Like a lot of you, I’ve been texting with friends about the Democratic blue wave and what it means for our immediate future. Here are a few thoughts I’ve shared with friends; I hope you share some of your own in the comments section. Thanks!
Democrats should come out swinging. The easiest clearest position to take is to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. (Should be higher, but still.) Instead, I’m reading stuff like this (courtesy of Nick Cruse): “Democrats are consistently going on tv and explaining their plan to lower the cost of goods is expanding Obamacare subsidies. Are these people serious? That is the tax payer funded giveaway to health insurance companies that has been proven NOT to reduce the cost of healthcare, but explode healthcare profits. This is going to be a disaster.”
The Dems have won too many seats! Now they can’t blame one senator (like Joe Manchin) or the Senate parliamentarian for nixing their efforts. (Known as the “rotating villain” tactic.) Of course, the “coolers” are already being empowered (Jeffries and Schumer) to kill real efforts at change. I hope the new Dems are full of piss and vinegar and willing to challenge their own leadership or it’ll be 2006 under Pelosi all over again.
AIPAC and similar interests have spent a lot of money over the years “buying” Schumer and Jeffries. The prospect of challengers from the left in 2028 is unlikely to drive them to move left themselves, but even if these men should lose in a primary, golden parachutes await them. Quick check: Schumer’s received at least $516K from AIPAC (actually, triple that number), Jeffries even more: $1.58M. Big Pharma: Schumer, at least $761K. Jeffries: at least $391K just in 2025-26 from the “healthcare sector.” These donors don’t give money for free. They expect results. Which is why one way or another Israel will keep getting its weapons, and we’ll never see Medicare for All. Unless we can get this big money out of politics. It’s a system of legalized bribery and we’ve got to change it.
Our small donations don’t drive policy changes. If money is speech, as SCOTUS said, we are almost mute as big pharma, AIPAC, etc. speak with megaphones. Our voices and concerns simply aren’t heard and addressed.
I just signed online petitions against Jeffries and Schumer. Here’s some info from the Schumer one: He is the Senate’s top recipient of pro-Israel lobby money, and his record follows it. According to OpenSecrets, Schumer has received at least $1.7 million from pro-Israel donors, more than anyone else in the Senate. He was the first Senate Democrat to publicly oppose the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal, and NORPAC, a PAC AIPAC’s leadership has been known to route money through, then gave his campaign $90,000. Progressives who want the U.S. to put human rights and international law at the center of policy toward Israel and Gaza cannot count on a leader funded this way. The new senators already see it. Senators-elect Adam Hamilton (Kansas), Troy Jackson (Maine), Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan), Juliana Stratton (Illinois) and Peggy Flanagan (Minnesota) have all said they won’t support him as leader. They ran and won on new leadership. We stand with them.
Democrats must stand on principle and enact policies that immediately help the working classes, such as a higher minimum wage, tax cuts for workers and tax increases for the rich, an affordable single-payer option for health care, and major cuts to war spending followed by true investment in U.S. infrastructure that will create more jobs than the usual spending on deadly obsolete weaponry. Half-measures and empty talk will drive voters into the arms of potentially worse Republican leaders in 2028, leaders who will be far more disciplined in implementing their fascist designs than Trump’s ever been.
Bibi Netanyahu speaks while Hakeem Jeffries beams
Final Thought: Is it too much to ask for our politicians to speak to us like adults? I did a quick check: John F. Kennedy’s speeches were pitched at the level of a college freshman. President Trump’s speeches are typically pitched at a high school freshman level, with his rallies at a sixth- or even fourth-grade level. Aren’t we as Americans tired of being talked to like we’re ten years old? And if Trump is incapable of speaking above a sixth-grade level, maybe he’s not qualified to serve as president?
Bonus Text: AOC supports “Leader Jeffries” for Speaker of the House. Not good.
