W.J. Astore
President Harry S Truman famously had “The buck stops here!” on his desk. He was unafraid to take responsibility — to make the tough decisions when they reached his desk. And for this and other reasons he’s gone down in history as one of America’s better presidents.
News that President Donald Trump will soon disband his COVID-19 Task Force is consistent with Trump’s (unofficial) motto: “Pass the buck.” Trump has apparently decided that Covid is a losing issue in 2020 with respect to his reelection, and if Trump knows one thing, it’s how to dodge responsibility for his own mismanagement. Just consider his many failed casinos and business ventures.
If Trump appeared as a contestant on his own show, “Celebrity Apprentice,” is there any doubt he’d be the first guy fired?
Despite his complete lack of empathy and his total failure to take responsibility for his actions, Trump’s supporters still embrace him. As they might say themselves, the Lord truly works in mysterious ways.
Yet despite all his tough-guy posturing, Trump is a very weak man indeed. He doesn’t have Truman’s guts. When Trump faces a difficult, demanding, or tough issue, his instinct is to avoid it, or spin it, or lie about it. He’s both craven and lazy. And uncaring to boot. And in the coming months that combination is going to cost America a lot more lives.
As Don Henley sang, “These days the buck stops nowhere/no one takes the blame/but evil is still evil/in anybody’s name.”
Bracing Views 
Here’s a great Trump euphemism: President Trump, in Arizona, said yesterday: “Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open and we have to get it open soon.”
“Affected badly” — as in “dead”?
And isn’t our country “open” already? Except to new immigrants, of course, especially darker-skinned ones.
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You couldn’t be more accurate
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Don Henley is truly a genius, one of the best lyricists ever, in my opinion. Btw, I heard that the words of another great composer, Paul McCartney, were playing in the factory yesterday where tRump made an appearance. Seems the workers were blasting, “Live and Let Die” over the internal sound system. Quite appropriate for the lying weasel.
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Totally with you on Don Henley, a GREAT songwriter of our time!! “Live and Let Die,” of course, was penned for a Bond movie. Donald J. Trump is no 007, that’s for sure!
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Showing all the consistency of a broken compass, Trump now says he won’t disband his taskforce, which has, he claims, been an incredible success. There is no “true north” for Trump — and no truth either.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/06/trump-coronavirus-white-house-taskforce-covid-19
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Yep, Donny beat you to the punch on this one, Bill A.! But…but…don’t conservatives profess hatred of flip-flopping politicians?!? Will these frequent reversals cost Trump the vote of a single one of his adoring fans?? They’re like the religious fundamentalists (many of them are, of course, or say they are) who swear they believe that every word in the Bible is literally true, and when you underline any of the hundreds of self-contradictions in that esteemed tome…they just smile and proclaim “I believe BOTH versions.” [Did you know, readers, that just for a start, the tale of Creation is told again post-Book of Genesis, with the events transpiring in a different chronological order?!? It’s true, damn it! The contradiction, that is.]
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Trump is the ultimate flip-flopper, but his followers don’t care because they know he professes to hate what they hate. And here he’s remarkably consistent.
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Trump is the ultimate weaselly little liar prick… He’s also remarkably consistent there too!
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From fourteen years ago. A ruined “Shrub” now Michelle Obama’s and Ellen DeGgeneres’s latest rehabilitation project. Who next? Donald Trump?
Boobie Qualifications for Higher Office
(from Fernando Po, U.S.A., America’s post-literate retreat to Plato’s Cave)
At Yale he studied history
And picked up his degree
Yet somehow he forgot to learn
About some cruelty
Dispensed by the Crusaders on
Their way through Galilee
So when he launched his own crusade
He proudly used that word
Until he found a world aghast
At something so absurd:
Another stupid malaprop
As bad as any heard
And when he got his MBA
From Harvard Bidness School
They taught him how to quantify
The numbers hard and cruel
So “folks pay lots of taxes” is
The way he states the rule
And some have tried to make him speak
In words that others know
It hasn’t worked, so now he does
That Bubble tell-and-show
Where actors on the payroll pose
As newsmen kept in tow
“If I should fool you once,” he says,
“Then shame upon you, sir!
