Fitting that Trump's replacement of Nation Security Adviser Lt. Gen H.R. McMaster with John Bolton comes directly on the heels of the 15th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. If the United States has been tacitly at war with the world, now it is explicitly so; at least that's "morning after" assessment in the prestige press.
Yesterday, before the Bolton bombshell was dropped, Nicholas Kristof penned "Trump’s Talk Worries Me, Like the Talk Before the Iraq War." When I read Kristof I think of him as a situational progressive whose views when they are enlightened usually line up with the "better angels" at Langley. I stopped reading him several years ago when he wrote a few columns from Ukraine championing the Banderites of Pravy Sektor.
The last part of Kristof's column caught my eye:
Looking back, the biggest problem 15 years ago was that the administration was stuck in an echo chamber and far too optimistic, and Democrats and the news media alike mostly rolled over. Journalists too often acted as lap dogs, not watchdogs — and today I fear that we may be so busy chasing the latest shiny object that we miss an abyss ahead.
I also frankly doubt that we as a nation have learned the lesson from Iraq. A recent Pew survey found that 43 percent of Americans still believe that invading Iraq was the correct decision.
Hello?
Forty-three percent believe invading Iraq was the correct decision because that is the prevailing wisdom found in the mainstream media. Governments and the corporate media outlets that serve them lie repeatedly. It didn't end with the invasion of Iraq. See Craig Murray's latest post, "Boris Johnson A Categorical Liar."
Suddenly war appears to be imminent when it was front and center the whole time.
The positive is that The Donald is destroying the current Republican Party. Look at what the reality television star has accomplished so far: He quickly asphyxiated the presidential candidacy of a truly baleful Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker; and he ruthlessly exposed the Bush dynasty as nothing more than a mirage generated by the heat produced by furiously spending tens of millions of dollars.
Trump has proven himself an avatar of the new media. According to Nicky Wolf, a reporter covering the U.S. presidential race for The Guardian who was interviewed yesterday on Democracy Now!, Trump is rewriting the playbook:
But I think Trump is also a uniquely 21st century social media phenomenon, too. He’s huge, to paraphrase him, on Twitter. He’s got this enormous following. He can reach more people with a tweet than almost every TV ad market in the country. Now, that’s something that Schwarzenegger never had and that Jesse Ventura never had, that Reagan never had. I think that changes the arithmetic of stuff a bit here. And he’s just so able to build this brand. It’s difficult to not see him as a pretty unique phenomenon now. And it’s amazing to watch. I mean, it’s just absolutely spectacular how he’s playing with the Republican Party like a cat with a mouse. It’s fantastic.
The reason it is fantastic is that Trump is trumpeting positions that are the direct opposite of GOP orthodoxy -- on trade, on Social Security, on Russia. These differences between Trump and the Republican congressional agenda are what Steinhauer highlights in her story. We can only hope that enough power brokers in the GOP establishment maintain their delusion that Trump can somehow be kept from the nomination. The idea that some of these dead-enders seem to be forming, now that it is apparent that Rubio has very little mojo, is of a brokered convention that produces Paul Ryan as the party's nominee. As Steinhauer explains,
Though most in the Republican establishment are hoping for the dust to settle and for Senator Marco Rubio to emerge as their nominee — his Capitol Hill endorsements stack up daily — some still murmur privately that in the event of Mr. Trump’s nomination, they would like to see Mr. Ryan emerge as a brokered nominee at the Republican National Convention in July.
This amounts to a nuclear option. The potential damage to the GOP is beyond comprehension.
That's why there is already a significant amount of noise emanating from Capitol Hill that all sounds like "Wait a second. We can work with Trump." According to Steinhauer,
Some Republican lawmakers say, though nervously, that there would be plenty of intersection between their agenda and Mr. Trump’s.His tax plan — which calls for large tax cuts for all Americans, especially the rich — is similar to Mr. Ryan’s. Mr. Trump, like Mr. Ryan, is all for repealing and replacing the current health care law, although he, unlike Mr. Ryan, has endorsed the individual mandate.
