This Isn't Even the Bottom Point Yet, But It's Pretty Bad
American news voices and political establishment workers love high-ranking military men. The spectacle of General Petraeus (who "literally wrote the book on counter-terrorism") facing a Congressional Committee to explain his leaking of military secrets to his mistress nevertheless presented a typical proud lion of Democracy's defense in barbarian lands. Put these men in their heavily decorated uniforms, speaking in their clipped monotones about "necessities," "the battle space," or "the few who serve in an all volunteer military force,"--the greatest thing since the legions of Marcus Aurelius--and news commentators lose their rationality.
Petraeus, a married man, was the subject of journalistic inquiries by a good-looking woman who also got herself intimately involved with the twenty-first century Patton and later wrote a book about her personal experiences as she viewed the hero in a way Petraeus worshippers in the news media and in Congress may have envied.
All of this begs the question: Why wasn't Petraeus prosecuted for giving top secret information to his mistress?
It comes down to what I wrote above: high-ranking military men can commit egregious violations and get away with it, while a mere Private, like Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning, who revealed explicit evidence of U.S. war crimes, was put into a cell with the lights on for two years, a form of sleep torture practiced under the aegis of Barack Obama, not Donald Trump, in case we're under the impression that Trump is the only evil President.
That dress uniform works really well when it has lots of ribbons and metal stars on it. In 1987, Oliver North, a mere Lieutenant Colonel, became a folk hero because of the way he looked in his Marine uniform. He had well-acted gravitas even as he confessed before Congress, speaking with blunt, unashamed pride about how he and his gorgeous secretary, Fawn Hall, shredded shitloads of government documents to cover up the Reagan Administration's illegal funding and involvement in the Contra War in Nicaragua, a U.S.-directed atrocity that also involved the selling of missiles to the Ayatollah Khomeini; but that was all done by Reagan, a great man even Obama admires.
Extending my sarcasm to the present day, we have another General, John Kelly, Trump's first head of the Department of Homeland Security and, after the firing of Reince Priebus, Trump's second Chief of Staff. A tough-looking taciturn man, Kelly has a sense of humor that seems self-deprecating. He pretends like he doesn't know how politics work and the press corps giggles. This idea gets reinforced by news media commentary. Kelly "comes from a military sphere and as such he will bring discipline to the Oval Office, limiting access to the President, and, we can hope, reducing the amount of tweets."
In Trump time, that was ages ago, but really it was just recently that John Kelly took on the position with the chief purpose of "stopping the leaks."
They haven't stopped. I've wondered sometimes if Kelly himself leaks to the press. He's said to hate his job, according to leaked information, and is planning an exit that may also involve a simultaneous jumping of the ship by Secretary of State Tillerson. Trump, for all his self-claimed accomplishments as a great businessman, is unable to keep people working for him. This, in any business, small or large, indicates shitty management, not competence.
Kelly couldn't stop Trump from saying horrible things about yet another Gold Star family. Last year, Candidate Trump took a shit on the Khans, Muslim parents of a dead Army officer who was killed saving the lives of his men, qualifying him as a hero. Just recently, Trump took another shit on a Gold Star family who lost a husband and son in Niger in a still mysterious military action against an ISIS offshoot. Kelly took credit for telling the President what to say during his condolence call to the widow. When Kelly later explained what he had instructed Trump to say, it sounded reasonable. Kelly's a combat veteran, he's made such calls himself, but Trump must've sounded like the tactless, shallow brute that he is. The widow had put the call on speaker, a Democratic Congresswoman and friend of the soldier's family heard it too, as well as the soldier's mother. All three women, all Black, a race Trump has demonstrated his documented prejudice against, agreed that the President was insensitive, didn't mention the soldier's name, La David Johnson, even once. He said also that "He [Johnson] knew what he signed up for."
The widow was in tears from Trump's call, from the President's attempt to "help."
Kelly appeared at a press conference and explained the background of the call. He also spent a lot of time attacking Congresswoman Wilson "for listening in on that call." Kelly didn't know, even though the information was available, that Wilson has known the Johnson family for a long time and also that the widow chose to let her mother-in-law and the Congresswoman listen to the President. Trump later tweeted petulantly that Wilson listened to a "SECRET" call, even as he revealed that other unnamed people besides Kelly had been in the Oval Office during the call. Thus, it was not a secret call, even if one were to capitalize every letter of that word to somehow make it so. Trump also tweeted several times about how Wilson's account was "fake news," even though it was corroborated by Mrs. Johnson and her mother-in-law, the latter saying, "The President did disrespect my son."
