Tag Archives: Donald Trump

They Said That? 11/18/16

Posted on November 18, 2016 | Leave a comment

Two letters to the editor from today’s Wall Street Journal:

It appears liberal elites have learned nothing from Donald Trump’s victory if Democratic pollster Ann Greenberg is representative (“Groups of Women Voters Hurt Clinton,” U.S. News, Nov. 12). She concluded that there are women “who are skeptical about women’s political leadership” and that “we still live in a sexist country.”

As an older woman, a former clerical worker, who voted for Mr. Trump, I understand why blue-collar women voted as they did. I voted for him not because I am irrationally prejudiced against female leadership, but because I examined Mr. Trump’s policy positions and compared them to Hillary Clinton’s. Mrs. Clinton is a liberal progressive and made clear she would carry forward Barack Obama’s program. This would be contrary to my principles, which are free market and conservative. Mr. Trump spoke to my own policy concerns. Hillary did not. It’s that simple. My vote was hardly based on sexism.

We live in a country where progressive elites disdain ordinary women. They just cannot believe we are anything other than biased and ignorant.

Ellen Pollack
Baltimore

Once again the experts have dropped the ball. Women aren’t skeptical about women’s political leadership. They are skeptical about Hillary Clinton’s political leadership. Do the experts regard it as remotely possible for someone, regardless of gender, to vote against a woman without being “sexist?” Who indeed is being sexist here?

Mark Quinn
Naperville, Ill.

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Steve Bannon Interviewed: “It’s About Americans Not Getting F—ed Over”, by Tyler Durden

Posted on November 18, 2016 | Leave a comment

Parts of the mainstream media have been in a tizzy about Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Allegations with little or no support have been thrown around that he’s a racist, an anti-Semite, or both. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Moments ago, the Hollywood Reporter released the much anticipated Michael Wolff interview with Steve Bannon, the controversial president-elect’s chief strategist. As a preface, Wolff reveals that Bannon – unlike virtually anyone else in the “credible” media – predicted exactly how things would play out:

In late summer when I went up to see Steve Bannon, recently named CEO of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, in his office at Trump Tower in New York, he outlined a preposterous-sounding scenario. Trump, he said, would do surprisingly well among women, Hispanics and African-Americans, in addition to working men, and hence take Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan — and therefore the election. On Nov. 15, when I went back to Trump Tower, Bannon, promoted by the president-elect to chief strategist for the incoming administration, and by the media as the official symbol of all things hateful and virulent about the coming Trump presidency, said, as matter-of-factly as when he first sketched it out for me, “I told you so.”

Perhaps Trump naming Bannon “chief strategist” is not a bad idea.

Below we picked a few of the most notable excerpts from the interview, starting with Wolff’s description of what he saw on the day he visited Trump. He writes “the New York Times, in a widely circulated article, will describe this day at Trump Tower as a scene of “disarray” for the transition team.” It appears the NYT was being a source of fake news again:

“In fact, it’s all hands on: Mike Pence, the vice president-elect and transition chief, and Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, shuttling between full conference rooms; Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and by many accounts his closest advisor, conferring in the halls; Sen. Jeff Sessions in and out of meetings on the transition team floor; Rudy Giuliani upstairs with Trump (overheard: “Is the boss meeting-meeting with Rudy or just shooting the shit?”), and Bannon with a long line of men and women outside his corner office. If this is disarray, it’s a peculiarly focused and organized kind.”

Why did Wolff pick Bannon as the subject of his interview: simple – he is the brains of the operations, the man whose job is to make the Trump regime “intellectually and historically coherent.”