A favorite movie of mine is “The Cooler,” starring William H. Macy. Macy plays a sad sack, a loser, a guy down at the mouth and down on his luck. He’s employed as a “cooler” at a casino. Whenever someone is winning too much at the roulette wheel or at craps, Macy goes and stands near the high-rolling winner. Within moments, the high-roller starts to lose, and lose big. Macy is good at his job.
William H. Macy as “the cooler”
Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are the Democratic Party’s coolers. They’re being sent in by the house (the owners and donors in America’s casino-style capitalism) to cool any real change that might hurt the bottom line of the rich. And they’re good at their jobs.
Another “cooler” is the “liberal” New York Times. I caught this summary this morning of the Democratic Party’s goals come next year:
Congress. Chuck Schumer, the likely Senate majority leader, says job No. 1 is to bring down the cost of living for Americans. Democrats want to reverse Medicaid cuts, restore Obamacare subsidies, limit Trump’s ability to impose tariffs and curtail a war that has raised fuel costs. Trump promises he can be “Mr. Veto” if necessary. Even so, Democrats can force his allies into votes they’ll regret when the next election comes around.
Democrats also want to exercise their constitutional power to check the executive branch and conduct oversight. Now they promise to investigate crypto windfalls, well-timed stock trades and a wedding party for the president’s son bankrolled by a Kremlin-connected oligarch. One House Democrat said in a statement on Tuesday that White House officials should “lawyer up.”
Cooler, indeed. Basically, it’s a return to the Biden status quo. I like the part about curtailing a war that has raised fuel costs. Is that the worst part of the Iran War—that it’s raised fuel costs? And why “curtail” instead of ending the war? Isn’t the war illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, and disastrous?
Also, I like the part about going after Trump and his family for profiting from insider trading and the like. Speaking of that, Nancy Pelosi and many other leading Democrats should also “lawyer up.”
Of course, you’ll notice what isn’t mentioned by these coolers. There’s nothing about raising the minimum wage, nothing about single-payer health care, nothing about ending wars globally, nothing about major cuts to spending on wasteful wars and obsolete weaponry, and most certainly nothing about cutting weapons and other “aid” to Israel as it pursues a genocide in Gaza.
Among rank-and-file Democrats at the moment, there’s a lot of positive energy. A lot of high hopes for real and substantive changes. But the house has already taken action—it’s sending in the coolers, because the little guy and gal can’t be allowed to win when those wins hurt the bottom line of the owners.
I woke to the news of a “blue wave” as Democrats regained control of the House and Senate by margins that few predicted. It was a resounding rebuke to the Trump and MAGA crowd, which can’t be a bad thing. But it isn’t a moment where, as the saying goes, we can all go back to brunch and let a Democrat-controlled Congress handle things. We have to stay involved, for the mess in Washington is very much a bipartisan one.
The “new” House and Senate majority leaders will be Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, corporate Democrats who support Zionist Israel and gleefully accept money and marching orders from AIPAC. That is unlikely to change much, as the power exercised by these men isn’t easy to challenge since they control the money and the perks for their party.
Still, there are more populists/progressives elected this time around, so perhaps Hakeem and Chuck will discover new masks to don. These are men who are flexible like Gumby when it comes to principles, so it’s up to the newly elected Members of Congress, as well as people like us, to demand real change rather than the cosmetic version they’re most comfortable at selling.
Americans are most certainly tired of war; will Democrats finally act to end Trump’s unconstitutional and disastrous war against Iran? What about support of Zionist Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza? Will Democrats finally stop all the U.S. military equipment flowing to Israel even if it hurts American manufacturers of the same?
Trump, of course, has already promised to veto anything a Democratic-led Congress tries to do for a saner and safer world. I saw today that Trump says he will accept the election results, as the New York Times put it. How generous and gracious of him! It’s like accepting that the sun came up this morning.
If Trump really does veto everything, a friend suggested that Democrats should force him to “veto a wealth tax for billionaires, veto a pause on data center construction, veto a restoration of healthcare to millions, veto a cut off of military aid to Israel and other authoritarian regimes, etc. This would set up [Democrats] for a 2028 victory.” That’s a sensible strategy, but whether Democrats have the discipline and commitment to follow it is questionable.
