I'm sorry to say that this is already semi-stale news. It's just a hop, skip and jump from steamy sex and bribery to sleazy political murder.There was the just-revealed Monday Afternoon Massacre (Trump's body man mysteriously and forcibly removed from Trump's body and environs); the Tuesday Morning Massacre (Rex Tillerson fired by Trumpian Tweet); and the Tuesday Night Massacre. This wasn't really a massacre at all, even though the corporate media were prematurely describing the still too-close-to-call Pennsylvania special election as such. A right-wing Blue Dog Democrat was slightly ahead of a right-wing Trump Republican. This was despite The Leader's rousing Nuremberg rally in steel country over the weekend, when he called for death to all drug dealers. (Update: the Democrat, Conor Lamb, came in like a lion cub and will able to serve his one term before his district is un-gerrymandered.)
Trump is acting weirdly chaotic, even for Trump. And it's still only Hump Day. Maybe he is more sleep-deprived and cranky than usual, given the Daylight Saving Time torture bug that's been going around. Speaking of which, his elite factotum's last known official act before getting bounced was setting all the clocks in the personal residence ahead by an hour on Saturday night. Perhaps Trump's sense of personal security was breached more by this effrontery than by his manservant's suddenly discovered history of alleged financial chicanery. Where's Jeeves when you need him?
The corporate pundits are, of course, blaming Trump's purge of the State Department on Tillerson's heretical stated opinion that the Kremlin is to blame for the poisonings in Britain of a former Russian spy and his daughter. But perhaps just as likely (besides the trauma induced by Daylight Saving Time) is that Stormy is threatening to spill her guts on national TV. I suspect Trump is not so much worried about having been caught cheating and later having his lawyer pay her off. I suspect Trump is worried that Stormy will reveal that he is a total dud in the sack. So he's got to prove his virility however he can.
It's March, the rutting season for horny hares. So Trump could be on a firing binge because he feels like he's been stuck in a different kind of rut. He doesn't drink or do drugs so he's got to get his jollies somehow. I'm sure he misses hosting Celebrity Apprentice, too.
He is certainly exhibiting all the classic symptoms of hare-brained weirdness. From Wikipedia:
This odd behaviour includes boxing at other hares, jumping vertically for seemingly no reason and generally displaying abnormal behaviour. An early verbal record of this animal's strange behaviour occurred in about 1500, in the poem Blowbol's Test where the original poet said: Thanne þey begyn to swere and to stare, And be as braynles as a Marshe hare (Then they begin to swerve and to stare, And be as brainless as a March hare).
Herr Trump reportedly has swerved his withering braynles stare in the direction of his Veterans Affairs honcho. But not before he hopped Air Force One over to California to eyeball samples of designer walls against immigrants. Ever the wascally wabbit, Trump quipped that the wall has to be really high because those Latino dudes sure are great jumpers. And just to make sure, his "Justice" Department is suing California over its sanctuary polices which protect immigrants, both with papers and without, from Trump's ICE brigade.
All of this compulsive punching and swerving is not to say there aren't any upsides to the the Blowbol President's March Madness. At least we're no longer being tormented by the corporate media's fawning blow-by-blow accounts of Barack Obama's boring obsession with his college basketball brackets as he went out about quietly deporting a record number of immigrants, more than all previous administrations combined. For despite all his vicious rhetoric, Trump still has a lot of catching up to do in that department.
The major upside to the latest bout of insanity is that the long-protected torturer whom Trump has tapped to lead the CIA will finally be subjected to a public grilling in the Senate. Of course, this will probably be a mostly theatrical grilling prior to Gina Haspel's ultimate confirmation. But at least the public will be reminded of this deliberately buried and sordid chapter in our nation's long, buried and sordid history. The appointment of a war criminal to lead the spy agency is forcing politicians from both legacy parties to take a stand and reveal who they really are. Supporters of Haspel - for example, Clinton campaign adviser and former acting CIA Director and current CBS consultant Mike Morell - are already defending her as a poor misunderstood Adolf Eichmann type of gal who "was only following orders" as she ran a secret black site prison and later oversaw the destruction of incriminating evidence. She is, after all, among the people described by Barack Obama himself as "patriots who tortured some folks" before he ordered the full Senate report of the Bush-era torture program to be classified for at least another decade.
The public will also be reminded of Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo's sleazy financial ties to the Koch Brothers.
Still, Minority Weasel Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) has signaled he'd be just fine with the hawkish and xenophobic Pompeo, as long as he's "tough on Russia." He will not, therefore, urge his caucus to stall the confirmation process. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CIA) will vote to confirm Haspel on the grounds that she is "respected" by other spooks and torturers. Because, just like Obama said when he refused to prosecute war criminals, "we have to look forward, not back."
