Sit Your Ass On that Cake

     Donald Trump and his apologists like to boast about how he reacts when someone attacks him.  When "hit," he "hits back ten times harder."
     Setting aside the image of his (likely) flabby old man arms going into fierce action against an adversary, we can imagine his reaction to the recent death of an American special forces soldier in Afghanistan.  Hit back ten times harder.  Unleash MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast), the largest non-nuclear bomb ever detonated, but, technically, not a weapon of mass destruction, even though it has a blast radius of one mile.  I daresay, if MOAB were used against Manhattan, it would be considered a WMD.
     But in this case, in its first combat offense, it was used against ISIS fighters in northeastern Afghanistan.  A U.S. soldier died there, heavy punishment followed, plus, MOAB was first tested in March 2003 (in Florida of all places) as a nasty letter to Saddam Hussein, a warning to watch out, as then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it, adding that the bomb test would possibly help deter a war in Iraq, scaring Hussein, who committed his first murder when he was a teenager and willingly gassed Kurds and Iranian soldiers using U.S.-supplied chemical weapons.  Hussein, who in 1983 met Rumsfeld, sent by President Reagan to Baghdad to assure Iraq's leader that although America had to officially condemn Saddam's gassing of 16,000 Iranian soldiers, that wouldn't adversely affect U.S. assistance to Iraq in its war with Iran.
     These asides just go to point out that the people who run the world in America and elsewhere are evil disgusting motherfuckers.
     A U.S. general in theater asked for use of MOAB.  Some forms have to be signed, I guess.  The weapon itself contains 21,700 pounds of TNT, looks like a fat needle, and is made in Oklahoma.  Some lunatic working for the Air Force Research Laboratory designed it.  The one tested in Florida was painted bright orange, like a prisoner in America's for profit prison system.  The first MOAB freed itself blindingly and earthshakingly from its tubular shape to prove a point: Not only do we plan to sodomize you and your country, Saddam, we'll use weapons like this as well as much less expensive (MOAB costs 16 million dollars per unit) weapons to carry on with an endless war in the Middle East.  This propagandistic use of an extraordinarily ridiculous and powerful bomb (dubbed "Mother of all Bombs") set the tone for future use.  Consider that MOAB hasn't been used in "combat" until Trump ordered its deployment against ISIS in Afghanistan.  Fourteen years of not using MOAB.  The Russians, incidentally, reportedly have a bomb four times more powerful nicknamed, "the Father of all Bombs."
     The blast happened against a complex of "caves and tunnels" in Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border.  Several hundred ISIS fighters were reportedly using this underground network.  We've been assured (convincing only brainwashed Americans who never think carefully about what bombs do--they explode) that the Defense Department and the MOAB-dropping planners did their utmost to ensure civilians wouldn't be hurt and/or killed.  They said nothing about deafening people in the vicinity.  If there were no civilians within several miles of the blast point, we can assume that truly no civilians were killed or hurt.  I don't buy it, though.  For one thing, an army, even a non-state force like ISIS, has non-fighters working with it or for it, whether voluntarily or not.  The ISIS "capitol" in Syria, Raqqa, is a city of a quarter million, most of the inhabitants of which are not ISIS fighters.  Thus, Ted Cruz's Bela Lugosi-like moment during a debate when he expressed his desire to carpet bomb Raqqa led even the rock-faced Wolf Blitzer to seem a little consternated.
     ISIS, to maintain itself, has helpers who cook, clean, maintain domestic order.  They have people who do shit work for them.  They have sex slaves.  Do those people coerced into serving ISIS, whether in Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan, deserve to be atomized by a gargantuan bomb sent to end their lives by a man seeking to impress us and the world with his fantastic military judgment?
     Because human psychology has some truly weird depths, that military judgment has elevated Trump's ratings.  When he attacked a Syrian airbase with fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles launched from U.S. Navy ships, their bright nighttime rocket exhaust causing Brian Williams of MSNBC to wax poetic and get a boner, even while the images were fed to MSNBC and other networks by the Defense Department as the kind of war porn (complete with a ship's American flag silhouetting one of the missile launches) we've seen often since the military compromised the press in the 1991 Gulf War, pundits and network anchorpersons couldn't resist praising the action.