Still, as another friend put it this morning, let’s enjoy the rebuke of Trump and MAGA before Democrats start gathering their usual circular firing squad. Seriously, yesterday’s election sent a clear message that Americans are fed up and want a government that actually serves them rather than the usual suspects at the top. Now, we have to push our new “leaders” to govern in that spirit.
It’s not time to go back to brunch. It’s time to keep pushing politicians to serve the public rather than the plutocrats and the powerful.
Readers, what did you take from the election results? Are you more hopeful today? Remember, however, that “hope is not a plan.”
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, three dystopic novels were pretty much required reading: Orwell’s “1984,” Huxley’s “Brave New World,” and Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” They were all interesting and important books, with Orwell’s being the most important and prescient.
Half a century later, dystopic elements of all three increasingly pervade our lives. From “1984,” America lives in a state of permanent war, with a “Big Brother” government surveilling us for thought crime, even “face crime.” Privacy seems a thing of the past. From “Brave New World,” deference to automation and efficiency remains a thing, along with deep faith in various drugs, whether for pain or anxiety or almost any condition that disturbs the physical and mental health of Americans. From “Fahrenheit 451,” the obsession with screens, which we see today with huge “smart” TVs and palm-sized “smart” phones, along with the decline of reading and books. (Firemen aren’t burning books yet, but maybe with growing deference to AI there’ll be no need to.)
Rattling off these symptoms also suggests a cure. Americans need to act against endless war. Against the erosion of our rights to privacy, free speech, and free expression. We need to resist all the advertising that sells us drugs as panaceas to personal and societal ills. We need to put aside our screens, big and small, and seek out people, nature, life and the reality of the same, without devices as intermediaries. Reality may be messier than virtual reality, but surely it is richer for that reason?
America used to be a land of dreams, or so we claimed, but it seems nightmares are becoming far too common. Perhaps we’ve allowed those with the most money and power to follow their dreams, which have resulted in increasingly nightmarish scenarios for the rest of us.
Which brings me to Caitlin Johnstone and her exploration of what’s up with the AI craze. I think she puts it well here:
I hear people say things like, “I don’t understand why they’re pushing AI so hard when we can all see it’s making everything worse.”
That’s because it’s not being marketed to you; it’s being marketed to governments and plutocrats. They’re the real target audience for these products, not you.
You are not receiving the real sales pitch for AI, because the real sales pitch would not appeal to your sensibilities. The real sales pitch for AI isn’t “Hey check out this product, it makes some web searches slightly easier and it can maybe write your emails for you.” The real sales pitch for AI is “This product allows you to surveil the entire population of your country. It can be built into autonomous surveillance drones and killing machines. It can allow you to monitor and control every aspect of your society. It can reverse the decentralization of information brought on by the internet age. It can take away the collective bargaining power of workers and give you the skilled services your company requires. It can nullify strikes, civil disobedience, and even full-scale revolutions, and lock humanity into your capitalist dystopia forever.”
That’s the real sales pitch. It doesn’t sound appealing to any normal person, but it makes sense when you remember who these technologies are really being sold to, and why.
More dystopia. We wish it weren’t so. But wishing isn’t a plan. Action is. For Americans, this Tuesday the least we can do is get out and vote for the least dystopic candidates. Meanwhile, continue to exercise your rights as best you can. As the Moody Blues said: And keep on thinking free.
Let’s put ourselves back “on the threshold of a dream.”
I recently came across the expression “minimally invasive” to describe an internal medical procedure that seemed anything but. I immediately thought of the Pentagon and its various “operations,” which always start with great enthusiasm and promises of decisive results with minimal trouble. “Invasive” operations like Vietnam in 1965, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, all promising quick and decisive results, all instead leading to further escalation, serious “collateral damage,” and profound debilitation of both the foreign patient and the American doctor (though the doctor, or perhaps the hospital, always got paid).
