Humanity Is Doomed: December 2018 [January 2019] Edition

Donald Trump is disgusting. He's a racist, misogynist, hypocritical, spoiled, stupid grifter. His tax policy, his health care "policy," his environmental policies, his immigration policies, ... they're destructive, murderous, cold, evil. He's scum.

But the majority of the US political class is scum. Psychopaths. Corrupt. Representatives of, or mere servants to, a psychopathic, insanely entitled capitalist class. So, there's not much sense in getting excited about the present set of alternatives. Impeach Trump if you're so inclined US-Americans. I'd support it. Because his personal corruption, his refusal to divest his personal holdings and his subsequent use of his position as president to enrich himself, it's all there in broad daylight. His payment of hush money to women he'd slept with, out of campaign funds, is undeniable. If you want your laws to mean something (even after George W. Bush and Barack Obama used your country's Constitution as toilet paper for sixteen fucking years) by all means impeach him.



At this point in time, Trump knows that he's wounded. He'll be subjected to Congressional oversight and he knows that Robert Mueller has a case for the impeachable offense of using campaign funds for personal use (hush money to mistresses). And so, Trump is lashing out. Trump has cunning. He knows that his strongest supporters are anti-immigrant racists. So he's allowed the US government to shut-down so that he can look like he did all he could to protect his racist base from the drug-dealing, raping, murdering Latino hordes pushing against the US-Mexico border.

This is a stupid thing to do for a number of reasons but tactically it's stupid because Trump's racist base is not all that electorally significant. Even if they're inspired to come out and support him for his devotion to the border wall idea, he's alienating the far larger group of people who wanted their factories back, for whom Trump has done almost nothing.

The other thing Trump is doing as he lashes out is sticking it to the Military-Industrial-Complex. The military, and (more importantly) the CIA, the neo-cons, the "globalists" (a euphemism for a supposedly Jewish-dominated, one-world government, wherein the majority of white people will be dragged down to the levels of poverty of the black, brown, yellow people, where they'll be forced to respect "diversity" and be "tolerant" while a small coterie of Jewish and liberal elites like the Clintons, Gores, Obamas, will push politically-correct environmentalism).

These people have been a burr in his butt since before his presidency started. And all because Trump wanted better relations with Russia. Because, you see, Trump being an obvious grifter and an incompetent businessman, has no credit with US financial institutions. But Russian oligarchs and mafioso saw his empire as a way for them to launder their dirty money. So that's who he depended on to keep his ramshackle operation running. Which made him sympathetic to the Russian point of view.

Look at it from Trump's perspective. These Russians are, for all intents and purposes, fellow white people. (Their hookers are often blond!) They say they want to be friends with America. (They do. It's the wealthiest country in the world. They want to get rich.) They tell him that they should be fighting together, as Christians, against the Islamic terrorist monstrosity. So why is it bad that Putin is helping Assad in Syria fight the terrorists? Why must America and Russia continue to be enemies?

That there is the story of Trump's disagreement with the Military-Industrial-Complex. Trump has no problem lavishing public monies on the military. He just doesn't see the need for a Russian bogeyman. But this shatters the Washington Consensus. Neo-Cons and neo-liberal internationalists long ago decided that the gargantuan military budget requires there to be enemies. When the Cold War ended there was some loose talk among peacenik leftards about "conversion" from military to peaceful industry. Then the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait diverted everyone's attentions. Then, "terrorism" became the excuse. The terrorist enemy story got a big boost from 9-11 launching over a decade of war and an orgy of looting and corruption for scumbags like Dick Cheney's Halliburton.

But the US public (and the majority of the world) began to get sickened by this unending war. When Obama tried to gin-up an invasion of Syria over alleged chemical weapons use, the British Parliament voted against their own country joining it. And that vote was part of an international explosion against the idea of another invasion of another Middle Eastern country. The vast majority of US-Americans are heartily sick of these wars. They begrudge the enormous waste of money and lives and they are aware that it is benefiting selfish vermin like Dick Cheney. This is money that could go towards investing in infrastructure or schools or any number of necessary domestic programs.

Trump's publicly professed isolationism was a big part of his appeal to some voters. So his blurting out that he was leaving Syria was another attempt to shore-up his base while simultaneously sticking it to the Deep State actors like the CIA and the State Department. The whole fit of petulance was subsequently kiboshed as the psychopathically insecure bully John Bolton, the slimy, corrupt Benjamin Netanyahu, and no doubt other beneficiaries of endless war put enormous pressure on Trump to rescind his order.

But the biggest tragedy was the way so-called "progressives" shrieked in outrage at Trump's move. People who I tend to respect and can have intelligent conversations with were babbling about HOW DARE Trump ignore his military advisers!  A few years ago they would have been cheering if Barack Obama had ignored his generals and brought US troops home from some neo-con abomination somewhere. In fact, that's what they did when Obama implemented bush II's formal withdrawal from Iraq. But now that Donald Trump is a professed isolationist, and Saint Hillary of Femaleness was the foreign-policy hawk and the CIA are the Knights of the Round-Table, many "progressives" have thrown past principles and values into the trash and are now more pro-war than many "conservatives."

I'll let Glenn Greenwald [Demohack "Driftglass"'s own personal Emmanuel Goldstein] describe the phenomenon:

But what is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of support for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and independents overwhelming favor their removal. The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it. Trump voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14 percent.
A similar gap is seen among those who voted Democrat in the 2018 midterm elections (28 percent support withdrawal while 54 percent oppose it), as opposed to the widespread support for withdrawal among 2018 GOP voters: 74 percent to 18 percent.
This is, of course, not the first time that Democratic voters have wildly shifted their “beliefs” based on the party affiliation of the person occupying the Oval Office. The party’s base spent the Bush-Cheney years denouncing war on terror policies, such as assassinations, drones, and Guantánamo as moral atrocities and war crimes, only to suddenly support those policies once they became hallmarks of the Obama presidency.

This is tribalism. No more. No less. And it's pathetic. And it's tragic. One would think your adult opinion on gigantic issues such as war and peace; international imperialism or international law; should be less disposable than this. Alas! They are not. This weakness and failure is only further evidence of the stupidity of humanity and our inability to avoid the cataclysms we are bringing upon ourselves.