Steve Bannon In (and Out?) of Donald Trump’s Imperial Court

Spot on and sobering commentary. A disheartening week for those of us who voted for Trump based on a hope that he’d reverse years of neoliberal and neocon policies

Russia is to blame for the missiles on Shayrat. They should never have backed Assad, and amplified his war crimes and genocide, instead they should have been first in line to eliminate him.

Now Putin owns the mess of Syria, and he will lose it because he jumped on the side of dictators rather than democracy.

China watched all this and now realizes if they want to control the Korean Crisis, they need to be first in line on ending the Kim Dynasty and getting ahead of the US on ensuring the Kim Dynasty ends and is reunited with the South Koreans who aren’t batshit insane and who can conduct business with them as well as bear all the costs of cleaning up the North.

If one lesson should be clear to all here. Never back fucking dictators over the people, be first in line to pop them in the head, and do it quickly, then eliminate their state security apparatus and put in place a new police force that isn’t tainted and swiftly smush the various militias and get them under a single command answerable to a civilian agency. This is how Turkey is policing the areas it liberated from Daesh and the SDF Terrorists and its working, the cities liberated are now under the control of the FSP which answers to the SNC and are organizing elections while keeping the militias of the ESF, excepting air defense, out of the cities unless they disarm beforehand. The various groups are under a single command and answer to the SNC which is gearing to appoint a General Staff and get these various groups under a better central command while Turkey re-equips them.

Intervention done right can be decisive, the trick is to swiftly get central civilian control in place and get services back up. This is where the US fucked up in Afghanistan and Iraq, they overthrew the Taliban/Saddam and then just let chaos bloom.

Personnel is policy, and Bannon is the sole populist, albeit a deeply problematic one, in the Trump Administration. What this means is that Trump’s “populism” which was highly marginal to begin with, and even then mostly verbal, is disappearing faster than dew in a Saharan summer. Again all this was predictable and predicted.

I guage Trump and the Trump Administration keeping the following three things in mind. So far it has been very useful.

1. Trump is the most ignorant and intellectually lazy President in nearly a century, and this includes Dubya. He has all the resources of a huge federal government at his disposal, and he doesn’t bother asking it anything. Instead he derives his info from the foilier types at Fox News.

2. Trump is deeply conservative. I have always thought it was funny how idiot pundits swear that Trump ISN’T CONSERVATIVE because he wasn’t a fully vetted member of their club when from Pence to his Cabinet and agency picks to his choice of Gorsuch to his anti-environmentalism to his support of Ryancare to his warmongering to his desire to push tax cuts for the rich to his war on Planned Parenthood and women, his is the most conservative Administration anyone can remember –but somehow he’s not conservative. What we are seeing is the paper thin veneer of populism is peeling/peeled off and the billionaire kleptocrat underneath.

3. His remains a hollow Administration. While he has named people to most of the top jobs, an incoming Administration needs to hire people to fill positions about four levels down into the bureaucracy. Lots of Deputy thises and Assistant thats. All told around three to four thousand people. And this simply isn’t being done. In addition, many of the second tier people need Congressional approval. Again not happening. This is one of the reasons that Trump depends so heavily on nepotism. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are about all he has for senior advisors and staff.

4. As a bonus, I could add Trump’s clinical narcissism. Bannon certainly has run afoul of this, but he would be on his way out anyway. At least so far, it has been largely tangential although annoying. I mean everything is always about Trump, and the man has a really impaired linguistic faculty where he can’t articulate an actual sentence, let alone string several of them together. Instead we get noun phrases peppered with overblown adjectives: amazing, phenomenal, very successful, etc. I guess the one area where Trump’s narcissism has a substantial impact is his ability to lie without any hint of self-reflection or awareness. So NATO was obsolete last week but not this week. And Ian’s list: China was a currency manipulator but now it’s not. Russia was going to be our friend and now it’s our enemy, etc. Trump simply declares one of his failures, screwups, or flipflops a wonderful success and moves on –in the opposite direction. No matter how I look at it, it is going to be a very long four years.

I never thought Bannon was POTUS. I did think Putin was, but maybe now he’s not. Never say never, though. Not with Trump. Right now, Mattis is POTUS and his Mad Dog rabidity is showing. Trump has given the American Military carte blanche to do whatever it takes to win in all theaters and new theaters to be announced any day now.

Anyway, the Mother of all Bombs was impressive, wasn’t it? Donald likes bombs. They’re like big, giant exploding dicks. Wee!! What fun!!

We have MOAB and MOAP.

What’s MOAP, you ask?

Mother of all Presidents, of course!!!

Repent. The end is nigh.

It appears His Nibs is not in charge, not even close, and Our GoverWnment is being both playful and threatening about it. The military and police are more or less free to do whatever they will, the congress is stalemated, the presidency is neutered, and Bannon is (for now) an irrelevancy.

That sweet young couple, Jared and Ivanka, are not ruling, but they are being allowed to play as if they might be taken seriously… one day.

The problem, of course, is that this situation is inherently unstable and potentially catastrophic. Of course. Those who rule us don’t seem to mind very much, though, do they?

I notice that Trump is using Mar-a-Lago as a Winter Palace. The room where he held the bilateral discussion with Xi was all white and gold and crystal, just like Putin’s many palatial meeting rooms in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Well, it was smaller, but still the parallels were obvious.

Bannon was there at the table.

The White House cannot compare in grandeur.

That little crypto-Nazi gnome Stephen Miller has been showing up at White House meetings looking crabbed and forlorn. I imagine nobody even speaks to him anymore.

And of course, the neoLibCon program is actually accelerating, not slowing down at all. Anyone who thought the Trump regime would shatter the ruling paradigm once and for all was a fool.

Ah well…

And yes, Trump is going to end up an “establishment” Republican, just dumber, meaner, and less competent than usual.

