Steve Bannon said last week that there has never been as destructive a Presidency in this country as that of George W. Bush. He’s right but that’s because Trump has only been in office for 9 months. Just give stupid Donald a little more time. He will easily overtake and pass Bush as the worst president in the history of the nation.
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The deaths of four special forces fighters in Niger opened a Pandora’s box of political commentary when, like Benghazi, it should have been thoroughly understood by both our congressional groups and most of the pundits discussing it from the beginning. When I hear a member of the Senate Armed Services committee say that he had no idea that we had 1000 troops in Niger all I can wonder is why didn’t he? What the hell has he been doing in that job for as long as he’s held it? It’s his job to know. That’s why he’s on that committee.
But more importantly, so many supposedly knowledgeable people in Washington and in the media claim they had no idea that we were maintaining troops in so many places around the world. How can this be? Do they all have their heads in barrels?
When he took over the office of the President in 1960 John F, Kennedy was appalled by our intelligence corps lack of infiltration in countries all over the world. So in a 1961 moment of brilliance he, along with Sargent Shriver, formed the Peace Corps. The Peace Corp is currently an organization with 7000 employees not counting volunteers, and is under the aegis of the Federal Government. The initial selling point of the Peace Corps was that it would be a volunteer organization that would place young Americans in nations all over the world to help the local populace solve the problems of survival. It was a great selling point.
Of course while all these smiling volunteers were going into foreign, mostly third world, countries to help, we also managed to insert a number of young and smiling intelligence operatives that swelled our clandestine information pipeline to an unheard of degree.
Of course it didn’t take the opposition in some of these countries too long to get the point and begin attacking our Peace Corps “volunteers”. That brought up the necessity of protecting those high-minded young people, which gave us an excuse to add troops to those countries. At first it was regular troops but not too long after it was special troops and now over fifty years later we have almost 300,000 special forces troops spread around the world in places like Niger actually training locals and fighting terrorist cells. That number, 300,000, by the way represents almost one quarter of our entire military enrollment.
As stated in a previous column we have troops on every continent with the possible exception of Australia. None of this information is a big secret. It has all been published in numerous places for the past fifty years. That it has escaped our supposedly knowledgeable legislators and pundits is only proof they aren’t doing their jobs. Or that they find it to be of some benefit to lie about what they should know.
I am not saying that every member of the various Armed Services Committees should know exactly how many troops we have in each country. What I am saying is, they should all know that this program exists and at what scale. There are certain facts that everyone sharing in the responsibilities of government should have in their pocket. That is not to say that they all have to know all the details of specific assignments. One of the big problems with our current government is, too many members are too ignorant of what they specifically need to know and way too ignorant of how the world works in general.
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There is one fundamentally infuriating strategy that the Trump white House uses in every situation where they are found to be absolutely wrong, which is about 90% of the time. It is to start a new discussion about the complicity or guilt of Barak Obama or Hillary Clinton in some situation which no one really cares about any more or in which no one believed when it happened.
Every time Trump is found to be wrong about something, i.e. most of the time, or when he hasn’t got an answer to some important question, i.e. the rest of the time, he jumps the shark and goes directly to Hillary or Barak and something he perceives, incorrectly, they did wrong. Of course, this is blatantly, un-Presidential behavior. It is the winner who is actually a loser trying to blame the loser who is actually a winner for his own faults.
And before you tell me that Trump won the election and Clinton lost let me refer you back to a Clinton lifetime of achievement and a Trump lifetime of cheating, petty crime and misogyny to decide who is a winner and who is a loser. The ignorance and greed of the voting public and a twisted electoral system does not answer that debate.
And one last thought. After George W. Bush left our country in shambles staggering out from under two illegal wars, wars that created ISIS, and the worst crash since the great depression, Obama did not spend his time telling the American pubic what a mess Bush had left him, nor did he attempt to prosecute him for lying to the nation or the other crimes that led to these wars. He jumped in and tried to solve the problem and get the country moving again. That’s why the market is at an all time high today. That’s why unemployment is at an all time low. That’s why we are still the greatest country in the world even if Trump doesn’t know that. Despite his attempts to grab some piece of that apple, Donald Trump has had nothing to do with any of that and if he continues on his bumbling, incompetent way he never will.
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If you look carefully at the problems of Puerto Rico before and after Maria, it seems the criticisms of Trump in this area are mostly unfounded. Sure he has no idea how to talk to people who are in trouble but that’s not the problem either. There seem to be more than enough supplies available on the island but because of the ruined roads little way to get them where they have to go. That’s only partly due to the hurricane. It’s just as much due to the failed infrastructure caused by the mismanaged finances of that territory.
But there are things that Trump should be doing besides telling us what a great job he did. He could have used the bully pulpit to help guide the proper rebuilding of the island, especially its infrastructure and even more especially its power infrastructure.
