Guardian predicts Donald Jr White House run in 2024

There's a remarkably sympathetic review of Donald Trump Jr's new book on view at The Guardian, which is normally a seething nest of Trump-hating pseudo-progressives.

The reviewer, one Lloyd Green, goes so far as to draw a parallel between Trump Jr's bashing of progressives in his book, with Obama's recent remarks on "wokeness."

Fair enough, but commentators on  US politics should have more to chew on these days than who might run in 2024. It should be obvious by now that the elected president of the United States is not in fact in charge of the joint.

If it's not the elected president, who is it?

That's a question that deserves an answer long before we speculate about who might be running in 2024.

Trump as tool of America's "deep state"

How are things going for the guy who was going to drain the swamp?

My hunch is that Trump's enthusiasm for draining the swamp waned mightily once he realized he had become the boss 'gator in that swamp.

As things stand, he's surrounded by deep-swamp creatures like Bolton and Pompeo. That tells me that whatever "drainage" he may have once envisioned has come to naught.

Instead, he's going with the neolib flow.

Not that he has much choice.

It's interesting to see how our mainstream press, the same folks who literally created Trump as a media celebrity, turned on him once he became prez. It's not Trump who changed; it's the way he's treated by the same media that fawned all over him from the early '80s till 2016.

Also interesting is how that same media is currently renovating the reputations of some of those names in the news that they used to uniformly deplore.

Pre-Trump, national security institutions like the FBI and CIA were widely considered not to be trusted. This scarcely requires elaboration. Yet since Trump found himself in the Oval Office, those institutions have been recast as honourable truth-tellers.

What's also being recast is the toxic legacy of the Bush family. CNN has an ongoing Bush rehabilitation series that works overtime to show the war criminals in a favourable light. Here's today's effort.

From where I'm watching, it looks like the apostles of American Exceptionalism are singing out of the same hymnal, whether their name is Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama, or Trump.


The names may change, but the song remains the same.

Too big to fail and too big for #MeToo

I see where Roger Waters is taking some flack for his stand on the faux "benefit concert" Richard Branson is putting on for the benefit of the coup plotters in Venezuela.

What's astonishing is how the apologists for Branson are claiming he's a totally apolitical guy motivated only by his concerns for the long-suffering people of Venezuela...

Would that be this Richard Branson?



Oh lookie! It's Branson and Barry just goofing around!

And here's Ricky with Hillsie...



... and RB with the FIRST black president...



And just so you know, Sir Richard is totally bipartisan!



Sir Richard even makes time for some of the wannabees!



Justin: I love your hair man!

Sir RB: You're looking very fine as well, my good man!

---------

For a guy who is totally apolitical, Sir Richard sure sucks a lot of political ass!

Why I love Michael Moore

Moore had me hooked with his first doc, Roger and Me.

I loved that on-screen persona, the fat slob schlumpfing about Michigan looking for the president of General Motors. Wanting to hold him to account for shipping all those Michigan jobs to Mexico. It was a beautiful thing!

Over the holidays me and the Farm Manager found time to finally view his latest doc, Where to Invade Next.

We weren't disappointed. Moore's latest film neatly contrasts living standards in America with what regular folks typically experience in a variety of European counties. The contrast is an eye-opener. On the one side you've got eight weeks of paid vacation, free health care, free post-secondary education, subsidized day-care, and yadayadayada...

On the other side you've got... well, look around you.

University grads working at Mickey D's trying to pay down their $50,000 student loans.

Health care expenses as the prime cause of personal bankruptcy.

Veterans sleeping on the sidewalk.

Families living in their cars.

Welcome to America!

Over the course of his career, Mr. Moore has done yeoman's work skewering the shibboleths of "American exceptionalism." I suspect a lot of the millennials "feeling the Bern" were feeling it largely thanks to Moore's oeuvre.

So here's what I don't like about Michael Moore.

Right after he made his last doc he came down four-square for Hillary. Yup, Michael Moore, renegade documentary film-maker, morphed into a strident Dem party supporter.

This was after the Democrats had held the White House for eight years and had done utterly fuck-all to improve the lot of those folks Moore claims to represent; the working class.

The homeless vets.

The families living out of their cars...

Ya, there's Obamacare, I suppose, but what is that other than a giant subsidy to for-profit health-care providers?