On foreign policy his decision seems to be to let the generals do what they wish. “Total authorization” as he said. I don’t know what that will entail but I suspect nothing good.

He still has Sessions at DOJ and seems personally motivated by a lot of xenophobia and racism, so on immigration, civil rights etc I expect most of the same policies Bannon would have advocated. He and his AG seem to believe in them (and Ivanka and Jared aren’t personally affected) so they will probably move ahead.

If anything, these measures will become even more important as they will be the only thing he still offers many of his supporters. They won’t get changes in trade, better health care, jobs, etc, but a lot of them will still stick with them as long as they feel he hates the right sort of people enough.

In the end it was Bannon who was Trunp’s blunt instrument.

Remember people said Dubya was the kind of guy you could sit down and have a beer with?

Well, Bannon is the kind of guy you can stand up and have twenty fingers of scotch with from across the room.

The guy’s a real looker. Polished. He presents well. Charismatic. Gregarious. Loquacious. Amiable.

Just an easy guy to like if you like dog shit and find it appealing.

The mistake was made way back when conservatives weaponized Jesus first. There’d be nothing scarier for congresspeople, even presidents and corporate dibs than the unionized armed pofolks mob on a mission from God. But that’s water under the bridge.

I quit judging others by what they said long ago. And it’s not all about what they do, but the discrepancies between what they say and what they do. Of course, there are those who do as they believe but their stuff is all a buncha BS. I don’t think they don’t get elected much, preferring instead to work as useful tools.

Ian; good post.

Along those lines, I offer this read:

http://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/4/14/15293136/syria-strikes-trump-war

Ian Welsh Says: “It’s useful having Tom around, so I know the Turkish party line.”

So much pain…for such useless information

Not coincidentally, I think that Trump and Republicans will suffer for it electorally.

At least some of Trump’s base is seeing the light and turning on him for his many betrayals:

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/trump-base-supporters-turn-on-him-237200

Mind you, Trump could still rescue his presidency, the same way that Schwarzenegger rescued his governorship, by pulling a 2010 Obama and handing the other party Congress*. If he does that, then he actually might be able to do things with Democratic majorities that would actually honor his campaign promises to improve the lives of all those working-class stiffs who put him in office. He could become once more the Trump of the 1990s or early 2000s who was not against abortion or defunding Planned Parenthood, who was not for vouchers for private religious schools or other parts of the Christian right agenda, and be in favor of single-payer healthcare. This tack would also be an analogy with those who have been comparing him with George Wallace, who ended up appointing African-Americans to his cabinet and to offices and winning with their votes.

(And yes, I think Obama really wanted that 2010 result, in order to achieve his cherished dream of having a SS- and Medicare slashing lovefest with his “Republican friends”, as he calls them–a result he thought he’d never get as long as the Democrats ruled Congress. Recall that at Harvard he disappointed the Left there too and chummed around with Federalist society pals. Obama spent most of his presidency trying to elevate “bipartisanship” as a virtue in its own right, to convince righties that “I”m really one of you” (he did that early in January 2009!). The reason SS and Medicare were saved was that the Tea Party believed its own propaganda, that Obama was the Great Librul Satan, and no matter how often Obama put SS and Medicare on the chopping block and how little he demanded in return for that (by the very end, just the mere *promise* of some unspecified tax increases in the future), you don’t make deals with Satan. Just like Monica Lewinsky saved SS from the “pact” being worked out between Clinton and Gingrich in 1997, the Tea Party’s irrational intransigence meant they couldn’t take a deal that even Cantor admitted was “97 % of what we want”.

I don’t think Bannon’s ouster will result in better treatment of immigrants and foreigners under Trump. Those actions are staying in place (other than the blanket visa ban which is the action of the courts, not the Trump admin). But the arbitrary power of border agents and ICE raids (a continuation of Obama) are here to stay.

This is the worst of all possible outcomes.

@ Duder

I don’t think Bannon’s ouster will result in better treatment of immigrants and foreigners under Trump.

You know, it baffles me to think that we are “easy” on foreigners coming into the US. The simple fact is, we’re hard as hell. We’re cruelly, viscously, stupidly, unnecessarily hard as hell.

Let’s say you’re a foreigner from a non-visa waiver country. You want to visit the US–maybe you want to sightsee here, maybe you have relatives you want to visit, whatever. Let’s say you have in your travel history an established record of visiting other countries, and have never overstayed your visit there but returned to your country of origin. No problem visiting on a tourist visa, right?

Wrong. It’s very likely you’ll be denied, unless you’re already quite rich or at least reasonably well-off. You’re out the money you spent for the visa, and while you can re-apply, you have to again pay for the visa fee. You have no right to appeal save in certain cases.

Let’s say that after paying for visa after visa, you finally gain admittance. You can stay up to six months, but let’s say you are going on a 90-day trip. When you arrive, you present the customs officer at the US airport you arrived in you airline tickets showing your arrival and return flights. But the US customs office doesn’t think you should stay 90 days, so he says “I think you should only stay 45 days”.

Then what? You have to scramble to get the date on your return flight changed. Maybe you can do that, at the cost of a additional hefty fee, or maybe you can’t. In the latter case you have to book an *additional* one-way flight back because said customs official maybe was having a bad hair day, or didn’t like the way you looked when you arrived. Once again, you have no right to appeal.

Let’s say after all of this, you loved visiting the US, and you want to come back, to see other tourist sights. Or maybe you have relatives or friends here, maybe you have a grandmother who has cancer and may not live, so you’d like to see her as much as you can while she is still alive. Let’s say you did everything as you were told, broke no laws, and never overstayed your visa. You have now an established record of good behavior in the US. No problem returning, right?

Wrong yet again. No matter how good your behavior, customs looks at visiting the US too frequently or staying too long unfavorably too. So it’s likely if you visit your ailing grandma for 3 months each year you might be denied a return visit at some point.

