It seems that a Ukrainian fired, USA-supplied ATACM, using coordinates provided by the USA (likely from a surveillance drone flying over the Black Sea) trying to hit a Russian airbase in Crimea, was shot down and it expelled its cluster munitions over a beach at Sevastopol killing four civilians and wounding 127.
This is insanity.
The US foreign policy establishment wants to dismember Russia and subdue China because those two countries are powerful enough to effectively resist the USA-dominated international order. The US foreign policy establishment doesn't give a fuck about Putin's authoritarian tendencies or China's treatment of the Uyghurs. If it were truly the case that they cared about such things they wouldn't be subsidizing and protecting and installing fascist death-squad governments in Latin America, their own murderously racist police and prison system and their for-profit healthcare system, and they wouldn't support the hideous House of Saud, and they wouldn't support the Zionist-apartheid criminal state of Israel.
Joe Biden was never an intellectual giant. Today he is a shell of the mediocrity he used to be. If he isn't in the beginning stages of dementia, he is inarguably very tired and slow. At his best it's likely he'd have no real conception of the risks he's taking with all of humanity in his war with Russia. The rest of them, Hillary Clinton, Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, the Krazy Kagans, ... all of them, ... are shallow, stupid, vain, corrupt, useless individuals. Most of them have always been fat-assed armchair warriors who have never had a problem with throwing away other people's lives in pursuit of their sick delusions.
They call themselves "Realists" but that's such a stupid idea. If the USA doesn't really stand for anything other than the "interests" of its ruling classes, and this includes the profit-driven Military-Industrial Complex, why is it worth destroying all of civilization in a nuclear war to advance those interests? I mean, even I can see how these useless vermin can enjoy their careers of writing crappy analyses to justify the interests of the MIC and of US and international capitalism. They enjoy the lifestyle afforded by serving such wealthy masters and they get a little thrill thinking about the actual chessboard that their moronic plot play out on. But that could all come crashing down in an instant if heightened tensions and things like the cluster-bombing of Russian civilians on a beach in Sevastopol lead to full-scale nuclear war.
I called this post "Hopeless Liberals" because, sadly, there are a lot of liberals who have bought into this garbage. Hypocritical partisan hacks who supported Obama's continuation of bush II's imperialist foreign policy. (The foreign policy that they'd condemend when bush II was nominally in the driver's seat.) Hypocritical partisan hacks who gushed over the blood-soaked career of Hillary Clinton and who raged at Trump for "not listening to his generals" when he wanted to end the USA's illegal occupation of Syria. The absolute imbecilic cultists at "Daily Kos" who thrill to real and imaginary Russian losses in its war in Ukraine, imagining that Biden is supporting plucky freedom fighters against Russian imperialism when the reality is that Ukraine's military is dominated by bona fide NAZIS, that the war was stupidly provoked by the USA who repeatedly spurned a diplomatic solution to comepl Putin to accept for Russia what the USA would never accept for itself. And these "Daily Kos" shitheads jerk themselves off to their Ukrainian fantasies while excusing (or more often ignoring) the USA's support for Israel's genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Yesterday I read Henry Giroux latest article at CounterPunch. The first half of the article is about how the New York Times has been exposed for deliberately imposing a glaring double-standard on the actions and sufferings of Israels and Palestinians. The second bit is a diatribe about the dangers of Donald Trump and how the corporate media has normalized him and obscures the reality of Trump being a dangerous fascist.
Personally, I'm somewhere between Giroux and Caitlin Johnstone on this one. Trump really is a different sort of monstrosity from the Republican leadership that started to fizzle-out during the 1990's. But he's the product of a process of devolution. He's not the only whackjob ignoramus being supported by a movement of confused, reactionary ignoramuses in that party.
But my question for Giroux and anyone else who wants to shriek about the [genuine] danger of Donald Trump is this: If Trump is such an existential threat, why does the Democratic Party offer us Joe Biden as the USA's alleged democracy's alleged champion? And, if they're giving us Joe Biden and his support for the wholesale slaughter of all the Palestinians in Gaza is alienating Democratic voters and weakening his chances against Trump, ... why is it incumbent upon those voters to swallow their principles and side with Biden rather than Biden having to renounce his support for genocide?