“In a lot of ways, it might actually be conducive to getting things done to have someone with business sense in the White House,” said Representative Mick Mulvaney, Republican of South Carolina and a leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
Like Mr. Ryan, Mr. Trump also supports gun rights and a strong military, although Mr. Trump has broken with many Republicans with his criticism of the Iraq war.
“All of the Republican presidential candidates would be better than Hillary Clinton,” said AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan. “And Speaker Ryan would be able to work with any one of them.”
Some even argue that Mr. Ryan, who operated in lonely political waters before his party took over the House in 2011, will adjust to the environment and try to help Republicans in congressional races who, in many states, will be fighting for their lives.
***
Congressional Republicans — especially senators up for re-election in swing states — have been terrified to criticize Mr. Trump by name because they need his voters, too, in primary and possible general election battles. White-hot fear is beginning to set in.
This is the negative: Trump is the right wing's Obama 2008, a shape-shifting Manchurian Candidate who is in fact loyal to the 1%. I think this is the correct interpretation, brought home to me one morning reading a Gail Collins column, "Trump Shows His Inner Rabbit," where she points out that Trump back-tracked on his most powerful statement during the last Republican debate, that Bush and Cheney lied to get us into Iraq:
In a dramatic highlight of the last Republican debate, Trump accused the Bush administration of deliberately deceiving the American public about the invasion. (“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none.”) It was a potentially historic moment: a top Republican candidate for president attempts to lead his party into a frank reappraisal of the Bush-Cheney administration’s inherent honesty.
Here we are, one week later: “I’m not talking about lying. ... Nobody really knows why we went into Iraq.”
Meanwhile, reporters continue to ask Trump supporters what the attraction is. And his fans say that he tells it like it is.
Trump is an agile performer whose gift is the ability to mesmerize an audience with an apparent spontaneity; this sponateity creates a facsimile of truthfulness.
It is of course nothing of the sort. It is bullshit. A Trump White House would preside over a large tax cut for the 1% and a big increase in military spending. It would be Reagan's first term all over again.
Let's see who Trump selects for a VP. My guess is a hawkish general a la Curtis LeMay, George Wallace's running mate in his 1968 independent presidential bid.
The United States is not an egalitarian country. It plays one on TV. But the reality it is corporate-dominated kleptarchy that is only nominally democratic.
Our nominal democracy and vestiges of constitutional protections give us a leg up on the subjects of Saudi Arabia. But in terms of an ally who has a strong voice in the conduct of American affairs, you would be hard pressed to find one greater than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Yesterday, when Iranian President Hassan Rouhani proclaimed his country's readiness to intervene in Iraq to protect the Shiite holy sites there, the Saudis responded by issuing a warning against any foreign intervention. Rick Gladstone and Dan Bilefsky report in "Insurgency in Iraq Widens Rivals’ Rift" that
In a televised speech in Iran on Wednesday, Mr. Rouhani expressed full support for the Iraqis who have joined volunteer militias to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Sunni extremist group that straddles both countries. It has seized large sections of northern and western Iraq over the past few weeks, threatened to march on Baghdad and vowed to obliterate cities and shrines dear to Shiites.
“Regarding the holy Shiite shrines in Karbala, Najaf, Kadhimiya and Samarra, we announce to the killers and terrorists that the big Iranian nation will not hesitate to protect holy shrines,” the president vowed in the speech to a crowd in Lorestan Province in western Iran. “These terrorist groups, and those that fund them, both in the region and in the international arena, are nothing, and hopefully they will be put in their own place.”
Mr. Rouhani also said many Iranian volunteers were prepared to travel to Iraq to defend religious sites. He sought to cast them as the allies of patriotic Iraqis from all backgrounds who see the Sunni insurgents as a scourge — a theme he also emphasized in a posting on his Twitter account.
