Trump = Dubya II

Recall how Dubya ran against Gore on an America-first, semi-isolationist platform (re-watch or read synopses of the debates from 2000 if you need to refresh your memory), but when 9/11 happened, while understandably going after bin Laden and al-Qaeda, nevertheless also took advantage of the opportunity to do a bait-and-switch and go after Saddam Hussein, trumping up charges of terrorism-sponsoring against the secular, Baathist Iraqi regime leader and claiming Hussein had WMDs (which turned out to be false), and used that pretext to launch a war against Iraq. He also used the opportunity to smear Iran and North Korea’s leaders as being, along with Iraq’s leadership, part of an ‘axis of evil’, and whipped up antagonism against the NORKs and the Iranians, threatening to go after them.

Now in Trump, America has a president who campaigned against the bipartisan American imperialist foreign policy consensus, and made some semi-isolationist noises, but who, while rightly attacking ISIS and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists for their actions, has nevertheless taken advantage of the opportunity presented by the increasing rate of terrorist attacks to do a bait-and-switch and go after Assad, trumping up charges against the secular, Baathist Syrian regime leader – and also whipping up antagonism against the NORKs and Iran, threatening to go after them.

I can’t see the difference; can you see the difference?

None, in the first GOP presidency since Dubya and 9/11, almost two decades later…

Still not tired of being betrayed, diehard endlessly loyal Chumps for Trump?

 

No and Wrong

Dairy Palace, Canton, Texas.

Christ died not for our freedom, but to save sinners from their sins, not for freedom in some abstract capacity.

U.S. soldiers died fighting for their country or the empire; take your pick, depending on the war. Again, freedom is abstract; one’s homeland is concrete, reality.

Equating the two is even worse than Julia Ward Howe’s line ‘As Christ died to make men holy, let us die to make men free’ (not ‘live to make men free’; that was a change from the original), because at least that was just drawing an analogy, rather than outright equating the two.

It trivializes Christ’s atoning work, equating it with human efforts, equates the work of God’s advancement of His Kingdom with the advancement of an earthly, temporal realm, and is therefore sacrilegious.

Remember, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 

May’s Election Gamble Seems to Be Backfiring

May’s Election Gamble Seems to Be Backfiring

Theresa May’s election gamble does not seem to be paying off:

Theresa May risks being ousted from Downing Street after a shock new poll suggests Labour could be on course to cut her majority down to just two seats.

The YouGov poll for the Times found that the Conservatives are on 43%, just five points ahead of Labour on 38%.

[…]

[…]

While I thought there was a real danger that calling an election would backfire on May, especially when she had repeatedly said there would be no early election, I still didn’t guess that it would blow up in her face as spectacularly as it seems to have done.

Thus far, the election campaign has helped improve the favorability ratings of both Labour and Jeremy Corbyn and has had the opposite effect on May and the Conservatives. An election that almost everyone thought to be in the bag now seems to be slipping out of May’s grasp. Fraser Nelson wonders if May and the Tories will blow it. May has been dogged lately by a series of sudden reversals, including the original decision to call the election after swearing she wouldn’t

[…]

For his part, Rod Liddle dubs the Conservative campaign to be the worst general election effort on their part that he can recall. As he puts it:

I don’t think anything quite matches up to this combination of prize gaffes and the robotic incantation of platitudinous idiocies.

Liddle goes on to say that it is the decision to have an early election that could be a significant factor in turning people against the governing party

[…]

That there is now even slightly serious talk of a possible Corbyn victory shows how mistaken May was to gamble on an early election. Her party may still be in power after the vote, but her authority will likely be weakened and her judgment will be called into question.

Why, one might almost think she’s trying to lose on purpose…

 

Harper 2.0

Newly elected Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer is Stephen Harper 2.0.

He’s ostensibly socially conservative, yet considers abortion and gay marriage settled and won’t let his personal opinions on such matters influence his policies.

But he’s fully neo-con / Zionist warmongering; wants Canada to step up and help smash ISIS.

In short, he’s just like Stephen Harper, except he smiles more.

On the plus side, the libertarian Max Bernier didn’t win; nor did the crypto-anti-monarchist Erin O’Toole.

Kudos to Kellie Leitch, for raising ‘national question’ / immigration issues that no-one else would touch. Perhaps they’ll have a better champion in the future; we can pray…

The Tories, no longer in flux,
Have settled on putting their bucks
On nothing too strange
Or smacking of change
But Stephen J. Harper redux.

