The Comey "Nothingburger"

From my latest, at RT.com:

To observers of goings-on in Washington over the past year or so, Thursday’s train wreck had every hallmark of a very familiar scenario, in which the media and the Democrats loudly herald something to be the certain downfall of one Donald J. Trump, only to suffer the same fate as Charlie Brown over and over again, as Lucy snatches that football away.

Meanwhile, President Trump is left to savor the big juicy nothingburger, cooked way past well-done and served with a ketchupy mess. Just the way he likes it.

The Comey nothingburger: Why ex-FBI director’s testimony won’t topple Trump (Op-Edge) https://t.co/EjVLje006k

— RT (@RT_com) June 10, 2017

'Drive them out': Trump sends message to Muslims on terrorism

I am far from the only one to make the observation that the mainstream media in the US are in throes of the Trump Derangement Syndrome - a mutation, if you will, of the Putin Derangement Syndrome diagnosed a decade back - and treating everything the 45th POTUS does with alarm and contempt irrespective of what it is, simply because he is the one doing it.

Thus the headlines about his trip to Saudi Arabia are filled with nitpicking about one particular phrase he didn't say, the multi-billion weapons deal with a country the media suddenly discovered was waging a war on Yemen (having not given a damn about said war before January 20, 2017), and obsessing about his daughter and son-in-law yet again.

FULL SPEECH: President Trump delivers speech to Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia https://t.co/62boIRKJsT pic.twitter.com/xY6SABYcsy

— The Hill (@thehill) May 21, 2017

Therefore I was surprised to see The Hill post a full transcript of Trump's speech, and even more surprised to read what was in it:

America is a sovereign nation and our first priority is always the safety and security of our citizens. We are not here to lecture—we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship. Instead, we are here to offer partnership—based on shared interests and values—to pursue a better future for us all.

[...]

Young Muslim boys and girls should be able to grow up free from fear, safe from violence, and innocent of hatred. And young Muslim men and women should have the chance to build a new era of prosperity for themselves and their peoples.

With God’s help, this summit will mark the beginning of the end for those who practice terror and spread its vile creed. At the same time, we pray this special gathering may someday be remembered as the beginning of peace in the Middle East—and maybe, even all over the world.

But this future can only be achieved through defeating terrorism and the ideology that drives it.

[...]

There can be no coexistence with this violence. There can be no tolerating it, no accepting it, no excusing it, and no ignoring it.

Every time a terrorist murders an innocent person, and falsely invokes the name of God, it should be an insult to every person of faith.

Terrorists do not worship God, they worship death.

[...]

This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects, or different civilizations.

This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life, and decent people of all religions who seek to protect it.

This is a battle between Good and Evil.

[...]

But the nations of the Middle East cannot wait for American power to crush this enemy for them. The nations of the Middle East will have to decide what kind of future they want for themselves, for their countries, and for their children.

It is a choice between two futures—and it is a choice America CANNOT make for you.

A better future is only possible if your nations drive out the terrorists and extremists. Drive. Them. Out.

DRIVE THEM OUT of your places of worship.

DRIVE THEM OUT of your communities.

DRIVE THEM OUT of your holy land, and

DRIVE THEM OUT OF THIS EARTH.

[...]

Religious leaders must make this absolutely clear: Barbarism will deliver you no glory – piety to evil will bring you no dignity. If you choose the path of terror, your life will be empty, your life will be brief, and YOUR SOUL WILL BE CONDEMNED.

[...]

Starving terrorists of their territory, their funding, and the false allure of their craven ideology, will be the basis for defeating them.

So much for him being 'Islamophobic' or 'bowing down' to terrorism.

And while he accused Iran of being the ultimate sponsor of terrorism - disingenuous in the least, because it's Iran and Hezbollah doing a lion's share of fighting against ISIS, which the previous US government tacitly endorsed as a way to "regime change" in Syria - that makes it doubly hard for the Gulf Arabs to disregard his message, seeing as how they've been harping about "Iranian aggression" for years.

And if they do shrug off his offer (which I suspect they will), that just makes it clear which side they are on. After decades of pretending the problem didn't exist, finally, some clarity.

What Putin really said about Trump, Reagan and the DNC

The Atlantic Imperialists really dislike Vladimir Putin. They dislike Russia in principle, as the ultimate "other" - a large, European civilization separate from the post-Roman West. As usual, the Economist is completely wrong: It is really the Empire that sees Russia as an existential threat, because its resurgence provided proof positive that the Western "end of history" paradigm was even desirable, much less inevitable. As for the validity of Western models... how are those working out these days?

