion, did not "fit the profile" of those in the West who might be disaffected targets of ISIS propaganda. Young alienated Muslim men, rather, would more likely fit the profile. The Farooks, however, got going with their violent plans in the midst of marriage, with pregnancy and baby thrown in. The husband had what many would consider a good life: a good job, a faithful wife, a child, extended family support, American citizenship. These elements do not add up, rationally, to people wanting to annihilate others and then themselves.
Were the Farooks life-loving enough to provide their baby with a decent car seat? Yes. What is, as some young people used to say, "totally whack" about this couple, apart from their murderousness, is their act of leaving their six-month old baby with Farook's mother, and telling her they had a medical appointment. True in a way, because what they did after that caused a lot of people in San Bernardino to require help from doctors.
The example of a pregnant woman plotting with her husband a crime involving blasting the shit out of a lot of people with guns and bombs does not "fit the profile." It makes no sense from what we think of as the nurturing archetype of the mother. It does, perhaps, make sense in terms of what war, oppression, tyranny, terrorism by individuals and by states, does to some people and their descendants who often witness and feel the horrors.
The Arab Spring happened in response to decades of U.S. and other western state-supported dictatorships pushing down on their peoples, until finally a time came of social media allowing the possibility of getting messages and images out to the world that made it difficult for U.S.-supported bastards like Hosni Mubarak to maintain power (bright flashlight beam on cockroach). The same social media also became useful to malicious people with determination, guns, bombs, seized land from severely weakened states and the oil underneath (due ultimately to the acquisitive and inhumane decisions of Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and others, all of whom were retroactively pardoned by President Obama to prevent them from ever facing war crimes charges in the Hague, making Obama an accessory after the fact as one aiding and comforting war criminals).
The world seems to be trying to become one. With the fulfillment of the Information Age, new technologies in communication are making everybody's business known to everybody. It is a time of bloody birth struggle, but trying to fight the malign forces growing within it using nineteenth and twentieth century invasion methods and believing those tactics will "destroy ISIS," is ignoring San Bernardino, Paris on November 13, and the indefatigable sometimes evil spirit of humanity to adapt to new situations, inventing new tactics and strategies while hidebound minds in the Pentagon and equivalent mass-death-to-others mentalities in governments around the world believe, like the Farooks, the Paris and Bamako, Mali, attackers, that shooting and blowing up people will solve humanity's problems, and not, as Jesus knew, cause more violence, which will cause more violence.
Donald Trump's recent proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States has been condemned even by Benjamin Netanyahu, a prolific killer of Muslims. Trump's poll numbers orgasmed after he declared his anti-American, unconstitutional, and illegal proposal. Within twenty-four hours of his cheered (by supporters) comments, a person in Philadelphia tossed from a moving car a pig's head at a mosque. Trump stimulates hatred of Muslims, of Mexicans, of women, even of himself. He also, from a national security standpoint, alienates Muslims generally around the world. The frontrunner of the Republican party's struggle to regain the White House has proposed murdering families of ISIS members (a war crime, for deliberately targeting civilians is regarded thus by those who try to enforce international law, and it's also a practice of terrorists, making Trump a self-admitted advocate of terrorism).
Trump now wants to close the borders to all Muslims, telling MSNBC's Willie Geist that everyone trying to enter the U.S. will be asked, "Are you a Muslim?" Leaving it there, he didn't acknowledge that simply replying "No" to that unconstitutional question would defeat his method of filtering out all Muslims. One need only lie to get into the country. Trump knows about lying, but Geist didn't bother to press him on the epic stupidity of his proposed identification method.
Trump's alienation of Muslims plays into the hands of ISIS recruitment. Numerous politicians, security and intelligence experts, and retired military officers in America have acknowledged this. Given this widely held view, why hasn't the Secret Service-protected Trump been visited by the FBI? Aiding and abetting ISIS recruitment would get a normal American investigated, possibly arrested and prosecuted, resulting perhaps in prison. Trump, with his bullhorn-style, has more influence than some schmuck operating at a low level in favor in ISIS. Is Trump not helping ISIS? Is ISIS America's declared enemy or not?