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq: they were all “operations” that were supposed to be over and done with in a matter of a few weeks or months, tops. They all lasted at least a decade, sometimes two, always doing harm to the invader and especially extreme harm to the invaded.
I know, of course, that medical terminology shouldn’t be applied to war, but tell that to the Pentagon, which loves to speak of “surgical strikes,” and which also speaks of terrorism as a metastasizing cancer. It would be interesting indeed if the U.S. military was guided by the Hippocratic Oath of first doing no harm as it planned its various “operations” around the world. (Strictly speaking, “First do no harm” isn’t in the oath, but it’s a Hippocratic sentiment that captures the essence of that oath.)
And now we have war with Iran, yet another war started with the promise of a quick victory, a war we were told that would last no longer than eight weeks, tops. A war sold as helping the Iranian people win their freedom, though that BS rhetoric is no longer used.
If we judged America’s military operations like we judged medical procedures, surely we’d fire all the “doctors” at the top for malpractice and incompetence, wouldn’t we? When “minimally invasive” medical procedures lead to 20-year struggles that end in abject failure and prodigious debt, we don’t buy happy-talk of, well, the doctors tried, but “mistakes were made,” and the patient wasn’t really worth saving to begin with because he just didn’t cooperate with his freedom-bringing American “doctors.”
Surely an “exceptional” nation like the United States should be helping others—or, at least, not harming others. How about that for a foreign policy goal? It sure beats a “warrior ethos” of punching others when they’re down.
Yesterday, I was on “Judging Freedom” with Judge Napolitano to discuss America’s state of permanent war and the fantasy of our leaders that America remains the world’s hegemon:
America had its hegemonic moment in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. For a decade, Pentagon spending was curbed and the Clinton administration produced budgetary surpluses at the tail end of the 1990s. (With U.S. national debt soaring above $40 trillion this year, those budgetary surpluses seem fantastical, a unicorn and rainbow moment.)
How did America throw away its moment of triumph? Hegemonic vainglory was one reason. Mistaking military might for being morally in the right was another. Seeking vengeance after 9/11 in 2001 by declaring an unbounded “war on terror” globally was a third. Meanwhile, no matter how poorly wars went in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran, and no matter how wasteful the Pentagon proved to be in that war (eight failed audits and counting), no one was held accountable for lost wars, wasteful spending and wanton corruption. In fact, those who were punished were patriotic whistleblowers who tried to shed light on what became a massive system of theft from American citizens.
That said, let us not forget all those on the receiving end of U.S. military power—all those killed, maimed, and displaced by America’s state of permanent war across the globe.
And let us not forget as well that U.S. security doesn’t come from vast “investments” in wars and weapons—quite the reverse. Our security comes from the exercise of our constitutional rights and freedoms, our collective wisdom, our willingness to stand for what is right and true.
War isn’t security. War certainly isn’t peace. And a state of permanent war isn’t healthy; in fact, it’s the most insidious threat we face to our way of life, if by “way of life” we mean a people committed to liberty and justice for all, especially the weak and the vulnerable.
Yet more U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran may be imminent, which is truly a sad manifestation of America’s state of permanent war and its normalization of violence. Sadly, it’s an old topic for me, as a reader recently referenced an essay I wrote for TomDispatch back in 2015: “War is the new normal.”
Here in America, military marches have become the elevator muzak to our lives. When we’re not at war with Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or even with an abstract concept like “terror,” we’re making trillion-dollar preparations for the same. What is abnormal, even aberrant, in America today is serious efforts at peace. Peace consistently makes the news only when Donald Trump complains about his failure to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
Here’s my essay from 2015, more relevant now than ever.
It was launched immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when I was still in the military, and almost immediately became known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT. Pentagon insiders called it “the long war,” an open-ended, perhaps unending, conflict against nations and terror networks mainly of a radical Islamist bent. It saw the revival of counterinsurgency doctrine, buried in the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam, and a reinterpretation of that disaster as well. Over the years, its chief characteristic became ever clearer: a “Groundhog Day” kind of repetition. Just when you thought it was over (Iraq, Afghanistan), just after victory (of a sort) was declared, it began again.
