Donny J made it official yesterday; he's turning his back on the last campaign promise that he hasn't already broken; ending the longest war in US history. The particulars of his announcement are beyond laughable. He will ramp up boots on the ground by some 4,000 pairs and serve notice that we're now officially in it to win it.
Complete bullshit obviously. If the USA/NATO combine couldn't win Afghanistan with over 100,000 troops, bumping the numbers up to 12,000 from 8,000 is a joke.
I'm guessing that this is not so much a case of Mr. Trump changing his mind, but rather the acknowledgement that it's not actually the president of the country who is running the show.
Which raises a multi-trillion dollar question; if it's not the democratically elected leader running the country, who is?
That's not a question a lot of Americans seem to concern themselves with. No, Americans are far more concerned with where a trans person gets to take a shit, whether a NFL player stands for the national anthem, or if Civil War statuary should be removed from public spaces. These are issues that so divide Americans that they will gleefully beat one another to a pulp in defense of their respective opinions.
Questions of who is actually at the helm as the world's most dangerous state careens off the cliff isn't something most Americans can roust themselves off the couch over. After all, even raising the question will get you tarred with the "conspiracy theorist" brush.
It's not really going off the cliff of course. The only thing that really matters to those who call the shots is that the American war machine keeps pumping profits to those who own it. Making the Afghanistan campaign open-ended guarantees lots more of that. As do the dozens of other intrigues simultaneously greasing the war machine, from Ukraine to Yemen to Iraq to Syria to Israel and on and on and on.
From the point of view of those actually steering the ship, this is not "going off the cliff." This is everything going to plan.
Which is what Trump is in the process of figuring out. Who the hell was Trump, after all? Until he ran for the 2016 election he was anything but this racist, misogynist, nativist, etc, etc, beast who now fronts every newscast. He was a fairly typical Manhattan uber-rich liberal who was relentlessly fawned over by the same media that now denigrates him non-stop. Oprah had no qualms about conducting deferential interviews with him. Google Images has a vast trove of pictures showing the racist beast yucking it up with the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
In fact, if you were an A-list American socialite, politician, sports or entertainment star in the decades before Trump's White House run, chances are there's a picture somewhere of you posing with Donald J Trump.
So what happened?
What happened was that he unexpectedly won the election, and America's deep state propaganda machine, often referred to as "the free press," swung into action. Trump was not supposed to win. What's this nonsense about improving relations with Russia and ending wars for regime change? No arms race with Russia or China? No perpetual wars in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria? OMG, the gushing taps of the war profiteers will be down to a trickle in no time flat...
We gotta stop that man!
And I think they have. The beast has been tamed. Sure, he'll keep up with those silly tweets, but that doesn't hurt the war machine.
The last time America's propaganda infrastructure closed ranks so effectively in the interests of preserving the folks behind the curtain was circa 2001. I was a welding inspector at Frankel Steel where the structural steel for Seven World Trade Center was fabbed up. Nobody I've ever met who has hands-on experience with structural steel buys the official narrative, nor do the over two thousand professional architects and engineers who have put their professional reputations on the line to say so, yet sixteen years on it's that official narrative that holds sway.
If Americans were not so stupefied by their exceptionalism they might be asking themselves why.
Politics, American or otherwise, is an elaborate con. And voters are the easiest marks in this rigged shell game. Ostensibly, elections are about a number of things, but at the Big Boys' Table, it is about money. They want tax breaks, the end of financial and environmental regulation, antitrust waivers, US taxpayer funded military security in the 120 or more, countries which their corporations do business. Money is the be all and end all. They really don't care about religion, gun control, gay rights, bathroom laws etcetera or any other social issues drummed up by corporate media. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring both sets of politicians to market their needs to the citizen/consumers. The Republicans give them everything they want and the Democrats give them almost everything. The Republican vote is guaranteed-all the media has to present is a couple of guys kissing, pregnant Mexicans crossing the border or black kids showing their underwear.
ReplyDeleteAs for corporate media, conflict sells and poverty and inequality doesn't.
As for tonight's boxing travesty in the making, any good promoter will tell you the fighters (GOP and Dems) hate each other and that either (McGregor?!? WTF!) has a chance to win-otherwise why watch? And here's the irony-Trump won and continues to make headlines because he instinctively grasps that American politics is nothing more than a scripted "reality" TV show, nothing more. And the gaping, slacked-jawed mouth breathers can't figure it out.