We can expect Trump to indirectly accuse a Green Beret's widow and mother of being liars, but what did John Kelly do?
Kelly's account of his own soldier son's death in 2010 resonated with the news media, but once he attacked Wilson, calling her "an empty barrel, the kind that makes the most noise,"--unaware apparently that this accurately describes his own boss, Trump--he smeared her further by condemning her dedication of an FBI building in 2015, mischaracterizing her speech, calling it "grandstanding,"--again, unaware apparently that Trump is the biggest grandstander of all. Journalists quickly produced the speech in question, proving that Wilson's comments were anything but grandstanding. Kelly thus showed himself willing to smear an earnest Congresswoman on behalf of supporting his boss's lies which include the condemnation of a Gold Star family.
How ironic that a General would countenance such loathsome behavior toward a dead Green Beret's family. We Americans are supposed to respect the military, the flag, the National Anthem, but here we have a four star General and the Commander in Chief both dishonoring a dead soldier, his pregnant wife, their two other children, and his parents. What is that? Could it be that Trump's attacks against NFL players supposedly disrespecting the flag and the Anthem, and by extension the military, have nothing to do with Trump's own self-alleged love for the U.S. Armed Forces? When it comes to the real thing, actual combat death in a war theater (West Africa) most Americans and many politicians didn't even know existed, Trump and General Kelly have now shown in their treatment of the Gold Star Johnson family that soldiers under their command are just objects to throw down the garbage disposal of the Global War on Terror.
The narrative in the news media shifted to the idea that everyone, even tough General Kelly, gets brought low by exposure to the hazardous waste dump of a human being that is Donald Trump. This same corporate news media gave Trump unlimited airtime last year and the year before, allowed him endless minutes of spreading the lie about Obama's citizenship, not realizing, I guess, that close contact with this reality TV star might also pollute them; that is, if they hadn't already been corrupted by such egregious violations of decency as letting the Bush administration convince the American people of the necessity of war with Iraq.
John Kelly is so noble that he works for Donald Trump.
Out of this whole disgusting story, the truth is, Donald Trump is an asshole, we knew that; John Kelly is also an asshole.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
The Gold Dragon
I heard on the news this morning that Donald Trump wants the United States to have ten times as many nuclear weapons as it has now. Our current stockpile of such weapons (Go U.S.A.!) is 4,480. Trump wants us to have 44,800 nuclear weapons.
When I was a teenager playing the fantasy role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, my character and my friends' characters would gradually accumulate wealth, weaponry, personal defenses, property. Our ambitions would grow, ultimately leading us towards the game designation, Chaotic Evil, Lawful Good's opposite.
Our characters, starting out with good intentions, ended up living and thriving in an atmosphere of acquisitiveness, treachery, and casual violence.
Yesterday, Trump sat in the Oval Office with a familiar gnome, former Secretary of State and current war criminal, Henry Kissinger. The unspoken rule in corporate news media persists: show Kissinger but do not mention his vital role in killing millions of people. Instead, the story focused on Trump's tiff with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, that the latter "allegedly" called the President a "moron."
Trump, though he's pretended to be unruffled by this, bothered to tell a Forbes interviewer that if the moron comment is true, he'll "have to compare I.Q. tests with Tillerson," adding that we "know who would win." In saying it that way, Trump implied, to me anyway, that Tillerson might be a moron.
Verbal exchanges like this point to the adolescent nature of the Trump Administration. The Executive Branch eats itself. Paranoia, leaks to the press, "strong" new officials brought in to restore order (like Chief of Staff John Kelly) who themselves find it likely they might have to resign. How does one work for a lunatic indefinitely?
Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (the second person to hold that position and it's only eight months into this administration) seems to be holding tightly to her job without fear of dismissal. Her father, former Governor Mike Huckabee, who ran in primaries against Trump in 2016, interviewed his former adversary, giving the President an easy-going chance to sound off about how great he is. Not even Sean Hannity is as sycophantic toward Trump. He drew a compliment out of his daughter's boss by asking about Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her ability as a press secretary. Trump used one of his few adjectives, "great," to describe her job performance. I have no doubt that Trump thinks this of her, because Sanders lies for him every time she faces the press.
