Trump Gives Sanders the Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels

This dubbing idea is brilliant. A Cockney accent fits Trump's rhetoric perfectly. He sounds so good this way, he ought to fund an app for converting all his speeches.


p.s. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a 2007 movie.

Most Eyebrow-Raising Headline of the Week

How "elaborate" could it be under a trailer in Sitka?

"Fugitive found in 'elaborate tunnel system' at trailer park" - Sitka, Alaska (AP)

Sid "Vicious" Blumenthal: Ineffectual Ectomoph?

So who is Sidney Blumenthal, exactly? He's an old Bill Clinton suck-up and HRC crony from the 1990s, a self-styled political hatchet man ('Sid Vicious') who works as a paid consultant to two groups supporting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign - American Bridge and Media Matters - and he's someone the Clinton Foundation had on its payroll for $10,000 a month while Hillary was Secretary of State. More to the point, he's someone who sent Hillary what she called "unsolicited" emails that she sometimes passed on to State Department officials.

I believe that they were unsolicited, because their content was plainly nonsense. See for yourself here. Just as plainly, they were really intended to advance Blumenthal's personal business interests by giving foreign clients the impression he was a Beltway influence peddler. Showing his clients that he could send their crap policy advice on Libya to Hillary's personal email account was a way to monetize his access to her. See this? "hrod17@clintonemail.com"!

Considering that motive, look at the email address Sid used for himself in those unsolicited messages, "sbwhoeop", which looks like an imitation of the official White House email address convention: first initial, last initial, White House, Executive Office of the President. Was that just self-important fantasizing, or window dressing for foreign clients who wouldn't know any better?

Last but not least, he's Ichabod Crane. At least, so said Camille Paglia in a 1999 interview about Hillary Clinton and the weird Ichabod Crane men she surrounded herself with:

"Hillary loves eunuch geek men! Oh, my God, look at them all! Sidney Blumenthal, Ira Magaziner, Harold Ickes. They are all these weird Ichabod Crane men, all high-IQ men who have no natural virility ..."

I recall getting an uneasy feeling just looking at Ickes, Magaziner, and Blumenthal back in the first Clinton era. There was indeed something weird about them, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was until Paglia absolutely nailed it.

Norman Rockwell illustration of Ichabod Crane

The Legacy of HRC's Personal Email Troubles

Photo from Flicker

It's not all about the boot-licking sycophants and her frustration with DVRs and secure fax machines. It's about those too, but there are also much larger interests.

The National Security Archive - a non-governmental organization sponsored by The George Washington University which collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act - has a refreshingly sensible take on what is and is not important about Hillary Clinton's email troubles.

Read it here: The Real Legacy of Clinton’s Personal Email: Outdated Government-wide Email Management and Overclassification

Reports have paid particular attention to whether or not she mishandled classified information, speculation that has been buoyed by the retroactive classification of emails that she sent or received over her personal account. While Clinton, her camp, and the State Department’s FOIA office all share blame for her personal email use, the larger – and more complicated – problems of poor, outdated email management and government-wide overclassification have been buried by frenzied reporting on whether or not any of Clinton’s emails were classified.

Some of them were almost certainly overclassified, based on what State Spokeperson/Admiral Kirby has said, but that won't help Hillary's election campaign. Even if true, no excuse will be believed when it comes from a figure the public associates most closely with the word "liar", and the words "dishonest" and "untrustworthy" coming in at second and third place.

Could this be how The House of Clinton goes down? I had not thought so until this week, but now, with the White House giving her no political cover at all, I'm wondering.

Here's a tip: watch for signs of Joe Biden warming up.

 

Would Teddy Roosevelt Have Endorsed Trump?

I must be missing the point of The New Yorker's cover, the one that shows former Presidents looking shocked and appalled at Donald Trump.

Shocked and appalled? Really? At what, exactly?

Teddy Roosevelt was no fan of immigrants, to put to very mildly. He insisted that immigrants be thoroughly Americanized as quickly as possible ("this is a nation — not a polyglot boarding house") and speak English ("let the immigrant who does not learn it go back"). He was also an avid eugenicist who believed our "society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind." Does The New Yorker think TR would be aghast at anything Trump has said?