Allowing some half assed little company that had two employees to grab a government contract worth $300 billion bucks just because it’s from the hometown of a cabinet member who has done nothing since he got the job is not good planning. Rebuilding Puerto Rico’s power grid in the same model as it existed before the hurricane is a blunder of monumental proportions. This is being headed up by PREPA, the Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority. PREPA is the organization that is mostly responsible for the collapse of the system and the failure to get it back on line. PREPA wants to rebuild it in on the basis of oil and gas when it should be rebuilt in the model of the future, which is sun and wind.
Puerto Rico, for those like Trump, who are just finding it out, is a tropical island in the middle of an ocean. It is currently serviced by a power industry, which requires it to bring in oil and gas from foreign shores at great expense, an expense made even greater by American maritime law that has been a major element in the bankruptcy of the island. With the two greatest power sources above and next to them supplying free fuel do they really want to go back to oil and gas? Why? Who is making money off this abominable decision? It certainly isn’t the people of Puerto Rico. Oh, maybe a couple of the rich ones.
There is only one way to rebuild Puerto Rico’s power grid that makes any sense at all and it is with sectional solar that is within easy reach of where it will be needed. The current oil powered grid needs to transport power across the island, an expensive and losing proposition. If by any chance the power grid of Puerto Rico gets rebuilt with anything but renewables those in charge of that decision should be indicted and hung.
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Jeff Flake and Bob Corker were recently heralded in certain Liberal circles because they stood up to Donald Trump and then quit congress. Well, where I come from heroes don’t quit. Anything! For me, they would have been heroes if only they had stayed and fought. They both gave great speeches but then decided not to back up their words with a fight.
I quote from Flake’s speech. “When the next generation asks you why didn’t you speak up, what are you going to say?” In Flakes case it will be, “I quit.”
But the thought process of the Republican Party, the one that is kneeling at the feet of Donald Trump, is exemplified by the likes of Rob Portman ® Ohio, who actually came on TV and said that he thought the tax bill that has come out of the House is a good bill that will help the middle class. He also referred to George W. Bush, the man who lied us into two wars we are still fighting 17 years later, the man who removed just enough regulations to allow our banking, mortgage and Wall Street organizations to crash the economy and drive millions of people into poverty, as a great President. Rob Portman is either a bigger liar than Donald Trump or certifiably insane.
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The man who is most probably the most ignorant person ever to be President of the United States declared the other day that the terrorist who drove a rental truck into pedestrians in NYC killing eight and wounding many others should get the death penalty. Now this is not contrary to the thoughts of many Americans and they would most probably be within their rights to think that, but the President just can’t say stuff like that. An intelligent president would realize that such a statement would actually damage the case against the terrorist, giving his lawyer a wedge to say that he can’t get a fair trial in this country. But Trump is just too stupid to understand that. He is too self involved to think about anything except what comes to his damaged mind at any given moment. Trump has no idea how a president is supposed to act. His model is a street punk and he plays it out well.
That same terrorist requested, from his hospital room that he be given an ISIS flag. Maybe someone should suggest that it be tattooed on his eyeballs so he can see it every waking moment.
The fact that this guy happened to be an Uzbek immigrant had great significance in the small brain of Donald Trump, even though that immigration came a decade ago. The President, always looking for a chance to attack immigrants immediately made his political statements. While proven to be wrong on his facts, he then made another set of political statements.
We don’t, at this point, have a terrorist problem in this country, about which we can do more than we are already doing. Nothing that the intelligence services do would have dragged up this guy who wasn’t attached to any cells or anything else. He was just another loser who was dissatisfied with his life and looking to cash out. If he had been a white American as most of our mass killers are, he would have gotten much less attention than we usually pay to a Muslim. But both are very much the same person,
The fact is that almost all the Muslim terrorists that have caused havoc in this country were Americans. Maybe not all by birth but they had all lived here for a considerable amount of time. Almost none were recent immigrants so their problem, just like the problem with the Las Vegas and the Texas killers or any number of other non-Muslim killers was just a kind of universal dislike for their lives. The Muslim killers used ISIS more as an excuse than anything else. I do not include the 911 killers in this group. They were special. They were true terrorists, led from outside the country and brought here by organized forces. The rest, almost to the man are not. The rest, just like our American mass murders are malcontents and in their search for something to blame for their lousy lives they see the possibility of future or post life glory tied to mass murder.
What I am saying here is; there is almost no difference between American mass killers and Muslim mass killers. The only difference is that the Muslim mass killers can look to a twisted version of their religion as a motivating factor and the American mass killers don’t. That’s not much of a difference and certainly not one significant enough to allow Trump to push ahead with his idiotic immigration policies.