Now, as we find ourselves enmeshed in Iraq War 3.0, what better way to memorialize the post-9/11 American way of war than through repetition. Back in July 2010, I wrote an article for TomDispatch on the seven reasons why America can’t stop making war. More than four years later, with the war on terror still ongoing, with the mission eternally unaccomplished, here’s a fresh take on the top seven reasons why never-ending war is the new normal in America. In this sequel, I make only one promise: no declarations of victory (and mark it on your calendars, I’m planning to be back with seven new reasons in 2019).
1. The privatization of war: The U.S. military’s recourse to private contractors has strengthened the profit motive for war-making and prolonged wars as well. Unlike the citizen-soldiers of past eras, the mobilized warrior corporations of America’s new mercenary moment — the Halliburton/KBRs (nearly $40 billion in contracts for the Iraq War alone), the DynCorps ($4.1 billion to train 150,000 Iraqi police), and the Blackwater/Xe/Academis ($1.3 billion in Iraq, along with boatloads of controversy) — have no incentive to demobilize. Like most corporations, their business model is based on profit through growth, and growth is most rapid when wars and preparations for more of them are the favored options in Washington.
“Freedom isn’t free,” as a popular conservative bumper sticker puts it, and neither is war. My father liked the saying, “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” and today’s mercenary corporations have been calling for a lot of military marches piping in $138 billion in contracts for Iraq alone, according to the Financial Times. And if you think that the privatization of war must at least reduce government waste, think again: the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated in 2011 that fraud, waste, and abuse accounted for up to $60 billion of the money spent in Iraq alone.
To corral American-style war, the mercenaries must be defanged or deflated. European rulers learned this the hard way during the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century. At that time, powerful mercenary captains like Albrecht von Wallenstein ran amok. Only Wallenstein’s assassination and the assertion of near absolutist powers by monarchs bent on curbing war before they went bankrupt finally brought the mercenaries to heel, a victory as hard won as it was essential to Europe’s survival and eventual expansion. (Europeans then exported their wars to foreign shores, but that’s another story.)
2. The embrace of the national security state by both major parties: Jimmy Carter was the last president to attempt to exercise any kind of control over the national security state. A former Navy nuclear engineer who had served under the demanding Admiral Hyman Rickover, Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber and fought for a U.S. foreign policy based on human rights. Widely pilloried for talking about nuclear war with his young daughter Amy, Carter was further attacked for being “weak” on defense. His defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 inaugurated 12 years of dominance by Republican presidents that opened the financial floodgates for the Department of Defense. That taught Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council a lesson when it came to the wisdom of wrapping the national security state in a welcoming embrace, which they did, however uncomfortably. This expedient turn to the right by the Democrats in the Clinton years served as a temporary booster shot when it came to charges of being “soft” on defense — until Republicans upped the ante by going “all-in” on military crusades in the aftermath of 9/11.
Since his election in 2008, Barack Obama has done little to alter the course set by his predecessors. He, too, has chosen not to challenge Washington’s prevailing catechism of war. Republicans have responded, however, not by muting their criticism, but by upping the ante yet again. How else to explain House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress in March? That address promises to be a pep talk for the Republicans, as well as a smack down of the Obama administration and its “appeasenik” policies toward Iran and Islamic radicalism.
Serious oversight, let alone opposition to the national security state by Congress or a mainstream political party, has been missing in action for years and must now, in the wake of the Senate Torture Report fiasco (from which the CIA emerged stronger, not weaker), be presumed dead. The recent midterm election triumph of Republican war hawks and the prospective lineup of candidates for president in 2016 does not bode well when it comes to reining in the national security state in any foreseeable future.
