*president trump is seriously dangerous*

[Iamwhomiam]

Oh! Did he announce he was divorcing Melania? I though he considered her his most recent pet. I wonder if he'll choose an Afghan this time.

[brainpanhandler]

BPH, I think the controversial Taiwan call maybe a good example. The dogshit end of the MSM (HuffPo) took off running with pappy stories mocking Trump for having done the call out of sheer stupidity and ignorance when it now seems, to me at least, that the call was entirely in line with a dangerous geopolitical philosophy.

Agreed that the Taiwan call was not sheer stupity and ignorance in the sense that he had no idea that it would signal a more belligerent stance toward China. That seems in line with his rhetoric at least. But to follow your card playing metaphor it's like an amateur sitting at a table of professionals thinking he can bluff them. Idiot. Dangerous idiot.

Do I really think Trump is "smart" by any metric that I value? No, of course not. But he has played his cards over the past few years extremely wisely (and entirely possibly also sociopathically,) judging by the outcome.

Trump can't win an honest game of poker. Shit, he can't even win when he owns the casino.

For that matter, the patchwork nature of his cabinet seems to me, sadly, somewhat intelligent. They're not ideologically unified and they appeal to his base in different ways such that I don't see them as likely to form a counter-force to his whims.

That at least does seem to fit his MO and I will concede does suggest a sort of managerial savvy. I believe it is an avowed philosophy of his to surround himself with advisors that have substantially different ideas.

[Luther Blissett]

SLAD, do see any parallel between an obstructionist congress that entirely knee-capped Obama and the current inauguration boycott?

As absurd as it sounded to my historically Left/progressive/anarchist ears, the Right wing portrayal of Obama as the harbringer of the globalist apocalypse, stripped of content, now seems like something of a sympathetic precursor, energetically at least (and maybe semiotically,) to our current anti-Trumpism.

I can't help but notice that Bernie's take on the situation, again, diverges: http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/1.765371

I'm no more sympathetic to Trump than you are but I can't make the leap from being so inspired by the Bernie campaign to now allying with establishment dems simply because Trump is so monstrous.

on edit: BPH, I think the controversial Taiwan call maybe a good example. The dogshit end of the MSM (HuffPo) took off running with pappy stories mocking Trump for having done the call out of sheer stupidity and ignorance when it now seems, to me at least, that the call was entirely in line with a dangerous geopolitical philosophy. Do I really think Trump is "smart" by any metric that I value? No, of course not. But he has played his cards over the past few years extremely wisely (and entirely possibly also sociopathically,) judging by the outcome. For that matter, the patchwork nature of his cabinet seems to me, sadly, somewhat intelligent. They're not ideologically unified and they appeal to his base in different ways such that I don't see them as likely to form a counter-force to his whims.

One of the main differences being that Obama himself never really insinuated that we would be posting from FEMA camps in rural Colorado as of 2017, but Trump's statements, actions, associations, appointments, and the extenuating circumstances surrounding them (climate and socio-economic) indicate that we need to start preparing for resistance to a state the likes of which we have never seen.

The "taking our guns" / Islamic extremist Trojan horse / lesbian takeover of farms / antichrist / FEMA camps fantasies were dreamt up like Pizzagate and in much the same way - in the absence of survivor testimony / in the absence of deep state analysis. A deeply historic analysis of Trump's rise only bolsters whatever the established expectations for his presidency.

His cabinet just seems chaotic. The basest form of the old revolving door.

[Searcher08]

...will Rick Perry actually remember which Department he works at...?

Rick Perry is probably pooing in space.

[Iamwhomiam]

A deeply historic analysis of Trump's rise only bolsters whatever the established expectations for his presidency.

True. Bullying is his style, always was and ever will be, and that's what makes him so scary. The power of the presidency assures his danger.

When the market crashes, how will he handle it? When he levels an intolerable insult to an opposition leader? How will we react? Allow it to be brushed aside as all other have been so far, by calling it politically incorrect? How will the insulted react?

Far too many Unknowns for such a well known man, but he's still very predictable, imho.

Let's face one fact - Trump's election has shaken both the right and the left and both are concerned about Trump's lack of impulse control and what that means for the world.

[Luther Blissett]

How will he react to mass global protests on his inauguration weekend, when he's supposed to be off (first day of work being Monday)?