I ask you: Is Israel's right to commit genocide more important than saving America's "democracy" from Trump's fascism? If so, why?
I could ask: "Where does this end?" but the question is superfluous. Biden is committing genocide. He can't go any lower. He can't be any more vile of a monster than he already is. GENOCIDE. Do not attempt to speak to me of the genocidist being the "lesser evil." Do not speak to me about how the demented idiot and his moronic advisors risking nuclear war with Russia and China are going to save us from the danger of Donald Trump's fascism.
If this is how it plays out, that Biden lost to Trump because US-Americans felt the way that I do, and they couldn't bring themselves to vote for Biden, then so be it. That was the role that people like me will have played in that tragedy. In the same way, the hopeless liberals who aceded to the Democratic Party's neoliberal policies and abandoned their principles and their brains to defend imperialism and mass-murder when it was a Democratic administration doing it, who made their party's brand so toxic that less and less people could bother to vote for it, played their own part. And they can eat shit and die if they want to guilt-trip me while portraying themselves as innocent.
Biden's work to expand the USA's Prison-Industrial Complex, and his work on "anti-terror" legislation that the creators of the Constitution-shredding "Patriot Act" praised as their blueprint, his compliance with Obama's insane "kill-lists", everything these fucking Democratic Party "liberals" contributed to the erosion of human rights in the United States is responsible for whatever capabilities Donald Trump has to crush those rights upon an election victory.
And the beyond ridiculous, pathetically sad liberal devotion to the whole "Russiagate" myth only served to give ammunition to Trump's fans that there is a criminal "Deep State" aligned with the Democratic Party that will fabricate charges and threaten people and spy on them, in a witchhunt against anyone they don't like. They will push "FAKE NEWS" against Trump to hobble him and etc., etc., ... Gawd, that "Russiagate" stupidity caused so much damage. And hopeless liberals refuse to this day to recognize it.
The Democratic Party's support for the same pro-oligarch policies as the Republicans is what is making the population more frightened, reactionary and extremist. And the fact that, even after everything, the Democrats are less terrible than the Republicans, doesn't cut it:
Biden rewarded Zients’s poor performance by making him White House chief of staff. Zients’s predecessor, Ronald Klain, was pragmatic enough to maintain close ties with the Democrats’ progressive wing. As a result, Klain steered Congress toward passing historic investments in clean energy and infrastructure and reductions in health costs, paid for by tax hikes on wealthy corporations. Plus, he empowered progressive personnel at the regulatory agencies to crack down on exploitative fees and corporate power.
The very last speech Klain presided over was one of the most populist State of the Union addresses in U.S. history. Letting Zients fail upward into the number two role in the White House sent a message to corporate America that the days of tough talk like that were over.
...
NOW, THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION HAS HAD SOME GENUINE, even populist, successes in the Zients era. But these have mostly come from independent agencies and their directors, like Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission, or Jennifer Abruzzo at the National Labor Relations Board. Biden nominated all of them, so he can take some credit for their achievements. But they do lead independent agencies—Chopra, Khan, and Abruzzo do not take orders from the White House. If Zients had disapproved of their antagonizing Wall Street and Big Tech ahead of an election, he could not have stopped them.
Moreover, Biden has done little to tout these accomplishments from his team. His communications officials routinely balk at even talking about actions against big business. If this was meant to show corporate America that Biden isn’t as scary as The Wall Street Journal editorial board makes him out to be, clearly it hasn’t worked. It never could. It is abundantly clear to the world that Joe Biden is a capitalist — it’s in all of his speeches, it’s why moderates united behind him in the 2020 primary, it’s something anyone with a passing knowledge of his 50 years in national politics could tell you. The C-suites are fully aware that Joe Biden is not a socialist bent on their destruction. They don’t care.