And of course there's the record of the Nobel Peace Prize winner's foreign policy. Let me know if you can think of an example where Obama's foreign policy fostered anything resembling peace. Instead, America is involved in more foreign intrigues than ever, and never in the interest of "peace."

This is the party that America's number one anti-establishment film-maker wants you to support?

Fuck you, Michael Moore!

Obama and Kerry demonstrate their negotiating savvy

Heh heh... they sure pulled Bibi's pants down on that deal, didn't they?

Three months ago they sign an agreement to hand Israel 38 billions in military aid over ten years. I'm not much of a business whiz, but I think the word for that is "leverage," as in Obama had some leverage over the guys on the other side of the table. Once the deal was done, the leverage was gone.

So three months later they demand that Israel stop building settlements in the occupied territories? How inept are these guys?

The think tank here at Falling Downs figures they aren't really as retarded as they appear. What's changed in the past three months? Donald Trump won an election, that's what. And, difficult as it may be to fathom, a Trump presidency shows every sign of being the most sycophantic pro-Israel US government in history.

The Obama regime's eleventh hour recognition of the rights of Palestinians has nothing to do with Palestinians. After all, Obama had eight years to do something and did nothing. He's not motivated by issues of human rights or international law.

This sudden discovery of illegal settlements is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to stir up shit for the next president to deal with.

How hard are you gonna work at draining the swamp once you're the Boss 'gator?

My my, what a different Donald we've seen since Wednesday morning!

He's gone from out-of-control shit-storm to accommodating senior statesman literally overnight.

Look for Donald and Barry to share a round at one of Trump's golf courses any day now. Don't be surprised if Big Bill and Bad Vlad are rounding out the foursome.

That first meeting between the President and the President elect went just swimmingly, didn't it? Donald has since ventured that there may be a thing or two about Obamacare that he might take another look at before he tears down the entire edifice.

I'm guessing he'll take another look at locking "her" up as well. I'm guessing Donald and Barry spent a few minutes tossing that one back and forth at that meeting...

B: So you can't be serious about going after Hillary.

D: It would break my heart, but I made a promise to the voters... look, it would give me no joy. I've been friends with the Clintons forever, but business is business, and a promise is a promise.

B: I hear ya Donald. Whadya say I pardon her before I move out... that'll take the heat off you.

D: Appreciate it! (fist-bump)

I don't hear any back-pedalling about the wall yet, but I'm guessing that's on its way. After all, there's been more Mexicans heading home these past few years than there's been heading north. Why spend billions building a wall that's gonna slow down that process?

Looking at the action on Wall Street since Wednesday morning, seems the big dogs in Neverland didn't take long to make peace with the President elect. Ya, we poured a shit-load into Hillary's campaign, but why cry over spilt milk?

Go Donald!

How can we help?

And I think you can safely pitch that "drain the swamp" thing into the dustbin of history. Draining the swamp isn't nearly as appealing once you're the Boss Alligator.

While Obama plays golf, the wily Erdogan plays Obama

Funny how the biggest crisis to hit America's foreign policy establishment since the Cuban Missile Crisis rarely makes it to your evening newscast.

Somewhere between 50 and 90 nuclear warheads stored at Incirlik Airbase have been effectively out of US control for well over a month now. That's a situation that should be more than newsworthy, but you pretty much have to rely on piddly blogs like this one for the story, because some lying US swimmers in Brazil are sucking up all the news air on the US networks.

Wayward nukes vs. wayward swimmers...

What's the bigger story?

Erdogan has been making nice with Russia since the failed coup. Been making nice with Israel too, which fact should be snapping necks in the Beltway, but apparently is not. We're not far from Uncle Sam holding his pecker in his hand outside the tent while his former supplicants plot the future inside the tent.

A future that relegates the aging and increasingly irrelevant Uncle Sam to a rocking chair on the front porch of irrelevance while his former minions plot a new course for world affairs?

It's about time.

Did Obama just stab BFF Erdogan in the back?

There were stories floating about in the past few days about how Erdogan's government was going to try to mend fences with Assad.

Insofar as there was any truth to that, (and the denials were immediate and multifold) Erdogan would be biting the hand that feeds him; his American paymasters, his NATO overlords; the folks who decided years ago that Assad must go.

