Isolationism? Fascism?

In the days of Hillary and her pundits on the tube we were lead to believe that Trump was an isolationist……those incessant babbling from the pundits and what happened?

It’s nearly impossible to read major newspapers, magazines, or online publications in recent months without encountering a plethora of articles contending that the United States is turning inward and “going alone,” “abandoning Washington’s global leadership role” or “retreating from the world.” These trends supposedly herald the arrival of a new “isolationism.” The chief villain in all of these worrisome developments is, of course, Donald Trump. There is just one problem with such arguments; they are vastly overstated bordering on utterly absurd.

President Trump is not embracing his supposed inner isolationist. The policy changes that he has adopted regarding both security and international economic issues do not reflect a desire to decrease Washington’s global hegemonic status. Instead, they point to a more unilateral and militaristic approach, but one that still envisions a hyper-activist U.S. role.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/where-trumps-alleged-isolationism-32996

I admit that I do not like many of Trump’s foreign policies but as an analyst I just do not see a lean toward isolationism……just another broken promise?

Then there are those that kept saying that the election of Trump and some of his policies were ushering in a time of fascism in the US……actually the calls for fascism were loudest in Europe from the pundits……what happened?

Were fascism to ascend again in Europe, international security would be menaced and the liberal international order be even more imperilled. However, Europe’s current far-right parties fail to meet the minimum fascist criteria.

Just as the taxonomy of European far-right parties is not settled, there is no unanimously agreed definition of 1930s fascism. Differences over generic fascism or a recognisable fascist ideology punctuate the scholarly literature.

Even the two fascist exemplars, Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany, had important differences as well as similarities. However, the fascist movements that arose after 1918 and their shallow imitators—like Franco’s Spain and the Romanian Iron Guard—can be distinguished from today’s far-right movements.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2018/10/10/fascism_has_not_returned_113881.html

To be honest I could find fascism in the policies of Reagan and both Bush….just as those “people” on the Right want to find aspects of the Dems that they think smacks of socialism…..

These two stories were nothing more than sensationalism and speculation that drives the MSM these days….

Turn The Page!

Closing Thought–15Oct18

I know that it is October….but stop and think about the incidents and events that were reported in September…A new book, an anonymous Op-Ed and an Obama speech in the first seven days of September appeared to reveal dangerous insider moves against a dangerous, but constitutionally elected president.

An interesting piece written in Consortium News…..

In the first seven days of September efforts to manage and perhaps oust a constitutionally elected president were stunningly made public, raising complex questions about America’s vaunted democratic system.

What unfolded appears reminiscent of the novel and film Seven Days in May: the story of an attempted military coup against a U.S. president who sought better relations with Russia. The fictional president was based on the real one, John F. Kennedy, who opened the White House in 1963 to director John Frankenheimer to film the only scenes of a Hollywood movie ever made there.

Kennedy was well aware of the Pentagon brass’ political fury after his refusal to proceed with a full-scale assault against Cuba in the Bay of Pigs operation. It was compounded by his desire for detente with Moscow after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Kennedy expressed forcefully in his seminal American University address, five months before his death.

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/10/03/seven-days-in-september/

If nothing else watch the embedded video……

We are making history day after day…a history that we will eventually try to run away from….people like me will not let that happen…I will keep reminding the voter just how important it is to vote for issues and not slogans or promises.

New Politics, Old Ideas

As we keep an eye on yet another hurricane…this one is named Michael……and we wait to see……

The mid-terms are upon us and the so-called “blue wave” and we have a crop of “new faces” for the election……and some are even calling it a New Left.

Personally I think that is so much garbage to sell papers….there are very few new ideas just new faces on the Left….but that does not make it a change of direction.

Several articles on this subject……

Remember the “libertarian moment?” Not so long ago, commentariat from Reason magazine to the opinion pages of The New York Timesnoted a resurgence of libertarian ideas, driven by economic and technological fragmentation of power, and by the rise of a new generation of libertarian candidates such as the Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.

Yet the “libertarian moment” has not ushered in a new golden age of free-market thinking and innovative market-based policies. The Tea Party movement, of which the “libertarian moment” now seems an epiphenomenon, radicalized the Republican base into demanding ever-more extreme measures only to create a zombie—Donald Trump—whom nobody could control.

The bourgeoning “democratic socialism” on the Left carries echoes of the Tea Party movement. Both may seem refreshing after decades of groupthink and complacency in the political center. But neither is offering genuinely new ideas or a coherent governing strategy.

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/09/11/radical-politics-old-ideas/

More information…….

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2018-08-13/brand-new-left-same-old-problems

Will the “Blue Wave” change anything?

Americans across the country will be bracing for the coming Blue Wave; a self-induced disaster that will outpace even the climate change induced storms sweeping the country. The Blue Wave is inevitable as the inaction on climate change that will come with it. Democrats feel entitled to fill more seats with hot air now that the Not-So-Great Pumpkin is an international embarrassment. Donald Trump’s speech to the U.N. was similarly full of hot air, despite the encouraging words against globalization. Trump wants less foreign aid, diplomacy and immigration. But he also wants more war and handouts for the global elites. Add this all up and it’s a pitiful resistance to the devastation to working people that globalization has caused across the globe.

