The Liar

     During the Super Bowl, Fox News aired Bill O'Reilly interviewing his friend, President Donald Trump.  Trump, friends also with Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, probably pre-taped the interview so he could watch the Super Bowl.  He was a co-founder of the short-lived 1980s pro football league, the USFL.  I watched some of those games thirty years ago, they were entertaining.  At that time I'd never heard of Donald Trump because I didn't live in New York.  I didn't know about his penchant for elongated buildings or his use of ghost writers to put his messages across in books he emblazoned his name upon.  I didn't know he had a Czech wife who later claimed in divorce court he raped her.  I didn't know he would someday infect America with the impulsively projected thought patterns running through his self-obsessed psychotic mind.
     O'Reilly and Trump had an exchange that created affronted comments from numerous pundits, politicians, and news anchors.  O'Reilly, mentioning Vladimir Putin, called him "a killer."  Trump said that we have our killers, too, adding that "we're not innocent."
     Having ordered a raid on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula members in Yemen, the death of one Navy Seal focused on solely by politicians and news media here while the civilians killed, including women and children--Anwar al-Awlaki's eight year old daughter among them--got just the standard lack of compassion we must expect from corporate and state tools, President Trump, too, is "not innocent."  By her own account, he raped his first wife after feeling rage over getting a bad haircut; now, he's culpable in the deaths of Yemeni women and children, just like Barack Obama, who made it into the news yesterday because he went wind-surfing, proving that getting away with mass murder and running a surveillance state can result in fun times in the sun.
     Trump was talking about what happens under another sun when American foreign policy guides destinies of people in other countries minding their own business.  Pundits, politicians, and news anchors condemned or shook their heads at Trump's supposedly shocking claim that U.S. leaders commit egregious acts.  He mentioned as an example the Iraq War, an event most journalists will no longer accept as having been a good idea; yet, a president saying such a bad thing about America rubs even liberals the wrong way, partly because it's Trump saying it, and they hate him, but also because "we're not innocent" scrapes the hide of the wishful idea that this great country is just trying to do good at all times.  It's not the country, as such, but the sons of bitches who've been running it long enough to create an institution not responsive to the needs of common citizenry.  Hence, punishing American civilians with bomb attacks (Boston, for example) or gun massacres (Orlando nightclub) is as stupid, evil, and counter-productive as bombing without regard to civilian well-being in the Middle East and elsewhere.  Yemenis have every right to wish for the criminal prosecution of Barack Obama, but targeting civilians in terror attacks is the same thing the U.S. "defense" establishment does to innocent people who live in lands that America tries to control.
     I recall a passage in Carlos Fuentes's The Orange Tree, in which he questions the idea that Americans have of being innocent, newly sprung, a young and vibrant democracy with no hostile intent towards other nations.  He asks if America was innocent in the Mexican American War, which expanded U.S. territory like a big snake swallowing a pig.  In our time, I ask the journalists offended by Trump's statement if Reagan's use of the Contras to destabilize Nicaragua was the act of an innocent man, utilizing innocent "freedom fighters," as Reagan called them.  Was it our innocence that contributed to Eisenhower and Kennedy wanting to unleash the CIA in Laos, a war lasting fourteen years, making Laos the most bombed country in history?  Were Nixon and Kissinger innocent when they decided to bomb Cambodia?  Is Dick Cheney an innocent man?
     One of the tasks of psychoanalysts is to help patients discover the illusions they have about themselves, face them, and learn from them.  Donald Trump, with his offending statement to Bill O'Reilly, said the first true thing he's said since Inauguration Day.  Having ordered a mission that killed little children, he now knows what Barack Obama knows: long-distance murder is a serious thing, and easy, and he, Trump, gives as much of a shit about those Yemeni kids as does our wind-surfing ex-president.  The way to get emotional distance from the first taste of committing mass murder is to do more mass murder.  Had Hillary Clinton been elected, she would've had no problem slaughtering children.  Her husband, after all, withheld medications from Iraqi children during the 1990s embargo, resulting in the deaths of about half a million of them.  If your husband murdered half a million children, and you never tried to seek justice for those kids, even by just speaking out about it, what kind of person are you if you stay married to him?  Monica Lewinsky's blowjobs got a sordid grand volume of attention even while Bill Clinton was killing Iraqi children, evidently with his wife's, and U.S., consent.
     The photograph of the Clintons smiling broadly in the company of the newly married Melania and Donald Trump over a decade ago shows two First Ladys and two presidents.  I don't have much of a problem with Melania.  She's married to a wealthy and unwisely powerful piece of shit.  In that photograph she stands with three contemptible people who have contributed vastly to world opinion against America, causing some to fight back, creating enough damage (9/11 the spark in this century) to aid American war profiteers in their endeavor to convince us we need them, thus, the security infrastructure and dedication to the law of the bomb and the gun.
     The really bad shits of the world, here and elsewhere, are few in number.  All the people who died in World War One, fighting for dying aristocracies and capitalistic democracies, had no chance, had they survived, of gaining much benefit from the spoils reaped by the motherfuckers who made that war a prolific goldmine.  This pattern, constantly repeated and carried out by Woodrow Wilson in World War One, to people like Dick Cheney in the present day, uses the idea of slogans like "Protect Our Freedoms," and "If You See Something, Say Something."  We're being protected, supposedly, by these greedy disgusting wealthy things while they profit from conflicts they create.  America will only change away from this habit when leaders are elected who want to help, rather than manipulate.      For me, one of Obama's most offensive characteristics is his contribution to an Orwellian way of running the country.  Pol Pot went to the Sorbonne.  Intellectuals sometimes are horrible leaders.  What made Obama think it was ever a good idea to go along with the trend in post-9/11 security psychosis, especially after coming across, when just a Senator, as a potential leader not interested in perpetuating war or making his country a surveillance state?
     Obama spoke beautifully in his speeches, his personal talk in interviews was measured and intelligent, he didn't act like a Trump.  In his mind, though, something caved in to the idea of assassinating people, of using remote control warfare, not occupying countries, although he sent troops back to Iraq, bombed seven majority Muslim countries, didn't end the war in Afghanistan.
     To use news media terms regarding Trump's honest response to Bill O'Reilly, Barack Obama is "innocent."

                                                                            Vic Neptune