Thursday, November 30, 2017

Just Fascists Being Fascists

Just when you thought that Donald Trump had really gone too far, that his latest projectile belch was so loud and so toxic that even Congress would finally put its foot down, you were bound to be sorely disappointed. The man who bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and still be elected president could probably shoot someone in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and still remain in office.

"Oh, it's just Donald being Donald," they'd yawn, as they eagerly rushed their latest anti-social legislation to his desk for his pudgy-fingered signature.

I don't exaggerate. Because if Trump could re-tweet inflammatory anti-Muslim propaganda videos originating from a notorious Britain-based hate group whose leader is under criminal indictment, and all that GOP connivers like Jeff Flake and Lindsay Graham can do is shrug their shoulders and sigh "that's not helpful," then I think that yes, he probably could actually get away with a lot worse than simply instigating violence on an epic domestic and global scale.

 He is, of course, no outlier. Although his drone assassinations and the civilian death tolls of his bombing campaigns already threaten to overtake those of his immediate predecessors, he is only using the lethal and normal unitary executive powers bequeathed to him. His emotional and monetary embrace of the despotic Saudi government, with its mass extermination campaign against Yemenis now vying with Rwanda and the Balkans in genocidal horror, is met with complicit silence from both major political parties. Congress loves war, Congress loves arms sales to authoritarian regimes,  and Congress especially loves the campaign donations and the bases and the Homeland Security fusion centers and the nuclear and "conventional" weapons factories which keep military and civilian constituents alike employed and supportive.

So when the New York Times first published the story of Trump's anti-Muslim tweets and his boosterism of a marginalized far-right British hate group on Wednesday, the media world was still busy reeling from news that NBC superstar Matt Lauer had been fired. The Trump article was initially and discreetly placed about a third of the way down the digital home page.

Only days after publishing a much-maligned puff piece serving to "normalize" an Ohio neo-Nazi, the Times drawled in its initial story: "It is unusual (my bold) to see an American president push out this type of content on such a powerful social media platform."

Is it merely "unusual" for the leader of the free world to spread blatantly fake videos which purport to show a Muslim man attacking a child on crutches, and another Muslim man desecrating a statue of the Virgin Mary, and a Muslim mob pushing a man off a rooftop?

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the president's unhinged outburst with the usual disclaimer that facts don't matter as long as effective lies can serve to bolster his regime's fascist message. "Whether it's a real video, the threat is real," she insisted in true Goebbelsian fashion. "The threat is real, the threat needs to be addressed, and the threat needs to be talked about, and that's what the president is doing in bringing it up."

Look, I've been as sanguine as anybody about the sad reality that this president's Twitter habit serves mainly as a diversionary smokescreen from his own legal troubles and the kleptomaniacal attacks which pose as a White House administration. But this one goes way, way beyond the usual quotidian mischief.

My published comment on the original ho-hum Times article:
"It is unusual to see an American president push out this type of content on such a powerful social media platform."

No it's not. It's unprecedented, it's pathological, and it's dangerous. It might even border on the criminal, should it lead directly to someone, or many people, getting killed. It is an incitement to violence.

Trump is breathtaking in his irresponsibility. He knows, deep down within whatever rational part of his brain might still exist, that his presidency is a monumental failure. His solution, therefore, is to bring the rest of the world right down with him.

Thanks, but no thanks. Congress can either impeach this pathocrat, or they can be complicit with his antics. They don't get to have it both ways, not when so many lives are at stake.
Only when British Prime Minister Theresa May and other European politicians expressed shock and outrage did the Times advance the story to the top of the home page, and later completely rewrite it. The paper removed the banal "it is unusual to see an America president" characterization of the Tweet in favor of the more compelling "no modern American president has promoted inflammatory content of this sort from an extremist organization. Mr. Trump’s two most recent predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both made a point of avoiding public messages that were likely to be seen as anti-Muslim and could exacerbate racial and religious animosities, arguing that the war against terrorism was not a war against Islam."

Not that Bush and Obama are exactly friends of Muslims either, given the illegal invasion of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, the military-corporatist re-colonization of Africa, the cluster bombings and drone attacks on Yemeni civilians, the drone strikes in the "tribal areas" of AfPac, and the CIA's illegal program of domestic spying against Muslim Americans. Bush and Obama committed their own foul deeds with pretty and false words, while Trump commits his foul deeds with equally foul words. His bloodthirstiness and racist venom are unacceptably outside the "norms" of American bloodthirstiness and venomous exceptionalism.

But not that unacceptably. Because Trump is a very useful idiot indeed, able to convince his fans and fellow xenophobes that the oligarchic plot to financially ruin the lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary Americans under the auspices of "tax reform" is actually manna from heaven for them.

About a third of the voting population which continues to enable him will go happily to their doom, safe in the knowledge that their president feels not their pain, but their hatred.

Trump is a master of the politics of resentment. And if Congress has anything to say about it, he won't be going anywhere for a very long time.  Unless the KFC and the McDonald's fries do him in first, of course.

6 comments:

Mark Thomason said...

I don't think Trump is a master of anything. I think he fell into this, much to his own surprise, by reason of the utter disdain of Hillary for voters.

I doubt he'll live to the end of this term. His ankles are swollen, he's gaining weight, he's a rather old 71.

I can't imagine him able to run again in 2020. That means he'll be the object of jockeying like any lame duck, earlier than normal.

Thus, he isn't the real problem. The real problem is what else the big money almost did last time and will try again to do next time.

The oligarchs who own our politicians did not care what voters wanted when they treated Obama so badly. They don't care now about Trump, he's a place holder. They are going for power, right over the top of him.