Abraham Lincoln was no respecter of Constitutional limits when it came to national security. In 1861 he had the U.S. Army occupy Maryland and arrest the state's legislators to prevent them from voting on secession. Thousands of Maryland officials were held without trial or charges for the duration of the Civil War. And they weren't held in GITMO, either, but right here, since Lincoln had unilaterally suspended Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights be damned.

FDR was another President who had little regard for limits on his power. After the Supreme Court struck down key pieces of his New Deal program, he tried to expand the Court to 15 members so as to appoint his own new majority. And, there was his wartime Presidential Proclamation No. 2537 which permitted the arrest, detention, and internment of enemy aliens - Japanese, German, and Italian citizens residing in the United States - and his Executive Order 9066, which authorized the physical removal of all Japanese Americans into internment camps.

John Kennedy certainly would have traveled in Trump's social circles, and would probably have liked Trump's economic policies. Kennedy strongly advocated for reduced personal and corporate income taxes, and got that reform passed over bipartisan opposition in Congress. He was also a Life Member of the NRA.

George Washington was our greatest President, but, well ... slavery.

Hey, New Yorker, if you dislike Trump just say so. But, if you dislike him, then you really ought to dislike some of those ex-Presidents even more.
 

Sarah Palin Channels Karl Marx

That is not as strange a pairing as you might think. While everyone else is laughing at Palin's stream of consciousness style endorsement of Trump, think about this part of her remarks, courtesy of a transcript on Buzzfeed:

“Trump’s candidacy, it has exposed not just that tragic ramifications of that betrayal of the transformation of our country, but too, he has exposed the complicity on both sides of the aisle that has enabled it, okay? Well, Trump, what he’s been able to do, which is really ticking people off, which I’m glad about, he’s going rogue left and right, man, that’s why he’s doing so well. He’s been able to tear the veil off this idea of the system. The way that the system really works, and please hear me on this, I want you guys to understand more and more how the system, the establishment, works, and has gotten us into the troubles that we are in in America. The permanent political class has been doing the bidding of their campaign donor class, and that’s why you see that the borders are kept open. For them, for their cheap labor that they want to come in. That’s why they’ve been bloating budgets. It’s for crony capitalists to be able suck off of them. It’s why we see these lousy trade deals that gut our industry for special interests elsewhere. We need someone new, who has the power, and is in the position to bust up that establishment to make things great again. It’s part of the problem.

That is a very cogent statement of class interest and class consciousness, in those exact terms. The "donor class" has direct personal financial interests that are being served by the "political class" of both parties. The working class, meanwhile, can't get the system to protect its own direct personal financial interests.

A billionaire like Donald Trump might seem an unlikely candidate to advance those working class interests, but in fact he is a populist and an economic nationalist. Which only makes sense, since he made his billions in the real estate business and real estate cannot be off-shored or done cheaper in China. Trump is a rich guy, but his direct personal financial interests are more closely aligned with those of Sarah Palin than are those of, say, hedge fund managers. The hedge fund and investment bankers are better off backing Hillary.

Class interests ... economic base and political superstructure ... the elite and the non-elite ... the way the system "really works" to serve the elite and screw the underclass. That is classic Marxist stuff. Or better, it's classic James Burnham stuff, straight from his best work, The Machiavellians.

Burnham's view of politics, very briefly: “The primary object, in practice, of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. There are no exceptions.” All societies are divided between a ruling class and the ruled, an elite and the non-elite. The primary goal of every ruling class is to maintain and expand its power and privileges. Therefore, the rhetoric used by these ruling classes should be carefully analyzed for what it says about the political elite’s desire to retain power and exclude the non-elites.

Underestimate this Palin-Trump alliance if you wish, but Marx would have understood and agreed.

A Review Of A Movie I Haven't Seen

I have not seen 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. But, do I really have to see it in order to post something about it? Naw.