The focus on Bannon, if not necessarily the description, is right. He’s the man with the idea. If Trumpism is to represent something intellectually and historically coherent, it’s Bannon’s job to make it so. In this, he could not be a less reassuring or more confusing figure for liberals — fiercely intelligent and yet reflexively drawn to the inverse of every liberal assumption and shibboleth. A working class kid, he enlists in the navy after high school, gets a degree from Virginia Tech, then Georgetown, then Harvard Business School. Then it’s Goldman Sachs, then he’s a dealmaker and entrepreneur in Hollywood — where, in an unlikely and very lucky deal match-up, he gets a lucrative piece of Seinfeld royalties, ensuring his own small fortune — then into the otherworld of the right wing conspiracy and conservative media. (He partners with David Bossie, a congressional investigator of President Clinton, who later spearheaded the Citizens United lawsuit that effectively removed the cap on campaign spending, and who now, as the deputy campaign manager, is in the office next to Bannon’s.) And then to the Breitbart News Network, which with digital acumen and a mind-meld with the anger and the passion of the new alt-right (a liberal designation Bannon derides) he pushes to the inner circle of conservative media from Breitbart’s base on the west side of liberal Los Angeles.
Incidentally, Bannon appears to be a fan of “darkness”:

To continue reading: Steve Bannon Interviewed: “It’s About Americans Not Getting F—ed Over”

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Dear President Trump: Just Say No to the Neocons, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on November 18, 2016 | Leave a comment

Justin Raimondo gives Donald Trump some good advice, probably unsolicited. From Raimondo at antiwar.com:

The kudzu vine is one of the most invasive plants in existence: you cut it back, but that just emboldens it! You dig it up, but it keeps returning, stronger than ever. It is, in short, the horticultural equivalent of the neoconservatives, who have survived in spite of leading us over a cliff in Iraq, being roundly repudiated by the voters in the last three presidential elections, and even being called out by President-elect Donald Trump in his April 27 foreign policy speech, in which he said:

“My goal is to establish a foreign policy that will endure for several generations. That’s why I also look and have to look for talented experts with approaches and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect résumés but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war. We have to look to new people.

“We have to look to new people because many of the old people frankly don’t know what they’re doing, even though they may look awfully good writing in The New York Times or being watched on television.”

In that speech, and throughout the campaign, Trump took every opportunity to disdain the interventionist nation-building dogmas that had led the GOP and the nation to ruination, and lay out his own foreign policy vision of putting America first. “No country,” he averred, “has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Both our friends and our enemies put their countries above ours and we, while being fair to them, must start doing the same. We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism.”

From the neoconservative perspective, this was kryptonite. For the central canon of the neocon creed has been and always will be a militant internationalism. When the Soviet Union fell, and the War Party had no more dragons to slay, neocon consigliare Bill Kristol and sidekick Robert Kagan penned a piece laying out the neoconservative design for the new era, which they summed up rather succinctly as “benevolent global hegemony.” Here was globalism beyond the dreams of Alexander – and this is what Trump was and is rejecting.

The neocons know who are their enemies, and they accurately saw Trump as their undoing: they led the “Never Trump” mini-movement, and did everything in their power to destroy him. They sponsored and promoted two open letters from the GOP “foreign policy community,” a.k.a. the League of Discredited Warmongers, viciously attacking Trump: a concerted campaign to declare him “unfit” for office was promoted by the neoconservative media, which charged him with all the familiar epithets: “racist,” “authoritarian,” “isolationist,” and even “fascist.”

One of the loudest and most unrelenting was Eliot Cohen, who opined:

“He is not only an ignoramus, but he’s a dangerous ignoramus who doesn’t know the first thing about foreign policy and doesn’t care and has some very dangerous instincts,” Cohen, who served in the George W. Bush administration, told The Washington Post in a recent interview. ‘Part of what is so dangerous about him is not just his ignorance and contempt for our alliances, but his failure to understand how important these have been to our security since 1945. And he has already done a lot of damage. Our allies are deeply shaken by this election.’”

Those “dangerous instincts” Cohen is so worried about include an instinct to abjure the counsel of people like Cohen, who have a long record of being dead wrong – with deadly consequences.

