The Impeachment Circus: 28 November 2019
To the Trump-deranged spectators at the impeachment circus currently playing in the US House of Representatives, nothing is so urgent as to establish that Trump accosted his junior Ukrainian counterpart with a quid pro quo in the much-canvassed telephone conversation between Trump and Zelensky of 25 July 2019. The quid appears to be some combination of a Zelensky visit to the White House and the release of funds destined to aid the Ukraine in its military resistance to Russia; the quo is the criminal investigation by Ukraine of the putatively suspect actions of Joe Biden in Ukraine in the latter years of the Obama administration. Although Zelensky has not hitherto graced the White House, the military funding which had been suspended before the July conversation was, shortly after, released: so, there was a partial and ambiguous quid. As for the quo, nothing: there is no hint of a Ukrainian investigation of Biden’s doings.
The question of whether or not Trump offered Zelensky a quid pro quo is not easy to settle. Two things are known about what has happened since: (1) Trump, clearly the stronger partner, has delivered on what all agree is the most important component of the quid – the release of the money; (2) Zelensky, the weaker partner, the Monica of the scandal , who loves Trump’s ass and agrees with him 1,000% has not reciprocated with any quo.
During the past two weeks, the news cycle in the United States has been dominated by talk about the proclaimed intention of House of Representative Democrats to impeach President Trump for his alleged violation of election law in his 25 July 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Zelenski. The claim House Democrats are making is that Trump, in the aforementioned phone call, tried to leverage funds already designated by the US government for support the Ukrainian military to pressure Ukraine into the renewal of a criminal investigation which would immediately threaten with prosecution the son of the leading aspirant for the Democrats' presidential nomination, Joe Biden, and would eventually implicate Biden himself in a way that would fatally damage his presidential candidacy.
As is often the case, there are intensely interesting aspects of this event about which hardly anyone comments. What I find irresistibly intriguing is the similarity between the misdemeanour of which Trump is being accused and the alleged misdemeanour for which Trump is urging the Ukrainians to pursue Biden. That of which Trump is being accused – which involves an apparently disreputable attempt to investigate a suspicious and largely forgotten event of Joe Biden’s past – conspicuously resembles said suspicious and largely forgotten event. In 2014 Joe Biden, as is confirmed by Biden’s own boast, used his personal influence over the concession of $1 billion to Ukraine as leverage to secure the dismissal of a prosecutor named Viktor Shokin who was investigating corruption in Burisma Holdings of which Biden’s son Hunter was a major beneficiary.
Has Trump Been 'Warlike' ? (20 February2020)
Nicholas Levis writes in Counterpunch that “Bloomberg’s 12-year record as mayor of New York, his billions in personal spending as a political and “philanthropic” donor, and his many recorded public statements all suggest strongly that a Bloomberg regime would be at least as extreme, dangerous to democracy, lawless, and warlike as a second Trump term.”
What leaps out at me in this sentence is Levis’s way of asserting that a Bloomberg regime would be as ‘warlike’ as a second Trump regime. The phrasing implies that we would expect of a second Trump term would be exceptionally warlike. This, in turn, seems to assume that the Trump regime about to be either renewed or ended in November of this year has been conspicuously warlike. This assumption merits some reflection.
The adolescent bellicosity displayed by Trump in his taunts and insults of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in 2017, his unprovoked, unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Cooperative Plan of Action which had hitherto protected the Middle East from the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, and his wanton assassination of Iran’s beloved military genius Soleimani – these are all ‘warlike’ actions in two senses of the word: they are the kind of actions leaders carry out during wars and they are the kind of actions which, if taken in peacetime, could easily trigger war.
However, for Levis’ warnings about Bloomberg to make sense, it is not enough merely to adduce evidence that Trump is ‘warlike.’ We need besides reason for believing that the hypothetical ‘next’ Trump regime will be exceptionally warlike and this projection seems to assume that the about-to-end Trump regime has been notably more warlike than one had reason to believe.
To measure how ‘warlike’ Trump’s current tenancy has been, requires some characterization of the office he currently holds: that of President of the United States. One of Trump’s predecessors in said office – a Democrat named Harry Truman – ordered the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the only two cases in world history in which nuclear weapons have been used to slaughter civilian populations. Another of Trump’s predecessors – the Republican George W. Bush – ordered the destruction of Iraq on the basis of the false claim that this nation possessed weapons of mass destruction and the preposterous supposition that Iraq had cooperated with al Qaeda in the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. By the time Trump’s immediate predecessor has completed his first term of office he had led the military destruction of the most prosperous and egalitarian nation in Africa, namely Libya, and had initiated the dismemberment of the most liberal and secular Muslim nation of its region, namely Syria. Barrack Obama’s predecessor had, before his first presidential term had ended, destroyed both Afghanistan and Iraq. A former Undersecretary of the Treasury of the United States, Paul Craig Roberts, once remarked that anyone seriously aspiring to be President of the United States must be a cold-blooded killer prepared to murder tens of thousands of people on the basis of lies. “Warlike” Donald Trump most certainly is. But the bar of “warlike” in the particular office he currently holds and seems anxious to retain is uncommonly high.
Were justice truly served Donald Trump would have been impeached for his dangerous insults of Kim Jong-un and imprisoned for his abrogation the Obama’s only foreign policy achievement. For killing Soleimani, he would be hung by the balls and have his fat ass whipped until he chokes on his own blood. However, do the sum of these atrocious actions lift Trump to the level of turpitude of the pathetic Bush or even the sainted Obama?
Trump As Puppet: 8 April 2019
Before Trump was even elected, he was widely assumed to be under the control of the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.
Since he has been elected he has intensified sanctions against Russia, expelled Russian diplomats on the basis of suspect claims by the government of the United Kingdom that Russia had poisoned a Russian double agent living in Salisbury, and launched two missile attacks upon Russian ally Syria despite Russia's insistence that the rationale for the attack (the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian Arab Army) had no basis is fact.
In the mean time, Trump has ingratiated himself with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu by withdrawing from the Joint Cooperative Plan of Action which had provided some succour to Israel's nemesis Iran, has additionally endeared himself to Netanyahu by moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, has further gratified Netanyahu by honouring Israeli claims to the portion of the Golan Heights Israel had seized by force in 1967, Today, 8 April 2019, Trump has taken the unprecedented step of declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp to be a terrorist organization. Hardly anything could please Netanyahu more, unless Trump were to support Israel's anticipated claim to sovereignty over the West Bank.
It is very tempting to believe that the President of the United States is somebody's puppet. It is almost impossible to believe that the puppet master is in Moscow.