And let's not forget that Erdogan has not been seeing eye to eye on the Kurdish question.

Is that why it is Erdogan, and not Assad, who is going today?

And let's not forget, he's not gone yet. Erdogan didn't fake those election victories. He has a massive popular base. They will see this coup attempt as a US plot to replace Erdogan with someone more pliable.

Will Erdogan hop on a helicopter and fly to asylum in... Saudi Arabia? Germany? Russia?

Probably not. I think he knows he has a support base that can delay this regime change that's been orchestrated by his NATO bosses.

That could mean civil war in Turkey.

Pot-addled hillbilly takes a break from Bieber-bashing to pontificate on Brexit

It's gotta be tough being Bieber, wouldn't you say?

Yup, slamming Hollywood starlets and being an asshole at A-list parties has pretty much gotta drain your energy, at least if you had any in the first place.

But no matter the level of assholery, Biebs remains on the A-list.

I know... it seems to energize him.

But belieb it or not, there are bigger deals than Bieber loose in the world today.

Like Brexit for example.

Frankly, if George Galloway and Boris can see eye to eye on Brexit, there must be something good in Brexit.

And when Phoney Tony is campaigning for the "remain" side you know immediately that "remain" is profoundly flawed.

I've heard it said that Obama has weighed in on the remain side because it's way easier to steer one combine of 28 nations than it is to steer 28 disparate nations who each have their own agenda. That shit-show would just be totally unmanageable.

It's a conundrum alright.

But when Phoney Tony is on the one side, and George and Boris are both on the other, there's no question about which side of the debate I'm on.

Brexit now or Brexit later, but sooner or later Britain is out of the EU.

Thank God Trump was not President this week!

Stop for a moment and reflect on what this week would have been like had Donald Trump been president - the carpet bombing he'd have ordered in the Middle East...

Yup, for sure that's what would have happened this week, and lots more. Mosques firebombed... US embassies around the world firebombed too! That's according to NYT journo supreme Thomas Friedman in today's New York Times International Weekly.  The NYTIW is a few pages of filler the folks at the Sunday Star throw in with their paper, possibly to give us Hicksville hayseeds a taste of big-time journalism, or more likely because it's way cheaper than producing original copy with their own professional journos.

Friedman's article is grandly titled "lessons of Hiroshima and Orlando." At first I thought there must have been a copycat attack on a gay club in the Japanese city, but no, he really is referencing the attack in Orlando last weekend and the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima, in the same headline, because apparently both are somehow related to a Donald Trump presidency. Or something...

And TLF isn't the only NYT deep thinker with Trump, Islam, and Orlando (although apparently not Hiroshima) on his mind this week. Roger Cohen begins his take on the state of the universe with this howler; 

Omar Mateen, the Florida shooter who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, just ushered Donald Trump to the White House, Britain out of the EU, Marine Le Pen to the French presidency, and the world into a downward spiral of violence.

He did??? That'd be a decent night's work for one dude with an assault rifle, were it not such outlandishly overblown hyperbole.

Ya, the world is a tinderbox set to explode, and driving all this mayhem is the fact that "Islam is in epochal crisis." There is something about Islam that makes those folks hate modernity, women, freedom, gays, Americans, and each other. And Donald Trump is just riling them up even more. Or something...

But he saves the best of his incoherent ramble for President Hopey Changey. Apparently the world would be less of a tinderbox had Obama got tough with Assad and Putin. Not invading Syria has been Obama's single deadliest foreign policy mistake.

What we need to make the world a safer place is more US invasions of Muslim countries!

Oy vey, these may be two of the most esteemed journalists in American letters, but even the pot-addled hillbilly realizes a few sentences in that they're full of shit.

Islamic terrorist nuclear threat

Even casual consumers of mass media news product would have noticed some iteration of the above headline in their news over the past few days. That's because Obama was hosting a "Nuclear Summit" this week at which a gaggle of world leaders spent an undue amount of time wringing their hands over the prospects of Islamic State baddies getting their hands on crude "dirty bombs" or the material to build them. Among the handwringers at the table were the leaders of nuclear powers India, China, France, Britain, and of course the host nation.