Down with the globalists! Trump says he was being funny on purpose. But Trump is never funny, and he never does anything on purpose. But he is right. Down with the globalists! The words may be hallow but they are correct.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/09/28/the-blue-wave-is-awash-with-hypocrisy/

Of course when we talk about a New Left……the minds will go to Democratic Socialism…..which I do not agree with….but to get my readers caught up…….

Occasionally a phrase supports a wide range of political posturing while bearing little determinable relationship to actionable politics. ‘Income inequality’ is one of these phrases. Few using it are communists, a politics that recognizes concentrated economic power as both cause and effect in the skewed distribution of income and wealth. And the entire point of capitalism is the concentration of these that functions as (circular) proof of the social utility created by capitalists. As corollary to American democracy, the phrase ignores centuries of evidence that political power is determined by economic power.

Of current relevance is its place in the programs of Democratic Socialism, a rebranding of New Deal type social welfare programs that proponents (I am one) apparently intend to fit into existing American political economy. As one of ‘a multiplicity of tactics,’ the lives of the poorer 90% of the country could be vastly improved by Medicare for all, Federal government funded college educations and a job guarantee that pays a living wage and benefits. However, the improbability that Western capitalists, particularly American capitalists, will loosen their grip to facilitate functional versions of these programs was better understood in the late nineteenth century than it is today.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/09/28/democratic-socialism-and-political-power/

We will know one way or the other the first of next year…..

Closing Thought-30Apr18

When you turn your TV on to your favorite news channel you get very little actually news and a whole lot of opinion……and every day a whole line up of experts to ask questions to and allow to give their paid opinion….we see lots of “experts without expertise”……

The strong ratings of the first episode of the revived Roseanne set off an avalanche of commentary. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, for instance, John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, called the show’s success a “wakeup call for Hollywood.” Given how well it had done in Middle America, he said, the lesson was clear: for those who serve underserved Donald Trump voters, there are “riches to be reaped.”

Anand Giridharadas, a Brooklyn-based writer and MSNBC analyst, saw a broader truth: “Working-class white people may claim to be against identity politics, but they actually crave identity politics.” They want to be “seen and witnessed” in the same way that women and people of color do. With its glimpses of Maxwell House coffee and kitchen towels stitched with football logos, the show made an effort to pay respect to the details “of a certain demographic’s life.”

This is the problem I have with most news organizations……there are a couple of “fake” experts that give a fake look to several very serious subjects.

Plus there have been terrible comparisons that are nothing more than a variation of “fake news”……

After the justified uproar over pro-Trump Sinclair Broadcast Group forcing its scores of affiliates to humiliate themselves by reading an on-air script condemning “misleading” news, one would think other media outlets would be a little more careful not to mimic such behavior. Nonetheless, MSNBC—which rightfully tore into Sinclair Broadcast (4/2/18) for having its news reporters read off a corporate script—did a toned-down version of the same thing last Friday on Morning Joe (4/20/18).

Comcast corporate forced its nominally independent pundits and news anchors of Morning Joe to air a cultish 8-minute commercial for Comcast’s “Comcast Cares Day,” the lowlight of which was MSNBC host Al Sharpton comparing Comcast to Nelson Mandela:

“This is, I think, the way we can bring the world to where Mandela wanted us, where corporations don’t become expansive and influential just for personal wealth, but for a purpose, so that we have the ability to do good.”

http://theantimedia.com/comcast-msnbc-nelson-mandela/

It is no secret that I have been a staunch critic of the corporate media……where news is just propaganda.

The Death Of Clintonism

All Hail! The King and Queen have left the room…..(and the peasants danced)………

I have not hidden my distaste for anything Clinton. To me they are NO better than those banksters of years ago….they are only in it for the wealthy….and I do understand why so many black people think that the Clintons are all that and a bag of chips…..they did little to improve their lives or the lives of their children…

I will say I was not a Trump supporter neither did I support Clinton but the one thing that I hope this past election has given us, as a country, is the death of “Clintonism”.

In September 1963, two months before his death, John F. Kennedy mused aloud to his old friend the journalist Charles Bartlett about the prospects for the 1968 presidential election, in which, he presciently worried, his brother Robert might run against Lyndon Johnson.

“He gave me the feeling he wasn’t pleased,” Bartlett would recall years later. “He wanted a record of his own. I sensed that he wanted the Kennedy administration to be Jack, and Bobby was going to turn it into a succession thing. Jack didn’t want a dynasty, although I am sure his father would have wanted that.”

Source: The Death of Clintonism – POLITICO Magazine

The fun thing for me is that I am not alone in my wish to see the Clintons just slink back into the confines of the Foundation never to be a problem again…….

With Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 election, progressive activist Van Jones says that it’s time to move on not just from the Clinton family, but the kind of politics they represent.

Appearing on CNN Sunday, Jones noted that the Democratic Party’s base has gotten significantly more progressive since Bill Clinton was president in the 1990s.