We are in big trouble, and it isn't really Trump, it is what produced Trump.

Jay–Ottawa said...

Bill Clinton was so charming he could probably have extinguished hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives with an embargo and still been elected to a second term. Oh wait….

Barack Obama was so popular he probably could have continued Bush policies and started more wars holding the Nobel Peace Prize. Oh wait…

And now, Donald Trump is so mesmerizing he could probably shoot somebody … etc., etc.... You get the idea: he’s already getting away with much worse.

The fascism alarm has been ringing since well before Trump. No rescue crew in sight. Fascism, once established, will render impossible any chance at a reversion approaching normal. Only a tragic upheaval might deconstruct the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, Wall Street, Homeland Security, the big corporations, our corrosive celebrity culture and last, but not least, those trillion dollar nukes.

We elect leaders who do grand theft, murder, threats of more murder, and lately more fascism. Crime pays because so many people are distracted by style (winning or atrocious) and sideshows like the “great American sex panic.”

To borrow another phrase from William Kaufman, we are living through “a bizarre inversion of values.” Echoes of Wolin’s “inverted totalitarianism.” What we claim to value most, human rights and our national institutions, are being trashed by the few who are expert at whipping up fear and hate.

I was born in 1930s America and it looks like I’ll have to die in a facsimile of 1930s Europe. In this second coming, it sure does seem “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The cross-border invasions by dictators have already begun. This month, the great American sex panic keeps the fascist threat and “unparalleled crimes against humanity” far in the background. Time to scream.

Here’s the money paragraph from Kaufman’s screed in CounterPunch.

“So this is not just a moral panic—but a bizarre inversion of values in which Bill Clinton can murder 500,000 Iraqi children, throw millions of poor women and their children off welfare, and instigate the global rule of transnational corporations with NAFTA, but he is not impeached or stigmatized for any of those atrocities but rather for a workplace blowjob; in which Hillary Clinton can lead the charge for the destruction of Libya, reducing that country to primeval rubble, and is not only not fired or ostracized but is rewarded with the Democrats’ presidential nomination and lauded by corporate feminists as a champion of “inclusiveness”; in which Barack Obama pushed fraudulent health-care reform that leaves a barbaric 27 million people with zero coverage and millions more with crippling premiums and deductibles that render their “coverage” all but unusable, thus sentencing tens of thousands of people to death every year because they cannot afford timely medical care, and dropped 26,171 pounds of bombs in 2016 alone, and yet he is not only not reviled and abominated as a con artist but is worshipped as an icon of enlightened governance; in which the entire ruling elite and its associates in the corporate media are chronically underplaying—indeed, scarcely mentioning—the gravity of the climate change crisis, which would merely spell the end of the human species within a hundred years, yet no copycat 24/7 umbrage or five-alarm indignation on the part of anyone in those elite circles or their acolytes over this unprecedented planetary emergency.”

Erik Roth said...


In light of the low glow and skewed view we're getting from the Gray Lady lately, note Thomas "give war a chance" Friedman's recent fawning ad nauseam over the Saudis:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince-mbs-arab-spring.html

But perhaps it's better for the blood pressure to check out this first:

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/30/mehdi_hasan_rips_thomas_friedmans_nauseating

To support Mark Thomason's remarks, here's what the much missed, former NYTimes writer Frank Rich writes:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/frank-rich-trumpism-after-trump.html

Another concurring:

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/42533-whether-or-not-trump-remains-in-office-we-must-contend-with-the-forces-that-enabled-his-rise

"Presidents are powerful, but more powerful than them are capitalism's controllers, working in the background, directing for their interests.
White supremacy, too, is a grounding undercurrent of this country's history and present-day functioning.
If the Trump presidency concludes, we will still be faced with a powerful system of oppressions.
Until we confront the systems that enabled Donald Trump's rise to power, we'll always be at risk of seeing someone like him empowered again."

This morning on DemocracyNow, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz gave a scathing critique of Trump’s terrible tax plan and idiotic governing policies:

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/30/nobel_prize_winning_economist_joseph_stiglitz
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/30/anti_globalization_in_the_era_of

Concluding his case by stating that Trump is unfit to serve as President, he was asked by Amy Goodman: "Do you think he should be impeached?”
He replied: "We would then have a problem with Pence. And that is really difficult.”

Meanwhile, the Gray Lady continues to feature his sycophantic, dismal science counterpart, the ever obsequious, unenlightening Paul Krugman.

And between my screams, thanks to Jay-Ottawa for Walter Kaufman’s CounterPunch.
It helps to roll with the punches, and land a few as well.


stranger in a strange land said...

@Jay: yeah, that Kaufman screed is devastating - right on.

Comrade said...

(Comrade - formerly known as Anne and annenigma)

Don't worry. There's nothing for the Democrats or anyone else to save us from. According to Uncle Joe, nothing's wrong other than politically, we just don't know each other anymore. See no fascists, hear no fascists, speak to no fascists - because there aren't any around!

“There is overwhelming reason to be optimistic.”

“It bothers me when people say they will make America great again. It’s already great.”

“I’ve tried to give the new administration a chance to get its footing,” he said. “We want it to succeed. Why wouldn’t we?”

http://www.denverpost.com/2017/12/02/joe-biden-denver-american-promise-tour/

Pearl said...

Just a reminder that Bernie Sanders continues to make speeches to packed houses
regarding support for new faces running for congressional office next year, signing
petitions against the recent Tax bill, a plan to help Puerto Rico recover properly plus the endless destructive decisions being made by Trump as well as fighting for change among the current Democratic party representatives, ad infinitum.

He deserves more support from many progressives than he has been receiving.