RocketMan » Fri Jun 14, 2019 1:32 pm wrote:The response, even in MSM outlets has been of general, bemused incredulity. No one is of course demanding US accountability, I guess they're running down the clock on the "aberrant" Trump administration and hoping that a Biden/Warren administration returns to the Way Things Were... Which ain't gonna happen but there's such a general feeling of unreality, that's what they must be hoping for.
Yeah, bemusement or cynicism is really the worst response. When they threaten genocide with a prospect of global nuclear escalation, one should always take it seriously and never excuse it as incompetent growling or mad-dog strategy.
But long as I'm quoting my hits, I did call it that the Trump regime would have trouble running a New War operation almost two years ago:
Thus, even before the overwrought character from Queens completed his long climb from the middle level of the New York-New Jersey development gangster milieu to cast himself as the Beheader of the Washington Establishment, we had long ago descended to the gutter territory of Bush-era adviser Michael Ledeen and the brutish dictum attributed to him: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
Far from small or crappy, Iran is surely the Trumpistas’ dream target, as it would have been Ledeen’s, as it once was Cheney’s. I suspect many would also agree with that among the Democratic as well as Republican senators and representatives who wore out their knees and palms jumping up to give standing ovations to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2015 address to the Congress (featuring his usual harangue for a preventive war on Iran). But the prospect of a definitive break in the Transatlantic alliance (and even of a possible military defeat throughout the Middle East) may make Iran seem a touch infeasible, as the Bush mob was forced to acknowledge in 2007. (But wait, did I just cite feasibility as a concern for this latest group of idiots? Put nothing past them and you will likely turn out right.)
[...]
The Long History of Reality Presidents and the Weakness of Trump
But please accept my apologies, I am getting so very far ahead of myself! Perhaps by now it is clear that I don’t think the exact identity of the “crappy little country” matters that much to the psychos in charge, although of course it will have great significance to the tens of thousands or more who are to be sacrificed to assuage their sickness and secure higher profits for the war industry. What really matters comes before the main act and constitutes the enabling act: the quality of the pretext, the ostensible casus belli that will be discovered, confabulated, or arrive one sunny morning from the sky. While these devices (whether serendipitous or constructed) have always worked to set up a carte blanche for American Carnage against brown foreigners in the past, even a sure thing can run into a first failure. Unlike in 2003, or unlike even in 2001, propaganda preparations for a coming war on any of the above have not been conducted in a fashion that sits very deeply with the American people. The present regime (and the presidential campaign that preceded it) has done better and more consistent work in preparing them to sacrifice for a war with Mexico than for one with Iran.
Perhaps more importantly, the present regime is remarkably weak, despite its open authoritarianism and ambitions to redefine reality by pronouncing its own facts, in the way of Orwell’s novel 1984. Submitted: The remarkable thing about the Trump regime is not that it is a Reality TV show (with one of the best-known and most successful Reality TV producers in the starring role). Rather, it is that most American viewers do not actually buy into this administration’s televised reality. That is unprecedented.
[...]
As of today, thanks to a long-running trend to no longer suspend disbelief that has only been accelerated by the ascendancy of the Trump, the status of the White House as the entertainment bureau of the federal government has never been as obvious to a majority of the citizenry, whether or not they can muster the energy to notice or care.
[...]
Politics always involved theater. Modern democratic electoral politics merged with the news and entertainment industry long ago, and for decades they have been developing in tandem. More recently a large part of the audience has been lured into treating the results as media critics, rather than as sovereigns or citizen-participants with an actual stake in the proceedings. As interesting as anything Scaramucci said is that we all treat the identity of the White House press agent as though it is vitally important. As a result of this twisted form of transparency, however, the pretext for a new war may backfire, especially insofar as the war (or the triggering event likely to precede it!) involves numerous casualties of the precious American persuasion.
Think of the WMD lie in 2002-2003. Granted, its falsehood was transparent – it was a laugh riot to pretty much the whole world outside an Anglosphere bubble. Ultimately it failed to prevail even as a myth, and this despite the regime’s exploitation of the irrational and powerful emotional boost of 9/11. All that being said, however, the WMD lie was still a complicated, long-running and professionally crafted P.R. campaign, one involving separate teams of dedicated fabricators at the White House, in the Pentagon, at various intel agencies, at the New York Times, in Italian intelligence, at the Washington think-tanks, among Iraqi expatriate networks, and multiple other locations. At the height of the campaign, most Americans believed it. After all, “sixteen intelligence agencies” were in agreement with the fabrication.
Now, of course, the only such consensus of the intelligence “community” (nowadays numbered at 17, I seem to have missed the new birth) is on the claim that “Russia hacked the 2016 election.” That story may be no less implausible, but its very existence means that a lot of national security insiders are hostile to the Trump Show’s existence, and many of them may be loath to faithfully support whatever spur-of-the-moment back-story is served up for the war pretext.
My assertion, in short, is that a new international aggression cannot be justified via the discredited Twitter Thumbs alone; yet the possessor of these appendages seems bold and demented enough to believe himself capable of it. Unlike Cheney and Rumsfeld’s, his crew is not a long-running criminal enterprise of security state insiders with experience and reach and a specific war plan long in mind (however stupid it may have been). Cheney and Rumsfeld’s crew sprang its high-level leaks, but not on the first day. Trump’s crew is more akin to an open cocktail party for villains of opportunity, most of whom jumped in during his rapid if evitable rise, like the Mercers and Bannon, or who were borrowed afterward from the Prince-DeVos family and the Kochtopus; the latter having at first opposed him. The secretaries may be prepared to ritually bow and scrape before His Manhattan Majesty at the opening of the cabinet meeting, but what unites them? An ideology of extremist capitalism, to be sure, but that makes them all into junior John Galts, looking out for number one. Shared egomania, possession of wealth plundered in scams (much like the Trump Organization’s history), and a proven ability, as Mooch might put it, to stab friends and enemies without distinction, in the front and in the back: A ripe set-up, if ever a “New War” psy-op was to flop.
Go here to find out the parts I got wrong.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/04 ... part-2017/