     Bashar al-Assad, we've been assured, without reliable official or journalistic investigation, in the U.S. mainstream media, used chemical weapons for the second time against his own people, even though there's no convincing evidence as yet that he did.  It would be stupid of him to have done so.  In 2013, after the first attack, in reporting by Seymour Hersh, the chemical weapons had probably come via Turkish intelligence agents, supplied to rebels fighting Assad who shot them off to provoke a U.S. reaction.  Obama, to his credit, didn't react, although he went against his promise to react militarily, having called chemical weapons and their use a "red line."  If Assad set off a MOAB of his own, would that prompt such righteous presidential language?  After all, a bomb containing nearly eleven tons of TNT is legal.  So are nuclear weapons, provided a short list of nations possesses them.
     This recent chemical attack, again in rebel territory, again reacted to immediately as the work of Assad, makes little or no sense as the work of Syria's leader.  He's been making gains, with Russia's help, against the rebels (many of whom are al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-affiliated).  Why invite U.S. wrath from the new hotheaded U.S. president?  In any event, the Tomahawk missile attack, so lovingly admired by Brian Williams, and celebrated by Democrats (including Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer) didn't really do much except blow 83 million dollars worth of weapons, kill six civilians, damage some structures, leaving the main runway intact.  The day after the attack, Syrian Air Force planes were using the airfield.
     Trump coordinated the attack with Russian authorities, including Putin, no doubt.  For the sake of Russian planes and personnel not being adversely affected by the missile strikes, it makes sense that he contacted Putin--it also makes sense that Putin contacted Assad.
     Trump, the week before the attack, reiterated his position that he's not concerned about Assad, but focused rather on defeating ISIS, a goal one would think more American politicians and news media people would support.  It is, at least, consistent with U.S. force projection in Iraq and Syria since 2014, when Obama started his own campaign against ISIS.  Sarin, the chemical weapon in question, was used (if indeed it really was) and Trump shifted to attacking the Syrian military, i.e. Assad.
     Assad, ironically, is a U.S. ally in our fight against ISIS.  ISIS is opposed to Assad, and vice versa.  Attacking an ally is a truly weird and counterproductive thing to do, and if one does so, one better have a long-term strategy figured out.  I don't think Trump or his team does.  They react.
     One of the sickest things about all this is the Democratic Party perspective (as well as how that's reflected in the news media): the same authorities who have called Trump "sick," "incompetent," "unstable," "an egomaniac," "unfit to be president," now call him presidential.  Respected CNN talking head Fareed Zakaria said about the fifty-nine missiles, "Now we can call him the president."
     Believing and thinking that a leader is a sick fuck with no business being anywhere near the Oval Office is a valid viewpoint, but all it took for these violence-worshipping cretins to praise Trump was an order from him to attack Syria Leni Riefenstahl fashion, with propaganda images from the decks of mighty warships menacing a country that isn't a threat to the United States.  The same tactic of war drum pounding we saw used against Iraq in 1990 and in 2002 and 2003 is on display right now.  Brush up on your studies of war propaganda simply by turning on U.S. news programs.
     Trump, proving he's a scatterbrain with a moral compass that doesn't have a needle in it, gave an interview to Maria Bartiromo after the night of the Tomahawks.  He described sitting for a state dinner at the Florida mansion he spends every weekend in.  His guest was the President of the People's Republic of China.
     "We had a big chocolate cake, the most beautiful cake you've ever seen and I pointed that out to the Chinese president, and then I told him about the cruise missile launches against Iraq."
     Maria Bartiromo paused, then said, "You mean Syria."
     "Syria," Trump said, not even embarrassed.
     In the same sentence, he talked about bombing a country, got the identity of the country wrong, started the story with a wonderful chocolate cake.
     It's called criminal insanity, and now that's fine with people like John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Hillary Clinton, Fareed Zakaria, Brian Williams, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Howard Dean, and a host of conscience-free human beings we call our leaders and those in the Fourth Estate who have surrendered the responsibilities of their jobs to serve the people with real information, rather than corporate masters and politicians who don't have the best interests of Americans or anyone else at heart.

                                                                              Vic Neptune