America, Land of Normalized Lunacy

     Ivanka Trump, elder daughter of Donald, has never struck me as an attractive woman.  I'm heterosexual, I think Sophia Loren is a goddess manifestation, that Marilyn Monroe was the prettiest woman who ever lived, but Ivanka?  She's five feet eleven inches tall, blonde, well put together, having gained looks from her mother rather than her cave troll father.  What turns my stomach about Ivanka Trump is her commitment to accumulating money and gaining power.  

     There's nothing normal or wholesome about a person who grows up in an environment of wealth and shady dealmaking, daughter of a narcissistic father (who sees himself in her frosty beauty), a girl whose friend growing up was, and still is, Chelsea Clinton, herself the daughter of narcissistic parents.

     Ivanka Trump married Jared Kushner, one of those Trump relations, who, like Donald Trump, Jr., exudes the air of a character out of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho.  Bland, handsome on the surface, a human being surrounding a black hole where the heart should be.  Kushner, himself part of a very wealthy Jewish family, brokered the 110 billion dollar deal--in a phone call--with Lockheed Martin to further beef up the already beefed up Saudi military.

     Ivanka's husband, then, is a facilitator for merchants of death.  Saudi Arabia's depredations against the Yemeni people continue, with U.S. assistance.  The Arab world's poorest nation deals now with a cholera epidemic caused by Saudi Arabia and the United States.  Smashing infrastructure, like water supply systems, causes future disease.  In America's "lamestream media," (the one truly accurate phrase Sarah Palin ever coined) there is no discussion of Yemen's plight or the essential role two presidential administrations have played in making that catastrophe so.  Obama and Trump are both war criminals.  Trump, currently, is in trouble with Congress, the Senate, the FBI, the intelligence community at large, with the "liberal" news media, for his behavior past and present with Russian officials and, possibly, Russian organized crime figures in the post-Cold War era.

     Impeachment has become, in news media discourse, "the I Word."  Will Trump last to the end of this year?  Why is Vice President Pence being marginalized when it comes to receiving information from Trump's circle about the FBI's Michael Flynn investigation?  Obviously, this means Trump doesn't trust Pence insofar as he doesn't want the VP to know too much if Pence should ever be subpoenaed.  

     Now, Jared Kushner, President Trump's advisor and fucker of Trump's favorite woman, Ivanka, is under FBI investigation for allegedly attempting last December to set up a private line of communication between the Trump post-election transition team and "the Kremlin," meaning those nasty Russians.

     This fits with other Russian ties, such as Flynn's, one time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's, Secretary of State Tillerson's (a friend of Putin), and Trump's coziness with Russians, too.  

What glares at me about all this is how Trump, despite and because of his corruption, seeks to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia, while Democrats and their voices in the news media, want that relationship to be adversarial, criticizing Russia for its meddling and militarism in Ukraine, Georgia, the Crimean Peninsula, Syria, while the U.S. itself makes war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya; arms Egypt, supports that country's dictator, arms Saudi Arabia, supports that repressive government, maintains a worldwide military presence that even includes troops based in Suriname, Belize, Bulgaria, Greenland, Hungary, India, Madagascar, Ukraine, Vietnam, Barbados (where Rihanna is from--it's important to prevent more gorgeous and sexy singers from coming to the United States to make it big).  This is a very partial list of the extremely obnoxious omnipresence of the U.S. military worldwide.  Greenland, for God's sake!  What's that duty like?

     Recall President Obama's lack of rapport with Putin.  There was no interest then on either side in getting things to lighten up between the two governments.  Now, this relationship is regularly defined in the news media as adversarial.  Trump is "crazy" and "borderline treasonous" for wanting to "get in bed with Putin."  Conversely, one could argue that the two nations with the biggest nuclear arsenals getting along might be helpful for the future existence of the human race.  

     I doubt that Trump thinks in such subtle ways.  His mind is a sledgehammer.  You can tell by the way he shakes hands (holding on past the point of comfort for the person receiving the handshake) that he couldn't possibly be any good at pleasuring a woman.  Sensitive about his small hands, he seeks to make them seem strong with an unrelenting grip.  He doesn't back down, he doesn't admit to committing wrongs or telling lies, he's a real man in his dead father's eyes, in other words, a real prick.  His two adult sons are pricks, his son-in-law is a prick, his daughter Ivanka is a "tough businesswoman" and, according to her proud father, "the smartest person I know."

     Okay, fine, he's proud of his daughter, he even placed her husband in his cabinet and gave Ivanka an office and a role in the White House (something not granted, yet, and maybe never, to Mrs. Trump who remains in Manhattan) in a gross act of nepotism barely commented on negatively in the mainstream press.  The worst practices of the Roman Empire are common in the U.S. government, nobody gives a shit.