To continue reading: Dear President Trump: Just Say No to the Neocons

 

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Here’s Why Trump Is The Perfect Scapegoat for Obama’s Failures, by Darius Shahtahmasebi

Posted on November 18, 2016 | 1 comment

Obama’s Middle Eastern policies have created terrorist blowback, most of which lands in Europe, but some of which reaches America. Donald Trump is being blamed for hostility towards Muslims, but he gave voice to Americans’ concerns about the kind of Islamic terrorism plaguing Europe. From Darius Shahtahmasebi at the antimedia.org:

According to a recent FBI analysis, there has been an uptick in the number of hate crimes and racist and bigoted behavior in the United States, particularly towards people of Muslim backgrounds. This surge in hate crimes has been so prominent it forced Donald Trump to respond personally to these attacks in an interview with 60 Minutes, in which he urged these criminals to “stop it.”

Fears regarding the effect of Trump’s election on racial and religious divisions in the United States have been adopted by a number of celebrities, such as director Joss Whedon. The mainstream media has also voiced these concerns. Take, for example, an article published by the Guardian last week titled, “Claims of hate crimes possibly linked to Trump’s election reported across the U.S.”

As distasteful and disturbing as the president-elect’s rhetoric may be, claiming Donald Trump is responsible for America’s underlying racism and bigotry is giving Trump more credit than he deserves. One could potentially argue that racism has always been alive and well in the United States, and that Trump gave a voice to those who were too scared to say what they were feeling. In that sense, people would argue Trump is still ultimately to blame.

But one should take note of the groups of people Trump has been so keen on demonizing, particularly Muslims. It is not as if Trump decided Americans should ban all proponents of the Jainism religion. There is a reason his call to deport and ban a certain class of people resonated with a large number of Americans. The American people know the status quo has not been working to their benefit — even under the Obama administration. At the same time, Muslims have largely been demonized as responsible for the United States’ lapses in national security.

Americans have seen ISIS-inspired terrorist attack after ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on the news, and Trump provided them with a useful solution on the campaign trail: ban all Muslims (his team has since backtracked but the spirit of the proposed policy remains).

The underlying problem, therefore, is not that Americans inherently hate Muslims. The problem is that Americans desire security from terror threats, something the current administration failed to provide and clearly not something Americans could have looked forward to under Hillary Clinton.

There’s no point in beating around the bush on this issue. Obama’s policies in the Middle East – and to a large extent, Clinton’s policies – have made the world less safe.

The Obama administration bombed seven Muslim countries in a six-year period, a figure that could make Bush Jr. seem Muslim-friendly. According to Salon, Obama dropped 23,144 bombs on six countries in 2015, alone.

As Salon notes:

“As Salon stressed in a piece about the escalation toward the new war in Libya, the disastrous 2011 NATO bombing of Libya plunged the country into chaos. Today, in the aftermath, there is no functioning federal government, and large swaths of the country are now controlled by rivaled factions and extremist groups.

“There are presently estimated to be 5,000 to 6,500 ISIS fighters in Libya. There were zero before the U.S.-backed war.” (emphasis added)

Last year, four former U.S. air force service members wrote a letter to Barack Obama warning him that the single most effective recruitment tool for groups like ISIS was the United States’ use of drone warfare across the Muslim world, courtesy of the president himself. In fact, three former U.S. air force drone operators have even backed a lawsuit against the president and other government officials. It was brought by a Yemeni man who lost members of his family in a drone strike in 2012.

To continue reading: Here’s Why Trump Is The Perfect Scapegoat for Obama’s Failures

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How We Will Win, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on November 16, 2016 | Leave a comment

The Trump revolution could lead to significant libertarian victories. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:

What the libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard dubbed the welfare-warfare state has held sway in the US, and in the West generally, since the run up to World War II. The “welfare” part of the equation describes the growth of the State as the source and guarantor of social equity, while the “warfare” side describes the role of the State – in this case, the American State – as the source and guarantor of the “international order.”