On November 4, 2016, four days before the election, Mike Huckabee tweeted, "Trump may be a car wreck, but at least his car is pointed in right direction. Hillary is a drunk driver going the wrong way on the freeway."
When I see a wrecked car on a freeway or on a street, I don't think, "Good thing that car's pointed in the direction it was traveling." Huckabee last November couldn't bring himself to speak plainly, resorting instead to nonsensical car metaphors, when he could've just said, "Both of these candidates suck, but one of them, the Democrat, sucks worse." That would be an honest statement from Huckabee, at least.
I think, though, that Huckabee was hoping for a cabinet appointment or some other role in Trump World. In the interim period between election and inauguration, Huckabee met with Trump to discuss the possibility of being appointed U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Yes, a Bible-thumper with the standard set of End Times beliefs, which include the ultimate damnation of all Jews, as the top American diplomat in Israel.
Huckabee instead got his own show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, an organization I know nothing about, except that they, as Christians, are willing to have as a guest on one of their shows a man who admitted to Billy Bush on audiotape that he sexually assaults women, an activity enabled by his big money and power, the pattern seen in Trump's friends Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, and in the recently discovered sexual predator, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Go Christian values! Go capitalism!
Corporate news networks keep reporting the Tillerson insult as "moron," but in fact he called Trump a "fucking moron." He said this last June in relation to Afghanistan policy; it took three months to filter through, to the point where anti-Trump networks, CNN and MSNBC, mention it over and over, omitting the "fucking" part, which of course gives the insult its bite.
What this has to do with Dungeons and Dragons, I don't know, except that my friends and I, playing that game, knew we were Chaotic Evil
Vic Neptune
I heard on the news this morning that Donald Trump wants the United States to have ten times as many nuclear weapons as it has now. Our current stockpile of such weapons (Go U.S.A.!) is 4,480. Trump wants us to have 44,800 nuclear weapons.
When I was a teenager playing the fantasy role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, my character and my friends' characters would gradually accumulate wealth, weaponry, personal defenses, property. Our ambitions would grow, ultimately leading us towards the game designation, Chaotic Evil, Lawful Good's opposite.
Our characters, starting out with good intentions, ended up living and thriving in an atmosphere of acquisitiveness, treachery, and casual violence.
Yesterday, Trump sat in the Oval Office with a familiar gnome, former Secretary of State and current war criminal, Henry Kissinger. The unspoken rule in corporate news media persists: show Kissinger but do not mention his vital role in killing millions of people. Instead, the story focused on Trump's tiff with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, that the latter "allegedly" called the President a "moron."
Trump, though he's pretended to be unruffled by this, bothered to tell a Forbes interviewer that if the moron comment is true, he'll "have to compare I.Q. tests with Tillerson," adding that we "know who would win." In saying it that way, Trump implied, to me anyway, that Tillerson might be a moron.
Verbal exchanges like this point to the adolescent nature of the Trump Administration. The Executive Branch eats itself. Paranoia, leaks to the press, "strong" new officials brought in to restore order (like Chief of Staff John Kelly) who themselves find it likely they might have to resign. How does one work for a lunatic indefinitely?
Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (the second person to hold that position and it's only eight months into this administration) seems to be holding tightly to her job without fear of dismissal. Her father, former Governor Mike Huckabee, who ran in primaries against Trump in 2016, interviewed his former adversary, giving the President an easy-going chance to sound off about how great he is. Not even Sean Hannity is as sycophantic toward Trump. He drew a compliment out of his daughter's boss by asking about Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her ability as a press secretary. Trump used one of his few adjectives, "great," to describe her job performance. I have no doubt that Trump thinks this of her, because Sanders lies for him every time she faces the press.
On November 4, 2016, four days before the election, Mike Huckabee tweeted, "Trump may be a car wreck, but at least his car is pointed in right direction. Hillary is a drunk driver going the wrong way on the freeway."
When I see a wrecked car on a freeway or on a street, I don't think, "Good thing that car's pointed in the direction it was traveling." Huckabee last November couldn't bring himself to speak plainly, resorting instead to nonsensical car metaphors, when he could've just said, "Both of these candidates suck, but one of them, the Democrat, sucks worse." That would be an honest statement from Huckabee, at least.