Speaking of which, the host nation has embarked, under the leadership of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, on a trillion dollar update of America's nuclear arsenal. This should be more than a little disturbing. Given the sideways tilt that the ship of American democracy has taken recently, it is not inconceivable that America's nuclear arsenal could fall into the hands of a rogue nuclear arsehole in the foreseeable future.

But I digress. According to the headlines, what we should really be worried about is the Towelheads 'o Terror getting their mitts on some spent fuel rods from one of planet earth's many nuclear power stations and unleashing a dirty bomb in London or Paris or Washington.

Is such a thing a possibility? Of course it is, at some vague level of "possibility." What isn't? The possibilities are literally endless...

Should such a possibility be accorded front page news status?

No.

This is just the usual fear mongers peddling their latest dose of booga-booga, the better to stampede the public into going along with more intrusive surveillance of everybody all the time and more military spending.

Obama's latest Syria initiative has found only 60 moderate rebels to train

It's been a PNAC wet dream to affect regime change in Syria for at least 20 years, but somehow the media still manage to fumble over the matter as though it's an idea Obama just came up with six months ago.

Hence the desultory reportage about the epic fail in the latest US "training" program of those imaginary moderate Syrian rebels.

Yup, they've only found 60 moderates in all of Syria to train up in their $500 million training program... and they'll be "moderates" till they get around the next corner with their US weapons and training, whereupon they'll hook up with their home crew of Nusra or ISIL homies.

Nobody ever imagined things would turn out any other way.

Those vile Islamic head-choppers are an American fabrication from start to finish.

They are labelled "moderates" for training purposes only.

Crimes of the educators

Ran across this gem on my random internet ramblings this evening.

Yes, it's obvious that educators are guilty of crimes against humanity, insofar as their endeavours have produced a public sufficiently gullible to accept that Obama's America shares a page in the history books with Pol Pot's Cambodia, Hitler's Germany, or Stalin's Russia.

Unfortunately, this calibre of imbecility didn't erupt under Obama.

Sam Blumenfeld was born in 1927.

His co-author was educated in a firmly pro-American-exceptionalism pre-Obama era.

Not that Obama has in any way backed down from the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

But folks who have been educated in the no-fault era wouldn't know that. Nor would they recognize that Blumenfeld and Newman are wall-to-wall bullshit.

Thinking back to the last election cycle, I recall that moment when Mitt Romney castigated a critic for forgetting that corporations are people too.

Corporations are not people.

America in general gave Mitt's egregious insult a free pass; after all, the Supreme court had given the corporations-are-people nonsense a pass too.

So it must be true!

By the way, nobody on the supreme court had the misfortune of getting their primary education under "common core."

Yet they were fully able to come up with such an outrageously moronic ruling.

And when they did, they weren't tarred and feathered or run out of town or strung from the nearest lamppost.

No, American education has been heading down the shitter for a long time, and it's a phenomenon that has nothing to do with Obama and very little to do with educators.

It's a by-product of the Zeitgeist.

America-bashers at al-Jazeera now peddling Heritage Foundation propaganda

There was a time not long ago that the al-Jazeera network was deemed such a threat to US interests that George W. Bush considered bombing their offices.

W can rest easy. AJE has an opinion piece on view today straight from the Heritage Foundation's "Margaret Thatcher Fellow" Luke Coffey; It's time to arm Ukraine.

Leaving aside Mr. Coffey's extravagantly padded bio at the Heritage Foundation, (he "helped shape British Defence policy" while still a wet-behind-the-ears whipper-snapper in his 20's), reading his article clarifies that he owes his post at HF not to his keen insights or rigorous analyses, but to his ability to hew to a particular ideological program in the face of all evidence against it.

We start with the usual PNAC bromides, apparently none the less appealing for having lead to unmitigated disaster for America over the past 15 years; the unspoken and unquestioned assumption of American exceptionalism and the inference that anyone who disagrees with America's right to intervene in the internal matters of sovereign states at will is ethically and intellectually challenged.

As we all know, Russia is the aggressor and Obama is dithering. We expect nothing else and nothing less from the thinkers at this think tank.