If this dangerous new rhetorical bigotry won't dislodge Trump from his side of the log, we should acknowledge that even wealthy traitors, if their ratings are high enough, can walk freely, saying whatever they want, polluting their own countries with lies about innocent citizens, about faiths not their own, all for the glorification of the one true God, Donald J. Trump.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, December 5, 2015
I heard that El Nino is causing the unseasonably warm weather where I live. Today, high clear blue sky, temperatures in the forties Fahrenheit, less of a December, more like the second week of November. Climate change deniers contemplate a blizzard in March and call it a refutation of humanity-caused climatic eventual doom. It's cold, I slipped on the sidewalk and strained my back, therefore there's nothing to the idea of a Greenhouse Effect coming our way from air pollution.
Venus, Earth's nearest planetary neighbor, seems to have had a runaway Greenhouse Effect going on for millions of years, making the temperature in its mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere hot enough to melt lead. I've never heard or read why this happened, but I did read several years ago in Astronomy magazine about how Venus, Earth, and Mars, between three and a half to four billion years ago, all had planet-spanning water oceans with scattered land masses. A traveler in a spacecraft visiting our inner Solar System in those years would've seen three planets with viable life potential, all starting out using the same deck of cards. The traveler could've landed on all three worlds, collected soil, rock, and primitive bacteriological samples, then gone away to visit other star systems.
A descendent of that traveler, journeying in a far more sophisticated ship, visiting our Solar System now, would find Mars cold and dry (though underground water and evidence of water flows have been discovered), Earth abundant with life, still possessing its oceans, and Venus a hot cloud-covered hell with sulphuric acid rain and a day lasting longer than its year, so slow is its rotation.
What happened to these worlds that were so similar at one point? Time's passage causes divergences in a single human lifetime; one doesn't necessarily end up doing what one thought of doing early in life--at the age of ten I decided to become an astronomer, but didn't. Divergences over millions and billions of years are more pronounced than we, in several decades, can achieve. Mountains rise up and flatten over hundreds of millions of years, but to Earth's life perspective, these are like what to us would be periods of a few years, when, for instance, we spend some seasons with friends, but later on never see them again. In other words, the Appalachian Mountains used to be very hard to climb.
Venus and Mars had oceans, Earth still has a planet-wide ocean with several names, but there were times when atmospheric and local stellar conditions made Earth's water supply do strange things, like the period when the entire planet was covered with ice, a cosmic cue ball.
Climate change deniers are right when they say that the planet's environmental conditions alter over time, having nothing to do with our actions. They're wrong when they claim that curbing greenhouse gas emissions is futile and only hurts business. In time, if their belief about this prevails, their descendants will find it impossible to sell their products to dead customers.
Earth, fortunately, before its destruction by the growing red future Sun, will survive us.
Vic Neptune
Venus, Earth's nearest planetary neighbor, seems to have had a runaway Greenhouse Effect going on for millions of years, making the temperature in its mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere hot enough to melt lead. I've never heard or read why this happened, but I did read several years ago in Astronomy magazine about how Venus, Earth, and Mars, between three and a half to four billion years ago, all had planet-spanning water oceans with scattered land masses. A traveler in a spacecraft visiting our inner Solar System in those years would've seen three planets with viable life potential, all starting out using the same deck of cards. The traveler could've landed on all three worlds, collected soil, rock, and primitive bacteriological samples, then gone away to visit other star systems.
A descendent of that traveler, journeying in a far more sophisticated ship, visiting our Solar System now, would find Mars cold and dry (though underground water and evidence of water flows have been discovered), Earth abundant with life, still possessing its oceans, and Venus a hot cloud-covered hell with sulphuric acid rain and a day lasting longer than its year, so slow is its rotation.
What happened to these worlds that were so similar at one point? Time's passage causes divergences in a single human lifetime; one doesn't necessarily end up doing what one thought of doing early in life--at the age of ten I decided to become an astronomer, but didn't. Divergences over millions and billions of years are more pronounced than we, in several decades, can achieve. Mountains rise up and flatten over hundreds of millions of years, but to Earth's life perspective, these are like what to us would be periods of a few years, when, for instance, we spend some seasons with friends, but later on never see them again. In other words, the Appalachian Mountains used to be very hard to climb.
Venus and Mars had oceans, Earth still has a planet-wide ocean with several names, but there were times when atmospheric and local stellar conditions made Earth's water supply do strange things, like the period when the entire planet was covered with ice, a cosmic cue ball.
Climate change deniers are right when they say that the planet's environmental conditions alter over time, having nothing to do with our actions. They're wrong when they claim that curbing greenhouse gas emissions is futile and only hurts business. In time, if their belief about this prevails, their descendants will find it impossible to sell their products to dead customers.