I think, though, that Huckabee was hoping for a cabinet appointment or some other role in Trump World. In the interim period between election and inauguration, Huckabee met with Trump to discuss the possibility of being appointed U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Yes, a Bible-thumper with the standard set of End Times beliefs, which include the ultimate damnation of all Jews, as the top American diplomat in Israel.
Huckabee instead got his own show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, an organization I know nothing about, except that they, as Christians, are willing to have as a guest on one of their shows a man who admitted to Billy Bush on audiotape that he sexually assaults women, an activity enabled by his big money and power, the pattern seen in Trump's friends Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, and in the recently discovered sexual predator, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Go Christian values! Go capitalism!
Corporate news networks keep reporting the Tillerson insult as "moron," but in fact he called Trump a "fucking moron." He said this last June in relation to Afghanistan policy; it took three months to filter through, to the point where anti-Trump networks, CNN and MSNBC, mention it over and over, omitting the "fucking" part, which of course gives the insult its bite.
What this has to do with Dungeons and Dragons, I don't know, except that my friends and I, playing that game, knew we were Chaotic Evil
Vic Neptune
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Ad Nauseam
The first thing I thought when I heard about the mass shooting in Las Vegas, information that included the name and age of the perpetrator, a sixty-four year old retired white man, was that he wasn't committing his crime on behalf of ISIS and that he wasn't a Muslim. He didn't fit the profile of what quick-judging Americans think of as a terrorist; yet, he terrorized thousands of concertgoers, killed fifty-nine people and wounded 525. I heard later that the automatic rifle fire went on for about twelve minutes, or half the length of a sitcom.
He managed to sneak twenty-three automatic rifles into his hotel room. From a high vantage point he had a good view of the large flat space where the country music festival was taking place. Nobody knows why he did it. His brother said, "He was just a guy."
President Trump pronounced the massacre "an act of pure evil." Trump, like all Republicans and some Democrats, supports the NRA, gun rights, is against gun control. Trump admitted more than once last year that he has a pistol strapped to his ankle. Imagine that slob who never exercises trying to bend at the waist to get access to a pistol he wouldn't be able to use effectively because he has no experience in combat situations, a choice he made when he complained to the Vietnam-era draft board about his hurting foot, and years later he couldn't remember which foot it was--in other words, there was nothing wrong with his foot.
Trump's lack of fighting experience mirrors all tough-talking Second Amendment propagandists, like gun enthusiast Ted Nugent, who, during the Vietnam War years, avoided military service by making himself so repulsive (not bathing, shitting on himself, becoming a derelict) that he was rejected automatically as physically and mentally unfit for duty. He's clean now, but inside he's still a cowardly shit.
Bill O'Reilly, another tough talker with no combat experience, claims that the Las Vegas massacre is "the price of freedom." In some of the on-site footage I saw two young women running along, and then dropping to the pavement at the sound of another volley of gunfire before they got up again, moving in a herky-jerky way, clearly freaked out of their minds. If O'Reilly or Ted Nugent or Donald Trump were to ever undergo such an experience, would the words out of their mouths regarding the Second Amendment (which says nothing of lone gun maniacs with automatic weapons and endless ammunition, but mentions a "well-regulated militia," a body that would not accept a solitary creep with a penchant for mass murder) be modified? Would they denounce the NRA's knee-jerk reactions to such events?
Over and over, robotically, because it's a talking point, the NRA-infected political class (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders--the snake who speaks to the press for Trump) says that "this is not the time to be politicizing this tragedy. The bodies haven't even been buried."
They said the same thing after the murders of twenty children in Newtown, Connecticut, the mass murder (committed by a mentally ill young man) that moved President Obama to declare how fed up he was, not realizing, apparently, that he's ordered missile strikes in the Middle East that have killed far more children than twenty. Oh well, he tried, and failed, to get America behind the idea that gun control needs to happen. That it shouldn't be easy to obtain unlimited amounts of ammunition, that it's crazy to allow semi-automatic and automatic weapons to be bought legally in the first place.
Every time a gun massacre happens, this dispute goes on: don't politicize this because the victims must be honored, the families prayed for, thoughts sent their way. On the other hand (the one not holding the gun) it's exactly the right time to bring up gun control, to fight the NRA. The NRA, ironically, benefits from mass casualty situations brought about by people with guns. Gun sales go up. Guns, like metal and plastic flowers, rose from the graves of the children of Newtown. Guns will be sold massively after Las Vegas, in Las Vegas, because that's the site of so many gun shows that it's practically a daily thing.