Vladimir Putin's goal is to undermine Western democracies whose models present an existential threat to his rule https://t.co/6JUXNKgkTI

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) December 24, 2016

Much has been made of Putin's supposed trolling of the Democrats for being sore losers at the December 23 press conference at the Kremlin. This comes from the same media that kept assuring everyone that Hillary Clinton's presidency was inevitable, so forgive me if I am inclined to take it with a grain of salt. Especially since the actual transcript of Putin's remarks at the marathon year-end press conference paints a different picture (all emphasis mine):

Vladimir Putin: I have commented on this issue on a number of occasions. If you want to hear it one more time, I can say it again. The current US Administration and leaders of the Democratic Party are trying to blame all their failures on outside factors. I have questions and some thoughts in this regard.

We know that not only did the Democratic Party lose the presidential election, but also the Senate, where the Republicans have the majority, and Congress, where the Republicans are also in control. Did we, or I also do that? We may have celebrated this on the “vestiges of a 17th century chapel,” but were we the ones who destroyed the chapel, as the saying goes? This is not the way things really are. All this goes to show that the current administration faces system-wide issues, as I have said at a Valdai Club meeting.

It seems to me there is a gap between the elite’s vision of what is good and bad and that of what in earlier times we would have called the broad popular masses. I do not take support for the Russian President among a large part of Republican voters as support for me personally, but rather see it in this case as an indication that a substantial part of the American people share similar views with us on the world’s organisation, what we ought to be doing, and the common threats and challenges we are facing. It is good that there are people who sympathise with our views on traditional values because this forms a good foundation on which to build relations between two such powerful countries as Russia and the United States, build them on the basis of our peoples’ mutual sympathy.

They would be better off not taking the names of their earlier statesmen in vain, of course. I’m not so sure who might be turning in their grave right now. It seems to me that Reagan would be happy to see his party’s people winning everywhere, and would welcome the victory of the newly elected President so adept at catching the public mood, and who took precisely this direction and pressed onwards to the very end, even when no one except us believed he could win.

The outstanding Democrats in American history would probably be turning in their graves though. Roosevelt certainly would be because he was an exceptional statesman in American and world history, who knew how to unite the nation even during the Great Depression’s bleakest years, in the late 1930s, and during World War II. Today’s administration, however, is very clearly dividing the nation. The call for the electors not to vote for either candidate, in this case, not to vote for the President-elect, was quite simply a step towards dividing the nation. Two electors did decide not to vote for Trump, and four for Clinton, and here too they lost. They are losing on all fronts and looking for scapegoats on whom to lay the blame. I think that this is an affront to their own dignity. It is important to know how to lose gracefully.

But my real hope is for us to build business-like and constructive relations with the new President and with the future Democratic Party leaders as well, because this is in the interests of both countries and peoples.

To save the Republic, kill the Empire

“My foreign policy will always put the interests of Ukrainian people and Ukrainian security above all else. That will be the foundation of every single decision I will make. ‘Ukraine first’ will be the major and overriding theme of my administration."

Imagine for a moment that these words were spoken by one of the Empire's puppets in Kiev, installed after the February 2014 coup. Though official Washington lavishes praise on its Ukrainian stooges no matter how appalling their behavior, the outpouring of support for this kind of a statement would be deafening.

Except it wasn't a Poroshenko, Avakov, Saakashvili or "Yahtzee" who said it, but one Donald J. Trump - using "America" and "American," of course, in the quote I altered above. And because of that, the entire Washington establishment had a point-and-shriek episode.

Establishment figures left and right snarked about the speech being terrible, inconsistent, and awful. None other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Sith Lord of the Democratic foreign policy cult, called it a political suicide. This, mind you, is the same man who came up with the brilliant idea of using "riled-up Moslems" as a weapon against the Soviet Union in the 1970s, unleashing the modern-day jihad on the world, and remains unrepentant about it. It may have delivered his beloved Poland into NATO vassalage, but it sure hasn't helped the average citizen of the United States any.