But if I fool you twice,” he says,
“Then shame on him and her.”
(He never gets those proverbs right;
So thus, the slip and slur)
“As long as blame goes somewhere else
And doesn’t stick to me,
I’d blame the planets, sun and moon,
And all the ships at sea.
If that won’t work, I’ll blame the stars
Within the galaxy”
Republicans like Boobie Bush
“Assume the watch” – we think
They like the perks of office but
When asked to pay they blink
Accountability they shun
Ignoring their red ink
He only counts the stuff he likes
Ignoring what is true
Pretending he’s not president
When his bad bills come due
(Somehow the one who went before
Still manages the crew)
The Boobies never asked for much
Or anything at all
From those who wish to “lead” them, which
Makes “leading” such a ball
More like a bleeding by a leech:
A “doctor” kept on call
So Boobies get what they deserve
For asking not a lot
And letting off the hook the ones
Who’ve sprayed a stinking spot
Upon their name and nation left
Unraveling in rot
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2006
I’ve already written everything about President Donald Trump from the days when he went by the names of Clinton, Bush, and Obama.
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Fast forward from a Trump named “Bush” to a Trump named “Trump”. An excerpted quote from Dylan Ratigan. See: Trump Pushes Tax Cut Designed to Crush Social Security – with Dylan Ratigan, The Jimmy Dore Show (May 6, 2020):
. . .
[9:40] Dylan Ratigan: “Trump is particularly offensive and crude and barbaric and murderous in his disposition, in his nature, but he is in no way unique in following the standard protocol of using the government to benefit the rich, to consolidate wealth, and to destroy and deprive the most impoverished. I mean, listen. America functionally is a third-world country that is hiding behind the edifice of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and its military. But if you stripped away the American Military, Wall Street, the Valley and Hollywood, what you would see, and what you are seeing in the context of a consequence of this virus, is a third-world country, both in the nature of the priorities of the government and how it functions, and the resources and opportunities that are available to the vast majority of people who live here.”
. . .
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Moving right along in Jimmy Dore’s interview with Dylan Ratigan:
[begin excerpted quotes]
[11:30] Jimmy Dore: [reads quote from news article]:
Any plans for payroll tax cuts would have to include ways to replenish those funds, which are currently scheduled to run out in 2035.
At that time, 79% of the promised benefits will be payable.
[11:41] Dylan Ratigen: “Do you understand the absurdity of talking about money as if it’s scarce? The idea that there is an exhaustion date or “Oh, we can’t pay for this” or “Oh, you better go get a job” at a time when literally trillions of dollars are being given away to special interests? It is incomprehensible, the idea of utilizing scarcity or limited funding as a point of leverage for policy making while simultaneously supplying infinite capital for everything from oil companies to airlines to – – – down the list, is an indication of how third-world this government is.”
. . .
[13:59] Dylan Ratigan: “I know … I can offer my explanation but I don’t know how meaningful it is. I said it to you last week. I think there’s this sort of false adherence at the, sort of, civilian level of this mythology of American sovereignty and self-sufficiency and people really don’t like the idea of democratic socialism but they seem really enthusiastic for corporate socialism.
[14:26] Jimmy Dore: “Yes. 100%.”
[14:29] Dylan Ratigan:“I mean, America is a Corporate Socialist country. I mean, Rhian Cooperman is one of the most rapacious hedge-fund managers on Wall Street. You know. This is a very aggressive, very experienced, ruthless money man in New York. And he came out recently and said, ‘Listen,’ I mean, some of these guys are smart enough to worry about the pitchforks, you know, and they’re like ‘I don’t know how you can always expect to always have the fallout on the bottom be protected by the government and not expect the upside, or the progression of resources upward to be controlled by the government.’ He was making the point that you can’t have it both ways.”
[15:14] “Now, remarkably, America has it better than both ways. They have the amplification of the profits for the super-rich and total protection from economic losses for the big companies and the super-rich while simultaneously, literally, no safety net for more than half the country.”