Mind you, this is all to prevent people from other countries with an established record of good behavior and who are spending their money in this country, and boosting our economy, from doing just that. Whatever you think of immigration it’s attacking the very people who aren’t the source of whatever problem we have. As I remind you, these same people can go to Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, or elsewhere with nowhere near the same issues, and moreover all these countries have far less illegal immigration than ours (typically 1/6th of our rates, in many cases, 1/10th). Of course, part of the solution can be a tamper-resistant hard-to-counterfeit national ID card, which would be required to get employment in the US, but many of the very people who scream about illegal immigrants are against that too–because that in essence would be giving people ID cards that would allow them to vote, and they don’t want “the wrong people” voting.

What I wrote above is not hypothetical, I know of instances of this personally. Nor does this include all the other indignities and hassles that foreigners visiting her experiencing here undergo, one friend of mine had the customs official seize his cell phone and throw it in the trash can, just because they have arbitrary power and don’t have to justify exercising it. We need a bill of rights for both foreigners visiting here and also American citizens returning from visits overseas. One obvious thing is no seizure and searching of laptops or cell phones without a warrant for citizens, and reasonable cause for foreigners. You can also allow what other countries do if you’re worried about people overstaying their visits, which is to allow an American citizen to take legal responsibility, under penalty of law, to make sure they don’t overstay. There are any ways to make this more sensible and less stupidly and needlessly cruel.

Other countries aren’t hugely better about visas. The effort to get a Schengen visa for a non-waiver country is also quite difficult and capricious, and the liability declarations do not really impress the authorities that much. One of the reasons why Europe has such a hard time getting North African countries to accept deportees is that it’s not willing to offer the North African upper and middle class easier visa access, but thinks that monetary aid is all that’s required. This is very much not how the political class in those countries see it. I know of demonstrably very rich Africans getting denied tourist visas with letters hinting that European authorities are afraid they’d go on welfare or work illegally.

@Mandos

Other countries aren’t hugely better about visas.

I can’t speak directly about other countries, just saying that the people I know had no problems getting into the countries I cited. This includes people with no job, or marginal incomes, such as visiting students (not attending school in the country they are visiting, mind you, not a student visa issue) and the like. They could and did go to Germany, or the UK, or Austria, or New Zealand, or even Japan, but would be (or would likely be) denied the US. There is simply no reason to punish people who are playing by the rules, and moreover the system should reward, not punish, good behavior. Why would one want anything else?

What I noted is that I’m far better treated by other countries when I arrive than my own. I have my stuff searched, by body groped, and while I’ve not had my laptop or phone seized and searched, that could happen–for no reason whatsoever. And I’m an American citizen! Other countries seem to respect and trust me based on my record than my own!

FTR, after the Bernie ruining I like so many others, I left POTUS blank as a sort of protest vote. Little good that did. But what was the alternative? Hillary apologists can either feel no economic pain, or they prefer their slow and certain death to taking what certainly reeked of snake oil. I’d start by identifying apologist blogs and playing there for a while to see if there’s anything else useful to learn about these people.

StewartM, I am not really interested in what Trump might have done. I have seen that film too many times. If only Bernie Sanders had . . ., if Obama had . . . Obama ran on change. Clinton even claimed she was progressive. But again, personnel is policy. There wasn’t a single progressive to be found in either the Obama Administration or the Clinton campaign. No one and no circumstance forced them to exclude progressives they did it because they wanted to. Same with Trump. You could call the choice of Pence for VP a strategic choice. But Pence wasn’t Cruz. He was a non-entity from Indiana, and could have been consigned to NoWhereville the moment the election was won. Trump could have filled his Administration with populists if he had wanted to, but like Obama and Clinton with progressives, he didn’t want them. It wasn’t: discard the conservative whackos once he won. It was: discard the populists. He’s the President, the most powerful person on the planet. No one forced him to fill his Administration with hardcore conservatives or pursue a hardline conservative agenda. He’s chosen to do that. With Trump, the veneer was always populism and the substance was conservatism, not the other way around.

Well . . . at least Trump drove the Bush Dynasty out of elective politics for a while. And he has opened up a chance for us to drive the Clinton Dynasty out of politics before it can get itself firmly entrenched.

Trump’s fast decay into Washington Consensus neo-whateverism is being noted and followed in granular detail over at Sic Semper Tyrannis.

The Racial Stormtrumpers will accept all of it as long as the Trumpadmin retains its anti-Mexican and etc. border security orientation. The Downwardly Mobile Deplorables may be bitter. Can they get bitter enough loud enough in enough numbers to pressurize Tea Party Republican officeholders into obstructing certain parts of the Ryan-Trump domestic agenda? The Trumpie Yuppies ( the kind of stylish suburban Republican voters which the Clinton campaign was courting so fervently) will remain satisfied with Trump as long as they retain their money and position. Bitter Berners for Trump ( like me) are surprised at how fast and furious Trump has 180’d on all his Counter Clintonite promises. Attacking Assad was a totally Clintastic thing for Trump to have done, and it is not the kind or target of attack that I expected from Trump. Apparently Trump is just as much a piece of jihadi-loving scum as Clinton itself is.

As for expert political amateurs telling me how stupid I am for having voted for Trump in expectation of anything different . . . I have to wonder why they think they are any smarter, given that they supported the Clinton actively by voting for it, or supported the Clinton passively by voting for some Vanity Third Party candidate or oh-so-fastidiously leaving the “president” line blank.

But Ian Welsh is exactly right about how Trump is being trained. I can hear the Wall Street / World War Clintonites even now praising their good little Trumpuppy Dog . . .

” Good boy Donnie! GOOD BOYYYY!! Who’s a good little Donnie Dog? You are.
YOU ARE! Here. Have a cookie.”