— Limericking (@Limericking) May 28, 2017

 

The North Korean ‘threat’ is overrated

So says Srdja Trifkovic, and I agree:

“Use of force” means going to war against North Korea. This is a reckless and irresponsible proposition. That Pyongyang embodies a bizarre mix of Stalinism and Oriental despotism is beyond dispute. North Korean soldiers comically emulate their taller Western models in their goose-stepping routine, but the idea is the same: “passo romano” is the metaphor for violent dominance devoid of reason. North Korea is a dystopia unable to feed its cowed serfs—at least two million are estimated to have died of hunger two decades ago—yet it is perfectly capable of unleashing a hurricane of artillery fire against Seoul and other targets in the south at a moment’s notice, killing and maiming tens of thousands of civilians. That is not the kind of protection South Korea needs or wants.

The response of the Truman Administration to Kim Il Sung’s aggression in June 1950 was remarkably swift, bold, and necessary. For many years after the armistice, the presence of U.S. forces in South Korea was justified by the fact that neither China nor the USSR could be trusted to keep the North under control. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, the equation has changed. South Korea is an economic powerhouse with the financial and scientific potential to become a nuclear power at a short notice. It is perfectly capable of deterring North Korea, a fourth-rate power and an economic basket case. Qatar and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia notwithstanding, the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” is the worst country on the planet in terms of what passes for “human rights” and “freedom” among reasonable people. As per the Holy Roman Empire, it is neither democratic, nor people’s, nor a republic. It is “Korean” in the narrow sense of the Kim family’s acceptance of a quasi-nationalist mantle of self-sufficiency (juche); a quick visit to the approved source will give you some idea of the nebulous concept.

North Korea is a bad place ruled by bad people, but the character of its regime is irrelevant to the security of the United. The assertion that the country’s ineptly executed missile and nuclear testing programs can or will be used as a means of disrupting the regional balance of power—let alone deployed as an imminent threat to “our homeland”—is preposterous. Even if it had the wherewithal to threaten the U.S.—which it does not have—North Korea could not do it credibly. A single missile or two would be fairly easy to intercept and destroy; and the ensuing retaliation would turn much of the PDRK into a parking lot. In a few years the North may develop a medium-range device capable of reliably delivering a warhead, but much longer it will have no guidance system necessary for reasonable accuracy. For decades it will lack re-entry technology to develop and deploy an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

If North Korea does develop functional nuclear missiles some time in the late 2030’s, South Korea and Japan can and should acquire them too, in order to establish a regional balance of terror. This is the only viable model of regional stability. The U.S. and the Soviet Union (later Russia)—followed by China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan, and Israel—have had nuclear bombs for many years, but never used them against each other, or their lesser adversaries, or anyone else. Having the nukes makes no difference to China’s stalled efforts to bring Taiwan under its control. South Africa had developed its own nuclear arsenal in the 1980s—it has been dismantled since—but this did not enhance its government’s ability to resist the winds of change in the early 1990’s. It is like having a check for a million dollars that can never be cashed.

On the plus side, ever since 1945 the political effect of a country’s possession of nuclear weapons has been to force its potential adversaries to exercise caution and to freeze the existing frontiers. There is no reason to think that North Korea would be an exception. A coherent American response needs to address the question why North Korea feels it needs nuclear weapons at all. This is not because its regime intends to reunify the peninsula by force, but because Pyongyang regards the United States as an existential threat. North Korea may be the most unpleasant dictatorship in the world, but ever since it was designated the eastern pivot of the “Axis of Evil” in President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address it has had legitimate grounds to feel threatened. The Korean peninsula’s partition is unnatural but as inevitable as the German partition during the Cold War. Adopting the same principle in Korea today that was applied to the reality of two German states in 1974, when the United States established diplomatic relations with East Germany, would be prudent and rational, a technical move that implies no approval of Pyongyang’s policies.

For the North Korean regime the possession of nuclear weapons is the only reliable insurance policy against Washington’s regime-change obsession. Had Serbia had the bomb in 1999 or Iraq in 2003, they would not have been subjected to illegal American attacks on patently spurious grounds (“the Kosovo genocide,” “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction”).

Yep.

It is not America’s responsibility to play Globo-Cop; certainly, God didn’t declare such in Scripture, so the decision of the powers that be to pursue such a course is entirely of their own devising.

Frankly, I hope the NORKs get nukes; then the American government will leave them the fuck alone.