For the past half century or so this system has proved impregnable to would-be challengers. Indeed, the solidity and seeming permanence of this state of affairs was so convincing that certain of its champions theorized that we had reached, at long last, “the end of history” – that future developments in political and social science would merely refine and perfect the social democratic status quo, which would slowly but surely spread over the entire globe.

Yet history stubbornly refused to recognize its supposed endpoint. Things kept … happening, until, today, this supposedly immortal status quo is threatening to break apart in the face of populist rebellions from below.

The populist revolt currently shaking the American political landscape, and similar eruptions in Europe, herald the same sea change, albeit with somewhat different degrees of seismic intensity. In the United States, where a right-wing populist movement led by now President-elect Donald Trump has scored a major upset, the insurgents have stormed the fortress, and seized the inner sanctum of the ruling elite – the White House.

Trump defeated his Republican opponents and Hillary Clinton by attacking what he called their “globalist” agenda, and promised to put “America first” – a slogan that described his anti-Establishment politics to a tee. “Globalism,” or the idea of the American welfare-warfare state as the epicenter of a world system, perfectly encapsulates the ideology of the political class at “the end of history” – and captures the hubris that was their undoing.

Having supposedly achieved socioeconomic and moral perfection, our rulers embarked on a crusade to export their achievement to the rest of the world: and yet this was hardly a new idea. A similar crusade was undertaken by Woodrow Wilson in his war to “make the world safe for democracy,” and his successors continued the same mischief through World War II and the cold war.

This ongoing campaign for global uplift took on a new urgency with the fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union. Under the pretext of avenging the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and “draining the swamp” of the Middle East, the administration of George W. Bush undertook what many of his neoconservative cheerleaders saw as the final offensive against the last remnants of opposition to what Bush the Elder had called the “New World Order.”

That this ended in utter disaster did not deter the interventionists in the least. While ordinary people caviled at the monetary and human costs of perpetual war, the political class – secure in the certainty that both parties were safely in their hands – charged ahead. Their goal: eliminating the last vestiges of opposition to their international hegemony. This would eventually have to mean a confrontation with the two big holdouts: a new cold war with Russia, and the encirclement of China.

To continue reading: How We Will Win

 

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Feared, Not Loved, by Robert Gore

Posted on November 16, 2016 | 18 comments

One of the smarter things Donald Trump said during his campaign was that the stock market was in a “free money”-fueled bubble. He told Fox Business in early August that he was out of the stock market and “warned of ‘very scary scenarios’ ahead for investors” (“Trump says he ‘got out’ of stock market,” money.cnn.com).

The nominal national debt almost doubled during George W. Bush’s presidency and almost doubled again during Obama’s, to nearly $20 trillion. Estimates vary, but that $20 trillion is one-fifth to one-tenth of the US government’s unfunded medical and pension liabilities (the US GDP in 2015 was $17.914 trillion). Government, corporate, and personal debt in the US are all greater, in absolute amounts and as a percentage of the GDP, than they were before the last debt crisis began in 2008. The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet has expanded by roughly five times since that crisis.

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Sometime during the next four years history’s greatest debt bubble will pop. While most watched the crash in equity futures on election night and the huge recovery and rally the following days, the truly noteworthy action has been in the bond market. The yield on the benchmark ten-year US Treasury note has jumped from 1.80% to 2.23%, or over 20 percent. Pondering Trump’s pledges to significantly increase military and infrastructure spending, cut taxes, and not touch entitlements, the market concluded that much more debt is on the way. Hence the mark-down in bond prices, the mark-up in interest rates, and an acceleration of the bear market that began in July.

If Trump is confronted with a financial and economic crash, he will have a choice. He can let it happen, or he can apply the usual nostrums—big increases in government spending, intervention, and debt, and further expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet—and keep America not great for the duration of his probable one term. In other words, he can be like Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding, or he can be like Herbert Hoover.