. . .
[17:02] Dylan Ratigan: “… using the biological crisis to seize the opportunity to do all the worst things, which is, if you ever want to know, you see the true character of anyone when you’re in a situation like this. And the character that has been revealed about our government is that it is staggeringly hostile to the people who live in this country.”
. . .
[23:35] Dylan Ratigan: “… and I feel like the Mitch McConnells of this world have actually mastered that Lesser of Two Evils mind game. And once you’re in that Lesser of Two Evils architecture, all these other issues that we talk about become irrelevant because the entire political system is simply based on the ability to massacre your opponent’s identity using money. And as long as you’re confident that you can to that, you can literally rape and pillage people to the point where they’re homeless and dying in the street, and as long as when it comes to campaign time you can rape and massacre your opponent, you’ll still get re-elected. That’s why this is a third world country.”
[end excerpted quotes]
And to think that the political and military “elites” in the U.S. want Americans to think that the rest of the civilized world looks for “leadership” to a venal and vicious banana republic like the one situated south of Canada and north of Mexico.
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Thanks for the transcript, Mike. Really enjoy (if that’s the right word) listening to Jimmy and Dyan talk. They get it.
In a rare moment of clarity, I wrote about this in 2010, describing America as a kleptocracy. Here’s the link and my conclusion: https://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175235
An old Roman maxim enjoins us to “let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” Within our kleptocracy, the prevailing attitude is an insouciant “We’ll get ours, though the heavens fall.” This mindset marks the decline of our polity. A spirit of shared sacrifice, dismissed as hopelessly naïve, has been replaced by a form of tribalized privatization in which insiders find ways to profit no matter what.
Is it any surprise then that, in seeking to export our form of government to Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve produced not two model democracies, but two emerging kleptocracies, fueled respectively by oil and opium?
When we confront corruption in Iraq or Afghanistan, are we not like the police chief in the classic movie Casablanca who is shocked, shocked to find gambling going on at Rick’s Café, even as he accepts his winnings?
Why then do we bother to feign shock when Iraqi and Afghan elites, a tiny minority, seek to enrich themselves at the expense of the majority?
Shouldn’t we be flattered? Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery. Isn’t it?
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For the latest from Entertainment Central, i.e. the Trump White House, see the video of Donald making faces to mock a nurse he was supposedly “honoring” for her service in the Covid-19 trenches. Yep, THAT’S the way to unify the country, Fearless Leader!!
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And there’s the hypocrisy of President Bone Spurs telling the citizens we all need to be “warriors” and risk our lives for the “economy”, and ordering poor people back to work in the meat packing industry – all the while he and his criminal family are protected by privilege and ongoing testing.
If it was only him, it would be easy to dismiss this as just another outrage from this demented narcissist. But others, primarily on the right, are picking up on the notion of having to accept a certain amount of ongoing death to restore the old normal of the consumer society.
It seems to me this is the worst of the wars of empire finally coming home. The elites tolerated the deaths of hundreds of thousands of others – from Madeline Albright’s “the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it” to the Bush/Obama administrations having no interest in tracking the numbers of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans killed in their ongoing wars.
And now Trump believes the death count is too high. Soon, there will be an effort to hide the death count as they have no interest in the number of dead Americans.
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“We don’t do Body Counts,” said US Army General Tommy Franks, even though the US military never produces anything but body counts as its principle metric for “success” in those “wars” that never seem to conclude once initiated. And speaking of Madeline Albright, the demonic dwarf diva who “stands tall” and “sees further,” how about a little of her typically blundering, bad-ass
Boobie Humanitarian Intervention
(from Fernando Po, U.S.A., America’s post-literate retreat to Plato’s Cave)
In Boobie Red-state USA
The patriots don’t roam.
They egg on someone else to fight
While they stay safe at home
Attending tail-gate parties at
The local Astrodome
“My country right or wrong!” they chant
Without an eyelash blink.
“My mother drunk or sober,” say
The ones who’ve stopped to think.
“We don’t give Mom the car keys when
She’s had too much to drink!”