     Pictures of the Kushners, Jared and Ivanka (she, a convert to Judaism, her husband's religion), show a photo perfect family, with their three children.  Being Jews, they don't seem to have a problem with Donald Trump's placement of Steve Bannon in the White House.  Bannon, former head of Breitbart, a slick right wing news organization characterized by smears and hate mongering, has published numerous anti-Semitic articles, including pro-Nazi viewpoints.  Jared and Ivanka suck this up, whatever problem they may have with Bannon's presence in their lives.  Money and power beat out concerns about integrity and defense of one's religion, which of course makes them hypocrites--which makes them average American public figures exercising power these days.

     No, I don't find Ivanka Trump attractive.  She's just a more refined version of her father, whose rottenness infected her before she ever had a chance to be someone decent.

                                                                             Vic Neptune

                                                                       

                                                                                  

     Trump of Arabia

     Trump's close friend and former campaign advisor Roger Stone predicted in an interview that the president will soon be speculated about in the news media as having early stage Alzheimer's Disease. A long time political trickster, Stone himself may be on the verge of facing a Congressional investigatory committee looking into the Trump Campaign's possible connections to Russian operatives.
     One of Alzheimer's foremost features is forgetfulness.  Did Stone mention this peculiar accusation against news media because he wants the public to start thinking about President Trump in terms of someone who can't competently access his own memory?  Is Stone thinking of the example of President Reagan, who, during the last year of his second administration, began to display telltale indications of Alzheimer's, the disease that came to consume the remainder of his life?  Reagan, due to the mental condition of his last fifteen years, received much sympathy from Americans in general, Democratic and Republican politicians, and news media personalities.  Twelve years after his death, Reagan is still regarded by the political establishment and news media commentators as one of this country's greatest presidents.  This indicates that historical facts don't matter to people.  If you think I'm being snarky, look up details of Reagan's presidency and note how they don't match popular opinion about the man.
     Is Roger Stone trying to Reaganize Donald Trump?
     Is he trying to get us used to a Trump whose mental faculties have begun to deteriorate?  Getting the news media to speak, sometimes at excessive length, about a political figure's (or operative's in Stone's case) notions, ideas, words, proposed in front of cameras and microphones is easy.  Trump learned a long time ago that he can generate news cycles revolving around his tweets, many of which consist of nonsense.  He uses Twitter as a smokescreen.  He knows if he writes or says something outrageous, the news media will chew on it for hours or even days, sometimes bringing in presidential historians as commentators giving us lectures on the presidency of Andrew Jackson or the Civil War.  The Jackson controversy/distraction (created by Trump's ahistorical and speculative remarks about the man on the twenty dollar bill) sucked up a week's worth of news programming on the cable news networks.  I propose that Trump did this, and other distracting statements, on purpose, knowing that the news media will waste time debating his nonsense.  Does this make Trump stupid, or intelligent?  Someone who knowingly manipulates the news cycle (making him a propagandist) or someone who just happens to create distractions without knowing what's he's doing?
     Trump has already been called, by comedians, news people, and the occasional politician, crazy or nuts.  It wouldn't be a long leap for some to start thinking of him as mentally incompetent.  He's seventy years old.  What will he be like in four years?  Ten?  An asshole, yes, but will his mind be as sharp as the older Bernie Sanders' mind is now?
     Leaving behind an administration underneath the weight of a government investigation into "Russia ties," Trump, his wife, his girlfriend (daughter Ivanka), and a coterie of White House insiders, have visited Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and now they're in Israel, before heading to Vatican City and later Brussels and Sicily.
     Islam, Judaism, Christiantity, NATO, G7 Summit.
     Trump has spoken thus far in Riyadh and Jerusalem, the word "peace" popping up ironically in his speeches.  Benjamin Netanyahu praised Trump, speaking of a welcome change in American leadership.  I guess that the billions upon billions of dollars the U.S. gives to Israel in the form of weaponry, which they use to murder Palestinians, hasn't counted as support of the Israeli state during the Obama years.
     The Saudis received, during Trump's visit, a 110 billion dollar arms deal.  Trump, and Fox News anchors, characterized this as translating to "jobs jobs jobs."  I translate it as "Dead Yemenis Dead Yemenis Dead Yemenis."
     The Saudis put on a big show for Trump.  It resembled one of the scenes in Lawrence of Arabia after the Arabs have taken Damascus.  A celebration of upraised swords (one of them carried by Secretary of State and former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson) as men danced through the main palace where the head honchos of the Saudi aristocracy live.  Trump and his party accompanied them, Trump trying to dance a little bit, looking like an old white man attempting to find a dancing rhythm.  The Fox commentary did not include a remark on a fact of Saudi justice: Trump was visiting and bestowing military largesse upon a nation with a government that orders the decapitations of far more people than does ISIS.
     Saudi Arabian support of ISIS has also been established, as well as the strong possibility that members of that government had ties to 9/11.  Trump himself brought this up in recent years, speaking with suspicion of the government of Saudi Arabia.  Becoming president has changed his mind on this subject, apparently.  He now has no problem being feted and fed by some of the same motherfuckers who support the very terrorism Trump has condemned.  His shifting values are not due to Alzheimer's, but to a constant lifetime of immorality.
     Back home, investigations into the "Russian ties" continue, the news media spending most of their time on it, sparing not even minutes for questioning the 110 billion dollar arms deal to a nation currently annihilating Yemen, with U.S. consent and assistance.  Destroying Yemen is part of what greases U.S. foreign policy.  Donald is being a good boy when he takes the Saudi Arabian cock into his mouth.  When he reassures a thug like Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. is behind him, that "peace" is our goal, that a commitment from Arab countries to wipe out terrorism forever (an impossibility, but never mind) is something to seek realistically, even though many of these countries, along with the U.S., are states using terrorism as part of their policies.
     No, our news media spent time talking about Melania and Ivanka Trump not wearing scarves in Saudi Arabia.  That this is a good sign of things lightening up a bit in that severe country.  Of course, Melania and Ivanka also didn't drive cars in Riyadh.  It begs the question: had they asked, would they have been permitted to drive those streets?  The women of Saudi Arabia remain horribly oppressed, yet two rich American women don't have to wear scarves!  Isn't that great?
     When Trump returns to Washington and takes his first back home from the trip shit in the White House, the weight of coming back to the political shitstorm he helped create will, I think, hit him hard, a sure sign of newstime-consuming tweets to come, as news media people debate the level of "success" of his trip, ignoring the fact that he will have done exactly what foreign policymakers want: further the American goal of managing the Middle East, of maintaining the empire, which includes meeting with and placating atrocious people like the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Israel.  Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, would have, and did, exactly the same, meaning Donald Trump is the President of the United States.

