It's "Redneck Heaven".
Donald(Rambo)Trump, riding into town ready to shoot it out with them
Varmints in the Black Hats. Only instead of a six shooter, Rambo
Trump is slinging nuclear missiles. And the guys in the black hats
are slinging nuclear missiles right back at us.
Chapter 16, verse 16 in The Book of Revelations calls it Armageddon.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/13/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If We're on the Brink of War, the Fault Is Ours, Not Trump's or Bolton's
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
13 April 18
They have an excuse - they're stupid and crazy. What's ours?
So here we are, on the brink. Here's Donald Trump's tough-ass tweet about
how he's about to mix it up with both Syria's Bashar al-Assad and Russia's
Vladimir Putin:
The fate of humanity now rests in the hands of this Twitter-obsessed
dingbat
executive and his new national security adviser, John Bolton - one of the
most deranged people to have ever served in the United States government, a
man who makes Jeane Kirkpatrick look like Florence Nightingale.
With these two at the helm, we are now facing the imminent possibility of
direct military conflict with a nuclear enemy. No one in the popular press
is saying it, but there could easily be Russian casualties in Trump's
inevitable bombing campaign. Which will then put the onus on a third
lunatic, Vladimir Putin, to respond with appropriate restraint.
Ironically, pretty much the only places where you will read today about the
frightening possibility of Russian casualties are in military journals, in
the nervous musings of Pentagon officials. Here and there you will see
reports of concern about what might happen if we kill the wrong Russians,
or
the wrong quantity of Russians. One outlet calmly suggested the Russians
might step up "harassment" of U.S. warplanes and outposts if we kill too
many of theirs, as if this would not cause the whole world to soil itself
in
terror.
So to recap: the most terminally insecure president ever sits in the White
House, advised by one of the most war-crazy hacks in the history of federal
service, at the outset of a fully avoidable proxy war with an enemy that
possesses thousands of lethal thermonuclear warheads aimed directly at us.
Bear in mind that virtually any exchange of nuclear missiles between these
two countries would mean the absolute end of civilization. We could all,
right now, be minutes away from the end of everything, especially given who
holds the respective buttons.
At the beginning of the Trump presidency the sole goal of all thinking
people ought to have been: survive. Bad as the possibilities of a Trump
presidency were, we could live through almost all of them, except one:
Trump
trying to conduct a war with a nuclear adversary.
He is the first president we've ever had who combines the two deadly
qualities of a) being stupid enough to think nuclear war is survivable and
b) lacking the counsel of sensible persons to steer him away from
impulsive,
civilization-imperiling moves. JFK, desperate for career-defining war and
perpetually cranked on his morning Dr. Feelgood injections, was the last
executive who came close to being this scary - and he wasn't remotely as
bad.
But we had a head start in dodging the bullet with Trump, as one of the few
not-terrifying qualities he demonstrated as a candidate was his seeming
reluctance to get into unnecessary wars. Trump was specifically on record
as
wanting to "stay out of Syria."
Trump's isolationism was of course at least partly insincere, as the Orange
One has stepped up drone attacks, and both he and his Large Adult Son have
gushed over events like the dropping of the cretinous MOAB weapon in
Afghanistan. ("Another promise kept #moab #maga," moron-tweeted Don, Jr.)
Trump even reportedly bragged that he dropped the "Mother Of All Bombs"
after eating a "terrific, moist lemon bundt cake." (He later bragged he was
eating a "beautiful piece of chocolate cake" when he bombed Syria.)
But, unlike his racism and xenophobia and lack of sympathy for the poor -
issues where there are obvious currents visible in what passes for his mind
- Trump is highly suggestible in matters military.
He played isolationist as a candidate because he sensed that was what his
voters wanted (and he was right about this, as studies later showed that
communities hit hardest by our Middle Eastern wars responded to Trump's
isolationist message).
As president, however, the one time he received praise from the Washington
consensus was when he bombed Assad last year. You might remember that as
the
time when Fareed Zakaria gushed on CNN, "Donald Trump became president
tonight," and a tumescent Brian Williams countered by calling the bombs
"beautiful" 8 times in 30 seconds, quoting Leonard Cohen as he said, "I am
guided by the beauty of our weapons."
That remains the best night of press Donald Trump has ever gotten on MSNBC.
That was last year. This year, it's worse. Virtually the entire
intellectual
consensus within Washington - with a few exceptions among progressives and
Republican outcasts like like Rand Paul - has been pushing the president in
the direction of conflict.
Predictably, the instant Trump actually began to threaten military action
against Assad and Putin, the pundit-o-sphere began to embrace a new line:
They had been against military action all along!
Why, some Media Matters types, academics like UMass professor Paul
Musgrave,
and think-tankers like Brookings Institution fellow Tom Wright even began
suggesting that it had not been they themselves, but evil foreigners, in
conjunction with Fox News, who drove Trump to his "reckless" behavior.