Yet power acts just like a drug
Like whiskey at its worst
Anaesthetizing brain cells while
Exacerbating thirst
Till little drunken boys and girls
Resort to warfare first
When adolescents cannot get
Whatever they want now
They pout and stomp and throw a fit
And wrinkle up the brow
Which signals to their parents that
They want it anyhow
Like Secretary Albright fumed
When Clinton told her “No,
We cannot level Belgrade just
To show your machismo.”
“Why even have an Air Force, then?”
The madam wished to know.
So Bill relented, finally;
He wished so much to please
And sent a flight of bombers
To enforce his stern decrees.
He got the address wrong, of course,
And blew up some Chinese
Still Boobie Bubba couldn’t get
The Chinese point of view
They had so many people and
He’d only killed a few
(So why, since he felt so much pain,
Could he not cause some, too?)
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2006
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“We’re Number One! We’re Number One!”…in virus deaths globally. Oh, be ever so proud, USA!!
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Speaking of “Bucks” — as in the US Dollar as Global Reserve Currency — my Taiwanese wife and I had a discussion not long ago about President Trump’s short-sighted attempt to gin up some sort of “China-gate” hysteria as a means of deflecting responsibility for America’s own economic incompetence and murderous malfeasance. We figured that since the Clinton/Obama Democrats had already bet their political farm on red-baiting Trump by blaming Russia for America’s ills, then Trump might figure he could yellow-bait the Democrats by blaming China.
The Chinese, for their part, don’t attach much importance to the American political blame-business, which they regard as a sign of cowardly weakness. But they do understand and pay attention to business, especially where that involves the trillion dollars of US Treasury Bills which constitute Chinese loans to America so that Americans can buy all the stuff that the Chinese make. So when we read about US Treasury Department officials stupidly and loudly speculating about possibly defaulting on — i.e., stealing — that trillion dollars of debt as a means of “punishing” China for “aggressively” sailing Chinese ships around in the South China Sea, we figured that China would just sell off its US Treasury Bills, calculating that they might just as well get as much of their money back as possible before the US just stole the money and made all their investment worthless.
But, of course, the minute China starts selling their US Treasury Bills, everyone else will sell theirs, too, leading to — in the milliseconds that it takes stock-trading computer algorithms to execute — the complete collapse of the US dollar and the bloated military empire (at home and abroad) which cannot exist without it.
So, it came as no surprise to my wife (the smart one) and me when we saw this headline on our computer display devices: Beijing May Dump US Treasuries In Response To US Hostility, Start Its Own QE: Chinese Media, Zerohedge Zerohedge (May 7, 2020):
In response to recent media speculation that as the blame game over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic escalates the US may cancel some of its $1.1 trillion debt owed to China, the South China Morning Post reported today that China may “move to reduce its vast holdings of US Treasury securities in the coming months” in response to a resurgence in trade tensions and a war of words between the world’s two largest economies.
While analysts have also said that the US was highly unlikely to take the “nuclear option” of cancelling Chinese-held debt, with Larry Kudlow himself refuting this suggestion on several occasions last week, the “mere fact that the idea has been discussed could well prompt Beijing to seek to insulate itself from the risk by reducing its US government debt holdings” [emphasis added], the SCMP writes.
Loose lips sink not only ships, but also vastly over-extended empires based primarily and increasingly on financial fraud. The Chinese understand “bucks” extremely well, and so the idea that America could successfully advertise in advance its intention to rob these intelligent and hard-working people — like the US has already robbed Venezuela, Iran, and any number of other nations — has to rank as one of the most ludicrous ever conceived, even for an administration and country notorious for such arrogant — not to mention, larcenous — effrontery.
I would excoriate Larry Kudlow and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin for leaking their idiotic plans before having to eat them publicly but then “Senior Moment” Joe Biden has already said that he plans on installing Larry Summers as his chief economic adviser. So why bother? SOMEBODY NOT NAMED TRUMP AND NOT DEAD YET might possibly “win” the presidential election in November, but the “Bucks” won’t stop flowing upwards. “Changing” from Republican thieves to Democratic thieves has no effect on institutionalized thievery. The Chinese know this only too well. Trying to play them for fools, like US “elites” play their American peasantry, will only backfire — and badly for America.
