America; the reluctant hegemon

Check out Robert Kagan's ode to American Exceptionalism at Foreign Affairs. The trouble with too many Americans is that their innate modesty often prevents them from seizing the mantle of world leadership that history has bequeathed them.

You'll recall Kagan as the co-founder of The Project For a New American Century. That effort was launched in '97, and the "new" American Century at the time was to be the one we're in now. Nobody pushed harder for new wars on Afghanistan and Iraq than the neocons at PNAC, which resulted in the first twenty years of the new American century being more or less a disaster, not only for America, but especially for those benighted lands where we were spreading human rights and democracy.

But a new dawn has broken! Time for a reset on American Greatness! With a deep state yes-man in the White House there's nothing to hold America back from achieving true world mastery!

Except for those cowardly isolationists who have lost faith in America's mission of world leadership. Buck up, oh ye of little faith! American leadership is not optional. History has granted America not only the ability to impose its will on the world; it has fated the USA with the moral obligation to do so...

There you have it. It's not that America wants to play global policeman and ceaselessly bully the rest of the planet...

 It's a moral obligation.

The thing about Trump

What a lot of folks don't seem to get their heads around is the fact that Donny J is just a symptom. He is not the disease.

Those folks tend to believe that if we had a suave operator in the Oval Office everything would be hunky-dory. It's only due to the short-fingered vulgarian that America has become a laughing stock.

Suave like Hillsy.

Suave like Barry O. Barry was even better than Hillary; he allowed a lot of liberal white folks to congratulate themselves about how racially inclusive America has become.

Oh lookee! We have a black president! Everything is beyond cool!!!

Sure it is.

Don't look now, but countries like Croatia and Iran are giving America a good run on prosperity metrics like infant mortality and percentage of population working in poverty.

America continues its inexorable slide into decrepitude in all aspects of society save one; the illustrious military-industrial millstone around her neck.

Don't know if you caught Trump's speech in Poland the other day. Yup, America and her allies will prevail in the clash of civilizations. Pure PNAC boilerplate from end to end. I have no idea why PNAC stalwarts like Robert Kagan have such a hate on for Trump. After all, that Poland speech could have been written by some pro-empire twit like "axis-of-evil" maestro David Frum.

Maybe it's because they know that when Trump spews PNAC boilerplate he's just talking shit. His heart is not in it. He'd just as soon build condo towers in Tehran as nuke the place. That's not the kind of self-dealing opportunist that the PNAC crowd wants to see in the Oval Office.

They want a true believer in manifest destiny and American exceptionalism.

Donald J. Trump is not their man.

Shits and giggles on the campaign trail

It all started innocently enough. After a dinner party at Trump's palatial penthouse in Manhattan, Donald and his pals the Clintons sketched out the rough outlines of a Trump '16 campaign.

It wouldn't take more than a few months out of #therealdonaldjtrump's career of perpetual self-promotion, and, by golly, those few months would be consumed with perpetual self-promotion! There's a win-win for sure!

Trump, a dyed-in-the-wool Manhattan liberal, would run as a Republican, just to stir up shit in elephant land for the duration of the primaries. Make the Republicans look like dork-shits while making Hillsy look golden in comparison.

No serious person in America, including Donald J. Trump and the Clintons, dreamed that Donald might actually win the Republican nomination over that stable of establishment bum-boys.

But he did.

And that's where things started to go off the rails for the Clinton-Trump conspiracy to take over America.

Suddenly Mr. Trump realized that maybe, just maybe, he could gorf down the whole enchilada all by himself. Yes, all he had to do was stab his old pal Hillsy in the back, and the oval office was as good as won.

So he went for it.

And by God, look at where he is today! Running neck and neck with Hillsy even in the most egregiously biased polls!

Even after the entirety of the Republican establishment's Deep State PNAC apparatchiki has joined the Hillsy camp.

Even after the entirety of the mainstream media propaganda apparatus has jettisoned every last principle of professional journalism to dump on Trump.