I’ll repeat my query from above: Now that we’ve seen apparently conclusive evidence that we can’t escape the globalist corporate oligarchy agenda by voting, should we think about fighting for our freedom and the future, or should we just meekly accept that from now on we are livestock?

As I’ve said, I’m on my way out, with no children, so I’m just an observer and an analyst at this point, but really, folks, does anyone with a future have the guts to say where they stand on this question? Even philosophically?

(Even geniuses like the Clinton-clappers need to answer some hard questions sometimes. Otherwise, people may think they are only interested in posturing and propagandizing.)

Are y’all just gonna wait for some magic to happen, or what?

@ DC

LOL New term I just coined, to denote those who take every Trump setback as cause to celebrate because . . . . . Clinton!

IOW, the Terminal Lesser Evil Freaks. Whose strategy always and inevitably leads us deeper into the global corporate fascism paradigm, where a future is being shaped for mankind that will leave no room for individual human freedom or dignity.

My query: Is it worth fighting against that, or should we just meekly acknowledge that we are already past the point of no return and that our destiny as regular humans is to be as livestock to our Masters?

IMO, that is worthy of a spirited debate. A HYPOTHETICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, GAME THEORY, political science-type debate, if you please. (I hope that’s clear enough for all the paranoid panty-twisters lol.)

(I’ll be on the road today. Very interested to see if anyone rises to the occasion.)

RC said: “Now that we’ve seen apparently conclusive evidence that we can’t escape the globalist corporate oligarchy agenda by voting.”

Apparently, our resident “genius” is unable to recognize when he’s employing the straw man fallacy. SAD!

Well here RC, I’ll counter your straw man with a straw man:
There is no need to resort to violence because the system will collapse under it’s own weight.

RC wins the Dunning/Kruger effect poster child contest.

“We have received your submission, Mr. Kepler. Unfortunately, submission is for how many epicycles does Mercury has. Since the selection, you have sent is how ellipses – rather than circles, it is hereby rejected.
The Editorial Board of the Suncentric Universe”

“Dear Mr. Kepler, I have read with interest your piece on the orbits of the inner planets. But I am afraid I cannot believe that each planet has one Pythagorean solid at it is heart; so I cannot take equally seriously the matter of having ellipses – rather circles. It is the 2000-year-old tradition which holds astronomy together. Sincerely Yours G Galileo”

Remember this when I am talking about P = NP.

StewartM:

You’ll hear no objection from me on your line of thinking. I don’t necessarily believe that the system collapsing under it’s own weight will solve anything. I was simply pointing out our resident genius’s logical fallacy. Every now and then RC needs to be knocked off his high horse or else his delusions of intellectual grandeur get away from him.

@StewartM,

I wouldn’t refer to Trump’s appointees as “Deplorables”. I would refer to them as “Despicable”. The Despicables.

@RealityChecker,

You might want to be careful about your steady and constant suggestions that people other than yourself get violent. People will start to remember the old rule of thumb: the Undercover Cop is always the first person to suggest violence. You wouldn’t want people to begin wondering who you really work for . . . would you?

As to suggestions of violence in its own right, physical cowards like me are not going to get violent unless cornered like rats in the basement. There are ways to inconvenience and degrade and attrit a ruling elite in this country other than violence. Of course these ways only work if tens of millions of people practice them in a leaderless way. And the existence of the internets and social medias make possible the kinds of information exchange which make possible such forms of Leaderless Mass Obstruction.

Some people are in a better position to apply those methods than others. In a world where the Econosphere is now a very important Battlespace, and Every Dollar is a Bullet on the Field of Economic Combat, the Next 9 % ( the well paid service and support people who do the specialized management of power and money on behalf of the One Per Cent which the One Per Cent are not able to do themselves) are in a better position to wage Economic Warfighting than the Deplorables are, because the Next 9 Per Cent have more money and leisure than the Deplorables do.

Perhaps we will see a leaderless form of economic rebellion happen as we watch. People who have watched the United Passenger BeatDown on social video media venues are getting upset. If enough of them decide to avoid all possible future bussiness contacts with United, will they be able to exterminate United from existence and wipe United off the face of the earth? A few hundred million people in China in particular are disturbed by this video and while they can not be sure that United picked Dr. Dao for the beat down based on antisinitic racist antisinism, they wonder if it would be irresponsible not to speculate. If they all decide to Boycott United, would that destroy enough of United’s bussiness to be able to destroy United right there? If not, would it come close enough that a few million more extermicotters in Europe and America would be able to push United over the edge into extermination?

different clue;

To your comments listed below as 1 & 2:

To #1, can you give me 3 examples of your claim, because I haven’t seen it?

To #2, in my life, moral cowards have always been physical cowards. Brave men & woman are not always morally courageous, but physical cowards are always morally corrupt.

1] “You might want to be careful about your steady and constant suggestions”.

2]”physical cowards like me are not going to get violent unless cornered like rats in the basement.”

It’s the idiocracy factor, with the trend line increasingly going down. As a kid I could never have imagined how stupid my society would wind up being.

Instead of world peace we have multi-trillion dollar endless wars. Instead of moon bases and missions to Saturn no human has gotten out of orbit since. Instead of a cure for cancer doctors can’t even get my ear infection right (and god help me if really get sick). Instead of flying cars I have an expensive new clutch hydraulics system where parts fail in weeks. I do have a brand name flat screen smart TV, but after three short years the electronics are failing, as are everybody else’s owning the same set. Having an incompetent boss young enough to be your child, only being there because of the nepotism, is considered normal. Nobody trusts governments regardless of level, national or local, because the results are usually expensive and usually poor. Yet despite all the idiocracy everybody still promises you the moon.

Maybe realitychecker is the last sane person left and knows the way out of this mess. But if it involves penis cars, you may have to count me out.