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How true, Mike! Colossal mismanagement. A cosmic-level crunch is already in progress, but it seems America’s “geniuses” are determined to make it worse.
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Speaking of American “geniuses”:
“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.” — Michael Ledeen, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute
About that “crappy little country” thing as an example of imperial business prerogatives, ancient history provides some cautionary tales. From Wikipedia:
Thucydides explained that the purpose of conquering Melos was to demonstrate the strength and sternness of Athens so as to discourage its island territories from defecting. Whether it was effective at discouraging rebellion is uncertain. Just a few years after the conquest of Melos, Athens suffered a devastating defeat in a military expedition to Sicily, after which rebellions happened throughout the empire.
China does not qualify as a “crappy little country.” Nor does the Russian Federation. Neither does Vietnam (perhaps small, but hardly “crappy” when it comes to defending its national sovereignty). Neither does Iran. The US has just about exhausted the “crappy little countries” that it might easily conquer as an example to others contemplating their own independence. Now America has joined the ranks of “crappy little countries,” made so not by others but by itself.
So in the Libyan fable is it told
That once an eagle, stricken by a dart
Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft:
“By our own feathers, not by others hands
Are we now smitten.” — Aeschylus
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Have you read “Once an Eagle,” Mike, by Anton Myrer? Very interesting book. Popular in the Army — and for some good reasons.
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Yes, I’ve read Once an Eagle, by Anton Myrer. Also The Last Convertible, by the same author. Two excellent novels. More germane to my own life experience and interests, Anton Myrer has also written (from Wikipedia):
“World War II was the one event which had the greatest impact on my life. I enlisted imbued with a rather flamboyant concept of this country’s destiny as the leader of a free world and the necessity of the use of armed force. I emerged a corporal three years later in a state of great turmoil, at the core of which was an angry awareness of war as the most vicious and fraudulent self-deception man had ever devised [emphasis added].”
Coming back to America from Vietnam at the end of January, 1972, I felt the same anger and awareness of war as a colossal fraud, although I had never previously conceived of military life as anything but a poorly paid period of indentured servitude that I would have to endure until I could discharge my “six year military obligation” and experience the exhilaration of true freedom upon the return to civilian life. So, the US military never disappointed me so much as confirmed my low opinion of war and all who willingly traffic in it (including myself). As July 2020 approaches, I look back on a half century since I first deployed to the now-defunct Republic of Vietnam and I cannot help but reflect (as I do daily) upon that utterly wasteful experience that taught my fellow Americans absolutely nothing about themselves, their government, and especially a US military establishment that could tout an anti-war novel like Once an Eagle as a recruitment tool for the indoctrination of the professional pathological “patriot,” whom Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce called “the dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.” The standing US military — our very own Vaunted Visigoths — desperately requires abolishing, along with its non-uniformed branches like the CIA; the dogs-of-war mercenaries like Blackwater/Xe/Academi, ISIS and Al Qaeda; and corporate camp followers too huge and numerous to mention. 50 state militias and a Coast Guard ought to do the “defense” thing quite adequately. Anything more amounts to literal overkill on a colossal scale.
As another timelessly relevant Greek poet once explained:
“Men are so quick to blame the gods: they say
that we devise their misery. But they
themselves- in their depravity- design
grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns.”
― Homer, The Odyssey
So, again, I’ve read Once an Eagle (several times) but I obviously take from it lessons that the US military establishment would rather that I — and most especially my gullible and credulous countrymen (potential recruits) — not. The US military establishment has dedicated itself assiduously (and quite successfully) to making sure that the citizens of the United States learn as little as possible about the true nature of war so that Americans will come to know precisely what the US military establishment knows about war: nothing of any true value to the nation. Ignorance is “Strength.” Mission Accomplished.