                                                                             Vic Neptune
   

     We Condone Mass Murder, But You Don't Talk About It, Donald!

     President Donald Trump, often described in the press as "being less than truthful," or "bending the facts,--a spineless way of avoiding the word liar--is definitely honest when it comes to expressing the traditional and institutionalized cruelty of U.S. foreign policy.  In just the last few days, he's offered a White House visit to President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, said it "would be an honor" to meet with Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Jong-un, and has praised seventh U.S. President Andrew Jackson, claiming he would have prevented the U.S. Civil War.
     This last comment, given in a radio interview, has inspired numerous wasted hours of American news commentary.  Trump, given to speaking out of his ass most of the time (anyone who's observed him carefully over the years should know this), has mastered the tactic of manipulating the news media.  Throughout the sixteen months of his ultimately successful presidential campaign, he was in the habit of saying outrageous things, provoking pointless reactions from pundits and anchorpersons, from newspaper and internet journalism.  Instead of saying, "The man's full of shit, an endless stream of shit," and moving on to covering the important news of whichever given day, journalists spent most of their time writing and talking about the political clown with the too long clown's necktie and the funny haircut.
     Trump's statements about Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder who died in June 1845, fifteen years before the engagement at Fort Sumter that began the Civil War, reveal a typical Trumpian level of ignorance that should surprise no one; yet, newsmen and newswomen these past few days have spoken at length with historians about the "true history" of Andrew Jackson, about the actual causes of the Civil War and the Confederacy's states' rights question as they sought to maintain slavery in a country, as a whole, where that controversial and execrable, but lucrative, practice, was not an institution in the Northern states.  (I remember that basic information from U.S. History class when I was fourteen years old.  Trump, presumably, was exposed to the same information when he went to high school, but now has either forgotten it or chooses to remember it differently, for the sake of satisfying the racists comprising some of his political base).
     Because President Trump brought up President Jackson, there has been a great deal of Jackson-bashing on the news of late.  In Russia, the equivalent would be journalists bitching about Ivan the Terrible instead of Vladimir Putin.  I suggest that Trump's tactic consisted of bringing up a long dead president (a rather controversial one at that), so that now, because Trump said some inaccurate shit about not only Jackson but the Civil War, the news media must focus for several days on how horrible a human being Andrew Jackson was instead of how horrible a human being Donald Trump is.
     If this intellectually dishonest criticism of Trump's "praise for authoritarians and dictators" simply ended on American shores, with Jackson serving as an example of a "killer president who owned slaves," it would be less contemptible than the further step these journalists and pundits (and the politicians offering opinions on the subject) have taken when they attack Trump for reaching out to the President of the Philippines and suggesting it would be an honor to meet with Kim Jong-un.
     Duterte, author of a drug war against his own people, characterized by savagery and oppression, is without doubt an authoritarian brute.  An authoritarian brute, what's more, in charge of a country that houses U.S. military personnel, a country long used by America as a strategic player in the West Pacific region.  Duterte's war on drugs, bloody and horrible as it is, reflects other wars on drugs, including the one practiced (mostly on the poor and on Blacks and Latinos) in the United States.  Young Black men in this country have been decimated and disproportionately imprisoned in a "war" started in the 1970s, escalated in the 1980s.  As William S. Burroughs puts it in Gus Van Sant's great film Drugstore Cowboy,