Having set the stage, Coffey delivers his one-two punch of reasons the US needs to arm Ukraine now;

First, the people of Ukraine have demonstrated, whether on the streets of the Maidan or through the ballot box, that they see their future in the West and not under Russian domination.
There was a time not too long ago that closer ties with the West were discouraged by Ukraine's leaders. In fact, until a few months ago there was even a law that prohibited Ukraine from ever joining NATO. Since the disposal of the Russian backed former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich this has all changed.
Second, the security situation has stabilised when compared to several months ago. When Russia first started backing the separatists the situation on the ground was chaotic. Nobody knew how far the separatists would go and where they would be stopped. The Ukrainian military was in disarray.
Now the situation is different. There is a front-line and a traditional linear battlefield. The Ukrainian military has consolidated. Although it has a long way to go, recruitment and training is taking place. Also, there is a less of a chance that western weapons will end up in the hands of the separatists.

That's quite a batch of half-truths, non-sequitors, distortions, and out-right fabrications to serve up in two short paragraphs! The security situation has stabilised? The Ukrainian military has consolidated?...

So why does al-Jazeera, a network birthed to provide an alternative to the dominant Atlanticist world news industry, publish such obvious claptrap from such an obnoxious source? That's easy; on the matter of demonizing Putin, the PNAC freedom-fighters at the Heritage Foundation and the anti-democratic nutters of Qatar's royal family are on the same page.

Putin the Pariah

The establishment lefties at Slate have Putin isolated, shunned, ignored, and more dangerous than ever.

Well, one thing he isn't is "ignored." You can't find a news site anywhere in the Nations of Virtue where Putin's name does not appear on the home page.

That leaves "isolated, shunned, and more dangerous than ever."

If Putin is now more dangerous than ever, one must enquire as to how dangerous he was before.

While the bold activists of Pussy Riot may disagree, having spent 18 months hard time in the gulag for defiling a church, (and being sprung prematurely by the great ogre himself) it is exceedingly difficult to find where Putin has been a danger to anyone.

There was the bloodless reclamation of Crimea, which has unsettled those aforementioned Nations of Virtue no end. This seems to have gone over rather swimmingly with the citizens of Crimea. They tend to see Putin as a saviour rather than a pariah.

As for isolated and shunned, the record speaks for itself. While there is certainly no question that the self-anointed "International Community," ie the US and the usual me-too states, have done their level best and then some to isolate and shun Putin, there is no evidence whatsoever that isolation and shunning has come to pass.

Not only does Putin enjoy approval rates in Russia that are totally unthinkable among the hapless dolts who are doing the shunning... Hollande, Harper, Obama, Cameron... but he has far more credibility in the world beyond NATO than any of his detractors.

Which seems to drive the animus of his detractors... when there is nothing to say, shout louder.

Why are despots and tyrants not afraid to mingle with their own people?

The picture of Iranian leader Hassan Rouhani out for a hike, and the story behind it, reminds the casual western reader that our enemies have a different sort of relationship to their people than what we have here.

When is the last time an American president casually mingled with fellow hikers on an impromptu excursion into the hills? Not in living memory. Even the most mundane foray into the public sphere by Obama, or Bush or Clinton before him, is a massive security operation.

What's different about the "despots" is that they don't appear to be afraid of their people, whereas in America, the leaders are absolutely paranoid of unscripted spontaneous interactions with citizens.

Just before Saddam went to ground after the US invasion he was seen addressing a cheering and heavily armed mob. He was standing on the roof of a car as he gave them a pep talk. No American president would take that kind of chance.

Same with Gaddafi.  Sure there were people in Libya who didn't like him, but were it not for NATO air power those people would have held their tongues and held their fire indefinitely. The Libyans were a cultured, well educated, well informed people. By and large they knew things could be a lot worse, as subsequent events have shown.

So perhaps the trope of the "hated tyrant" is just that; a propaganda construct designed to placate the few who might ask questions here in our democratic utopias.

Things are not what they seem...

Obama lowers boom on whistle-blower Snowden

Let this be a warning to you.

If you have pious urges to spill the beans about how much your government is lying to you, be warned.

Government lying is for the greater good.

You talking about it is an act of treason.

Edward Snowden is now officially on the bend-them-till-they-break list with Assange and the hapless dweeb Bradley Manning.

Remember this; when your government lies to you, it's for your own good.

And if you know what's good for you, you'll leave it at that.

Stalin used to call it "governing."