Earth, fortunately, before its destruction by the growing red future Sun, will survive us.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Secretary of Defense Ashton (not Kutcher) Carter told the House Armed Services Committee that the war machine is giving birth to a "specialized expeditionary targeting force," to be sent to Iraq, the country President Obama promised we'd be done with militarily during his administration.
This force will conduct raids, rescue hostages, and, judging by their wordy title, will not act as U.S. troops on the ground. Still, they'll have guns and other weaponry, and will fight and kill ISIS fighters, as well as capture ISIS leaders, if they're successful.
Carter is the latest in a series of meaty-looking war department leaders, always acting before the camera with their "this is serious" faces, and "we've got a tough road ahead of us, make no mistake" tones. His predecessor, Leon Panetta, revealed in a recent documentary that one of his most difficult moments as defense secretary came when he was attending a funeral. A phone call came at the cemetery. The president wanted him to know about a terrorist currently in the sights of a killer drone in the sky. The wrinkle? Women and children in the potential blast zone. The decision was left up to Panetta, causing me to wonder about Obama's mind, dismissing the killings of women and children by ordering his Defense Department tool to decide whether or not to "take the shot."
As related by the documentarian, Panetta decided to kill the terrorist, and, "there was collateral damage."
Hearing this story made me sick, not patriotic. I guess there's something wrong with me for regarding President Obama as a cold-blooded man who tacitly accepts the dismemberment by missiles and bombs of women and children, and simultaneously condemns the up close and personal beheadings committed by ISIS killers. Am I crazy for being against both methods of obliterating lives?
I've written elsewhere about the use and misuse of language by those seeking and wielding power. "Specialized expeditionary targeting force" doesn't sound any less mechanical and inhuman than most Pentagon-derived word clusters, but coming now, in relation to the Paris attack of November 13, and the continuing (and continuous) war carrying on for Dick Cheney's pleasure since 2001, it just seems like another mistake doomed to succeed, as a mistake. Senator McCain has long argued for American troops in their thousands on the ground in Syria and Iraq to combat ISIS. He's right in that a ground war of major strength is needed to fully beat the motherfuckers. He's wrong in that such an escalation of the war will give ISIS what it wants: lots of Americans to kill, capture, torture, and fuck with in ways we haven't yet seen.
In France, Donald Trump-style, three mosques have been closed because "radical" ideas have been spoken there. This is insane. If mosques do better as recruitment centers for ISIS and other terror groups than the Internet, the world must be revolving in a pre-1990s reality. Continuing war in the Middle East by the U.S. and its allies only ensures the continuing and future existence of ISIS and whatever comes after it to act as politicians' cause in fighting evil come the next campaign season. Donald Trump and all the other candidates have no idea what to do, practically and humanely, when it comes to fixing the problems America helped create when its foreign policy makers decided to start fucking with the world after hearing about the sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898.
A specialized expeditionary targeting force is really just Special Forces, the kind that Kathryn Bigelow makes movies about, the elite teams who see green when they stalk at night, the trained killers who get lauded almost to the point of sexual excitement by pundits and politicians. Obama's war practice is one of specialization, maybe because he's such a cerebral SOB. Robot aircraft firing missiles at little kids who get in the way of terror suspects, operated in a different hemisphere by a fellow with a joystick, impersonal long-distance obliteration; not getting the hands dirty, like John McCain wants to make others do.
Send your specialized expeditionary targeting force, Mr. President. You could call them repairmen if you wanted to, but really, they're soldiers entering a space you said we were done with. Liar.
Vic Neptune
This force will conduct raids, rescue hostages, and, judging by their wordy title, will not act as U.S. troops on the ground. Still, they'll have guns and other weaponry, and will fight and kill ISIS fighters, as well as capture ISIS leaders, if they're successful.
Carter is the latest in a series of meaty-looking war department leaders, always acting before the camera with their "this is serious" faces, and "we've got a tough road ahead of us, make no mistake" tones. His predecessor, Leon Panetta, revealed in a recent documentary that one of his most difficult moments as defense secretary came when he was attending a funeral. A phone call came at the cemetery. The president wanted him to know about a terrorist currently in the sights of a killer drone in the sky. The wrinkle? Women and children in the potential blast zone. The decision was left up to Panetta, causing me to wonder about Obama's mind, dismissing the killings of women and children by ordering his Defense Department tool to decide whether or not to "take the shot."