Anyway, I’m sorry Trump feels the need to invoke conventional imperialist warmongering rhetoric against the NORKs, instead of charting a new course for America in terms of treatment of the Pyongyang regime; I’m also sorry he’s sucking up to China in the process. Of course, since China owns America, I suppose he felt the need to bow and kow-tow to them…

 

Trump administration to increase low-skill migrant workers, remove protections for American workers

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made out of red tape.” – attributed to Franz Kafka

Still believe in Trump?

A few days ago our legislators reached a tentative deal to fund the government through September; though the legislation has not been finalized and signed yet, the current agreement expires at the end of the week. Byron York reports that, like any 1,665-page bill, it’s stuffed with a lot of lawmakers’ pet priorities:

One of those priorities sure to cause controversy, if it becomes widely known, is a provision to greatly increase the number of temporary, low-wage foreign workers allowed into the United States. (In government-speak, “temporary” can mean a worker who spends up to nine months a year in the U.S. for multiple years.) The number of such workers is currently limited to 66,000 per year. Under the new spending bill, that could double.

…

It’s right there on page 735, in a section dealing with H-2B visas, which allow foreign workers to fill low-wage, seasonal, non-agricultural jobs in the United States. … “Notwithstanding the numerical limitation set forth [in the law],” the bill says, “the Secretary of Homeland Security, after consultation with the Secretary of Labor, and upon the determination that the needs of American businesses cannot be satisfied in fiscal year 2017 with United States workers who are willing, qualified, and able to perform temporary nonagricultural labor, may increase the total number of aliens who may receive a visa [under the H-2B law].”

…

In addition to increasing the number of H-2Bs, the new provision would remove some key protections for U.S. workers. In an email conversation, Michael Hancock, a former top official in the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, said that at present, there is a requirement that U.S. workers in the same geographical area as H-2B workers “are entitled to at least as generous wages and terms of employment as H-2B workers.” The visa provision in the spending bill, Hancock said, “forbids the Department of Labor from enforcing this protection on behalf of U.S. workers.”

Never mind the wall; how about just NOT increasing the total number of low-skill foreigners present in America, and protecting American workers?

What about ‘America First’, huh?

Hey, unswayable Trump loyalists: Still not tired of being betrayed?

 

Neo-cons, Democrats united in praise for Trump’s Syria bombing

Strange new respect…

There was certainly some jarring messaging coming from ordinarily cantankerous senators who have made a habit of criticizing the president. There was a new tone, for instance, from Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain following the strike against Assad’s regime.

“I was very proud of him,” Graham said, before reportedly comparing Trump to a conservative presidential icon.

“I think there’s a side to President Trump that’s very much like Ronald Reagan,” Graham said, according to the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel.

[…]

Trump “took action” by striking Assad’s airfield, McCain said. “For that, he deserves the support of the American people.”

Bill Kristol, the conservative editor of The Weekly Standard and an avowed #NeverTrumper, joined the Trump love-in, tweeting that “a growth spurt” in the president’s leadership appeared to be underway.

Democrats also endorsed the attack. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi did so publicly but with a caveat: the use of military force, she argued, should have been authorized first by Congress.

“I’m supportive of the Trump administration’s decision to launch airstrikes in response to Assad’s assault on his own people,” wrote Senator Jeanne Shaheen.

Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, described the action as “the right thing to do” in his written statement.

And not to be outdone, the former foreign affairs minister from Canada’s previous neo-Conservative regime also chimed in:

‘America is back’: John Baird says strike on Syria crucial in sending message

Former foreign affairs minister says Trudeau’s response ‘a wise decision’

Oh yeah, and Liberal Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau has indicated he’s fully on board, too:

Canada was briefed on and ‘fully supports’ U.S. missile strikes against Syria: PM

Now, I know that the Trump True Believers are of course in denial, and will no doubt spin this as an example of counter-intuitive brilliance on the part of the Donald, to elicit outright disavowals from the likes of Richard Spencer, Milo, Alex Jones, et al., no doubt to increase his support so he can enact the rest of his promises with decreased opposition, and with success.

Yeah, right…

Of course, I’m still glad he won, and beat Hillary; of course I’m still happy with some of what he’s accomplished, the Neil Gorsuch pick for the Supreme Court, and just the mere widening up of the Overton Window of acceptable American political discourse on subjects like immigration, Islam, etc. All good.

But he will NOT be the saviour of America from all its problems.

At best, he’ll be a good start; a turning point and a step or two in the right direction.

Let’s pray that he’ll do the best he can, by God’s grace, and in spite of himself.

Put not your trust in princes…