We call it "democracy."

Obamney Wins!

That's right, the think tank here at Falling Downs has called it for Obamney tomorrow.

And you know what that means.

Wall Street wins.

You don't.

I've not been able to fathom the minds of those regular folks who are voting Romney tomorrow. The nurses and school teachers and cab drivers and welders and carpenters and cops.

I mean Mitt is right when he says those folks are fucked with Obama.

But they're even more fucked with Mitt!

I listened to Mitt for a bit on one of the news channels. Live from Cincinnati. Or maybe it was Cleveland.

Here's a guy who hides hundreds of millions off shore to avoid paying taxes in the country that he loves so much he wants to be president of it...

Nah.

But he did make a reference to a 60 year old welder in his speech.

Fuck, I don't even remember talking to him.

But then he said the guy he talked to had been welding 60 years, and I didn't start till I was six, so obviously he was talking about someone else.

The reason anybody at all wants to talk about 60 year old welders is that we're a total aberration.

We used to work in "closed shops." I know people think that means you had to be a union member to work there, but what it really meant was the shop was closed. Yes, we had the big truck doors at each end, but generally they were kept closed, especially in the winter months, September to May.

So when you were working in those closed shops you were inhaling a bouquet of every alloy they put into a 7018 rod. Tungsten, molybdenum, lead, iron, etc, etc, oh, nickel of course, and even more etc.

Now you weren't inhaling a bouquet per se; YOU BURNED THAT POI POURI AND INHALED THE FUMES!!!

For eight or ten or twelve hours a day.

Which is why 60 year old welders are such a novelty.

But Mitt found one and talked to him and wants to do what's right for him, which is a bit of a shift for Mitt since the days when his company screwed over all those steel-workers in Kansas.

And welders are obviously steel-workers.

But Mitt's a shifty guy, and who is to say that his shifts are anything other than heartfelt and sincere?

Besides, Obamney wins either way!

Obama announces "Atrocities Prevention Board"

Hey, here's a ray of light; instead of creating/causing/committing atrocities we're now going to prevent them!

In a performance that could have been scripted by George Orwell, Obama today announced a new government bureaucracy that will determine when and if our enemies are carrying out "atrocities".

For our atrocity-committing friends I'm sure it will be business as usual.

But it's certainly a warning to our atrocity-committing enemies.

Flanked by Holocaust careerist-in-chief Elie Wiesel, Obama told the world we will no longer namby-pamby around with genocidal regimes unless they happen to be our allies.

Wiesel seized the moment to proclaim his distress over the fact that the Nations of Virtue have yet to deposit Iran's Ahmadinejad into the dustbin of history.

Don't worry Elie; this new "Atrocities Prevention Board" will soon make matters right.

Be patient.

Three Stooges renew vows in Washington

Curly, Obama, and Moe had a wee conflab at the White House today. They renewed their commitment to the war on drugs and free trade.

No, not the free trade in drugs, but free trade, as in General Electric is free to trade in your 35 dollar an hour job in the US for a three dollar an hour job in Monterrey.

Steve "Moe" Harper was mighty chuffed on the occasion of his second visit to the White House, as was the Canadian media. I guess it would hurt their feelings to point out that the CEO of General Electric has been there sixteen times.

"Steven goes to Washington" is today's big news story in Canada. You won't even find the story on CNN's US home page. The Mexican media mention in passing that Curly Calderon was in Washington today, but they generally don't mention Harper.

Think that's called "small-pond syndrome".

The small-pond guys inevitably get real excited by a visit to the White House. Nobody is a bigger fish in a smaller pond than Steven Harper.

So, the news was about nothing, other than the renewed commitment to the war on drugs. Mexico is taking a page out of Columbia's war-on-drugs handbook, and both Canada and the US now have free-trade agreements with Columbia, so they should be able to trade drug-war expertise freely among the four nations.

Harper made the point in his post-handshake press conference that the war on drugs hurts all North Americans and that we're in this fight together.

I don't know what Steve's been smoking, but even former hard line anti-drug guys have come around to the view that the war on drugs is hurting far more people a lot more than the actual drugs themselves.

But the three stooges agreed that the war needs more funding, more high-tech gizmos, bigger jails and tougher laws to bring it to a successful conclusion.

Good luck with that!