     "Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized.  The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots.  I predict, in the near future, right-wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus."

     The purpose of war against drugs, the war against terror, is control and the seizing of greater powers, with increase to police, military, security; i.e. the world we now live in.  9/11 "Truthers" are not necessarily arguing from a crazy and impossible viewpoint.  For a government to kill 3,000 of its own people on 9/11 seems minuscule to me by comparison to the hundreds of thousands killed by the U.S. government in the Middle East since 9/11.  Politicians and those who pull the strings in unseen backgrounds are characterized by ruthlessness.  I read a story today in the Intercept dealing with Canton Fitzgerald, the firm that lost the greater majority of its employees on 9/11, its offices located between the 101st to 105th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, a doomed place to be that fateful morning.  Its CEO, after a long battle against American Airlines to secure a settlement not disclosed to the victims' families, pocketed approximately twenty-five million dollars after trying to secure the entire 135 million dollar settlement for himself.  If this man doesn't fit the definition of a scumbag, tell me what does.
     Former President Barack Obama, fresh from his signing of a sixty-five million dollar contract for a memoir, has just accepted a 400,000 dollar speaking engagement from Canton Fitzgerald; in other words, he accepted a speaking gig from the motherfucker who bilked the families of his own dead employees of millions of dollars after not even letting them know there was a lawsuit against the airline.
     Disgusting pieces of shit looking like human beings exist.  Donald Trump apparently admires some of them--he is one of them.  On the news of late, his honesty about Kim Jong-un and his expression of a willingness to meet with authoritarian anti-democratic leaders makes "liberal" voices on CNN and MSNBC, to name two networks, recoil in disgust as they lecture viewers about how the United States supposedly champions democracy in the world (it doesn't).  About how former presidents did not "coddle" dictators (they certainly did).  The U.S. supports authoritarian regimes because democratic movements in other countries spawn the spirit of independence, which can lead, as it did in Chile in the early 1970s, to President Allende nationalizing the abundant copper ore mines in his country, a metal required for the coming information superhighway.  President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ordered a coup d'etat against Allende, backing a military strongman, Pinochet, who oppressed and killed his people (for the United States and for his own retention of power).
     Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Elder both backed Saddam Hussein.  Bush in the 1970s employed Noriega of Panama as a CIA asset.  Osama bin Laden's Mujahideen received three billion dollars worth of military assistance from the CIA, while Kissinger supported Pakistan's ISI and also the arming of fundamentalist Muslims in Pakistan.  The ISI has been implicated, along with Saudi Arabian officials, in the crime of 9/11, secrets kept to this day by the U.S. government, which has been led by people like George W. Bush, whose family has had close business ties to the bin Laden family.
     Donald Trump's sin when speaking about authoritarian leaders is his honesty.  He doesn't conceal the sharp tip of the weapon of U.S. foreign policy that's been aimed at the world since the aftermath of World War Two.  Cold War thinking influenced by the nuclear-armed authoritarianism of the Soviet Union shaped this foreign policy--there is much blame to go around, but now, journalists claiming that the U.S. is a great lover of peace (while it bombs numerous countries and is still occupying Afghanistan after fifteen years) put us inside an Orwellian nightmare in which the government, supported by a compliant news media, tells we're not seeing what we're seeing, that, for instance, President Obama welcomed Egypt's dictator al-Sisi to the White House, where he "coddled" him with generous weapons deals; that Hillary Clinton declared Egypt's former dictator Hosni Mubarak a great friend of her family.  I suspect that if President Duterte were bombing Syria he would be praised in the U.S. journalism community.
     These same craven journalists are now willing to trash Andrew Jackson, who, admittedly, persecuted Native Americans (as have many other presidents, including up to the present day, what with government oppression at Standing Rock) and who owned slaves (as did the highly admired President Thomas Jefferson), and who was probably the usual type of son of a bitch who runs nations, something we should be very familiar with by now.
   
                                                                             Vic Neptune