[Iamwhomiam]

Verily, a great concern. He'll be up all night tweeting orders! and just wait for his reaction after the news cycles to Tuesday, with little about him and lots about the worldwide protests!

He'll do something outrageous on Tuesday - that's a prediction - to try to offset Monday's news.

[Morty]

It’s Not About Trump, But Us
January 17, 2017

The looming inauguration of Donald Trump has led many on the “liberal/left” to vow eternal resistance but this fury has obscured the need for self-reflection on how “progressives” have lost their way, as John Pilger explains.

By John Pilger

On the day President Trump is inaugurated, thousands of writers in the United States will express their indignation. “In order for us to heal and move forward …,” say Writers Resist, “we wish to bypass direct political discourse, in favour of an inspired focus on the future, and how we, as writers, can be a unifying force for the protection of democracy.”

The run-down PIX Theatre sign reads “Vote Trump” on Main Street in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. July 15, 2016. (Photo by Tony Webster Flickr)

And: “We urge local organizers and speakers to avoid using the names of politicians or adopting ‘anti’ language as the focus for their Writers Resist event. It’s important to ensure that nonprofit organizations, which are prohibited from political campaigning, will feel confident participating in and sponsoring these events.”

Thus, real protest is to be avoided, for it is not tax exempt. Compare such drivel with the declarations of the Congress of American Writers, held at Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1935, and again two years later. They were electric events, with writers discussing how they could confront ominous events in Abyssinia, China and Spain. Telegrams from Thomas Mann, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out, reflecting the fear that great power was now rampant and that it had become impossible to discuss art and literature without politics or, indeed, direct political action.

“A writer,” the journalist Martha Gellhorn told the second congress, “must be a man of action now . . . A man who has given a year of his life to steel strikes, or to the unemployed, or to the problems of racial prejudice, has not lost or wasted time. He is a man who has known where he belonged. If you should survive such action, what you have to say about it afterwards is the truth, is necessary and real, and it will last.”

Her words echo across the unction and violence of the Obama era and the silence of those who colluded with his deceptions. That the menace of rapacious power — rampant long before the rise of Trump — has been accepted by writers, many of them privileged and celebrated, and by those who guard the gates of literary criticism, and culture, including popular culture, is uncontroversial. Not for them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics. Not for them the responsibility to speak out, regardless of who occupies the White House.

Clinton’s Contempt

Today, false symbolism is all. “Identity” is all. In 2016, Hillary Clinton stigmatized millions of voters as “a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.” Her abuse was handed out at an LGBT rally as part of her cynical campaign to win over minorities by abusing a white, mostly working-class, majority. Divide and rule, this is called; or identity politics in which race and gender conceal class, and allow the waging of class war. Trump understood this.


“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident poet Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

This is not an American phenomenon. A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.”

No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among today’s insistent voices of consumer-feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described “the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital.”

There is something both venal and profoundly stupid about famous writers as they venture outside their cosseted world and embrace an “issue.” Across the Review section of the Guardian on Dec. 10 was a dreamy picture of Barack Obama looking up to the heavens and the words, “Amazing Grace” and “Farewell the Chief.”

The sycophancy ran like a polluted babbling brook through page after page. “He was a vulnerable figure in many ways …. But the grace. The all-encompassing grace: in manner and form, in argument and intellect, with humour and cool ….[He] is a blazing tribute to what has been, and what can be again … He seems ready to keep fighting, and remains a formidable champion to have on our side … … The grace … the almost surreal levels of grace …”

I have conflated these quotes. There are others even more hagiographic and bereft of mitigation. The Guardian’s chief apologist for Obama, Gary Younge, has always been careful to mitigate, to say that his hero “could have done more”: oh, but there were the “calm, measured and consensual solutions …”

Idolizing Obama

None of them, however, could surpass the American writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the recipient of a “genius” grant worth $625,000 from a liberal foundation. In an interminable essay for The Atlantic entitled, “My President Was Black,” Coates brought new meaning to prostration. The final “chapter,” entitled “When You Left, You Took All of Me With You,” a line from a Marvin Gaye song, describes seeing the Obamas “rising out of the limo, rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying despair, defying history, defying gravity.” The Ascension, no less.

One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. This was given expression and reinforced during the two terms of Barack Obama. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Obama, who expanded America’s favorite military pastime, bombing, and death squads (“special operations”) as no other president has done since the Cold War.