Finally, for my tiny and unimportant part, I would associate myself with what David Halberstam wrote in the Author’s Note section of his truly excellent book The Best and the Brightest :
“Like almost everyone else I know who has been involved in Vietnam, I am haunted by it, by the fact that somehow I was not better, that somehow it was all able to happen.”
Some scattered and bitter thoughts from an expatriate ex-patriot as the half-century anniversary of my rude awakening approaches . . .
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Bitter greens — and I like bitter greens.
I was very impressed by “Once an Eagle.” Especially its critique of the MacArthur-like officers, the glory-hounds. But the Army has read it as a manual for the “right” kind of officer, the consummate professional devoted to his men as well as to country, the character of Sam Damon in the book.
I’d have to read it again, but I do recall Myer’s opposition to a war in Asia, and how Sam Damon dies. He sees the pointlessness of his own death in a war (i.e. Vietnam) that need not and should not be fought.
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“The Boobies never asked for much
Or anything at all
From those who wish to “lead” them, which
Makes “leading” such a ball
More like a bleeding by a leech:
A “doctor” kept on call”
so cool
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Thank you. I appreciate the kind words.
The word “Boobie,” as used in the ever-unfolding verse essay, Fernando Po., U.S..A., refers to an epigram to Chapter One of The Meaning of Meaning (1925), by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, two pioneering British scholars in the field Semiotics, namely:
“Let us get nearer to the fire, so that we may see what we are saying” — the Bubis of Fernando Po.
As a bit of history, it seems that ethnographers of the late nineteenth century had come across a small group of aborigines on an island off the coast of Africa called Fernando Po: a people so culturally devolved that they could no longer communicate with each other unless they could also see one another physically gesturing or striking poses. Joseph Campbell picked up on this history when he mentioned “The Boobies” in his book The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (1959).
I began composing Fernando Po, U.S.A. after reading Ron Suskind’s now-canonical article, “Without a Doubt,” in the New York Times Magazine (October 17, 2004). Practically the entire world now knows of the Bush administration official who boasted:
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
But for me the money quote came from Mark McKinnon, the Bush media guru whom Suskind quotes saying of Bush loyalists:
“And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!” In this instance, the final “you,” of course, meant the entire reality-based community.”
I tried to visualize the stumbling and bumbling AWOL Texas Air National Guardsman “walking” and “pointing” and “exuding” but I had no luck at it. But something else did occur to me. Something about Boobies. Something about Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave” (from The Republic). Something about Lewis Carroll’s “the Walrus and the Carpenter” (my mother’s favorite poem from Alice in Wonderland). And so this happened:
They like the way he “points,” they say
They like the way he “walks,”
Despite the fact that no one can
Decipher how he talks.
Yet when he mimics “standing tall,”
The stupid Boobie gawks.
Everything just followed and flowed from there — for years. I couldn’t stop interpreting everything I saw and heard from America’s corporate media as little more than flickering shadows on a cave wall aimed straight at a tribe of illiterate Boobie aborigines camped around their television fires striking poses, pulling grotesque faces, and uttering inchoate noises at each other — the perfect paradigm explaining and exemplifying Fernando Po, U.S.A., America’s post-literate retreat to Plato’s cave.
Like many anti-war Vietnam Veterans, I recoiled immediately at the prospect of former President George “Deputy Dubya” Bush launching his stud-hamster vendetta against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (with Afghanistan as a mere warm-up) in an effort to expunge a deep-seated filial antagonism towards his father’s more positively regarded WWII (and First Gulf Battle) legacy. And as the predictable tragedy unfolded, I only grew more agitated at my helplessness. I couldn’t stop any of it. The disaster would simply have to run its tortured course until sheer exhaustion and/or national bankruptcy brought it to a reluctant close. So to get through the impotent interim, I turned inward to creative therapy, as I had read of other Vietnam Veterans doing. I found that in composing verse, I could at least do something to dissipate the anger. I have since branched out into many other verse formats, but Fernando Po, U.S.A. pretty much started it all off for me. And I can see no end to it …
Thanks again for your kind comments. I hope this little bit of (not quite literary) history helps explain where it all began for me.
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