“Iranian nation will protect Iraq’s holy shrines & they aren’t alone. Iraq’s Sunnis, Shias & Kurds all ready to defeat terrorism solidarity,” he wrote.
Mr. Rouhani signaled over the weekend that Iran did not intend to send troops to Iraq. But Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards, recently traveled to Iraq to meet with Iraqi leaders, who have mobilized thousands of militia fighters, almost exclusively Shiites. The high-level contact suggested that General Suleimani was helping oversee their training and strategy.
In Saudi Arabia, Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal warned that no outside power should be meddling in Iraq. Coming on the same day that Mr. Rouhani spoke, the clear implication was that the Saudi minister was referring to the Iranians. He said the Iraqis needed to achieve national reconciliation without “foreign interference or outside agendas.”
Prince Faisal's admonition goes for the United States as well. That is why stories that appear in the press regarding Obama's deliberations on the use of force in Iraq always accentuate the limited strategic options he is dealing with. A few drone strikes are usually mentioned. The stories convey no sense of urgency, certainly none of the shrieking that went along with the press's drumbeat for strikes on Damascus last summer. Then it was the entire global order at stake, dependent as it is, or at least thought to be inside the Beltway, on unilateral U.S. belligerence. Here we are only dealing with the realization -- a caliphate rising in northern Iraq erected by a group Osama bin Laden found too extreme -- of the fantasy that Bush-Cheney used to justify their 2003 invasion.
The U.S. and the Kingdom are reading from the same script when it comes to Iraq: the ISIS blitzkrieg is due to the sectarianism of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. This is the talking point that has been reiterated with great discipline since Mosul fell.
Another red flag is that the atrocities and war crimes of ISIS are given short shrift, mentioned only as if in passing. Whereas any Shiite reprisals, such as the 44 Sunni prisoners who ended up shot in an attack on a Baquba prison earlier this week, are labeled "horrific."
Gladstone and Bilefsky mention that
The Saudi kingdom also issued a statement repudiating accusations by Iraq’s Iranian-backed Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, that it was providing moral or financial support to the Sunni insurgents.
“Any suggestion to the contrary is a malicious falsehood,” the Saudi statement said.
But Saudi sponsorship of ISIS was even acknowledged yesterday by the Gray Lady in her lede editorial: "Turkey, for instance, should shut its border to militants and to materiel flowing into Syria and Iraq. And Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other gulf states need to stop financing (directly or indirectly) ISIS, which began as an Al Qaeda affiliate, and other extremist groups."
Democratic politics in big industrial oligarchies like the United States is a game of manipulating public ignorance. Republicans electorally feast on fear -- fear that big government is going to rob you blind or make you live with black people or round you up in an internment camp. Democrats peddle hope as well as fear -- hope that wars of choice will not be embarked upon, that jobs will be created, that government will be administered fairly. For both branches of the duopoly to function effectively, public ignorance needs to be not only dominant but ascendant.
Barack Obama convinced a lot of Democrats that it was no longer so irrational to hope that the duopoly might actually be able to address some of its systemic woes -- income inequality, unemployment, wage stagnation, climate change, militarism, etc. What is happening now is a significant number of people (one might say the critical strata of the Democratic Party electoral base) are waking up to the realization that it was irrational to believe that Obama represented a break with the past and a possibility of renewal.
Obama's appeal has always been his ability to seem as if he was speaking honestly. His supporters could point to Republican obstructionism to explain why his deeds never matched his words. But what happens when his words no longer ring true? We're seeing that now, for instance, with his lie-bloated speech yesterday in Brussels. Obama told some whoppers: Kosovo was not precedent for Crimea; Iraq was invaded by working within the international system; and the United States did not conspire with fascists to topple the elected government of Ukraine. All lies, and acknowledged as such by people who pay attention to the issues.
But Obama isn't playing to people who pay attention; he's cutting against the grain of his appeal -- the intellectual truth teller -- to bang the drum of public ignorance. And it is going to cost him.
Democrats will lose the Senate. Obama, never a tough customer, will spend the last two years in office having to be tough and veto and a lot of bad bills.