Trump will visit Las Vegas on Wednesday, Puerto Rico on Tuesday. He's sent many a corrosive and vile tweet criticizing the heroic Mayor of San Juan for her strident and honest assessments of the slow and incompetent U.S. government response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria. In true Trump fashion, he doesn't like it when someone doesn't pay tribute to him. The poor and downtrodden are supposed to thank the masters for the scraps thrown their way, not comment on the paucity of offerings.
Vic Neptune
The first thing I thought when I heard about the mass shooting in Las Vegas, information that included the name and age of the perpetrator, a sixty-four year old retired white man, was that he wasn't committing his crime on behalf of ISIS and that he wasn't a Muslim. He didn't fit the profile of what quick-judging Americans think of as a terrorist; yet, he terrorized thousands of concertgoers, killed fifty-nine people and wounded 525. I heard later that the automatic rifle fire went on for about twelve minutes, or half the length of a sitcom.
He managed to sneak twenty-three automatic rifles into his hotel room. From a high vantage point he had a good view of the large flat space where the country music festival was taking place. Nobody knows why he did it. His brother said, "He was just a guy."
President Trump pronounced the massacre "an act of pure evil." Trump, like all Republicans and some Democrats, supports the NRA, gun rights, is against gun control. Trump admitted more than once last year that he has a pistol strapped to his ankle. Imagine that slob who never exercises trying to bend at the waist to get access to a pistol he wouldn't be able to use effectively because he has no experience in combat situations, a choice he made when he complained to the Vietnam-era draft board about his hurting foot, and years later he couldn't remember which foot it was--in other words, there was nothing wrong with his foot.
Trump's lack of fighting experience mirrors all tough-talking Second Amendment propagandists, like gun enthusiast Ted Nugent, who, during the Vietnam War years, avoided military service by making himself so repulsive (not bathing, shitting on himself, becoming a derelict) that he was rejected automatically as physically and mentally unfit for duty. He's clean now, but inside he's still a cowardly shit.
Bill O'Reilly, another tough talker with no combat experience, claims that the Las Vegas massacre is "the price of freedom." In some of the on-site footage I saw two young women running along, and then dropping to the pavement at the sound of another volley of gunfire before they got up again, moving in a herky-jerky way, clearly freaked out of their minds. If O'Reilly or Ted Nugent or Donald Trump were to ever undergo such an experience, would the words out of their mouths regarding the Second Amendment (which says nothing of lone gun maniacs with automatic weapons and endless ammunition, but mentions a "well-regulated militia," a body that would not accept a solitary creep with a penchant for mass murder) be modified? Would they denounce the NRA's knee-jerk reactions to such events?
Over and over, robotically, because it's a talking point, the NRA-infected political class (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders--the snake who speaks to the press for Trump) says that "this is not the time to be politicizing this tragedy. The bodies haven't even been buried."
They said the same thing after the murders of twenty children in Newtown, Connecticut, the mass murder (committed by a mentally ill young man) that moved President Obama to declare how fed up he was, not realizing, apparently, that he's ordered missile strikes in the Middle East that have killed far more children than twenty. Oh well, he tried, and failed, to get America behind the idea that gun control needs to happen. That it shouldn't be easy to obtain unlimited amounts of ammunition, that it's crazy to allow semi-automatic and automatic weapons to be bought legally in the first place.
Every time a gun massacre happens, this dispute goes on: don't politicize this because the victims must be honored, the families prayed for, thoughts sent their way. On the other hand (the one not holding the gun) it's exactly the right time to bring up gun control, to fight the NRA. The NRA, ironically, benefits from mass casualty situations brought about by people with guns. Gun sales go up. Guns, like metal and plastic flowers, rose from the graves of the children of Newtown. Guns will be sold massively after Las Vegas, in Las Vegas, because that's the site of so many gun shows that it's practically a daily thing.
Trump will visit Las Vegas on Wednesday, Puerto Rico on Tuesday. He's sent many a corrosive and vile tweet criticizing the heroic Mayor of San Juan for her strident and honest assessments of the slow and incompetent U.S. government response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria. In true Trump fashion, he doesn't like it when someone doesn't pay tribute to him. The poor and downtrodden are supposed to thank the masters for the scraps thrown their way, not comment on the paucity of offerings.
Vic Neptune
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)