"If the president's reckless Russia tweets were driven by Fox and Friends
segments today, as [Media Matters analyst] @MattGertz suggests," wrote
Musgrave, "perhaps we should make the show's producer a Senate-confirmable
post."
"There is a real question as to whether foreign intelligence agencies have
tried to penetrate Fox News, especially Fox and Friends," added Wright.
The unbelievable hypocrisy of all of this is belied by the actions of,
well,
just about all of Washington.
It started two weeks ago, when Trump announced he was pulling out of Syria.
"We're knocking the hell out of ISIS. We'll be coming out of Syria like
very
soon. Let the other people take care of it now," he said, reverting to his
campaign persona in Ohio.
The D.C. intelligentsia wasted no time in hammering this decision.
"Trump's Syria Policy Isn't Retrenchement, It's Pandering," sneered Foreign
Policy.
"Chaos reigns with his president," said Hawaii Democrat Mazie Hirono,
calling the withdrawal plan "incoherent."
Howard Dean, a man I once voted for because he at least tepidly opposed a
pointless Middle Eastern war, decided to use this occasion to taunt Trump
in
schoolyard fashion.
"Why are you such a wimp for Assad and Putin?" Dean tweeted.
Subsequently, news emerged of a chemical gas attack on citizens in a town
near Damascus. The Assad regime was blamed, but denied responsibility.
Washington's smart set instantly concluded (despite some at least faintly
legitimate concern about the intelligence linking Assad to the attack) that
Trump not only could not leave Syria, but also had to retaliate militarily.
Moreover, some insisted, the gas attack was actually Trump's fault.
"@POTUS's pledge to withdraw from #Syria has only emboldened Assad,"
tweeted
John McCain.
"Clearly there needs to be a response. It needs to be an international
response," said Democratic Senator Ben Cardin, underscoring the bipartisan
agreement.
"I would destroy Assad's Air Force," said Lindsey Graham.
"Some kind of military response ought to be considered," said Democratic
Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. "It has to be robust and
unmistakable."
The notion that Trump needed to do more than lob a few wimpy little
missiles
was a popular theme.
In some cases, there was a caveat to "bomb immediately" - Trump should do
it, but only after asking for congressional support, which he would of
course get.
Tim Kaine said, "I think there's a good argument to be made that there
should be a military tough response," then said Trump should ask congress
first, then said he would vote yes if asked.
In Britain, a nation whose foreign policy moves have become unpleasantly
intertwined with our own in a way eerily reminiscent of the Iraq war era,
Theresa May said the use of chemical weapons "cannot go unchallenged."
In the press, this is what the New York Times had to say in its house
editorial (emphasis mine): "Tough talk without a coherent strategy or
follow-through is dangerous."
"Morning" Joe Scarborough offered this armchair-tough tweet, aping the
McCain take: "Trump announced plans this week to surrender Syria to Putin,
Assad, ISIS and Iran. Putin's puppet responded to Trump's weakness with war
crimes."
Among think-tankers, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute
penned the non-sensational editorial, "It's time to assassinate Assad."
"Chemical Attack in Syria Demands Stiff Response from U.S., Allies," wrote
Luke Coffey of the Heritage Foundation.
So pols, press, and talking heads were virtually all been in agreement.
Attack!
One could maybe understand this attitude from millennials, who weren't
raised amid The Day After or "99 Luftballoons" or "1999" or Failsafe or Dr.
Strangelove even, and have never experienced even fake angst about growing
up under the specter of nuclear war. But all the preceding generations
should know better. We all grew up aware it could all be over in a
heartbeat.
This is probably the most serious showdown between nuclear powers since the
Cuban missile crisis, or at the very least, the shooting down of Korean
Airlines flight 007 in 1983.
The oft-derided Doomsday Clock, kept by the Union of Atomic Scientists,
describes us as closer to nuclear war than at any time since 1953, when
both
the U.S. and the Soviet Union tested thermonuclear weapons for the first
time. "The continued existence of urban, technological civilization will
soon hang in a precarious balance," the Scientists predicted then.
They were right. It's no mystery that most of the permanent jobholder types
who occupy Washington have since shown they will reflexively endorse pretty
much any military action in any situation. There's never been any real
institutional pull toward peace and sanity in our politics, just the
occasional quixotic straggler.
But in the pre-Trump years, this Beltway reflex mostly supported a
predictable - if bloodthirsty - form of global interventionism. It was
never
so suicidal, never so maniacal. Whether Trump has brought out the worst in
us, or we've just lost our minds, we've become a danger to the world and to
ourselves, holding John Bolton to our heads as a suicide weapon.
That Trump might forget the awesome danger of nuclear war is a given. The
man is a fool. But what's our excuse?
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