According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.

Every Tuesday — reported The New York Times — he personally selected those who would be murdered by mostly hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target.”

A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones killed 4,700 people. “Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,” he said, “but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.”

Like the fascism of the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent media whose description now fits that of the Nuremberg prosecutor: “Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically … In the propaganda system … it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

Destroying Libya

Take the catastrophe in Libya. In 2011, Obama said Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew … that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

This was the known lie of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. It became the media story; and NATO – led by Obama and Hillary Clinton – launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten.”

Under Obama, the U.S. has extended secret “special forces” operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa. Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late Nineteenth Century, the U.S. African Command (Africom) has built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds U.S. officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master’s black colonial elite whose “historic mission,” warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the promotion of “a capitalism rampant though camouflaged.”

It was Obama who, in 2011, announced what became known as the “pivot to Asia”, in which almost two-thirds of U.S. naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront China,” in the words of his Defense Secretary. There was no threat from China; the entire enterprise was unnecessary. It was an extreme provocation to keep the Pentagon and its demented brass happy.

In 2014, the Obama’s administration oversaw and paid for a fascist-led coup in Ukraine against the democratically elected government, threatening Russia in the western borderland through which Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, with a loss of 27 million lives. It was Obama who placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia, and it was the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any administration since the Cold War — having promised, in an emotional speech in Prague, to “help rid the world of nuclear weapons”.

Obama, the constitutional lawyer, prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president in history, even though the U.S. Constitution protects them. He declared Chelsea Manning guilty before the end of a trial that was a travesty. He has refused to pardon Manning who has suffered years of inhumane treatment, which the United Nations says amounts to torture. He has pursued an entirely bogus case against Julian Assange. He promised to close the Guantanamo concentration camp and didn’t.

A Smooth Operator

Following the public relations disaster of George W. Bush, Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s decision was part of this: the kind of cloying reverse racism that beatified the man for no reason other than he was attractive to liberal sensibilities and, of course, American power, if not to the children he kills in impoverished, mostly Muslim countries.

This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded, especially “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics,” as Luciana Bohne put it. “When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George Clooney, “you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”

William I. Robinson, professor at the University of California, and one of an uncontaminated group of American strategic thinkers who have retained their independence during the years of intellectual dog-whistling since 9/11, wrote this last week:

“President Barack Obama … may have done more than anyone to assure [Donald] Trump’s victory. While Trump’s election has triggered a rapid expansion of fascist currents in U.S. civil society, a fascist outcome for the political system is far from inevitable …. But that fight back requires clarity as to how we got to such a dangerous precipice. The seeds of 21st century fascism were planted, fertilized and watered by the Obama administration and the politically bankrupt liberal elite.”

Robinson points out that “whether in its 20th or its emerging 21st century variants, fascism is, above all, a response to deep structural crises of capitalism, such as that of the 1930s and the one that began with the financial meltdown in 2008 …. There is a near-straight line here from Obama to Trump … The liberal elite’s refusal to challenge the rapaciousness of transnational capital and its brand of identity politics served to eclipse the language of the working and popular classes … pushing white workers into an ‘identity’ of white nationalism and helping the neo-fascists to organise them”..

The seedbed is Obama’s Weimar Republic, a landscape of endemic poverty, militarized police and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a “market” extremism which, under his presidency, prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street.

Perhaps his greatest “legacy” is the co-option and disorientation of any real opposition. Bernie Sanders’ specious “revolution” does not apply. Propaganda is his triumph.

The lies about Russia — in whose elections the U.S. has openly intervened — have made the world’s most self-important journalists laughingstocks. In the country with constitutionally the freest press in the world, free journalism now exists only in its honorable exceptions.

The obsession with Trump is a cover for many of those calling themselves “left/liberal”, as if to claim political decency. They are not “left,” neither are they especially “liberal.” Much of America’s aggression towards the rest of humanity has come from so-called liberal Democratic administrations — such as Obama’s. America’s political spectrum extends from the mythical center to the lunar right. The “left” are homeless renegades Martha Gellhorn described as “a rare and wholly admirable fraternity.” She excluded those who confuse politics with a fixation on their navels.

While they “heal” and “move forward”, will the Writers Resist campaigners and other anti-Trumpists reflect upon this? More to the point: when will a genuine movement of opposition arise? Angry, eloquent, all-for-one-and-one-for all. Until real politics return to people’s lives, the enemy is not Trump, it is ourselves.