As related by the documentarian, Panetta decided to kill the terrorist, and, "there was collateral damage."
Hearing this story made me sick, not patriotic. I guess there's something wrong with me for regarding President Obama as a cold-blooded man who tacitly accepts the dismemberment by missiles and bombs of women and children, and simultaneously condemns the up close and personal beheadings committed by ISIS killers. Am I crazy for being against both methods of obliterating lives?
I've written elsewhere about the use and misuse of language by those seeking and wielding power. "Specialized expeditionary targeting force" doesn't sound any less mechanical and inhuman than most Pentagon-derived word clusters, but coming now, in relation to the Paris attack of November 13, and the continuing (and continuous) war carrying on for Dick Cheney's pleasure since 2001, it just seems like another mistake doomed to succeed, as a mistake. Senator McCain has long argued for American troops in their thousands on the ground in Syria and Iraq to combat ISIS. He's right in that a ground war of major strength is needed to fully beat the motherfuckers. He's wrong in that such an escalation of the war will give ISIS what it wants: lots of Americans to kill, capture, torture, and fuck with in ways we haven't yet seen.
In France, Donald Trump-style, three mosques have been closed because "radical" ideas have been spoken there. This is insane. If mosques do better as recruitment centers for ISIS and other terror groups than the Internet, the world must be revolving in a pre-1990s reality. Continuing war in the Middle East by the U.S. and its allies only ensures the continuing and future existence of ISIS and whatever comes after it to act as politicians' cause in fighting evil come the next campaign season. Donald Trump and all the other candidates have no idea what to do, practically and humanely, when it comes to fixing the problems America helped create when its foreign policy makers decided to start fucking with the world after hearing about the sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898.
A specialized expeditionary targeting force is really just Special Forces, the kind that Kathryn Bigelow makes movies about, the elite teams who see green when they stalk at night, the trained killers who get lauded almost to the point of sexual excitement by pundits and politicians. Obama's war practice is one of specialization, maybe because he's such a cerebral SOB. Robot aircraft firing missiles at little kids who get in the way of terror suspects, operated in a different hemisphere by a fellow with a joystick, impersonal long-distance obliteration; not getting the hands dirty, like John McCain wants to make others do.
Send your specialized expeditionary targeting force, Mr. President. You could call them repairmen if you wanted to, but really, they're soldiers entering a space you said we were done with. Liar.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
On Donald Trump's prime morning forum for airing his ideas to airhead TV personalities, Fox and Friends, the Republican frontrunner spoke in favor of mass murder:
"We're fighting a very politically correct war. And the other thing with the terrorists--you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourselves. They say they don't care about their lives. But you have to take out their families."
Co-host Steve Doocy, the male blonde sitting next to blonde Elizabeth Hasselbeck, then nodded as if approving of something he probably wouldn't ever want to witness firsthand.
Trump uttered this abominable statement after the other host, Brian Kilmeade, brought up the concern over civilian casualties resulting from what Trump's "hitting em hard" throw-big-rocks-at- western-Asia strategy implies. In true Trump contradictory fashion, he said he would do his "absolute best" to keep civilian casualties low, but then he used one of his favorite button-pressing expressions, "politically correct." Obama, I guess, has killed Yemeni and Pakistani civilians in drone strikes in a politically correct way, which probably feels the same as when one is doing it rudely. The fracture between Trump and the English language is the former's disrespect for the meanings of words.
It's one thing to boast, and another thing to do. There's no telling what Trump will do if he's ever the president. Any non-believer of Trump's bullshit knows he will run into obstacles from the government's other two branches. Howard Fineman of The Huffington Post, though, pointed out, convincingly I think, that Trump's self-centered personality may, if he's elected president, turn him into a Francisco Franco-like object of a leadership cult. Then it will all be about Trump. The fucker's in the habit of putting his name on everything he makes. Not even Khufu, a massively more powerful person than Trump, put his name on the Great Pyramid.
Trump's mouth lets out a barrage of words, and maybe he doesn't mean even half of what he says, but those who believe in him are chumps, fallen for a con man who's using them to glorify himself. News media outlets are not free of his spell. A man goes on television in America in 2015 and announces he wants to murder women and children in the Middle East. The same man, instead of being watched by the police as a potentially dangerous person, is granted taxpayer-funded Secret Service protection. He's given free advertising every time he opens his mouth in public, getting far more attention than even Hillary Clinton, whose poll numbers surpass his. He's allowed by journalists to get away with egregious lies and distortions of the truth, with vagueness and self-contradictory statements that would cause Jeb Bush to lose poll points, and, most important, news coverage, and still he plows forward, manure spreader working efficiently, heading a campaign with its headquarters in a golden tower where he happens to live. Like Adolf Hitler, the first political candidate to ever campaign by airplane, Trump flies from speech to speech, never having to actually stay in a mundane state like Iowa, like his competitors, who don't ride in helicopters and large passenger planes with their names written on the fuselages.