Someone who has seen it wrote a very good piece for the military veteran website Task and Purpose refuting the movie's inaccuracies and distortions. Being a former Marine Security Guard, he gets his information from real life rather than Tom Clancy novels and Call of Duty video games, so he knows whereof he speaks. See As A Former Embassy Guard, Here’s What I Know ‘13 Hours’ Got Wrong. Highly recommended if you plan to see the movie.

Something else I highly recommend is background information on the CIA's Global Response Staff, the employer of those protection contractors in Benghazi. See this WaPo article from 2012 for a description of the GRS.

Above all else, read the Vox piece on how Michael Bay's 13 Hours promotes some of the worst Benghazi conspiracy theories. While the movie is a good action flick for teenage boys - which Michael Bay freely admits is what he makes - it ends up feeding fantasies and conspiracy theories. See this quote:

The point is not that this narrative is overly simplistic and wrong — of course it is — but rather that in trying to wedge the real-life story into this box, Bay ends up distorting what happened in ways that could end up misleading millions of American viewers who are still trying to figure out what happened in real-life Benghazi and how to feel about it. It also ends up dovetailing, deliberately or not, with some of the most common and most persistent conspiracy theories about the incident.

That is the heart of the matter. “No one will mistake this movie for a documentary,” a CIA spokesperson told the Washington Post, but he is quite wrong. Dramatization beats disembodied narrative every time. The public - voters - get their information about current and historical events from entertainment media and will indeed think that they watched events in Benghazi happening before their eyes. You could ask Senator Tom Cotton whether or not the movie validated his unfounded beliefs about what happened.

Regarding those most common and persistent conspiracy theories, Vox included links to the main Senate and House investigative reports on the Benghazi incident, which make for good reading on this snowy weekend. The Senate Intelligence Committee report directly contradicts the main dramatic moment in 13 Hours, which is the charge that the protection contractors were ordered by the Benghazi Chief of Base ('Bob') not to respond to the attack on the Special Mission Facility. Did not happen. See pages 4 and 5 of the report.

The House Armed Services Committee report says the same. Furthermore, it explicitly refutes the movie's other big dramatic theme, which is the purported withholding of U.S. military air support during the incident. At least one of the protection contractors says air support was available. On the other hand, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the general who commanded U.S. Africa Command, and other general and flag officers and senior civilian defense offqicials have testified that it was not. You may decide for yourself which is the more reliable account.

This conclusive rebuttal of the air assets myth is on page 19 of the House report:

The Department of Defense had no armed drones or manned aircraft prepared for combat readily available and nearby on September 11. Secretary Panetta told the Senate in February 2013 that armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), AC-130 ground attack gunships, or other similar planes “were not in the vicinity.” Mr. Reid echoed this to the House Armed Services Committee in May 2013 when he declared “[g]iven the time and distance factors involved, dispatching an armed aircraft to Benghazi was not an option available to us at the time." As the result of a specific request from the committee, DOD accounted for the location of each of its AC-130 aircraft in the military’s inventory, DOD reported to the committee that no AC-130s were in the region in the days before the Benghazi attack, including for maintenance, crew rest, or merely transiting through the area. However, DOD also reported to the committee that some of these planes were deployed to “southern Europe” on September 14, in order “to support operations in North Africa.” Similarly, the U.S. Air Force F-16 fighters stationed at Aviano, Italy at the time were configured for training flights. None were on combat alert. Furthermore, unlike typical preparations during the Cold War, NATO allies also had no planes on war-fighting status. This meant other nations could not offer combat aircraft to respond on behalf of the United States.

It should not be surprising that no fighters or gunships were available. Tom Clancy aside, the U.S. is not perpetually at war with every country on earth. And that is before you consider the realities of time and space, logistical limits, manpower availability, the need for intelligence preparation, the wisdom of sending flights over a country where there were thousands of loose MANPADS, and other such grown-up things.

But, sadly, none of that outweighs the evidence of video games where airstrikes are always just a mouse click away. The public will not be convinced otherwise after they've personally seen 'Bob' tell our heroes to stand down.