John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: http://www.johnpilger.com.

[MacCruiskeen]

^^Thanks very much for that, Morty. It's a great piece. I suspect hardly anyone will even skim it, never mind actually read it right through, because Pilger is not just screeching about the unique and unprecedented awfulness of Trump.

the unction and violence of the Obama era

Yep. Unction, sanctimony, a thousand hours of soporific PR talk, tears and a medal for Biden, a Nobel Peace Prize for himself, and 26,171 bombing raids on foreign countries last year alone.

John Pilger is now 77. William Blum is 83. Michael Parenti, astoundingly, is 93. John Berger has just died at the age of 91. These people lived through WWII and everything that followed, and they all grew up before the brain-rotting era of 24-hour cable TV. Reality still existed for them. It's no wonder they all sound both more serious and more truly alive than 99% of the careerist hacks whose words get regurgitated here.

[seemslikeadream]

oh now he LOVES cut and paste

and I just posted 3 Pilger videos in another thread...let me see was that the everywhere is WAR thread

oh no on edit it was The Secret Agenda behind Trump's Election thread

[norton ash]

Until real politics return to people’s lives, the enemy is not Trump, it is ourselves.

Oh, one can have two enemies. Real politics in terms of occupy, strike, disobedience against a criminal system ... while demanding that the current liar rapist thief lunatic mercenary traitor not be the president.

[KUAN]

oh now he LOVES cut and paste

Who are you giving a hard time to now seemslikeadream?

[seemslikeadream]

I can not cut and paste according to Mac he will not give me permission


and I am not allowed to use the word war either...rules especially written for me according to Mac


but I do anyway ..cause he is not the boss of me

[MacCruiskeen]

oh now he LOVES cut and paste

Who are you giving a hard time to now seemslikeadream?

Me, mainly. She is pursuing me around this board with this infantile trolling, hoping to provoke an abusive response from me that will get me either suspended or permabanned without warning. And she has a little gang helping her along and hoping to provoke the same thing.

[seemslikeadream]

yes you mainly only

you are the one following me around nit picking

following me around telling me I can not cut and paste every chance you get all the while you gush over everyone else doing it ...stupidly chastising me for using the word war when every person on the planet does it

I am not following you around I am answering your stupid accusations..don't like it stop nit picking

at war with the press, John Lewis, women....and on and on and on

Trump poll numbers at 37%
lowest of any incoming president
he is at war with everyone but Russia

You really shouldn't throw that word "war" around so loosely. He is at war with precisely no one. War is not a joke, at least not to Europeans (including Russians).

Google is your friend Mac


The War on Drugs

Trump Can End the War on Cops

This war on math is still bullshit

Bulls Ready for War On

War on Boys

Microsoft reboots war on sleep - Signal v. Noise

DEA Wins the Battle but Is Losing the War on Marijuana

"EXPOSED: America's Secret War on Wildlife

AT&T just declared war on an open internet (and us)

Special Report: The war on big food

The War on Bernie Sanders

WHO's war on sugar

The War on Cameras

The War on Planned Parenthood

China's Xi Jinping at Davos: No Winners in a Trade War

War on Everyone

First the War on Cash, then the War on Gold

The War on Free Speech Escalates

The War on Learning

The war on 'fake news' is all about censoring real news

Brown fat-boosting cancer drug may be latest weapon in war on obesity

War on Health

Netanyahu openly boasts of Israel's war on Africans

The war on moderation

The Deep State Goes to War With President-Elect

Anonymous just declared war against Donald Trump

War on the South

The Orwellian War on Skepticism

War on Peace

War on Climate Change

Syria's War on Doctors

War On

The Coming War on China

End the War on Black People

The War on Democracy

Europe's War on Tobacco

The Western War On Truth

The War on Poverty

War on Want

War on Whistleblowers

The Real War on Science

India's Botched War on Cash

The FBI's war on Civil Rights

War on Humans

War on Guns

The War on Kids

War on Christmas

War on Society

War on Cancer

At War on the Shore

Trump launches war on unions

War on Debt

War on Stupid People

War on Poverty

War on Terror

In 1918, California Drafted Children Into a War On Squirrels

Trump Declares War on BMW's Mexican Plant


ok this will free up some time for you to go hunting other nits elsewhere