If Zients actually did unite the formidable power of industry behind Biden instead of Trump, or at least keep big money evenly distributed in the race, I’d have to grudgingly admit that it was effective. As Lyndon Johnson once said, “there’s nothing more useless than a dead liberal.” But that has not happened. Just as they have for 50 years, the captains of industry are mostly lining up behind the Republican. Whatever his ideology, clearly Biden does think the business world should have at least some set of checks on its power sometimes. That is enough for the billionaire class to prefer the fascist.
Liberals in the USA who support the rotten Democrats, Canadian liberals who fanatically worship the Liberal Party, British liberals who stupidly support the Labour Party of Keir Starmer, ... all of them are hopeless idiots.
All of these parties are leading us to global heating catastrophe, risking nuclear war by provoking Russia (and wreaking Ukraine in any case), and supporting genocide in Gaza. I refuse to go so low as to give them my support.
5 comments:
I think the way Trump was talked about by the media during his presidency was horribly symptomatic. 'Cause Trump was pretty random, he'd say and do all kinds of different stuff, most of it stupid, but quite varied, right?
And there was this pattern: Every time he did something violent, the whole mainstream media would suddenly start saying "Oh, he's presidential now! He's learning how to do things properly!" Whereas every time he did something not-violent they'd be all "What a whackadoodle! Look how obvious it is that he's a nutbar who isn't fit to be president!"
So like, when it came to doing evil violent things not on US soil, the liberal mainstream foreign policy consensus was clearly MORE HORRIBLE THAN TRUMP. That is the measure of the vileness we're dealing with here.
The connection is tenuous, but I just saw a short Youtube video. It contained two clips, one by a Canadian and one by an American cop-representative, on the subject of robbing people's homes.
In the Canadian one, the cop-guy was saying leave your car keys in the front entrance area, because robbers are just after your car so if they find the keys they will leave and steal your car. In the American one, the guy was saying we prefer it if you shoot robbers because it saves us having trials and stuff.
This was a video posted by an American, under the impression that it showed how much better the US is than Canada because we're wimps who don't go around shooting burglars. So apparently the problem with Canada is we're not enough of a death cult. It made me really shudder at how deep into American culture this whole mentality goes.
Purple library guy,
The desperation with which Democratic partisans try to conflate Trump's mental instability with Biden's senility is frightening.
I remember reading an article in Rolling Stone in summer 2015 about why people should take Trump seriously. The reporter said Trump said a lot of random shit, but he was able to pick up on things very quickly and integrate them into his unrehearsed speeches in such a way as to make people think they were his own ideas.
As an individual he's disgusting. Loathsome. But for these blood-soaked psychopaths like Bolton or H. Clinton or the doddering Biden to believe they're all that superior to him? It's ridiculous.
Biden has willfully taken us to the edge of nuclear war and he's committing a genocide. That's liberal morality.
With regards to the violent mindset of the USA's culture, ... I honestly don't know how I'd manage if I ever found myself down there. Of course, I'm something of a hermit here in Canada anyway. When there's a tv on at work I'm nauseated by Canadian television.
"at how deep into American culture this whole mentality goes".
In answer to PLG comment on the depth of the gun culture in the States I can only add that it is a place where I have seen a sign of a hand gun with a red circle and slash displayed at playground. Leave your Glocks at home Kiddies.
zoombats and Purple library guy,
Yeah. I hear about how all the radio stations outside of the biggest cities are running fascist ranters.
The instinct among so many USians to resort to guns to solve problems.
We're getting infected by it too. But it's still (I hear) way worse down south.
But capitalist oligarchs (including those who fund the Clintons, and including the Clintons and the Obamas) really prefer fascism over socialism. They prefer fascism over democracy. (Generally because actual democracy would mean redistribution. Even the FOX News crowd believes in health care and social security.)
Reading Yanis Varoufakis about the response of European elites to the rise of fascism in response to the 2008 financial crisis, you can see that they really don't care about fascism all that much.
Which explains the Democratic Party's refusal to ditch Biden, their earlier decision to sabotage Sanders, and their continued devotion to genocide in Gaza.
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