The rapid erosion of the Democratic Party as a national electoral force has commenced; hopefully, this will be more than a cyclical phenomenon. Hopefully, the duopoly will begin to disintegrate.
A departure for Hippies vs. Punks: I actually went to see a live performance of an artist who will be the subject of today's post.
Richard Buckner is conducting a tour of what he is calling his "Living Room Shows." Last night was his first, and I was there, seated on a sofa with a couple other graybeards; an attractive, mature couple sipping red wine at my feet; facing us ten-feet away, Richard Buckner, a big guy with long hair in a brown sports coat, looking not unlike a more attractive, virile Tiny Tim. He sat in a wooden chair at the front of the staircase and played acoustic guitar and sang and spoke for 90 minutes. He ended the performance with the a capella "Fater," from his seminal Devotion + Doubt (1997) major-label debut, delivered from the bathroom, which provided just enough distance and echo. Wonderful!
Before proceeding any further, I want to say that there a lot of ways I can approach this. I am dealing with a more liberal time constraint since I used a vacation day today knowing that I would get home late and not want to go into work with four-hours sleep. I could do a straight review of Buckner's performance and what it felt like to see an artist in a private residence among other fans who learned about the show via the Internet; I could describe the heft of Buckner's catalog; I could discourse on what I mean by "Life at the Millennium." But mostly I just want to make a purely adulatory statement: I think Richard Buckner is one of our most important contemporary artists. His recordings are close to my heart. As I mentioned in a previous Hippies vs. Punks post, his Impasse (2002) helped get me through a difficult stretch. In this age of digitally distracted time constriction, Richard Buckner's music taps into a fundamental honeyed current that must exist in order for life to flow forward.
The "Living Room Shows" support Surrounded, Buckner's latest record which was released at the end of last summer. It is an excellent album, consistent with the high quality we have come to expect from our bard of the millennium, and well worth picking up:
Buckner appeared yesterday morning on KEXP during Cheryl Waters' "The Midday Show" and performed some songs off Surrounded. It was on KEXP over 15 years ago, when it was KCMU, that I first heard Richard Buckner. Then he was promoting Devotion + Doubt on Amanda Wilde's show. What I remember is how hilarious the two were together, so much so that I got out a cassette tape and started recording their repartee. (Somewhere in a storage facility in Southern Oregon I still have that cassette.) Last night Buckner performed quite a few songs, in addition to the above-mentioned "Fater," from Devotion + Doubt:
One of the things that I remember about Amanda Wilde's electrifying interview of Richard Buckner from those days preceding the millennium is that it was a beautiful sunny afternoon. You see, we still had the sun -- sunniness -- back in the 1990s. Now, the sun still shines, but, paraphrasing Dylan from "Highlands," it is not the same sun. The sun that shines now heralds not a Golden Age, but a period of cataclysm and destruction and evil spirits. We cleared the Y2K hurdle, but we haven't made it to "the millennium" yet.
Time after time during the winter of 2002-2003 I would listen to Impasse. I was breaking up with my girlfriend of 11 years. I was fracturing, splitting in two. But I still had to go to work and earn a living, etc. The nation, post 9/11, was on its way to war with Iraq. At the office we were allowed to listen to music while we sat and toiled at our desks. I had a Sony Walkman. Once I made it through the first 11 songs of Impasse, I would cross a dividing line when I got to track 12, "Were You Tried & Not as Tough."
"Impasse:," "I Know What I Knew," and "Stutterstep" would follow, concluding the album and locating me in a blank, airy heaven realm.
Each time I completed listening to Impasse I participated in some sort of magical, healing dramaturgy, and I was stronger for it. What else can art aspire to? Once "Stutterstep" finished I would hit play and start the process over again.
So I'm going to cut it short with that. No disquisition of how alt-country grows out of cowpunk; no thumbnail sketch of American political history since Clintontime. Just pick up any Richard Buckner record and have a listen. Better yet, go hear him sing in someone's living room.