Wilson and then Harding did nothing to stop a depression that started towards the end of Wilson’s term in 1920; interest rates were allowed to rise. They recognized that depressions have their uses. Unsustainable debt is rescheduled or repudiated, uncompetitive companies close, assets are repriced and move from less efficient to more efficient entrepreneurs and businesses, capital goods and labor are redeployed, and the way is cleared for economic and financial renewal. That one was severe, but it was over in eighteen months and set the stage for the Roaring Twenties (see “The Forgotten Depression,” James Grant, 2014).

Hoover, faced with a similar situation, followed all the policies contemporary Washington knows and loves. The New Deal—spending, public works, expanding the debt, and economic meddling—actually began during his administration. Roosevelt merely expanded it and threw in monetary depreciation, revaluing gold against the dollar. That’s why there was no Roaring Thirties, but those policies have been standard operating procedure ever since.

If Trump wants to upend eight decades of business as usual, he’ll not fight the impending, sorely needed wash out. Coming after so many doses of consequence-delaying, zombie-maintaining Keynesian snake oil, it will be severe and global, but if allowed to happen, not necessarily prolonged. Given the weakness of the last snake-oil promoted “recovery,” more of the same will not stop or even delay the pain. It will only keep politically favored zombies alive and increase the public’s already monumental anger at bail outs. Assistance should be confined to those—and there will be many—in truly dire economic straits.

If Trump follows the conventional course his presidency will fail. If he explains where the depression came from and why he has no choice but to let it happen, the economy will contract but emerge on a sounder footing, and he has a chance of presiding over a recovery. Either way, Trump, the most polarizing president-elect since Lincoln, is not destined to be loved. He should consider Niccolò Machiavelli’s sage advice in The Prince.

And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved. For of men it may generally be affirmed that they are thankless, fickle, false, studious to avoid danger, greedy of gain, devoted to you while you are able to confer benefits upon them, and ready, as I said before, while danger is distant to shed their blood, and sacrifice their property, their lives and their children for you; but in the hour of need they turn against you. The Prince, therefore, who without otherwise securing himself builds wholly on their professions is undone. For the friendships which we buy with a price, and do not gain by greatness and nobility of character, though they be fairly unearned are not made good, but fail us when we have occasion to use them.

Washington must fear Trump if he is to have any chance of a successful presidency. He was elected to put fear there; his supporters will desert him if he doesn’t. He will never be loved. One enters a nest of vipers with a blowtorch. The advice Trump is getting to make nice-nice with the vipers is dangerous twaddle. If he accepts business as usual, he’s done before he starts. While everything he does must be procedurally correct and comport with the law, he has to make Washington sweat.

If you’ve ever been audited by the IRS, you know cold-sweat fear. It’s time to put the shoe on the other foot. The federal government spends almost $4 trillion a year. Past spending and current budgets cry out for a comprehensive audit. Congress passed a law twenty-five years ago mandating an audit of the Defense Department; it has yet to comply. Trillions of dollars have been wasted over that time. A team of outside auditors should examine not just Defense, but the entire federal government. Make it a requirement before any agency or department can submit its next budget.

The auditors will find not just unaccounted-for spending and sloppy bookkeeping, but diversion of funds, corruption, and criminality. Whatever they uncover should be investigated. The beauty of audits is that anybody who objects to them sounds like a venal idiot, given the US government’s well-documented record of wasteful spending. Audits would allow Trump administration to the seize the initiative and put opponents and backstabbers on the defensive. And nobody can object to subsequent investigations if that’s where the audits point.

Speaking of investigations, nothing would provoke more fear and outrage among the ruling elite than if Trump fulfilled his second-debate pledge and appointed a special prosecutor for Hillary Clinton. Who knows where that might lead, including up to the departing president himself. Obama may issue a prospective pardon for the Clintons before he leaves office, but Trump should force his hand. If the Clintons are to be swept under the rug, put Obama’s fingerprints on the broom. Of course, if the Clintons have nothing to hide, no pardon will be required.

