alias Bruce.

President Trump, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, and a week of atrocities

Tom McCarthy's Jan 28 Guardian piece is a good peek into President Donald Trump's jealous-toddler view of the world and what drives his policy moves, which are best understood as tantrums. What's most terrifying is that his triggers for his despicable acts rest so trivially, and even randomly, on perceived personal slights and disrespect (does the trajectory of Trump's weeklong tear have anything to do with media having dissed his tiny little inauguration crowd?).

 

Maybe it is ever thus with tyrants. But Trump does seem a wicked prototype for the pasty postindustrial piggycrat. He is eerily reminiscent of Dune's Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (below), right down to the first name and the iridescent hair. Call him King Twitter Thumbs. The tub of lard and lies whose tweets kill people.

 

 

Here is an excerpt from McCarthy's piece on this week of atrocities from His Grand Petulance:

 

Donald Trump's first week: carnage, both real and imagined

Tom McCarthy in New York

 

 

Saturday 28 January 2017 10.38 ESTLast modified on Saturday 28 January 201717.00 ES

What started with an ominous inauguration speech has ended with executive orders on everything from immigration to banning refugees and reigniting the fossil fuel industry. What does it mean for his presidency?

 

The crowd was small, the weather was bad and the speech, which described “American carnage”, was dire. For the tens of millions who voted against him and countless concerned others, Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States felt ominous, no matter how widely Barack Obama smiled and no matter how gracefully he and Michelle Obama made the transition from hosts to departing guests.

 

The feeling of foreboding did not last. It was overtaken within hours by the realization, at the arrival of the first of the new president’s executive actions, that the most outrageous campaign promises Trump had made to the smallest core of his supporters were now official US policy, or about to be.

 

Within a week, the rally chant “build the wall!” had morphed into a phrase published on White House stationery: “impassable physical barrier”. A proposed ban on Muslim immigrants took shape as a suspension of visa programs from countries that, as Trump put it, “have tremendous terror”. Grumbling about excessive government regulation had become, in one document, an exhortation to bureaucrats to help an oil company skip the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

 

“He’s delivering the goods to his core constituency in a really visible way,” said John T Woolley, head of the American presidency project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But there are a lot of things that he’s raising that may be above what he truly has the ability to do.”

 

Seven days into his presidency, the accumulation of Trump’s official actions, at the rate of as many as five a day, has created a new national reality on central policy concerns from the environment to voting rights to international commitments to immigration, healthcare and trade.

 

“You have to consider this a pretty aggressive use of executive power early on,” said Julian E Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “Using it not only on one marquee issue, which presidents often do, but on a series of major campaign issues, all within just a few days.

 

“So it’s rapid-fire, but more importantly, each one is a pretty significant decision.”

 

More difficult to assess than the new president’s official actions, but for many Americans just as significant, has been the impact on the public of Trump’s simple presence in office – the finally inescapable fact, as it were, of Donald Trump as president.

 

During the campaign, Trump’s lies about the fake scourge of voter fraud, his vain obsession with the size of his crowds (and his hands), and his explosions of bile and irrelevance on Twitter could be semi-ignored as the faults of a mercurial political figure who was quite likely, at least, to lose.

 

Now Trump is in the Oval Office and his lies are voiced by a press secretary standing behind the White House seal in the Brady briefing room. It was there that Trump’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, falsely declared on the day after the swearing-in that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period”. Trump’s audience was in fact significantly smaller than Obama’s 2009 crowd, but members of the media who tried to brandish evidence of the fact were shouted down.

 

Spicer rolled out another whopper days later, informing the country that the president still (wrongly) believed millions of votes had been illegally cast in November. As supporting evidence, he pointed to a 2012 research report on voter fraud, prompting the author of the report to categorically deny that the report said any such thing.

 

“Of those votes cast, none of them come to me,” Trump told ABC News a day later, embroidering his fantasy. “They would all be for the other side. None of them come to me.”

 

For Americans who doubt his leadership, just as disturbing as Trump’s new freedom to spout untruths with significantly inflated authority were early reports on his conduct behind the scenes, as he made his first decisions as the most powerful individual on Earth.

 

Repeatedly, Trump threw thunderbolts from his Twitter account – threatening to “send in the Feds!” to stop violence in Chicago and impugning Chelsea Manning – immediately following negative coverage of those topics on Fox News, which Trump told the New York Times he watches morning and night.

 

It was TV coverage of his small inauguration crowd that prompted Trump to trot out Spicer. The bad press had not allowed the president to “enjoy” his first weekend in the White House as he felt he deserved, the Associated Press quoted “one person who has spoken with him” as saying. Trump’s decision to act on voter fraud was inspired, Trump told members of Congress, by a conversation with a German golfer.