3. “Support Our Troops” as a substitute for thought. You’ve seen them everywhere: “Support Our Troops” stickers. In fact, the “support” in that slogan generally means acquiescence when it comes to American-style war. The truth is that we’ve turned the all-volunteer military into something like a foreign legion, deploying it again and again to our distant battle zones and driving it into the ground in wars that amount to strategic folly. Instead of admitting their mistakes, America’s leaders have worked to obscure them by endlessly overpraising our “warriors” as so many universal heroes. This may salve our collective national conscience, but it’s a form of cheap grace that saves no lives — and wins no wars.
Instead, this country needs to listen more carefully to its troops, especially the war critics who have risked their lives while fighting overseas. Organizations like Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace are good places to start.
4. Fighting a redacted war. War, like the recent Senate torture report, is redacted in America. Its horrors and mistakes are suppressed, its patriotic whistleblowers punished, even as the American people are kept in a demobilized state. The act of going to war no longer represents the will of the people, as represented by formal Congressional declarations of war as the U.S. Constitution demands. Instead, in these years, Americans were told to go to Disney World (as George W. Bush suggested in the wake of 9/11) and keep shopping. They’re encouraged not to pay too much attention to war’s casualties and costs, especially when those costs involve foreigners with funny-sounding names (after all, they are, as American sniper Chris Kyle so indelicately put it in his book, just “savages”).
Redacted war hides the true cost of a permanent state of killing from the American people, if not from foreign observers. Ignorance and apathy reign, even as a national security state that is essentially a shadow government equates its growth with your safety.
5. Threat inflation: There’s nothing new about threat inflation. We saw plenty of it during the Cold War (nonexistent missile and bomber gaps, for example). Fear sells and we’ve had quite a dose of it in the twenty-first century, from ISIS to Ebola. But a more important truth is that fear is a mind-killer, a debate-stifler.
Back in September, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham warned that ISIS and its radical Islamic army was coming to America to kill us all. ISIS, of course, is a regional power with no ability to mount significant operations against the United States. But fear is so commonplace, so effectively stoked in this country that Americans routinely and wildly exaggerate the threat posed by al-Qaeda or ISIS or the bogeyman du jour.
Decades ago, as a young lieutenant in the Air Force, I was hunkered down in Cheyenne Mountain during the Cold War. It was the ultimate citadel-cum-bomb-shelter, and those in it were believed to have a 70% likelihood of surviving a five-megaton nuclear blast. There, not surprisingly, I found myself contemplating the very real possibility of a thermonuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, a war that would have annihilated life as we knew it, indeed much of life on our planet thanks to the phenomenon of nuclear winter. You’ll excuse me for not shaking in my boots at the threat of ISIS coming to get me. Or of Sharia Law coming to my local town hall. With respect to such fears, America needs, as Hillary Clinton said in an admittedly different context, to “grow a pair.”
6. Defining the world as a global battlefield: In fortress America, all realms have by now become battle spheres. Not only much of the planet, the seas, air, and space, as well as the country’s borders and its increasingly up-armored police forces, but the world of thought, the insides of our minds. Think of the 17 intertwined intelligence outfits in “the U.S. Intelligence Community” and their ongoing “surge” for information dominance across every mode of human communication, as well as the surveillance of everything. And don’t forget the national security state’s leading role in making cyberwar a reality. (Indeed, Washington launched the first cyberwar in history by deploying the Stuxnet computer worm against Iran.)
Think of all this as a global matrix that rests on war, empowering disaster capitalismand the corporate complexes that have formed around the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and that intelligence community. A militarized matrix doesn’t blink at $1.45 trillion dollars devoted to the F-35, a single under-performing jet fighter, nor at projections of $355 billion over the next decade for “modernizing” the U.S. nuclear arsenal, weapons that Barack Obama vowed to abolish in 2009.
7. The new “normal” in America is war: The 9/11 attacks happened more than 13 years ago, which means that no teenagers in America can truly remember a time when the country was at peace. ”War time” is their normal; peace, a fairy tale.