Seems like Bannon completely contradicts the story Trump’s head tells itself now, so his usefulness is nil. He may not discover he was really always a servant like Lee Atwater (if ever a guillotine sang for heads, the Bushes would satisfy any thirst), but he’s definitely in the way of Trump’s id.

@RC — great comment above “…we are livestock?”

My hope is that the upper reaches of government can remain irrelevant to me. The future lies in community — making a better world right where we live with the people immediately around us. Back in my days at the School of B, they kept our class size to around 300 – so that everyone would know everyone else. Democracy works at that level, but gets dicier the bigger you get thereafter. Our future raced forward for 100 years on cheap energy, but with those days over the clock will now run backwards. We can borrow from the past — not to relive it, but to live it *better*.

The best any of us can do is to strive to think, speak and act within our character and station as honorably as possible.

How limiting! I’d like people to act honourably outside of their “character and station”. Especially their station. Ugh, station.

Why post?
What do you think you’ll gain?
Posting; purpose? Result? Change?
Years and years and years of posting; to what end?
It’s worth thinking about if one is serious.
Action is the missing ingredient; but action is little understood…
Hope you’re happy with your slavery…

At least you will have a laugh:
https://symbalitics.blogspot.com/2017/04/letter-to-editor.html

@S Brennan,

Since I am not the only person here who has seen Reality Checker’s calls to violence by others ( never himself) I think your #1 can be dismissed. It was right there in RC’s post in this thread and it has been in prior threads. Che Pasa sees it, which means you see it too, even if you pretend not to.

As to your #2, In my life, those people who speak of moral courage have none. The more they speak of moral courage, the more utterly zero moral courage they have.

There. What did I just show you? Was it a window? Or a mirror?

@va,
planting seed of change. perhaps/ hopefully someone sometime reads the old post-of-past and it precipitates personal taking action.

This fixation on Trump’s golf time just shows the snowflakes are running out of memes to paste over their resistance to keep it from being completely ignored. Trump needs this exercise and it may be the only time he can speak candidly with friends and guests.

This malodorous anti-Trump dirge being repeated by Hugh and others doesn’t seem to do anything but make their life look endlessly bleak.

Should we just start calling him “Baghdad Peter”?

So it was Ivanka I saw volunteering down at the union hall. The bib overalls fooled me. Speaking of being fooled, whenever I want to golf too much, I usually bitch-tweet about others doing it too much. Works like a charm and fools everybody every time.

@Tom

Thanks for the accurate description of the new Turkish constitution with its check and balances.

We can now wait for the Sultan Erdogan rants to begin.

Not that anybody cared, mf. And that’s no lie.

I wish Cheetolini’s fake tan would turn him red instead of orange, so I could make a reference to “In the Court of the Crimson King”.

Tom it is disheartening that you can be so correct on Syria and yet you’re a propagandist for Erdogan and Turkey — making your motives wrt Syria become suspect. Erdogan jails his opposition, and the election on this referendum was not free and fair from what I’ve seen. He will have no political legitimacy in any of the population centers, and will lead by dictatorship like his neighbor in Egypt. Erdogan, Sisi, Assad, they’re all the same. May they all rot.

Mark;

Sadly true, just yesterday I was thinking that the site has been overrun by Clinton propagandists…which is just another way of saying; dishonorable falsifiers.

I hope you had a good Easter celebration and that, other than this site being overrun, all is well. BTW, thank you for the compliment.

Here’s an article by a woman I have been reading. I don’t agree with everything she says, but I find her criticisms of “liberals”[1] spot on.

Russiagate Is Finally Dying, But For The Wrong Reason

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/russiagate-is-finally-dying-but-for-the-wrong-reason-ad812291334f

Regards,

Brennan

[1] “Liberals” as opposed to genuine liberals are people who wish to appear humane, but in fact have found wearing a mask allows them greater cruelty…without the social consequence of being seen as fascist in nature. The vast majority of Hillary supporters here are by this definition, “liberals”.

In Trump-world propaganda-speak, everyone opposed to Trump is by definition a “Clintonite” or “Obamacrat” (the same thing). Binaries. Two possibilities only. Choose one. If it is the wrong one, to the ever-lasting fires of hell with you.

It’s absurd. But that’s the “reality” Trump defenders and loyalists are drowning in and which they seek to drown the rest of us in.

It’s little different than Republican radical reactionaries calling everyone who has a different view “hard left” (what nonsense) or friends in the so-called alt-right insisting on their meaningless new speak to describe opponents.

This form of propaganda is rarely effective for long — or at all.

But you never know till you try, right?

Two days on the road, and a day to recuperate, and I’m back to see that not a single person has chosen to directly or honestly address the query I posted on Friday. Distractions, label-mongering, ad hominems, straw men, but no direct response to the guts of the issue, i.e., At what point, if ever, has the “consent of the governed” concept been so betrayed that violence is justified in an effort to make things right, and, secondarily and separately, could such a fight succeed in modern times?

Everybody seems terrified of that discussion, but that is all I have ever asked for, here or anywhere else. I am not “advocating” anything, as I do not have final answers myself to those questions, but I think if we can’t even dare to talk them out, then we need to recognize that we have ALREADY lost much of the freedom we had only a few decades ago, and the future trend seems very clearly tilted in that same direction.

Fine. So, now the question becomes, what do you think about being so scared to speak of things I studied openly in political science classes 40 years ago?

What does the word FREEDOM mean any more?

Where is the dividing line between what used to be considered “freedom” and the point where it is only fair to refer to us as “livestock”?

Not to worry, RC.

Your hero will solve these dilemmas one way or another, won’t he?

That’s all it really takes, doesn’t it? The right man at the right time in the right office, and we don’t have to do anything because somebody else will take care of it for us.

Relax.

Everything will turn out just the way you always wanted. Wait and see.

