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.

Trump's foreign policy; too much too fast

I'm not suggesting that Trump actually has a "foreign policy". It is well beyond obvious at this juncture that Trump has no policies whatsoever.

I'm pretty sure he just makes shit up on the fly.

But when you're the putative leader of the "free world," making shit up on the fly has consequences.

Getting a building permit for a new build in Manhattan is no doubt a tough gig. I respect Donny J for having the smarts to do that.

Policing the world is a challenge of an entirely different magnitude.

The "deep state" operators who determine America's future have never had a more pliable piece of putty in their hands than they have in Donny J today.

Not Nixon.

Not Carter.

Not Clinton or anyone with the surname "Bush."

So if our deep state operators find it expedient to nuke N. Korea, they've got the perfect patsy in the White House, don't they?


I hope I'm wrong.

Trump was never a right-winger

A lot of your mainstream liberal news platforms continue to pee their pants over the entire Trump-white-supremacist-right-winger-racist ball of yarn.

Donald Trump became all those things the day after he declared for the GOP nomination. Before that, he was just a pretty normal rich Manhattan liberal. There's literally thousands of them in Manhattan; in fact, Manhattan has the highest concentration of rich liberals anywhere in the world!

I've never been a Trump fan. The egregious self-promotion always put me off. Maybe I was just jealous.

But I became a fan when I saw how deftly this Manhattan liberal hijacked the Grand Old Party.

Hundreds of millions of donor dollars down the drain as Rubio and Cruz and Bush were all left at the curb.

Since then, the supposed "liberal" media have been doing their best to paint Trump in the darkest possible tones. To some extent I get the Trump anxiety. He does say some outrageous shit and he does aim for the headlines with that shit, but I think there's still the real DJT behind all that PR, and that's a dyed in the wool Manhattan liberal.

But what else is the "liberal" media to do? Admit that negotiating with North Korea is a good idea?

Admit that making peace with Putin is a good idea?

Admit that America's working class took it up the ass for NAFTA and every "free trade" agreement that's been signed since?

So I see their conundrum. And that conundrum does not form in a vacuum. It forms in an environment very much shaped by the beltway boffins who stage manage America's foreign policy, energy policy, defence policy, wars on drugs, immigrants, terror, and the working class, and of course the finance policies that allow government to bail out crooked banks but not struggling home-owners.

When your "free press" is that deeply embedded in the anus of the power elite, it's no wonder that this particular Manhattan liberal has been re-purposed as a "right-winger."

Welcome to the Banana Republic of Canada

Get a load of this;



That's Canada's top soldier, Chief of Defence Staff Lt. General Thomas J. Lawson, having a sit-down with Masrour Barzani, son of Masoud Barzani, the top dog in the imaginary state of Kurdistan.

(Barzani is the guy with the tea-towel on his noggin, in case you're wondering. Lawson is the guy seriously eyeing it because it would definitely make him look less bald.)

The fact that our top soldier only gets face time with the son of the Kurdish leader and not the leader himself should tell you something; not even the imaginary state of Kurdistan takes Canada all that seriously!

But there are other issues that our recent love affair with Kurdistan should bring to the fore. First of all, this father-son stuff should raise some eyebrows. Then again, maybe not... after all, you had Bush and Bush junior, and we might even get Trudeau junior right here in the great white north... so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree on that one.

Nevertheless, rampant nepotism is generally not the sign of a thriving liberal democracy...

Barzani Jr. apparently exhorted our Defence Chief to cough up lots and lots of guns and bombs so the fabled Peshmerga freedom fighters can keep killing whoever they're killing over there. The actual meeting itself was not revealed to the Canadian public by our government until the Kurds publicized it.

Why?

Well, I have a hunch that the Harper gang is not too keen on having the Canadian public take too close a look at our new besties in the Middle East. Kurdish culture doesn't actually have a lot in common with Canadian values. Google "female genital mutilation Kurdistan" and "polygamy Kurdistan" and you'll see what I mean.

By the way, our latest Middle East mission to help Iraq fight ISIS isn't about helping Iraq at all; it's about helping the imaginary state of Kurdistan.

Another by the way; did anybody else find Harper's remarks about our "evolving" mission, ie "we're gonna kill 'em," to be a little untoward? We haven't heard that kind of blustery bullshit since General Rick Hillier was on his way to Afghanistan to rid that land of the murdering Taliban scumbags.

We know how that turned out.

Anyway, in for a penny, in for a pound, as they say, and Harper's done a grand job of getting us in. We're not likely to cut and run until we do, which will be a few hundred billions and a few hundred dead Canadians down the road, when the entire exercise in stupidity becomes an election liability.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, we are yet again proclaiming Israel's right to defend itself by itself. (That "by itself" bit just started mysteriously showing up in Baird's pronouncements in the past year or so... I think it's code for "without consideration of international law.")

The "terrorist incident" in question is Hezbollah's retaliation for an Israeli attack on Hezbollah fighters in Syria a week or so ago. Did the Harper gang condemn that? Don't be ridiculous! Continuous violations of Syrian sovereignty, multiple genocidal wars on Gaza, ever-expanding illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land...
what would Israel have to do to draw a mild rebuke, nevermind a "condemnation," from the Harper gang?

The mind boggles...

The Banana Republic agenda continues on the home front as well. After forty years of falling crime rates, the Harper gang promises to get tough on crime once again in the upcoming session of parliament. Yup, there's always a few votes to be had by getting tougher on imaginary crime.

Crimes against the environment are a different matter though. Check out this headline; NAFTA probe of Alberta tailings ponds blocked by Canada. Ya, we're not gonna let those enviro-weenie tree-huggers in Washington and Mexico City push us around!

Kinda makes ya proud, don't it? By God, I think I have to vote for the guy in spite of everything...