 

If Trump’s character is immutable, however, his executive actions may not be. His orders have the power to guide the conduct of federal agencies and officials, but cannot contravene existing law.

 

Woolley said: “The question always is – and this is a real question for Trump – whether the president is going beyond the scope of the law, whether he’s infringing on congressional power, and whether he’s infringing on the divides between national, state and local power.

 

“There’s going to be a festival of lawsuits about almost every controversial action that he takes.”

 

Next week, Trump is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress and announce a nominee to fill the vacancy on the supreme court.

 

Here’s what he got done on week one.

 

(McCarthy's entire piece is here.)

After Paris, "an odor of early fascism" in America: the demented appeal of Trump, Carson, and the Republican Party

The wicked irony of our insulation as Americans, living as we do galaxies away from the agonies that daily afflict the global billions affected by our domination, is that we entirely lose our minds at the first sight of our own blood.

One-hundred-thirty, the number of people who died horrible deaths two Fridays ago in Paris, is less than half the number of Iraqi civilians killed weekly by bombs, gunfire and other political murder, and an even smaller fraction of those steadily murdered in the Syrian civil war: 220,000 in the past four years or one every 10 minutes. The chaos that set this colossal carnage in motion was the destruction of the Iraqi state by an American war of choice.

And yet, cushioned here in the plush headquarters of global capital and war -- with oceans and empire shielding we Americans from anything like the cascading catastrophe of parts of Africa and the Middle East and even Europe -- our politics now teeter, at even the threat of one or more attacks, into panicked flirtation with fascism. Go ahead, say the word out loud. It is, horribly, the accurate term for a national conversation in which journalists have begun soberly quoting politicians' calls for forced internment of selected immigrants, religious tests for immigration, banning certain nationalities, treating people from some countries like "mad dogs," and suspending checks on state power. The ease with which many of our news media accept this new lexicon is chilling.

It is as if this American readiness to panic and lunge toward authoritarianism is in direct proportion to the outsized privilege the nation has for so long taken for granted: North American conquest and genocide, white supremacy, global riches with little cost, foreign invasion with impunity, a guaranteed satisfactory consumer experience. 

Sasha Abramsky, in The Nation, puts it this way:

Over the past several days, one Republican governor after another has closed his state to refugees from Syria—or, since they technically do not have the legal power to prevent the federal government from admitting refugees, has pledged to refuse all state resources to aid in this process. A Republican mayor in Virginia has called for using the World War II internment system that was used against Japanese Americans—itself one of the most widely discredited and shameful episodes in recent American history—as a model for how to approach the Syrians. 

Jeb Bush has said we ought to prioritize refugee status for Christians. John Kasich has called for a government agency that would beam “Judeo-Christian values” over Middle Eastern airwaves. In Congress, the GOP-led House, with a shockingly large number of Democrats in support, just voted on a bill that would make it virtually impossible, in practice, to admit Syrian refugees into the country. And Donald Trump has used the crime against humanity that occurred last week in Paris as a prop in his vicious campaign of demagoguery: Because of Paris, he has said, we must get serious about building a wall to close off Mexico. Because of Paris, we must put security first above all civil liberties. Because of Paris, we must start up again the few post-9/11 surveillance programs that were curtailed by courts and politicians because of their abusive properties, and must maintain and expand a raft of others. A surveillance state briefly put in the dock by Edward Snowden will, in this vision, be fully unleashed and unchecked. And because of Paris, we ought to consider registering American Muslims in a special database.

There is an odor of early fascism, or rather of the hysteria that precedes the march away from democracy, to much of this Trumpian rhetoric. An odor of the street fight. An odor of the iron fist.

Ebola + ISIS = brown fever.

It is time for more people to call it out. Right now in the United States, what whimpers just beneath the surface in everyday sidewalk throngs and crowded bars and restaurants is, "Are they here yet?"

You know: Them. The Africans carrying the Ebola virus. The ISIS operatives ready to transmit beheading videos from American hotel rooms in which they have taken ordinary folks hostage. You know what I'm talking about. You know people are thinking it. You know the volume is building toward a wider shrieking sound.

Days before the stories broke about people presumed African reportedly being shunned in retail establishments and neighborhoods in Dallas amid that city's Ebola panic, I and I know many others, particularly people of color experienced in being profiled, were already muttering to ourselves that it would only be a matter of time before the African profiling started. I considered blogging about it in advance but, again no doubt like many, I didn't want to be among those planting the suggestion to folks who are already too suggestible. That was a silly reservation on my part: it's not as if anything I do on this little blog could alter the motion of American public impulses that are so deeply ingrained and so continually remanufactured. That machinery is built to last, baby.