What’s truly “exceptional” in twenty-first-century America is any articulated vision of what a land at peace with itself and other nations might be like. Instead, war, backed by a diet of fear, is the backdrop against which the young have grown to adulthood. It’s the background noise of their world, so much a part of their lives that they hardly recognize it for what it is. And that’s the most insidious danger of them all.
How do we inoculate our children against such a permanent state of war and the war state itself? I have one simple suggestion: just stop it. All of it. Stop making war a never-ending part of our lives and stop celebrating it, too. War should be the realm of the extreme, of the abnormal. It should be the death of normalcy, not the dreary norm.
It’s never too soon, America, to enlist in that good fight!
Mission Accomplished in Iraq in 2003! Why, then, did U.S. troops stay until 2026?
Postscript (2026): Today, America’s Department of Defense has been rebranded as the Department of War. It’s led by a wannabe warlord who revels in attacking without mercy. Even worse, America’s commander-in-chief has threatened the total obliteration of Iran while going all-in on a Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion in FY2027. A feckless Congress does nothing to stop Trump’s wars and has from day one facilitated Israel’s genocide against Gaza.
America’s leaders say they want peace, but that the only language they—the enemy of that day—understand is murderous violence. What if that language is the only one ourleaders understand? Even worse, why have we allowed them to preach and act as if war truly is peace?
Donald Trump is a one-man horror show. Call him “annihilation man” for threatening to exterminate nearly 93 million Iranians for the crime of defying his will (and that of Israel and Netanyahu).
I don’t write about Trump a lot because he’s so scrutable. He is what he is, an utterly shameless con man, a bullying narcissist who’s always on the make. What he isn’t, what he’s never been, what he never will be, is a public servant. Sadly, he has a lot of company. Few prominent politicians today really are, and if they are, the system does its best to corrupt them or expunge them if they can’t be corrupted.
Trump came pre-corrupted, so to speak. Put more charitably, the powers that be determined they could live with Trump because he was so easily manipulated. Let him make some money, let him sign things with a Sharpie, let him pose and preen and insult, and otherwise flatter and cajole him in the direction you want him to go.
Some Americans, Trump supporters of course, seem to think of Trump as a sort of lovable rogue. They laugh with, sometimes at, Trump while investing him with far more meaning than he has. It’s strange. They make apologies for him and think of him as being on their team.
Back in October 2016, I implored Americans to “dump chump Trump.” I remember getting a comment from a reader about my article, in which I contrasted my father’s character with that of Trump’s. Basically, the guy commenting said he preferred the kind of man Trump was. He really did emulate the bully, the braggart, the bigot in Trump. Perhaps because it gave him the excuse to be the same.
Anyhow, here’s that article I wrote ten years ago this month. Obviously, America chose not to dump chump Trump, and so here we are, facing his many lamentable qualities, most especially his boasts about annihilating Iran just because they choose to resist his will.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump holds a rally with supporters at the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi, Michigan, U.S. September 30, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
What kind of a presidential candidate tweets in the middle of the night about alleged sex tapes involving a former Miss Universe winner? Indeed, what kind of a man does this?
Donald Trump is a chump. I’d call him a chimp, except it would be an insult to chimpanzees everywhere. The man has no discipline, no sense of decorum, and no compassion for others (let’s not forget his signature line, “You’re fired”). Indeed, he seems to revel in humiliating others. This was mildly amusing when he was taking on equals on the stage during the Republican primaries, but it’s disturbing in the extreme to see him bullying the little guys and gals for whom he’s supposedly a champion.
So many sane people and major newspapers have gone on record as being against Trump that there’s little I can add. Sadly, Trump’s followers seem unperturbed and undisturbed no matter his insults and tyrannical behavior.
