Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Thursday, February 2, 2017

How Soon Before The Shooting Starts?

So every day is another WTF moment in American history, thanks to Cheeto Benito.  Yesterday alone we had three incidents that would normally be a crisis.

1) Trump insults and attacks the Australian Prime Minister and then shits all over him on Twitter.

2) Trump may have threatened to invade Mexico, though Mexico denies this.

3) The military felt like they needed to throw the White House under the bus for the weekend's botched raid in Yemen.

Leaving aside the fact that Trump apparently didn't know that Frederick Douglass is dead, those three stories ALONE contain more scandal than three years of the Obama administration.

Trump's attack on PM Turnbull is 100 times more vehement, insulting and damaging than anything Obama did with Netanyahu.  As much as Obama hated Netanyahu and as much as Bibi involved himself in American politics in a way that should have outraged everyone, their relationship over 8 years never got as bad as Trump's with Turnbull in a 30 minute phone call.  The linked article notes that Turnbull is weak on his right flank, and this could topple his government.  Presidents don't do this.

An invasion of Mexico to root out cartels would presumably fall under the president's war powers.  Congress would be very unlikely to check him on this, though perhaps Democrats will try.  If we combine this with the Yemen story, I think we can see a situation where Trump launches an attack on cartels sites in Mexico because why the fuck wouldn't he.  Then, we learn of dead civilians, dead soldiers and we have a full blown international crisis - not just with Mexico but with all of Latin America.

Meanwhile, today we can expect a ratcheting up of tensions with Iran.

We will be at war with someone soon.  It is frankly inevitable.  Trump is basically governing like 9/11 just happened, because in the right wing hive-mind, it is always 9/12.  But I don't think anyone outside the 101st Pantwetting Brigade is all that jived up to go to another bullshit war.

Trump was elected as a chaos agent.  He was elected to destroy the institutions of government.

He's right on schedule.

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