The same goes for our view of the ISIS conflict. While we Americans worry about being snatched in an alley by an ISIS sleeper cell, the actual cataclysm has now embroiled Turkey as well as Syria and Iraq in real and bloody war and internal insurrection -- including, as I write, violent tumult in Turkey over whether to join the battle for Kobani, a city on the Syrian/Turkish border. If the ISIS juggernaut continues to gamble successfully on the cynicism and patience of Western corporate powers for whom continually decimated nations of color and a fearful American public are just part of the dirty job of managing global capital, then we can expect more howling and jostling here in the Homeland beneath the threatened encroachment of the Black Flag. And we can brace for a lunge into frothing hysteria if any local acts of ISIS-sympathist terror actually take place here.

Meanwhile, we quietly accept that more Americans will die by gunfire per capita than in any other industrialized country, that this month alone 50,000 of us will die of heart disease and another 50,000 of cancer,  and that the corn- and cattle- and chemical-fueled enterprises that underpin our deadly diet continue to enjoy the subsidied, panic-free favors of the state.

Call it Brown Fever. Watch for it in your neighborhood.

American rage at the embassy murders in Libya is

missing one thing: an understanding of the terrible ruthlessness of consequences.

Give President Obama credit for at least taking a momentary verbal swipe at the looney-tunes hate video that helped ignite this hellfire before he settled into the conventional righteous American narrative of condemning such violence as senseless, incomprehensible, unforgivable, and so on. (We can, however, safely ignore Mitt Romney's laughable snipe at Obama for supposedly "sympathizing" with the attackers.)

But lost amid the roaring American condemnation of the awful attacks and murders in Egypt and Libya is any sense that there is a pattern here, that this sort of thing has happened before, and that there is a terrible logic connecting a history of American racism and bloody American recklessness in the Arab and heavily-Muslim world with the stream of horrific hatred aimed at Americans from some in those nations. From the shocked outrage issuing from American megaphones in the past 24 hours, you'd think there had never been an American-orchestrated overthrow of Iran's democratic government in 1953; disproportionate American support for Israeli brutality and apartheid over the decades (again, a nod to Obama for his at least refusing to parrot some recent lines in the script); a succession of American invasions carried out with brazen dishonesty and racist hubris; and a tradition of American persecution and exploitation of brown-skinned non-Christians here and abroad.

The Independent's Robert Fisk provides a good moral and political accounting here.

The point is not that American diplomats deserve to die, but that we as a nation will never get out of the crosshairs until we stop engaging in willful amnesia about how we got there.

(Thanks to Tina at The Agonist.)

This photo provides some Bible education for Tea Partiers:

It's from the Wall Photos album of the Americans Against the Tea Party site on Facebook. Go and take a look. There is plenty there to make you think, hard, about what the roots of fascism actually look like.

Thanks to Cat.

"The newly elected House Speaker John Boehner on Wednesday

promised a new era of transparency..." – New York Times, 1/6/2011

And if you believe that promise, you're proof that Americans are as dumb as much of the world thinks we are. This pledge of Republican-led "transparency" comes from the same folks who sat on their hands while Vice President Dick Cheney crafted energy policy in secret meetings with industry reps and defied subpoenas to reveal their names; who (like many Dems) have happily allowed corporate lobbyists to literally write the text of bills; who cheered President G.W. Bush as he lied the nation into war; and who continue to lie in service of the perpetually failed idea that giving the rich more money to put in the bank creates jobs. Transparency? Good luck with that.

For an unredacted version of Obama's Tuesday Iraq speech

-- by which I mean, more literally, a transcript with italicized insertions reflecting what Obama likely wanted to say or could have said but didn't -- read this post by Michael Collins. It's as close as we'll get to an unsanitized Obama on Iraq.

When Ted Koppel said today that Americans are failing to sacrifice for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars,

he had a point. Koppel was right to say, in his NPR Talk of the Nation interview, that putting the war bill essentially on a credit card held by the Chinese, and placing the sacrifices on the backs of a small pool of reservists and recruits who are recycled again and again into combat, is the wrong way for a nation to fight its battles. He was right, too, to hint that a draft would help to equalize things, and to criticize private mercenary operations such as Blackwater that prosper while military servicemen and women fight and die for a pittance.

But Koppel was wrong on two important scores.