A final suggestion: as soon as possible Trump should end a US military intervention somewhere and terminate a government program, agency, or department, the bigger the better. Those would be dramatic departures from how Washington has operated for decades and save money in the coming era of fiscal austerity. Just the idea that something can actually be terminated will have the capital crowd shaking in their Guccis.

Until the swamp is drained, there is no prospect of making America great again.

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A Trump Doctrine — ‘America First’ by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on November 15, 2016 | Leave a comment

Donald Trump’s foreign policy views are antithetical to those of the neoconservatives and are a big reason he won the election. Will performance match promise? From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

However Donald Trump came upon the foreign policy views he espoused, they were as crucial to his election as his views on trade and the border.

Yet those views are hemlock to the GOP foreign policy elite and the liberal Democratic interventionists of the Acela Corridor.

Trump promised an “America First” foreign policy rooted in the national interest, not in nostalgia. The neocons insist that every Cold War and post-Cold War commitment be maintained, in perpetuity.

On Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” Trump said: “You know, we’ve been fighting this war for 15 years. … We’ve spent $6 trillion in the Middle East, $6 trillion — we could have rebuilt our country twice. And you look at our roads and our bridges and our tunnels … and our airports are … obsolete.”

Yet the War Party has not had enough of war, not nearly.

They want to confront Vladimir Putin, somewhere, anywhere. They want to send U.S. troops to the eastern Baltic. They want to send weapons to Kiev to fight Russia in Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea.

They want to establish a no-fly zone and shoot down Syrian and Russian planes that violate it, acts of war Congress never authorized.

They want to trash the Iran nuclear deal, though all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies told us, with high confidence, in 2007 and 2011, Iran did not even have a nuclear weapons program.

Other hardliners want to face down Beijing over its claims to the reefs and rocks of the South China Sea, though our Manila ally is talking of tightening ties to China and kicking us out of Subic Bay.

In none of these places is there a U.S. vital interest so imperiled as to justify the kind of war the War Party would risk.

Trump has the opportunity to be the president who, like Harry Truman, redirected U.S. foreign policy for a generation.

After World War II, we awoke to find our wartime ally, Stalin, had emerged as a greater enemy than Germany or Japan. Stalin’s empire stretched from the Elbe to the Pacific.

In 1949, suddenly, he had the atom bomb, and China, the most populous nation on earth, had fallen to the armies of Mao Zedong.

As our situation was new, Truman acted anew. He adopted a George Kennan policy of containment of the world Communist empire, the Truman Doctrine, and sent an army to prevent South Korea from being overrun.

At the end of the Cold War, however, with the Soviet Empire history and the Soviet Union having disintegrated, George H.W. Bush launched his New World Order. His son, George W., invaded Iraq and preached a global crusade for democracy “to end tyranny in our world.”

A policy born of hubris.

Result: the Mideast disaster Trump described to Lesley Stahl, and constant confrontations with Russia caused by pushing our NATO alliance right up to and inside what had been Putin’s country.

How did we expect Russian patriots to react?

The opportunity is at hand for Trump to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy to the world we now inhabit, and to the vital interests of the United States.

To continue reading: A Trump Doctrine — ‘America First’

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The Bolton Threat to Trump’s Middle East Policy, by Gareth Porter

Posted on November 15, 2016 | Leave a comment

Given his disastrous history and views, John Bolton should have no place in a Trump administration. From Gareth Porter at antiwar.org:

Post-election comments on Middle East policy last week by President-elect Donald Trump and one his campaign advisers have provoked speculation about whether Trump will upend two main foreign policy lines of the Obama administration in the Middle East.