He's a racist! (Let's just ignore the entire pool of Trumpian imagery that suggests he was more than cordial with the likes of Jesse Jackson, Ali, Don King, Reverend Al, etc...)

He's a misogynist! (Impossible to deny that he has referred to certain female critics in wildly misogynist terms.)

He's a cheat! (Hey, the only people who file 12,000 page tax returns are really rich people who pay zero taxes, but I'm sure it was all legal.)

He has made complimentary comments about Bad Vlad, the foreign leader most reviled by the PNAC crowd because he hasn't signed off on the Brzezinski plan for America's full-spectrum dominance of the planet in perpetuity.

What the elites don't realize is that every one of these charges just endears Trump to the rubes who long ago turned their backs on the contagion of political correctitude.

They just figure he called some fat ugly bitch a fat ugly bitch?...  This bald breach of PC etiquette should have voters turning their backs on Trump in droves.

In fact, it has the opposite effect.

And doesn't he have a profoundly problematic relationship with the elephant in the elephant room, AIPAC? One day he's going to be "more balanced" in his approach to Israel/Palestine, and the ziocentric media panics...

But today Bibi pays a house-call... what to make of that?

Who knows?

Trump is a wild card, a loose canon,  and at least another half dozen cliches all rolled up in a phenom unlike anything American politics has seen in the modern era.

In November he will destroy Hillary in the election.

By January he'll be dead.

Me and Trump

Have to say I was never much of a Trump fan.

I read his "Art of the Deal" book back in the day, and mostly I recall shaking my head and muttering "what an asshole" on pretty much every page. I was especially chagrined by his germ-phobia that prevented him from shaking hands with the commoners.

Looks like he's gotten over that.

But, what I took away from the book was that at the very end he went out of his way to pay respect to the union workers who build his shit. It was a step outside of the overall tone of his tome. He didn't have to do that, but he did.

By the time his next book came out, he was in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings of some sort. "Of some sort" is the key clause here, because after multiple bankruptcy proceedings it is apparently true that, as he claims, he has never filed for personal bankruptcy.

And why would he? Apparently his dear daddy Fred left a legacy of some 15,000 apartment units in NYC, and I've never seen any stories about them being sold off, so I assume they're still somewhere in Trumps portfolio. Given the nature of real estate inflation over the past forty years or so, that alone would make Trump a multi-billionaire, no matter what he did or did not achieve on his own account.

Those bankruptcy proceedings were hugely entertaining. I remember reading shit about how he needs to keep his yacht because it was a platform for hosting fundraisers for charitable organisations. As I recall, the courts let him keep it.

When I was at Frankel we fabbed up the steel for a new Trump casino in Atlantic City. We were a well paid union shop and as far as I know everybody got paid. The Trump casino initiatives eventually went tits up, but not before Trump won huge on them.

But that's the capitalist way, is it not? Move in fast, make your money, let the taxpayer clean up your mess. That happens everywhere all the time. You can't blame Trump for inventing predatory capitalism. And where is capitalism not predatory?

When Trump announced his candidacy for a 2016 White House run I initially thought Mountain Dew Comacho. Yup, Trump is gonna give real-world cred to the film Idiocracy. It's not sci-fi anymore; it's a documentary.

Then he trashed the non-fiction GOP candidates in the primaries, and suddenly I had a new view of Donald J Trump.

Hey! This guy could actually bring down America's rancid, rotten, self-dealing political establishment!

And he could.

That's why the entire right wing of the GOP and the entire PNAC crowd have been deserting the GOP and aligning behind Hillary.

And that's why, if you're against perpetual war, if you're against universal "free trade," if you're against more of the same old same old, you need to take a chance on Donald Trump in November.

General John Allen (retired) takes crap in "love trumps hate" celebratory punch bowl at DNC

Things have been a little tense around Falling Downs the last couple weeks. The Farm Manager insists on watching the conventions on CBSN, aka "the HRC network."

She's largely fallen for the mewling pro-Hillary propaganda that CBS has smothered us with this week.

So thank God for General John Allen!

Suddenly all that "indispensable nation" shit seemed to roust her out of her stupor.