First, Koppel misses the fact that most Americans' distance from personal sacrifice is the main reason why they have tolerated these wars at all. The Iraq War, for its part, was deceptive and uncalled-for from the beginning. An Afghanistan military action, although perhaps worth arguing for eight or nine years ago, is now a case of the horses having long ago bolted the barn. It is plain to American voters that neither of these wars has been worth fighting: the first was concocted for cynical corporate and geopolitical gain, and the second is a flailing attempt by Obama to salvage a disaster and to appear war-worthy as a president. The very fact that a draft is politically unthinkable for these wars says a lot. Bringing the nation together to sacrifice for a war requires, to start with, a supportable war.

Second, Koppel fails to see that even if the casualties of these wars are borne by a few, and much of the wars' fiscal cost is in deficit spending, there is still a brutal and widespread cost to Americans in the form of missing government support that would otherwise be covered by deficit spending. A time of national economic crisis -- which is to say, right now -- is exactly when deficit spending is sensible and justifiable. If you refuse to borrow to keep your ship from sinking, what good are your hoarded pennies at the bottom of the ocean? Borrowing billions upon billions for Iraq and Afghanistan means that those borrowed billions are therefore not available to shore up unemployment benefits, to do something about our health care disaster, and to create a national corps of jobs (e.g., repairing crumbling infrastructure, expanding mass transit, providing day care for working families). We can't sufficiently borrow to repair our busted country because we're too much in debt for bad wars? Sounds like a national sacrifice to me, Ted.

Koppel kept stressing that he did not want to get into the issue of whether or not we ought to fight these two wars. But he's ducking. Whether these wars are worth supporting IS the issue. If our nation truly bought into them, we could get the fairness of sacrifice that Koppel seeks. And if our leadership acknowledged that we haven't bought into them, we could stop killing people and instead put the money where it would do some good.

"If you enjoy your freedom, thank a vet,"

read a bumper sticker I saw yesterday on the highway.

Talk about a whoring out of the role of veterans.

The last war in which the American military arguably protected our freedom was World War Two.

The Korean War did not protect our freedom. Neither did the Vietnam War. Neither did the Gulf War. Neither did the Iraq War. Neither does the Afghanistan war, although one could make the argument that had Bush not blown off Afghanistan in favor of oil, it might have at one point. But certainly not now.

Want to know what really threatens my freedom? Out-of-control corporations. Out-of-control health insurers. Gelded federal regulatory agencies. Politicians who auction themselves off to the bidding of companies (e.g., Verizon) that would invade my privacy and violate my constitutional rights. A "security" state that trades its foreign policy for oil revenues and cynically strategic military alliances. A for-profit prison industry that hawks incarceration as a solution to rage and drug addiction. Police departments for whom the War On Drugs has become a money-making enterprise.

Want to thank veterans? Then let's stop using them, with all they have sacrificed, as pawns in a long-running ruse of false enemies. Vets deserve far better.

Petraeus tells it like it is on Israel.

You have got to read this from a Foreign Policy article by Mark Perry:

On Jan. 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."

It's about time somebody on the Obama team said it. Sure, Biden lambasted the latest planned settlements, and the disastrous timing of their announcement, as a monkey wrench in current efforts for peace talks. But Petraeus went a gargantuan step further by saying, in effect, Israeli arrogance is gonna get American troops killed and weaken American power in the Mideast. He is right, of course, and there is nothing new about the revelation except the fact that a general of Petraeus' influence dared to say it.

FP's Perry went on to report, just as stunningly, that Petraeus has asked "that the West Bank and Gaza (which, with Israel, is a part of the European Command -- or EUCOM), be made a part of his area of operations. Petraeus's reason was straightforward: with U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had to be perceived by Arab leaders as engaged in the region's most troublesome conflict."

Holy Cojones, Batman.

Petraeus' request was refused in an instant. But think about what this means: A general overseeing U.S. major military operations sees Israeli behavior as being so dangerous that he wants authority over the region in order to try to mitigate Israel's endangerment of American troops.

According to Perry, ripples of shock at Petraeus' candor are spreading in the Obama administration. One question, I guess, is whether the administration will silence the messenger or understand his having delivered a reality check. Or maybe both. In any case, American indulgence of Israel's destructive excesses has become harder to publicly defend over the years. Even the conservative Andrew Sullivan has become quite the critic of Israeli policy. He wrote a few days ago:

Petraeus sees what so much of Washington refuses to see: that Israel's year-long contempt for Obama, initiated by the Gaza campaign, entrenched by Netanyahu's victory and compounded by continued settlements and last week's humiliation of Biden is a problem. More then a problem, Israel's total impunity for its intransigence is becoming a liability for the advance of US interests around the world.

One thing is for certain: A general committed to protecting American military influence is not one of the usual easily-dismissed critics of the Israeli regime. Israel's shit is now seriously hitting the fan.