But the more decisive question about the future of US policy toward the region is whom Trump will pick for his national security team – and especially whether he will nominate John Bolton to become Secretary of State. Bolton, one of the most notorious members of Dick Cheney’s team plotting wars in the George W. Bush administration, would certainly push for the effective nullification of the main political barrier to US confrontation with Iran: the 2015 multilateral nuclear deal.

Trump created a minor stir by giving an interview to the Wall Street Journal last Thursday in which he reiterated his criticism of the Obama administration’s involvement in the war against Syria’s Assad and supported cooperation with Russia against the Islamic State group. And a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser once connected with an extremist sectarian Christian militia in Lebanon named Walid Phares suggested in an interview with BBC radio that Trump would demand that Iran “change [a] few issues” in the agreement and that “the agreement as it is right now…is not going to be accepted by a Trump administration”.

The significance of that interview, however, is very unclear. Trump himself had avoided threatening such a move during the campaign, denouncing the nuclear agreement as “disastrous” but avoiding any pledge to renounce it as his Republican rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio had done. In his speech to AIPAC, Trump thundered against the agreement but promised only to enforce it strictly and hold Iran “accountable”.

Trump has consistently embraced the long-standing official US animosity toward Iran, but thus far he has given no indication that he intends to provoke an unnecessary crisis with Iran.

In any case, Trump’s own views will only be the starting point for policymaking on Syria and Iran. His national security team will have the power to initiate policy proposals as well as effective veto power over Trump’s foreign policy preferences. That is why Trump’s choices of nominations for the top positions on national security will certainly be the crucial factor in determining what policy lines ultimately emerge on those issues – and why the real possibility of Bolton’s nomination as Secretary of State now represents the greatest threat to international peace and security.

Barack Obama became president with a firm intention to get US combat forces out of Iraq within 16 months as he had promised during the campaign. But in his very first meeting with CENTCOM Commander Gen. David Petraeus, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen in late January 2009, Petraeus and his two allies pressed Obama to back down on his pledge, arguing that it wasn’t realistic. In the end, Obama accepted a scheme devised by the military and Pentagon officials under which combat brigades remained in Iraq long after the August 2010 Obama deadline for their withdrawal with no reduction in combat capability. They were simply given additional tasks of advising and assisting Iraqi military units and renamed “advisory and assistance brigades.”

To continue reading: The Bolton Threat to Trump’s Middle East Policy

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The Scenic Route to Hell, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on November 15, 2016 | Leave a comment

The election cannot change the fundamental economic facts facing America. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

I rarely comment on specific news items, as I tend to focus on the long view. However, I’ve been repeatedly asked to comment on the recent American presidential election and what a win by Donald Trump will mean.

Of course, those who read this publication are rarely liberals in the modern sense. Many are conservative, but the majority are likely to be libertarians. Those from the latter two groups may well be singing, “Ding-dong, the witch is dead” at present, but this will not be the case. Mrs. Clinton and her fellow globalists are not about to shrink back into the night.

Already the mighty hand of George Soros is visible on the East and West coasts of the US, in the form of massive demonstrations and, in some cases, riots from the “Not my president” crowd. This is a setback for them, not an endgame.

At the same time, of course, a quieter group – those who supported Mister Trump – are hoping that all will be right with the world in future. They will be anticipating a stemming of the migration tide from Mexico and the Middle East. They’ll be hoping to see companies located in the US to increase hiring and those that have left the US due to excessive corporate tax returning. They may also be anticipating a diminished national debt and an overall return to prosperity.

They will be disappointed.

Mister Trump has never been a conservative of the traditional school. He’s more of the modern school, which translates roughly to “collectivism lite.” His solution for exiting businesses is not diminished taxation, but trade embargos (check the Hawley–Smoot Tariff of 1930 to see how well that will turn out). He doesn’t wish to do away with socialized medicine, only to scrap Obamacare and replace it with “Obamacare lite.” (Government will still be the driver of the system, not the private sector.)