Yup, General John showed us why all those PNAC types have been defecting from the GOP to the Hillary camp. If you wanna make sure that America remains the most indispensable and most special and most powerful nation in the family of nations, you gotta vote for Hillary!

Gotta go... Chelsea Clinton is making her speech...

Drumpfobia splits the GOP

It's been a heady few days in the race for the White House. Chris Christie was the first high-profile establishment Republican to come out for Trump, but he's getting more and more company. Sorry Chris, that VP slot may no longer be the slam dunk it looked like at the time!

Herman Cain has clambered aboard the Trump bandwagon. That means that both black candidates from the last two election cycles are now Trump supporters. Pulls a bit of rug out from under that "Trump = racist" meme, doesn't it? That meme is of course the touchstone of the white liberal intelligentsia, the same folks who still think, this late in the game, that Hillary has any "liberal" cred whatsoever.

Rick Perry has signed up. He's a serious enough guy in traditional GOP circles. But he's got nothing on Darth Cheney, who, much to our surprise here at Falling Downs, has climbed aboard too.

Maybe it was the heart transplant?

And then there's Sheldon. Sheldon and Donald have at times been bitter rivals. I think in the course of their rivalry, Sheldon has perhaps prevailed in the net worth rankings. But he's gotta have nothing but respect for Trump for the way he has steam-rolled over the duds Sheldon was financing. The fact that Sheldon can admit his mistakes says a lot about the man... he's not a complete shitbag after all!

Meanwhile, back in Crawford, W has poutily declined to support the "presumptive" GOP nominee. Seems the entire Bush clan are having a group sulk because Trump made mincemeat out of Jeb without really trying. Jeb wasted what, $150 millions on his DOA campaign?

Holy Christ! It's not hard to see why the Bushes are bitter!

Paul Ryan still has wet dreams about being in the oval office himself someday, so he's hedging his bets. And when I say "in the oval office" I mean sitting behind the big desk. The reason he's hedging his bets is because there's a lot of GOP bigs coming out, if you can imagine such a thing, for Dem front-runner Hillary!

Most of the PNAC crowd is way inclined to get behind Hillary, and it's not hard to see why. Trump is a loose cannon. He's unpredictable. He could conceivably do all kinds of scary shit; get along with Putin, stop overthrowing governments we don't like, abrogate the trade deals that have disembowelled America's working class, and so on.

Hillary, on the other hand, is gonna continue the tried and true course of perpetual war and the never-ending sell-out of working Americans. Let's face it - that's a formula that works for a huge slice of the American oligarchy!

So we've got a Manhattan lib hi-jacking the GOP, and a Dem candidate far to the right of the GOP candidate...

Best race ever!...

End Times indeed!

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.

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.

Saudi Arabia saves Ukraine from Putin - Conrad Black

That astonishing revelation comes from no less an armchair general than disgraced peer, convicted fraudster, and failed media magnate Conrad Black.

As Conrad sees it, Putin's order to have Russian troops pull back from the Ukraine border last week was not a goodwill gesture in the ongoing dialogue with Ukraine PM Poroshenko, but the result of pressure put on Russia by Saudi Arabia!

Conrad's musings in the National Post are a toxic stew of Islamophobia, Putin-bashing and wishful thinking.

• ISIS is fading and will be beaten by the Kurds
• Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel will join forces to liberate Iran
• more bombing will bring peace and democracy to Iraq and Syria
• Iran is the main cause of conflict in the region... and so on.

In fact, Mr. Black pretty much gives you the standard PNAC/Likud boilerplate in one condensed easy-to-read article... I didn't have to run for the dictionary once!

And that doesn't happen very often when I'm reading anything by CB.

Mr. Black, in spite of the many set-backs he has suffered over the past two decades, remains an entertaining spokesman for the smug and self-righteous Western elites. 

Too bad he gets so much so wrong!

Ten years ago, with oil under $50, western companies were pouring billions into the Russian oil fields because it was profitable for them to do so at that price. Now that the infrastructure is in place Russia isn't going to be crippled by a price of $70, but the fracking industry behind America's petrol-renaissance will be.

