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.

Why are all those noxious neocon turds aligning behind Hillary?

The mainstream "liberal" Toronto Star saw fit to run an opinion piece by neocon turd supremo Robert Kagan the other day, the gist of which was that America is flirting with fascism.

Yup, it's that Trump thing.

Trump is the Pied Piper of populism - the American Hitler. Yessiree, America today is just like Germany in the thirties.

There are of course innumerable reasons why America today is nothing whatsoever like Germany in the thirties.

Today, America remains the world's only super-power.

In the thirties, Germany was just digging itself out of failed-state status.

Alas, those parallels are not the ones that Kagan et al would like us to focus on. Whereas Germany was digging itself out of failed-state status in the thirties, America in 2016 is digging itself deeper in.

You see the signs of it everywhere.

The decaying infrastructure.

The student loan crisis.

The failed health care system.

The ninety million working-age Americans not "participating" in the workforce, because if we counted them as unemployed the unemployment rate would be at crisis levels.

America is fucked.

But if you've noticed, it's been salad days for big pharma, the weapons purveyors, and the prison-industrial complex, among others.

That would be the crowd Robert Kagan shills for.

Yes, business has never been better for that tiny elite who have been profiting from America's decline!

That's why Donald J. Trump is such a threat to the status quo.

Trump might, and "might" is the key word here, just upset the apple cart. What a disaster it would be for the Kagan crowd if Trump actually did make peace with Putin. What, no more reason to outspend Russia on bombs and bullets by a factor of ten to one?

That would absolutely cripple the bombs and bullets complex and the dozens of Washington think tanks they fund, wouldn't it?

That said, I fear that the more mainstream advisers Trump takes on, the more likely it is that he will be co-opted by the prevailing DC geist.  Nevertheless, there remains a sliver of a chance that Trump "might" overturn the status quo.

After all, he's said "you're fired" before, and maybe those are the words a lot of those establishment advisers could be hearing right after Cleveland.

Which is why those noxious neocon turds are stampeding to the safety of Hillary Clinton.

GOP warmongers circle the wagons to block Trump

It was D (for desperation) Day among the GOP establishment today.

There was the Mittster warning America that security and prosperity would fly out the window with a Trump nomination. Romney doesn't get the fact that, from the point of view of street-level folks, America's security and prosperity has already been squandered by the perpetual-war establishment types.

Then, to prove that they're just as clueless as Romney, seventy-some charter members of that establishment posted an open letter on the War On the Rocks website. Yup, a president who could get along with Putin and be neutral on the Israel - Palestine conflict would be bad news indeed. That this clique of war cheerleaders feels threatened by Trump tells me he must be doing something right. A "Dump Trump" plea signed by the likes of Daniel Blumenthal, Michael Chertoff, Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan and a few dozen like-minded Washington insiders isn't going to make much of an impression on the millions of regular folks who have begun to realize that the trillions pissed away on unnecessary wars at the urging of these people has only made America poorer and less secure.

In fact, it's these war cheerleaders who have brought America down. Bill Kristol gave the game away when he revealed that the GOP elite would be better served by having Hillary in the White House. Unlike Trump, Hillary is a reliable advocate for senseless military interventions and endless weapon sales to all sides in virtually every conflict. What that should tell the Republican rank and file is that their party has long since been hijacked by the military-industrial complex.

It's no wonder the elite feels threatened by a candidate who is bringing democracy back to the party.