He supports mandatory social programmes like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc., that gobble up 67 percent of government expenditure, even though they have reached the point that they are not only unfunded but unfundable.

In addition, he has promised to rebuild the country’s aging infrastructure, expand the military, ramp up aggression against ISIS and bomb oilfields controlled by the Islamic State.

Mister Trump has, however, stated that he will diminish direct taxation. The highest earners would pay 33 percent and the corporate tax rate would drop to 15 percent. Yet, he offers no explanation as to how he will make up for the shortfall. Nor does he explain how he will deal with the mushrooming national debt.

What this tells us is that, despite the euphoria that is presently being felt by Mister Trump’s supporters, the fundamentals that plague the US economy remain present and not only is it impossible for him to reverse the pre-existent slide toward economic collapse, it’s not really even a part of the agenda.

Under Mister Trump, the US will still see inflation for the US dollar and larger deficits.

To continue reading: The Scenic Route to Hell

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‘Tolerant’ educators exile Trump voters from campus: Glenn Reynolds

Posted on November 15, 2016 | Leave a comment

If those who were disappointed in the election result are given special dispensations and solicitude on college campuses, doesn’t that marginalize those who were happy with Trump’s victory? Aren’t the latter marginalized, which right thinking colleges supposedly abhor? Guess that only goes one way. From Glenn Reynolds at usatoday.com:
Official safe spaces marginalize Republicans as the ‘other’ and turn universities into a joke.

One of the more amusing bits of fallout from last week’s election has been the safe-space response of many colleges and universities to the election of the “wrong” candidate. But on closer examination, this response isn’t really amusing. In fact, it’s downright mean.

Donald Trump’s substantial victory, when most progressives expected a Hillary Clinton landslide, came as a shock to many. That shock seems to have been multiplied in academe, where few people seem to know any Trump supporters — or, at least, any Trump supporters who’ll admit to it.

The response to the shock has been to turn campuses into kindergarten. The University of Michigan Law School announced a ”post-election self-care” event with “food” and “play,” including “coloring sheets, play dough (sic), positive card-making, Legos and bubbles with your fellow law students.” (Embarrassed by the attention, UM Law scrubbed the announcement from its website, perhaps concerned that people would wonder whether its graduates would require Legos and bubbles in the event of stressful litigation.)

Stanford emailed its students and faculty that psychological counseling was available for those experiencing “uncertainty, anger, anxiety and/or fear” following the election. So did the University of Michigan’s Flint campus.

Meanwhile, even the Ivy League wasn’t immune, with the University of Pennsylvania (Trump’s alma mater) creating a post-election safe space with puppies and coloring books:

Student Daniel Tancredi reported that the people who attended were “fearful” about the results of the election.

“For the most part, students just hung out and ate snacks and made small talk,” Tancredi told “The College Fix.” “Of course, that was in addition to coloring and playing with the animals.”

At Cornell, The Fix reported, students held a “cry in.”

As the event took place, students — roughly 20 or so, according to The Cornell Daily Sun’s video — wrote their reactions and emotions on poster boards with colored markers, or with chalk on the ground. A chilly day on the Ithaca campus, at one point the demonstrators huddled together as what appeared to be a barista brought them warm drinks. Several adults, most likely professors, stood around the group. The event appeared to take on the atmosphere of a funeral wake.

Yale had a ”group scream.”

At Tufts, the university offered arts and crafts, while the University of Kansas reminded students that there were plenty of “therapy dogs” available. At other schools, exams were canceled and professors expressed their sympathy to traumatized students.

It’s easy to mock this as juvenile silliness — because, well, it is juvenile silliness of the sort documented in Frank Furedi’s What’s Happened To The University? But that’s not all it is. It’s also exactly what these schools purport to abhor: an effort to marginalize and silence part of the university community.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/11/14/trump-liberal-college-campuses-michigan-yale-glenn-reynolds-column/93765568/

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