Others guffawed at Trump's pronunciation of "Tanzania," or claimed that advocating unpredictability and consistent principles was somehow absurd. If there is an inconsistency in Trump's speech, though, it's in his simultaneous denunciation of Iran and ISIS - even though Iran is one of the few countries actually opposing the firestorm of jihad in the Middle East, sparked by Zbigniew and fanned by Bush the Lesser's 2003 invasion of Iraq and Obama's fumbling "regime change" policy in Syria (both of which Trump is on the record for opposing).

I'm neither a registered Republican, nor a Trump supporter. I did not vote for him in my state's primary, either. But as I listened to his speech today - having spent the better part of 15 years poring over US foreign policy and writing hundreds of articles about it at Antiwar.com, here and elsewhere - it struck me that Trump has just made an argument that the Trans-Atlantic Empire has eaten the American Republic alive, and that if there is any hope of saving the latter, the former must be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Hillary Clinton sneers that one can't "make America great again" because it's already great. Easy for her to say, when she's basically running not for a chief executive of a constitutional republic, but the Kaiserin of the Greater Atlantic Reich. Meanwhile, the current Kaiser thinks it perfectly acceptable to visit London and lecture the British on how sovereignty shouldn't really be a thing.

Back in 2012, Ron Paul made the argument against the Empire. He was muzzled by the media, and his supporters were shouted down at the GOP convention, with the establishment creating a special rule to favor its preferred front-runner. Who, by the by, ended up getting destroyed by Obama that November. The establishment has tried every trick in their playbook to do the same with Trump - and failed every step of the way.

Trump has already turned several of the establishment's sacred cows - open borders, free trade, and Muslims come to mind - into so much kebab. Today he challenged the Empire itself, and promised the chattering classes who spill other people's blood and money with reckless abandon that he will throw them out with the dishwater come November. Their snark and smug posturing is hiding what must be panic at the prospect that he may actually win the election six months from now, and put into practice what he just preached.

I don't know if he's genuine, if he'll be able to resist the lure of power and the insidious whispers of the dark side to join the Empire and rule the world - or at least pretend that's the case, as the current lot does - but I've spent enough time gazing into the abyss of trans-Atlantic (and -Pacific) imperialism to know that Trump's speech today made a powerful point. I don't know if that will be enough to save the American Republic, to be honest. But it will be interesting to watch him try, and the imperialists squirm.

(The usual disclaimer about this being strictly my personal opinion and in no way related to my employer or my work applies; ignore it at your own peril.)

Donald Trump on Kosovo in 1999

When I saw the media in Serbia reporting about Donald Trump's alleged condemnation of the 1999 NATO attack on then-Yugoslavia, also known as the Kosovo War, I shrugged it off as disinformation. Most of them, I'm sad to say, are almost entirely dedicated to gaslighting the general populace, and as likely to spread confusion and cognitive dissonance as actual news.

It turns out that Donald Trump did talk to Larry King about Kosovo - but everyone is leaving out that this took place in October 1999. That is sort of important, though: by that point, the Serbian province had been "liberated" by NATO occupation forces, and the ethnic cleansing of non-Albanians by the terrorist KLA had been going on since mid-June.

Here is the segment touching on Kosovo, from the official CNN transcript (with my emphasis):

KING: But, we don't know the - for example, you and Kosovo. Would you have done what Clinton did?

TRUMP: Well, I would have done it a little bit differently. And I know this would sound terrible. But look at the havoc that they have wreaked in Kosovo. I mean, we could say we lost very few people. Of course, we had airplanes 75,000 feet up in the air dropping bombs. But, look at what we've done to that land and to those people and the deaths that we've caused.

Now, they haven't been caused with us and the allies because we were way up in the air in planes. But, at some point, you had to put troops in so not everybody could go over the borders and everything else, and a lot of people agree with that.
Now, would people have been killed? Perhaps, perhaps more. But, at least ultimately, you would have had far fewer deaths. And you wouldn't have had the havoc and the terror that you've got right now. So, you know, I don't know if they consider that a success because I can't consider it a success.

KING: You don't.

TRUMP: They bombed the hell out of a country, out of a whole area, everyone is fleeing in every different way, and nobody knows what's happening, and the deaths are going on by the thousands.

He could be referring to the KLA ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Roma, and other groups here. But true to himself, Trump is being very vague and it is impossible to pin the statements down. At the time, he was considering running for the presidency, but ultimately decided against it.

It would certainly be interesting if someone asked him the same question today, 17 years later, when he is actually running for president (and may be getting the nomination, too).