Birds of Prey

     President Obama vacations while Trump/Pence visit flood-stricken areas of Louisiana!
     Unlike President Bush's infamous flyover of Hurricane Katrina-devastated New Orleans, which, as dismissed by a Fox News commentator, happened "a long time ago," Obama's brazen lack of compassion for thousands of displaced Louisiana residents reminds the same Fox commentator of his "doing the wave" with Raul Castro at a baseball game in the wake of ISIS attacks in Brussels.
     Obama, tone deaf to suffering, shown on Fox today driving a golf cart (the only vehicle presidents are allowed to drive, I guess).  Trump/Pence, meanwhile, shown on the same channel shaking hands in the sunshine with people taking time from their losses to meet men who will fix America.  Trump, the misogynist/racist/bigot; Pence, the anti-abortion extremist so unpopular in his home state he had to accept a job offer from the most loathsome man in the country.
     I noted a lack of standing water on the ground in the Trump/Pence clips.  Their arrival, via Trump's 757, in Louisiana, was the easiest thing they could do to generate a sense in those who don't think much that they care about people displaced from their homes.  Trump, a vehement opponent of Syrian refugees finding safe haven in the United States, cares nothing for men, women, and children fleeing their country's five year old civil war, a conflict contributed to by Russia, whose oligarchs, some of them at least, may be the Republican candidate's business partners.  I heard George Will, a formerly staunch Republican until Donald Trump came along, say that Trump's refusal to release tax returns has to do with his Russian ties.
     Maybe so; in any case, Paul Manafort resigned from the Trump Campaign.  Arch-demon attaches himself to the Devil's fortunes, finds it a bumpy ride, jumps off before the train crashes.  Maybe Ukraine will take him back.
     I find it strange now that I never saw, except for the mock cabinet meeting photo from Trump Tower, pictures of Manafort and Trump together.  Maybe I've forgotten any I saw.  Whatever the truth, the two standing together smiling doesn't stick in my memory.  Trump, Melania, and the Clintons standing together and smiling at the Trumps' wedding looks in my mind's eye like a still from a conspiracy-themed documentary.
     Due to evidence of Trump's long-term ambitions to be president, related by his friends and business acquaintances, I don't accept as true the theory that he entered this shitstorm to ensure Hillary Clinton's victory, and also to obliterate the Republican Party.  Trump's political ideas lack sophistication.  He's pro-America (the white variety), pro-strength projection, nationalistic, fascistic.  Born in 1946, son of a capitalist with German ancestry, sheltered from harsh realities due to wealth and the draft-dodging tricks of privileged 1960s youth, he's never experienced need, desperation, or danger.  His politics, therefore, amount to a set of viewpoints easy to maintain, because never challenged by real world conditions.
     There's a video of a wounded Syrian child "going viral" worldwide.  A little boy, a bombing victim, sitting in an ambulance, head bloody, looking bewildered, young enough to have had his entire life backgrounded and foregrounded by warfare in a country bombed by Russia, the United States, Turkey, by the Syrian government itself, terrorized by ISIS and other groups.  For some, perhaps, this is a first shocking look at what warfare looks like when children are involved (which they often are).  The image, shown on CNN yesterday, wasn't accompanied by any commentator remarking that the United States does this same wounding and destructive thing to children in Yemen and other nations.  We're supposed to find it horrifying if Russia does it, while the lack of introspection into our own criminality goes without research and without remorse; after all, what is there for us to feel guilty about?  Everything we do is great; we're the greatest country, Joe Biden said so at the Democratic National Convention, a gathering characterized by vigorous patriotism and patriotism's dark brother, pride in military prowess, the same projecting strength that makes small children sit with bloodied heads in ambulances.
     What's Trump really doing in Louisiana?  Did he go to Flint?  His "consoling" trip to flood zones comes at the beginning of the new stage of his Campaign called, "Let Trump be Trump."  He cares about (American) displaced people, you see.  He also plays golf and owns golf courses.  Most of these rich motherfuckers, Obama included, play golf.  It's not a story, especially when the current president is on vacation, just as members of both houses of Congress are also on vacation.  They boogie out of Washington in August.  In August 2001, Bush received the notorious presidential daily briefing warning that Osama bin Laden was planning a major attack in the United States.  He drove his golf cart well, but he couldn't drive the country until 9/11 popularized him, saving his ass by elevating him to a war president, helping create this godforsaken world we now live in, where security, mass surveillance, nationalism, militarism, jingoism, and the degradation of language and warping of truth, rule our lives and shape our thoughts and beliefs.
     In a sense, the president is always on a golf cart or hitting a white ball into the sky, an artificial green land underneath his feet, receiving reports from the actual spacetime continuum, where chatting with Donald Trump in a flood zone means one moment of meeting a celebrity, before not going home, because that isn't possible.

                                                                              Vic Neptune