@ PeteM

I come here because FDL died, and I have found no better place for thoughtful people, of which there are some here. I enjoy intellectual conversation, believe in the marketplace of ideas concept, and this is a conversation that I think is worth having. Have thought so for a long time, and the evidence just keeps piling up.

I understand it is difficult for liberals, but, frankly, it’s difficult for everybody to contemplate a time when they might have to experience concrete risks to their body in order to sustain conceptual values like freedom. I have given full disclosure that I will not physically participate, and my reasons, but I still think it is the most important philosophical discussion for our time. It is obvious that all our systemic change tools have failed us, and we must decide if we want to have a future ruled by corporations, or continue being something like “free.”

As to tactics, you have shown you don’t “get it,” as do most lefties fail to “get it,” so I refer you again to the book Public Enemies for a primer. One can’t reasonably approach this topic without understanding what is possible. That book can open a lot of eyes.

A much better source book for what is/has been going on among a segment of freedom-lovers (as opposed to poseurs) is David Graeber’s “Revolution in Reverse.”

On the other hand, fascists, authoritarians in general and rightist reactionaries figured out many years ago that they could seize and/or control the apparatus of most western (“democratic”) governments without a lot of fuss or bother (oh, there would be some, but it could be ignored) simply and efficiently through strategic agit-prop (media) and control of money flow to and through political parties. Piece of cake.

Crises have to be created to keep the Rabble dazed and confused, of course, and they have to be taken full advantage of. We’ve seen it transpire for decades.

Through these means and others, successful rightist (neoLibCon) revolutions have captured nearly all supposedly important “democratic” governments everywhere. The rightist populist reaction has failed nearly everywhere it’s tried (which says to me it never was a genuine movement). We’re seeing it fail in the case of Trump — who always was a con man anyway — day by day.

People who stick to an anachronistic view of Revolution generally can’t see what’s really going on. They see things through such a narrow lens that revolutionary actions on many fronts simply go unnoticed.

I think it is interesting that the white rightists have announced the streets of Berkeley to be the epicenter of the Civil War — which they have declared — for the soul and spirit of America. One has to laugh. But that kind of thinking and the spectacle of it all does serve as an entertaining distraction.



RC, if we join will we get nice white Toyota pickup trucks with gun turrets in the bed? That’d be cool and a nice gesture. Molotov Cocktails are so yesterday.

Repent.

Revolutions are always impossible until they happen. Revolutions are always violent because they are themselves a response to the great violence that the powers that be have inflicted on the rest of us, and the even greater violence they are willing to use to defend themselves, their power, and above all else, their loot. That last is key. Revolutions happen, indeed are inevitable, when the powers that be have simply stolen too much for too long from too many.

@tsisi,
Full disclosure: I don’t follow Jesus Christ. I don’t trust Jesus Christ. (Yes, I’m banned, I know.)

@RC

PeteM is my nom de Guerra for the Maoists and other hard left sites I used to follow. They were trying to infiltrate and take over the Occupy group in Oregon and use that for a base to assault the power structure. The Anarchists of Occupy were not assimilated and they identified and ignored them.

Money could have been working on screenplay ideas for a updated radical urban version of Red Dawn. Detroit would be an ideal location with young white suburbanites infiltrating the wasteland of the ghettoes to fight for some freedoms for the oppressed. I saw the real life version of this unorganized small insurrection in ’67 with burning buildings, massive military presence, tanks in the streets, snipers and dead civilians.

There are people or small groups already carrying out attacks on property not people in an organized manner. The multiple cutting of the San Francisco fiber optics lines without being apprehended is one example of discipline and planning and the actions are nation-wide. The media doesn’t report much about this and if they do they tend to blame vandals.

There are young and not so young people who are willing to walk the radical road and those possibilities should be discussed. The problem is that here and at many online sites there are few radicals and the liberals, Clintonites and snowflakes are counterrevolutionaries although they may be coup plotters and supporters. You recall that the word revolution was banned at FDL showing just how fearful liberals are of radical thought no less action.

@OS

You’ve chosen a group, antifa, that deserves examining more closely to see who they are and what they actually are. I think they are identified as being from the Black Bloc during Occupy in SF another group we know little about.

They are described as Anarchists but I wonder if they represent Emma Goldman’s anarchy or are better described as the tools of George Soros’ colorful activism. Their attack on free speech in Berkeley was too ironic and depressing to support any positive view of this group.

There’s plenty of footage of a lot of things. You can form your own opinion about what happened in Berkeley on Saturday. Just keep in mind it wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last that things got a little unpleasant between Antifa and fascists. (Actually, for most of the participants, it seemed they were pleased as punch. So to speak.)

As for “free speech,” horseshit. “Free speech” was being used as a propaganda ploy by the fascist/white supremacists who would like the rest of us to believe that their “free speech” rights are infringed by Antifa and the state and their other opponents. Infringement for shouting them down and telling them to fuck off.

At least from what I saw on various recorded livestreams there was lots of hyperventilating, but little mayhem. Just going by appearances, it was hard to tell which “side” was which in any case. No wonder the po-po didn’t want to play.

Don’t fool yourselves into thinking Antifa started it. Both “sides” came ready to rumble, armed with their sticks and whatnot, lightly armored and helmeted up. There was plenty of provocation to go around. Much the same thing happened the week before, and there have been similar Antifa/Fascist confrontations up and down the West Coast, some of them more bloody and violent than what happened in Berkeley.

It’s mostly masculine posturing, propaganda and theater. It is not the harbinger of Civil War — as some of the white supremacists claim it is. This isn’t Wiemar Germany. And the Nazis are very far from seizing the government (not that it couldn’t happen.)

Given who this sort of thing benefits, you would almost think it was staged or provoked or somehow arranged for the cameras.

On the other hand, those who engage in these street brawls can hardly be called cowards or snowflakes or whatever the newspeak term is today. They aren’t necessarily heroes, but they’re not afraid. They fight and fight back. Even when they lose, they come back for more.

