Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Globe and Mail apoplectic over Putin-Trump confab in Helsinki

There's been shit-hemorrages galore at the Globe since Trump failed to win the release of Putin's Crimean hostages yesterday.

Both Mark MacKinnon and Adrian Morrow lard their front page news stories with plenty of anti-Trump editorializing. Doug Saunders picks up the baton in a quarter page op-ed castigating Trump for failing the people of Syria, Ukraine, and Britain, all of whom were apparently waiting for the US to save them from Putin's aggression.

The paper's main editorial starts out with this fair and balanced assessment of the Trump-Putin meeting;

Donald Trump covered himself with disgrace on Monday, giving another surreal and disturbing performance on the world stage that should fill lovers of peace and democracy with dread.

I certainly love peace and democracy, but what fills me with dread is that there are still folks like the Globe's op-ed crew in positions of influence who think that the USA is the standard-bearer for peace and democracy. That's been a demonstrably false proposition since at least August of 1945.

America bombs other nations for peace and over-throws elected democracies for democracy?

But the Globe and Mail's home-grown Trumpaphobes have nothing on guest hyperventilator Jared Yates Sexton.

Jared turned on his TV just in time for the Trump-Putin news conference and saw the leader of the free world, the President of the Exceptional Nation, "licking the boots of a murderous dictator." According to Jared, this is an even greater outrage than the Singapore summit a few weeks ago with that fat kid from North Korea, where "people are slaughtered, imprisoned, and denied basic human dignity."

I thought he was talking about his own country for a minute, because the description certainly fits, but apparently it's even worse in North Korea, if such a thing can be imagined. Anyway, Trump committed an outrage by attending a conference in Singapore that "put the American flag on an equal footing with that of North Korea."

Who can even imagine such a thing? The Stars and Stripes just another flag alongside a flag that belongs to slanty-eyed brownish folks who have been giving Uncle Sam the finger since 1950?

The horror!

Jared rants along in that vein for a few hundred words. Obviously Trump is a grave threat to the US-dominated world order. That's what I've hoped for all along; that the world will finally wake up and see "American leadership" of the global order for what it is, and it's certainly not been about peace and democracy in my lifetime.

Jared's not giving up hope for American Exceptionalism though. Apparently Mueller has some "concrete evidence" of something that will restore dignity to American politics, although neither Jared  or Mueller are forthcoming about what that might be.

If Mueller doesn't deliver, Jared figures Trump needs to be "removed for the good of the country." How or by whom Trump should be removed isn't something Jared elaborates on. I'm assuming he's talking about the democratic process whereby the resistance can put paid to the Orange Ogre at the ballot box two years hence.

If he's talking about something else, I guess we'll find out soon enough if President John Brennan and his Sec of State Michael Moore are up to restoring America's image in the post-Trump world. I'm sceptical.


As for Putin's hostages in Crimea, it seems that a solid majority are quite content to face the future as Russians instead of Ukrainians.

People who value peace and democracy should respect their wishes.





1 comment:

  1. The G&M's hilarious and bizarre over-the-top reactions Trump’s meeting with Putin is matched to their counterparts in the US's WaPo and NYT. None of these pundits can tell us why Putin is suddenly the devil. They don’t even try. Instead, they carry on like their hair is on fire. In this echo chamber, they took turns trying to outdo the previous whack-job's contrived outrage. In demonizing Putin/Trump, they are trying to scream the devil into existence, so they can have a reason to scream. And it will continue...

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