Yes, he's a celebrity, he's "entertaining," if a man making fun of the involuntary movements of a journalist afflicted with motor control problems is entertaining. He wants to kill women and children--how hilarious can he get?
Trump supporters, microphones before their faces, defend him by saying his "untruths" don't matter to them, because "he's a good manager, and he'll get things done." That could end up being the case, but I fear that Trump, if elected, will simply get the things done that he wants done. Beholden to special interests, Trump will be the only special interest. Like his tax proposal that just happens to benefit himself, we can apply any area of American life to the same idea: how will President Trump benefit? How can he get the best deal? How can he make the best killing (literal and figurative)?
When words mean nothing, they can mean anything. Donald Trump, voila, is the man who destroys meaning.
Vic Neptune
"We're fighting a very politically correct war. And the other thing with the terrorists--you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourselves. They say they don't care about their lives. But you have to take out their families."
Co-host Steve Doocy, the male blonde sitting next to blonde Elizabeth Hasselbeck, then nodded as if approving of something he probably wouldn't ever want to witness firsthand.
Trump uttered this abominable statement after the other host, Brian Kilmeade, brought up the concern over civilian casualties resulting from what Trump's "hitting em hard" throw-big-rocks-at- western-Asia strategy implies. In true Trump contradictory fashion, he said he would do his "absolute best" to keep civilian casualties low, but then he used one of his favorite button-pressing expressions, "politically correct." Obama, I guess, has killed Yemeni and Pakistani civilians in drone strikes in a politically correct way, which probably feels the same as when one is doing it rudely. The fracture between Trump and the English language is the former's disrespect for the meanings of words.
It's one thing to boast, and another thing to do. There's no telling what Trump will do if he's ever the president. Any non-believer of Trump's bullshit knows he will run into obstacles from the government's other two branches. Howard Fineman of The Huffington Post, though, pointed out, convincingly I think, that Trump's self-centered personality may, if he's elected president, turn him into a Francisco Franco-like object of a leadership cult. Then it will all be about Trump. The fucker's in the habit of putting his name on everything he makes. Not even Khufu, a massively more powerful person than Trump, put his name on the Great Pyramid.
Trump's mouth lets out a barrage of words, and maybe he doesn't mean even half of what he says, but those who believe in him are chumps, fallen for a con man who's using them to glorify himself. News media outlets are not free of his spell. A man goes on television in America in 2015 and announces he wants to murder women and children in the Middle East. The same man, instead of being watched by the police as a potentially dangerous person, is granted taxpayer-funded Secret Service protection. He's given free advertising every time he opens his mouth in public, getting far more attention than even Hillary Clinton, whose poll numbers surpass his. He's allowed by journalists to get away with egregious lies and distortions of the truth, with vagueness and self-contradictory statements that would cause Jeb Bush to lose poll points, and, most important, news coverage, and still he plows forward, manure spreader working efficiently, heading a campaign with its headquarters in a golden tower where he happens to live. Like Adolf Hitler, the first political candidate to ever campaign by airplane, Trump flies from speech to speech, never having to actually stay in a mundane state like Iowa, like his competitors, who don't ride in helicopters and large passenger planes with their names written on the fuselages.
Yes, he's a celebrity, he's "entertaining," if a man making fun of the involuntary movements of a journalist afflicted with motor control problems is entertaining. He wants to kill women and children--how hilarious can he get?
Trump supporters, microphones before their faces, defend him by saying his "untruths" don't matter to them, because "he's a good manager, and he'll get things done." That could end up being the case, but I fear that Trump, if elected, will simply get the things done that he wants done. Beholden to special interests, Trump will be the only special interest. Like his tax proposal that just happens to benefit himself, we can apply any area of American life to the same idea: how will President Trump benefit? How can he get the best deal? How can he make the best killing (literal and figurative)?
When words mean nothing, they can mean anything. Donald Trump, voila, is the man who destroys meaning.
Vic Neptune
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