What a joke. I looked at some of the footage as well. Idiots on both sides which are really the same side with minor differences. Remember the horseshoe ideological spectrum? These thug wannabes in the streets shouting and threatening is just a bunch of nonsensical posturing and a distraction more than anything.

Meanwhile, Trump & Tillerson threaten yet another country today. The whole world has been put on notice by Trump. He’ll bomb the f*** out of you if you cross him or he thinks you crossed him and even if didn’t and he just feels like it.

I doubt this made for TV drama with these Altfa posers is what RC was wanting to discuss. They do show how the elite Clintonites coopt and pervert radical ideas and even groups to keep the snowflakes frightened of their neighbors and seeking the party supplied safe spaces.

Stereotyping the opposition worked so well during the election that its no wonder why CP and others continue with their humiliating loses and dim prospects.

@ Che Pasa

“Nobody wants to play RC’s hypothetical game, . . . ”

Right you are, for once, amigo. And nobody has had the guts to play that game for at least ten years that I have been trying to get some participation in the discussion. Amazing, right?

(FTR, I actually took a course entitled “Protest and Revolution” at NYU in the early 1970’s; also “Politics of Minority Groups,” “Pressure Group Politics,” and a poly sci course whose title I can’t recall now, about political polling and data gathering.)

You have actually stumbled into some truth: Everybody is afraid to discuss what used to be, not very long ago, accepted as a suitable topic for mainstream discussion.

That illustrates the dramatic extent to which ‘they’ have already succeeded in turning the American left into a pussified, gutless pack of mewling cowards who can beat their gums endlessly and impotently, but can’t fight for a second to preserve their actual freedom.

If you see that the electoral system is hopelessly corrupted and designed to stymie the People’s desire for change, and has effectively done so, and you are AFRAID to even TALK about changing things by force, then how much actual freedom do you have, how much actual democracy do you have, how far removed from livestock status, are you really, RIGHT NOW?

What a disgusting display of simpering cowardice, from the descendants of those who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Y’all ought to read that document sometime, and then go hide your heads in shame. The Founders would piss on the pack of you.

Safe mother-fucking spaces, indeed. Terminally attached to your mama’s nipples.

But sarcasm and snide remarks? Well, y’all have the market cornered on that. Yay.

Dang, RC is really running the triple-dog-dare-ya shtick into the ground.

Keep beating that dead nag, RC. Surely it’ll get up and gallop someday. 😆

OK, I’ll turn off the snark (briefly).

How well did violent tactics work for the Weathermen or the SLA?

Or on the other end of the political spectrum, for Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols? Or Dylan Roof?

Nothing else drives the just-getting-by majority into the arms of the government faster than violence. Chaos threatens what little safety they have, so the vast majority of them will not support the rebels. Moral issues aside, it won’t work; that is, it will not gain the rebels the power to change their society.

Of course, that assumes that the rebels’ real goal is to change their society. If their actual goal is merely to demonstrate their high testosterone levels in the vain hopes of gaining more frequent sexual encounters with more desirable and more numerous partners–well, it won’t work for that either, but a million years of irrational instinct tells them otherwise. 😉

Speaking of the Weathermen’s time period, Different Clue has already reminded us of the bitterly learned wisdom of that time:

“The first guy who suggests violence is always the undercover cop.”

Then, armed with the confidence that comes from manly muscle, lefties can march against the jocks and ROTC goon squad without fear

HaHa!! See, that’s all changed now too. All the Jock & ROTC Goons have come out of the closet like Ellen & Company and are now more interested in decorating & what not versus beating up social media junkie lefties armed with killer bud and plastic lightsabers.

That was sarcasm, folks. The point is, you can never go back. Too much has changed. Cold Evil has replaced Hot Evil and more creative ways of resistance are necessary to combat the rising and all-consuming tide of Cold Evil.

RC sure has a lot of vim & vigor for an old codger unable to reproduce.

I’ve found that ratfucking does work – most creeps will leave you alone if they suspect you capable of such. An itch they cannot scratch is especially good. And amusing-cathartic for the victim.

The founders weren’t all bad. They did finance their new government with tariffs. And I do believe that Mr. Washington himself turned the first spadeful of dirt for the very first public works project and gave the standard speech about jobs and benefits and all. So, would I need their respect, maybe but not necessarily. Do I need RC’s respect? Definitely not. He might be a wizard at spotting discrepancies and reminding us all of his education, but needs a bit more proving himself to earn respect as a wise and insightful teacher. And his hurling himself under the bed to pout about the cowardice of the rest of us is a good way to lose style points.

Good point, Ivory. Required reading as well is Orlando Figes’ A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924. The Russian Revolution spanned many years and it took on a life of its own above and beyond all the various contributing factions.

A Revolution is a very complex, unpredictable Force that cannot be planned and controlled although it does comprise planning and attempts to control by all the various inevitable factions.

But, once it gets going, it’s hard to stop and it takes its toll in flesh & blood before it’s all said & done, and actually, it’s never really all said and done — hence A People’s Tragedy.

In a way, that’s the whole message of the original, early 20th-Century Progressives:

“Look, barons, if you’ll only make some token concessions to the peasants–the cost of which you’ll never notice–and speak graciously to them, the vast majority of them will be content, and the few remaining rebels will be few enough to be crushed easily.”

One can argue, and it’s a cogent argument, that the American Revolution was never fully completed and never will be. At least as far as The Common Man is concerned, one tyranny was replaced with another.

The Declaration of Independence, as erudite & eloquent as it is, was written by & for Landowners and Men of Means. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Landowners & Men Of Means are created equal……..”

It was meant to say, the implication was, that we American Landowners & American Men of Means are equal to the British Monarchy and its Courtiers.