And as the World Socialist Website has just so brilliantly documented with its exhaustive lists of congressional candidates actively recruited by the Democratic Party from the ranks of the CIA and the State Department and the Pentagon, we're already as good as living under military and surveillance state rule anyway.
So let's look for at least one more silver lining. Trump's firing of the State Department's public relations flack, Steve Goldstein, along with his boss means there is nobody officially in charge of the just-released $40 million in excess Pentagon funds to fight Russian trolls and other nefarious sowers of domestic discord. This money was to have been shared by Silicon Valley and various unnamed corporate media outlets "to fight the spread of divisive content" on the Internet. In other words, the express purpose of this slush fund is the censorship of both sock puppets and legitimate independent news sources, along with an even more intensive spreading of oligarch-friendly propaganda on approved, consolidated platforms.
Maybe Trump can appoint DOTUS (Ivanka) to dole out this money as she sees fit while her own security status is still so conveniently fuzzy. Who wouldn't kill for an Ivanka-branded line of mix-and-match accessories after the fact? Instead of sowing divisions, women can be empowered to sew on buttons and bows for pennies an hour in sweatshops all over the world. Somebody's got to ensure that Ivanka will continue to clear her millions in profits every year, so it might as well be entrepreneurial feminists in Bangladesh and Pakistan and Thailand.
As an homage to Daddy and to the first woman ever nominated to lead the CIA, the Ivanka Collection's Little Black Site Dress could well be the hit of the Paris, London, Milan and New York Fashion Week runways next season.
How about a physical test for Gina Haspel, to start by waterboarding her several times. Then maybe confine her in a small dark box while members of Congress ask her questions?
ReplyDeleteWe can thank Obama if Gina leads the CIA, which she almost certainly will because she will do anything, no matter how illegal. Couldn't Obama have at least fired, reprimanded, or suspended Gina the Bloody Torturer to show he didn't approve of torture and her destruction of evidence? He was more loyal and protective of his CIA henchmen/women than to our country.
ReplyDeleteSince young Obama didn't serve in the military like former CIA Director GHW Bush, he had no similar military service to rest his laurels on, nor the maturity and perspective. Instead he was proud as a peacock to be the secretive, stealthy, chief Secret Agent Man, thereby earning my title of 'First CIA President'.
How Obama handled Russiagate reminds me of FBI stings where they latch onto some relatively harmless moron who's merely fantasizing about some potential crime but doesn't have the brains to carry it out, then they don't just allow it to continue but often assist in turning it into a concrete plan and crime, just so they can construct enough evidence to bust it and leverage into usable currency: turning the asset into a snitch or double agent, justifying sanctions, a new propaganda department, more power and money, more National Security measures, curtailment of civil liberties which any enemy would be envious of, etc.
Their motto might as well be - Never Let a Crime go to Waste. Obama did nothing about 'Russian meddling' because there was a greater value in letting things run their course and portraying the activities of a troll farm as an attack on democracy to get more sanctions and threats against Russia and beef up National Security. Then it turned far more useful when Trump unexpectedly won. But I digress.
State Dept embassies have always been CIA listening posts, safe houses, and armories for weapons, but since they're now moving into State, lock, stock, and gun barrel, it's time to change the name of the State Department. Diplomacy was just a sham and a cover anyway, I propose a new name - Department of Clandestine Imperial Affairs, CIA. No? How about the Deep State Department. I hope they dedicate the new Global Engagement Center to Obama by renaming it The Obama Propaganda Center. I'm referring to the one in D.C., not the one in Chicago.
Thanks again, Obama. What a legacy.
Obama's first job out of Columbia University was writing a newsletter for Business International, a reputed CIA front organization. Even the New York Times has expressed skepticism about his weird caginess about the "missing New York City years."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/us/politics/30obama.html
Of course, this article was written in 2007, when Hillary was "inevitable" for the first time, and long before the official media hagiography of Obama got underway.
Business International also had gotten a mention in the New York Times's 1977 investigative piece on journalists planted in news organizations by the CIA:
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/27/archives/cia-established-many-links-to-journalists-in-us-and-abroad-cias.html
In between his stint at Business International and his Chicago community organizing job, Obama spent several months in Pakistan "traveling and visiting friends." This was during the time he was allegedly so deeply in college debt.
His later covering up for CIA crimes actually makes perfect sense if you buy into the theory that he himself was/is a CIA asset.
Torturers, conspirators, double agents, all at the very highest levels of government? C'mon, you're talking about the USA. If you cynics keep it up, you'll have the rest of us thinking that our population of over 300 million people is nothing more than a life support system for fascist elites, or the dark state, or whatever term you'll think up next. Look forward, think positively, be optimistic, be a team player, try to be helpful.
ReplyDelete@Karen
ReplyDeleteWow, I didn't know any of that. Thanks!
He just always struck me as being the CIA type. Now that you filled me in, I'm wondering whether he had help landing that job as a community organizer in order to keep tabs on Black activists.