In fact, he said that several of Clinton’s policy decisions — from his championing of NAFTA to his support from the 1994 crime bill that introduced the “three strikes” policy — came back to haunt Hillary Clinton during her presidential campaign

Source: ‘The Clinton days are over’: Van Jones says good riddance to the centrist Democratic Party

I am with Jones on this…..time for Democrats to embrace a more progressive agenda….one that will benefit every man, woman and child in this country….and let the Clintons become a footnote in American history.

The Joke That Is The Media

My readers know that I think that the news media in the US is a joke…at best…..Their coverage of news is one sided….depending on the point of view of the editorial staff……and international reporting is horribly skewed….I give you the reporting on the problems in Israel/Palestine….the media is pro-Israel and will report little that is any way derogatory towards Israel….and that trend is continuous on any other international news.

Then we have the reporting on the political scene…..there the media is as worthless a news source as a box of corn flakes…..but do not take my word for it……

Political reporting in the US is in a sad state, and the problem is more fundamental than you might think, writes Jonathan Stray at Medium. Yes, coverage tends to be of the superficial “horse race” variety and too many reporters covet “insider” status, but Stray’s complaint goes deeper. He thinks we have a far too narrow view of what “politics” means. The word encompasses more than candidates and government, he writes. The true meaning involves actual people and the way they want to change their communities. Unfortunately, “most politics coverage is about politicians, not the things I care about and the actions I could take.”

It’s the reason young people are tuning out of traditional politics, writes Stray. They’re not apathetic—they’ve just learned that social change is more likely to come about through ways beyond electoral politics. If the political press wants to stay relevant, it better pay attention. “I want political journalism to help me better understand how to change the world to my liking, by acting with other people who want the same thing,” writes Stray. “I want it to be about me and my community, and our aspirations, and what we could do to make them real. ” In short, “political journalism should be politically empowering. Everything else is entertainment.” Click for the full column.

The media is to blame….not completely…..for the state of our politics today….personally I get more “balanced” news in the US from the BBC and that is just sad on so many levels….the US media is more about entertainment not news…..

Enough Said!

The Fix: Red vs. Blue: A history of how we use political colors in NBC

Now with every election we hear about this red state or that blue state…..but how many know where this word play with colors became part of the American election divide?

Like or not….yet another history lesson….you are welcome!

The Fix: Red vs. Blue: A history of how we use political colors in NBC.

It’s Time to Rethink American Exceptionalism | The Nation

I have written a few times on the subject of “American Exceptionalism”……I have found that it is a subjective topic….has many definitions and some not so comprehensible…….it has been a rallying call…..and a political slogan……and a bumper sticker……..but seldom understood.

Regardless what you think the term means…..maybe it is time to re-think the slogan……I found this article over the weekend……give it a read and let me know what you think……

It’s Time to Rethink American Exceptionalism | The Nation.

Elections In Name Only

You know I have been analysis for about 40 years and at one point I had high hopes for this country……different people of varying ideologies would run for office and the people would show some genuine concern for the fellow Americans…..they would listen and then decide who was best for the country and vote for that person…….but the 90’s brought my optimism to an end.

To be truthful….I have become disheartened with the whole system……the country is NO longer the most important thing……instead the voter picks an issue and everything they do revolves around that issue……no longer is the subject of politics anything but the selfish ramblings of ego-centric individuals…..no longer is society and its people important but rather some emotional dribble that does not move this country forward…..

As much as I am disappointed in my fellow Americans….I still drag myself up and look everyday for that ray of hope…..so far that ray is hidden from view by the personalities that lie and cheat to gain a seat at the table of power….

And that table of power is the government…….no longer is there a grand scheme for moving us forward….but rather individual ego trips…..say the most outrageous things and you are assured massive coverage……that is NOT the way to move a country forward…..but it is a great plan to move the individual forward….and there is the problem.

These individualistic ego trips have turn the country from a majority rule to one of plurality….no longer is there a two party system….more like a 3 party system……at least in the House…and the Senate is not far behind……..“On paper, the GOP currently has 245 members, but when 50 feel they can walk away from their leadership on any given day, it’s really a plurality, not a majority,” Politico notes.

“The House, then, is not controlled by one party but better understood as a playing field for at least three: the party on the right, the dominant Republican core in the center, and the left represented by the Democrats. The challenge is to build alliances among these three to get to the 218 votes needed to move legislation. This coalition approach may seem a blow to Republican pride but it could also be liberating for John Boehner since it brings him back to the role he often forgets: Speaker of the House.”

I have heard some people voice optimism in the 2016 elections…..that we can find our way out of this minefield that is slowly choking the life out of our system…….BOLLOCKS!

2016 will be the same game…..theatrics, hysterics, lies, misinformation and more insulting rhetoric…….in other words…..same song, different year.

Nothing we do in 2016 will change anything…..that will happen when someone wakes up to the games and the disrespect for the American people….and that cannot happen as long as the voter enables the morons to run and win.

In Saner Thought

"It is the duty of every man, as far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error"..Thomas Paine

Tag: Political Analysis