I read a book years ago, called [b]Painted in Blood[/b], which said that the origins of the aristocracy of Europe were exactly as if the Old West outlaw gangs had been able to seize and hold territories as their own, and subjugate the inhabitants.

So yes, the displacement of Ye Olde Titlede Aristocracie (excuse Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe), 😉 by the plainer oligarchy of wealth, was simply one glorified gang of thieves supplanting another glorified gang of thieves.

Something that’s always instructive in the understanding of propaganda is to look at it through the lens of history and compose your research spanning decades and even centuries. Pursuant to that, let’s dial the Propaganda Wayback Machine to 1992. Too funny — tragically funny, but funny nonetheless. Now, look at the news being proffered today and try to extrapolate from it what it will look like 25 years from now. Who’s today’s Osama bin Laden as if it’s 1992? There are so many choices. So many permutations. So many possibilities. Look for the signature calling cards. Of course, there’s the predictable crowd that will always say, without fail, “who could have known?” instead of, “who knew?”

Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts His Army On The Road To Peace

@RC said: ….the men who built this country…

Ummmm….no, the Founders did not build America. First, they essentially stole it, and second, the building was done by the men & women, The Little People, who’s names aren’t recorded in the history books. They’re the ones who “built” America with their blood, sweat & tears and you do them a disservice by attributing this amazing feat called America to the Founders. But, that’s who & what you and your ilk are. Donald Trump is no different. He claims successes for himself & his rich friends that are not, and never could be, his/their’s.

America is a tram The Rich use on their way to even greater, unimagined wealth. Thanks Tayyip for that telling metaphor. Hey, at least he’s honest about it and so too am I.

Of Mice And Great Men

Aaaand the flogging of the dead cayuse continues…

I would ask what Reality “Macho Man” Checker has done, to earn a position from which he may justly rebuke us lowly scummy wormy sniveling grovelling serfs–but it would be useless, as anyone can claim, over the Intertoobz, to have done anything.

I would not be surprised, if the truth could be revealed, that he would turn out to be a Foggy Dewhurst type–for those of you familiar with Last of the Summer Wine. 😛

I don’t mind the “Get off my lawn!” geriatric. Adds flavor to a neighborhood. But it starts getting creepy when it’s not even their lawn. Creepier still when the owner of said lawn has already told him to knock it off.

All anybody’s trying to do here is get realitychecker to back up his personal insults and admonitions with something pointedly substantial, such as “because there’s dog shit on the lawn!”. But it rarely ever happens. Apparently this is what the misanthropic do. Insult and nitpickery are their mediums. Disenchantment and chaos are their goals.

I’d hoped that somebody would vouch for realitychecker, telling us of his change from wise and avuncular humanist to exasperated asshole. But nobody’s stepped up. Nobody has any tales of a brilliance that went repeatedly ignored until some break happened. And now we get to have these self-described “heroic performances” nobody cares about.

Great man indeed.

I get out in the real world, where I must meet and deal with many people. I’ve observed and known many people from many religious and political persuasions. I know exactly where my standing is in relation to each, as well as the whole.

Assuming you are being genuine, and are not some troublemaking dissembler intent on ruining a progressive website with your “mindfuckery” (as you so eloquently put it), you stand apart from a great many I’ve known. You’re an anomaly, realitychecker. You’re far too quick to disrespect most commenters here without ever specifically highlighting any “logical fallacy” from which they can learn. This is known as “ad hominem”, the worst fallacy of all.

You are a self-important asshole. And “patheticness” is not a word. Own it.

@realitychecker,
I think your challenge is a good one. But it’s paradoxical. In 1789, “the sovereignty of the people” and “all men are created equal” were new ideas, and people could rally under that banner to create a new order. What would be the banner to rally under, today? The ideas of 1789 are revealed to be false, a sham. There’s zero chance a left-wing revolution would make things better. Rather, it would be more of the same medicine that is killing us.

On the other hand, a right-wing revolution is almost an oxymoron. It would have to be a revolution from above, or a restoration. The problem is, there are no more aristocrats, and our elite class are mostly sociopaths or morons. So we don’t see much hope for the immediate future, and instead we look to the transcendental, and to the lessons of history for guidance. As Spengler wrote:

We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

The problem is, there are no more aristocrats, and our elite class are mostly sociopaths or morons.

The aristocrats always were mostly sociopaths and/or morons, but capital-R Romantics don’t see that. 😛

Being an un-Romantic fellow, I’ll still take the Enlightenment over any of its challengers. Its science and technology have given me, and the majority of the world’s population, far longer and better lives than we could have had if the Middle Ages had somehow gone on forever–though of course, many of us wouldn’t exist at all without the sci/tech revolutions, because one or more of our ancestors would have died before reproducing.

We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

*cue sad trombone*

I’ve never read Spengler, but if this passage is representative, he was quite the drama queen. 😆

I’m sure that if I died in a pile of hot volcanic matter, my last thought would not be, “Gee, I wonder how long the Millennials will remember me after I die”? At least, I hope not.

It seems that most folks here are very willing to assume that nothing can happen in the future that is not an exact repeat of the way some vaguely similar past event played out in the past.

Very self-limiting, IMO.

@IBW said IIRC, Twain said that history did not repeat itself, but it did tend to rhyme.

True enough. Today, in America, when the Yellowstone Caldera erupts, perhaps there will be a selfless, braindead soldier who, like the dedicated Roman soldier, refused to leave his post and his loyalty will be captured in ash for all eternity with the only difference being this loyal American soldier preserved in ash will have his, or maybe it will be a her which would be a rhyming twist as well, Smart Phone on him/her.

Geez, guys, the diff between “repeat” and “rhyme” is yuuge when you are in the context of trying to accurately predict the future.

If “rhyme” is correct, then one should NEVER be saying things along the lines of, “It never happened that way before . . .,” should one?