All I can say is this: Trump is not the kind of man my father taught me to be. My dad, who fought forest fires in Oregon in the CCC, a veteran of an armored division in World War II, a city firefighter for more than 30 years until his retirement, treated people fairly and squarely. He was humble about himself and considerate to others. I can’t recall him insulting others, certainly not in the intentional and hurtful way that Trump directs at others. Trump is especially fond of attacking women or minorities or anyone he sees as vulnerable, the very opposite of my dad’s code of behavior.
Don’t get me wrong: my dad wasn’t perfect. He had his faults. But his faults were not directed at others; he didn’t try to demean or diminish other people, as Trump so obviously enjoys doing. Unlike Trump, my dad wasn’t boastful; indeed, three favorite sayings of his were: “Still waters run deep,” “Don’t toot your own horn,” and “The empty barrel makes the most noise.”
You were right, Dad. The rushing nonsense from Trump exhibits his shallowness; the man is constantly tooting (or tweeting) his own horn; and, like the empty vessel that he is, he makes an awful amount of noise.
Trump: Not the kind of man my father would respect; not the kind of man our country needs.
The one quote I know from Joe Biden is show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value. Biden wasn’t exactly Abe Lincoln but that quote does resonate.
As the “Department of War” budget approaches $1.5 trillion, as spending on boondoggle weapons systems like the Sentinel ICBM, the B-21 nuclear bomber, and the “Golden Dome” continues to soar, it’s obvious what America’s leaders value: war and weapons, full-spectrum dominance, coercion and control, mass violence and threats of the same.
Only an American leader is currently threatening the complete annihilation of ninety million people, as Trump has done repeatedly with Iran. Surely mass death and destruction shouldn’t be what America values most?
As war and weapons spending continues to spiral upward, Americans should reflect on the lost opportunity cost of all that money. Better schools, more affordable health care, more housing, a cleaner and safer environment, all this and more is achievable if we invested in them rather than wasting it all on more weaponry and more wars.
Bringing this message home with the help of humble Oreo cookies is Ben Cohen, famously of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The short video below is well worth watching.
Tell your members of Congress you’re fed up with murderous wars and deadly weaponry. Vote them out if they refuse to change their ways. And let’s start saving some Oreos for ourselves and our hungry neighbors rather than handing them all to gluttonous warmongers.
There’s a kerfuffle about art being political, with journalists and writers I respect, such as Matt Taibbi and Caitlin Johnstone, coming down on opposite sides of the issue.
Johnstone puts it bluntly: “I have no respect for this idea that art is somehow separable from politics. ALL art is political when you live in a genocidal dystopia, because all your expression exists in relation to our freakish civilization.”
While I sympathize with Johnston’s opposition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and have written plenty of articles myself against this genocide, I don’t define all my writing as reducible to politics. Writing is a form of self-expression, a creative act, and though we are all influenced by the society in which we live, that doesn’t mean that everything we write (or otherwise create) is necessarily a political expression.
Of course, art can have political meaning, often by design, occasionally not. But if all art is political, doesn’t that suggest that art is simply politics by another name?
Without looking at dictionary definitions, I think of art as a creative act. An act of imagination, an expression of the human spirit. We draw, we write, we sculpt, we make music, we dance, etc., as forms of expression. The richness of that expression–those creative acts–shouldn’t be reduced to political expressions. The best art transcends politics.
It’s like saying all sports is politics. Sure, sports can have political meaning, but sport is something more than political expression. For example, there is a physical joy to sports, as a form of expression, that denies its reduction to politics.
This idea that everything is politics or political is a dangerous one. It seems to be driven by those who want to attack others for the “wrong” politics in their art. Defining art as politics seems a handy formula for the dictator to outlaw or repress art that is considered dangerously “political” or otherwise threatening to political power.
Hitler, a failed artist, judges “degenerate” art
Recall that in the 1930s Adolf Hitler attacked “Jewish” art as degenerate. Included in that was jazz as well, treated by the Nazis as a degenerate form of music, associated as it was with Black and Jewish musicians.
Art, put simply, is something more than politics, and those who create art shouldn’t be defined or judged or constrained or condemned by the politics of critics who see everything through a political lens.