There goes America's so-called economic recovery. 

"Demented theocrats" in Tehran aren't the biggest obstacle to peace in the region; that would be the demented theocrats in Washington who truly believe, in their hearts, in America's God-given exceptionalism.

The Arab people have been mis-governed for the past 65 years because American power has propped up corrupt and repressive governments, and forced repeated wars on the region to affect regime change whenever the vassals strayed too far from their script.

PNAC/AIPAC dreams come true; towelheads killing each other all over Middle East!

If you're a Likud acolyte or a neocon, you have to admit it doesn't get much better than this. In fact, I'd wager you've already cracked the bubbly.

Not only are the towellers slaughtering one another in Syria, but now our ISIS boys are turning Iraq into a charnel house!

Again!

I suppose a possible downside is going to emerge when enough of these folks who are busy slaughtering one another step back and consider who is pulling the strings...

That could get ugly.

Making Russia disappear; hanky-panky in the blogosphere

On a typical day this blog can expect to get 50 or 60 page views from Russia. In the three years I've been putting out this unique combine of investment tips, political commentary, highly selective personal memoir, and downright awful offal, page views from Russia rank third in number, after only the US and Canada.

So when there are zero page views for several days in a row, I know something is going on.

My Russian readers are back, as of shortly after noon today. 

It's as if a tap was turned off, and then turned on again.

Was it something I said?

Russians enjoy something lacking in much of the Western world; leadership. There's not a whole lot of folks who don't understand who is in charge in Russia.

We can disagree to the nth degree over whether the man governs for "the people" or for a mafia of oligarchs, but we can all agree that one man is in charge.

Nobody is sure who is in charge in America, but most people are agreed that it ain't Obama. The "Oracle of Nairobi" has pretty much dropped the ball on every file that he's ever handled. 

Single payer universal health care morphs into the biggest profit subsidy for private health care ever imagined.

Closing Gitmo morphs into keeping that festering sore open forever, or till the last inmate dies.

Hope and change morphs into dope and rage...

"Red lines" come and go, as well they should, because most of what comes out of Obama's mouth is about political expediency that doesn't look more than 15 minutes into the future.

The Ukraine fiasco is that only because Obama couldn't decide, and still hasn't, what America's "strategic interests" are in that corner of the world. And unless you buy into the "American exceptionalism" fantasies of the PNAC crowd, you have to admit there are none.

A cursory reading of history and a glance at a map will confirm that Russia, on the other hand, does indeed have legitimate strategic interests in Ukraine, specifically in Crimea, and it didn't take Putin long to act in the interests of the nation he is leading.

The presumptuous dilettantism of Nuland and Pyatt was nipped in the bud before they were done congratulating themselves on their "revolution."

That has of course led to the most embarrassing howls of outrage from the PNAC acolytes in Washington, and also from their more devout devotees like Tusk in Poland and the incomparable Harper-Baird combination in Canada.

I don't for a moment imagine that Putin is some sort of modern day messiah who is leading his people to the promised land. But I do believe he is a hard-nosed realist who is preventing Russia from being steam-rollered by the "American exceptionalism" juggernaut that rules Washington and most of its helper-states these days.

And for that Mr. Putin should be celebrated.

Heady days for the Oaf of Tobruk

Or "le twat," as he is known in France.

If you're at all acquainted with the folks at the so-called "Foreign Policy Initiative" you'll realize that "le twat" is in good company, namely the company of the same blood-thirsty gang of dipshits who couldn't get Bush Jr. into Iraq soon enough back when they called themselves the Project for a New American Century.

BHL is still chuffed by his glorious rout of the forces of darkness in Libya, and all things considered, finding the disco dandy's name on the list of the usual suspects prescribing more war for America should not come as a surprise.

What should be a surprise is that the man retains any credibility anywhere on the media spectrum. From the disaster that is Libya to the disaster that is Mali to the fact that Francios Hollande still doesn't have his spurs, how is it possible that any serious person cares what imbecilities tumble from the lips of the aging buffoon?