At the end of this morning's story "House Leaders Express Their Support for Syria Strike," by Mark Landler, Michael Gordon and Thom Shanker, finally comes a mention of the reality that Obama and his war cabinet are trying to subvert:
The calendar is Mr. Obama’s enemy: Many members from both parties are still back in their districts hearing from constituents, and the feedback, based on numerous interviews, is overwhelmingly negative.
On Tuesday, however, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, threw its support behind military action in Syria, citing the need to send a strong message to Iran and the militant group Hezbollah, both of which support Mr. Assad.
Any gauge of sanity and basic fairness, given the decade-plus ongoing foreign occupations following 9/11 and the recent Snowden revelations of an omnipresent surveillance state that has metastasized since then, has the American public clearly in the right on this issue. Public opinion was wrong to support Bush II's invasion of Iraq, but Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld & Co. were shrewd in their use of the fear and anger 9/11 created to sow enough confusion with their bogus intelligence to pull off the crime (so far) of the century.
Now is a different time. We're coming to the end of the 9/11 era, which also happens to be the end of the Arab Spring. People might have looked the other way on Libya because of a heady rush caused by toppling Arab dictators, but no mas. The 2012 Benghazi attack put to rest the fallacy of a problem-free intervention.
The American citizenry has been treated to a series of budget crises by a divided national political class. And suddenly that political class is coming together, but not to fund a public works project or expand early childhood education. No, the national political leadership is joined in an embrace of the Obama request for an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). In other words, folks, you get to carry and pay for guns but you get no butter.
And the public understands the screwing it's getting. Support for bombing Syria has not grown since the Obama team has "flooded the zone" and the nation's fourth estate has resumed its role from the run up to Iraq's invasion -- cheerleader for illegal warfare and megaphone of tendentious intelligence. It is unquestioned in the Western media that the Syrian government is responsible for attacking the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. The unverified death toll of 1,400 is unquestioned as well. Pleas to "Save the children!" are made incessantly by beautiful, young cable news anchors. But despite all this American public opinion is unmoved.
This is not to say that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) doesn't have a few tricks left to pull on us. Opinion might tilt a few points in the direction of launching the Tomahawks. But I don't think so. I think this will be a clear case of "which side are you on?" The 10-7 vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee augurs a divided Senate. But the real challenge for AIPAC and other warhawks will be in the House.
If the AUMF passes the House of Representatives, given everything that we've been through since the millennium, I think it's safe to say that electoral democracy is officially dead in this country.
I took a run at The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey last night. At the two-hour mark, with an hour left to go, I threw in the towel; I couldn't make it to the Lonely Mountain.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is part one of Peter Jackson's three-part prequel to his Lord of the Rings film trilogy from last decade. Unless you're a Tolkien diehard or a sword and sorcery nut I wouldn't recommend this film. I was hoping An Unexpected Journey might tap into some of the Lord of the Rings vibe, which for me was a Hollywood blockbuster cinematic discourse on Manichaeism. It does not. Lord of the Rings was a manifestation of the Zeitgeist of the new millennium -- Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq. People wanted to make sense of what was happening to them. So they went to church, which for a lot of Americans, let's say most, is the movie theater. And what they found was Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings.Those three films -- The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003) -- made perfect sense of the times. I went to the theater and saw each one, and the theater was always full. Now, ten years and a global financial meltdown later, people don't go to the theaters like they used to; they have theaters in their own home in the form of large wall-mounted high-definition television screens or, in my case, a good rectangular computer monitor. Our shared spaces are shrinking, atomizing. The Shire, where Jackson's Tolkien films lovingly begin -- a bourgeois suburb at the end of the Western mind -- is disappearing. A buddy of mine (the same one whose opinion regarding North Korea seems closer to the mark than my own) said after seeing one of the Lord of the Rings movies, "Americans think they're good Hobbits living in the Shire when they're actually Orcs in the service of Saruman."
