John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ON CBC NEWS

 

“‘Democracy-defining moment’: House representatives debate Trump impeachment”

 

Well, maybe.

I think it more likely the impeachment effort will reveal how deeply divided the United States is.

The White House refuses to cooperate.

Leadership in the Senate – where such trials occur – has talked about calling no witnesses and shutting down the whole thing quickly, leaving Trump exonerated.

Where does that take anyone that is worth going?

America is a deeply troubled country. Divided, seriously so.

You might not recognize that from the way it tyrannizes over so much of the world with its unceasing imperial demands, but real differences on empire and the military are simply not part of America’s political division.

Likely, Trump will prevail in the Senate. Despite a few dissenting Republicans, there is little evidence of a serious undercurrent against him. Conviction requires a two-thirds vote in a Republican-dominated body.

Yes, Trump’s behavior vis-à-vis Ukraine, trying to use it to influence American domestic politics, has been inappropriate, but it is only inappropriate in a country where people adhere to civility and the rule of law.

And that country is certainly not the United States. Running an empire, and an increasingly harsh one in response to growing awareness of its own relative decline in the world, is the polar opposite to civility and respect for rule of law, but running an empire is the business that America’s establishment is in full-time. All of its establishment, which includes the major figures of both parties, the wealthy interests they all faithfully represent, and powerful, almost unaccountable agencies like CIA assisting their efforts.

A situation arose in Ukraine only because the United States fomented and paid for a coup against an elected government there in 2014. All of the controversy which swirls around Joe Biden arises from the fact of his having served as Obama’s proconsul to demand certain directions for the new government.

Trump’s phone call was wrong, but in the context of all the dirt that the United States has been mired in with Ukraine, it does seem almost small.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN INTERVIEW BY NICK LEHR WITH DAVID BROMWICH IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Why Barack Obama Was Particularly Unsuited to Live up to the Ideals of the Nobel Peace Prize

“A new book is unsparing in its assessment of Obama’s legacy”

 

I can’t believe how many people still are fooled by Obama’s boyish smile and baritone voice.

Perhaps the sheer contrast in style to the rude, incessant bombast and repulsive insults from his successor in office contributes to sustaining some illusion.

Perhaps also his being the first black man elected as president lends him a special aura, associations in people’s minds that do not really fit the man.

As though he were somehow associated with all those struggling people in the Third World and in the vast sprawl of ghettos which pockmark most of America’s cities.

(Of course, when he ran for office, he played off those very things, as when speaking to crowds of black Americans in the rhythms of old-style preachers with a much-repeated phrase like, “Yes, we can!”)

As though he weren’t at all associated with the brutal, soulless officials of Washington’s vast imperial establishment. Men who sit at meetings around large polished oak tables and decide the fates of others thousands of miles away. Who will live, and who will die. Men, women, and children.

Although much reduced from his earliest days in office, he does still have a following.

I agree with the author that early on he was seen as something of an anti-war figure. I saw him that way myself, briefly regarding him as almost heroic, but it really did not take very long to see how wrong that assessment was.

Indeed, by the time he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, it was already clear what sort of man he was. Of course, many of the Peace Prizes have been awarded on the basis of airy hopes, somewhat better than the numerous awards to outright killers and terrorists.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/on-obamas-nobel-peace-prize/

Not only did he not keep his own promises, such as closing that shameful place called Guantanamo, this man spent eight solid years killing people.

He bombed somewhere every day of his two terms.

And he holds the distinction of having created an industrial-scale extrajudicial killing system, incinerating people far away who were never legally charged or tried for anything. The method frequently kills bystanders, too, but even the targets are legally guilty of nothing.

All in the name of freedom, the same freedom as is used in the name of the medal he awarded to Joe Biden, his Vice President, a strong inside advocate for creating the mass hi-tech operation for “disappearing” people.

Obama turned an extremely well-run country like Libya – maybe not a democracy, but a place where no one did without clean water and housing and free education and health care, and a place that remained at peace for decades – into a vision from hell. It remains so to this day.

And he worked very hard to do the same for Syria, having his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, oversee the transfer of savage fighters and storehouses full of weapons from the ruins of Libya through devious channels to the beautiful, historic land of Syria.

We even know from one of our finest living investigative reporters, Seymour Hersh, that she had a small amount of Libya’s stock of poison nerve agent shipped for ultimate use in Syria. Gaddafi, just as several Arab leaders had done, kept such stocks as a counter to Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal.

They wanted to create an incident so that Obama’s public warning about Syria’s government “not crossing red lines” (in its fight against the terrorizing mercenaries sent to destabilize the country) could be used to bomb the crap out of the place, just as had been done in Libya.

He only failed because of immense efforts by others (especially Russia’s Vladimir Putin).

He signed off on a coup against an elected government in Ukraine, something done for no other reason than to threaten and harass Russia, creating a series of conflicts and problems we have to this day, including a civil war in the country’s East, the Donbass, that has killed thousands.

He once quietly joked with words to the effect, ‘Hey, I’m pretty good at this killing stuff.’ I have no idea why he spoke in that strange way, but his words were recorded.

A penchant for brutal humor seemed to be part of the environment of his government. After the unspeakably grisly death of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi (there is a video you could not pay me to watch), his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was recorded saying, “We came, we saw, he died! Ha, ha, ha!”

He pressed hard against the elected government of Venezuela with economic measures that served only to reduce the lives of millions of ordinary people.

In addition to the immense amount of violence Obama oversaw as President, he had a very strong tendency towards secrecy, and went after whistleblowers with a vengeance.

Poor dear Chelsea Manning was imprisoned under him, an ordeal she almost didn’t survive.

Edward Snowden was forced into exile under his watch.

John Kiriakou went to prison under him for revealing the CIA’s use of torture.

And it was in his time as President that Julian Assange sought asylum from Ecuador.

The intelligence community’s massive new Utah Data Center, designed to hold unholy amounts of secret data about people was opened under this President.

He often was remarkably arrogant, something not widely noticed, but you can see it clearly in his posture and finger-pointing in some old photos.

https://chuckmangrotesques.blogspot.com/2016/10/john-chuckman-grotesque-obama-best.html

This truly was a monster, just one with a deceptively pleasant face.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

That must be some journal to publish such a feeble idea and some academic to come up with it.

It is simply ridiculous work to be called science or research or even an idea.

The standards in academia have fallen almost everywhere and thus the rise in pseudo-journals for second-raters trying to get published.

Our world can be divided into things which are simply facts and all the rest, including fears and lies and nonsense.

One certifiable fact of today’s world is that governments have invested increasingly in elaborate lies and misrepresentations to their people. This reflects both increased prosperity with so much more at risk than ever before and the world-scale of so many events and activities.

In Britain, the examples of Tony Blair’s stream of lies or the mysterious death of Doctor Kelly surely resonate with many ordinary souls who could never be called “conspiracy theorists.”

In the United States, the list is huge, as you might expect in a country whose establishment focuses on controlling events everywhere and telling others how to live their lives.

Another fact is that the very term, “conspiracy theorist,” was coined by the CIA decades ago to be used to disparage honest people who just want to know the truth about some important events such as the Kennedy assassination.

That term was picked up by the press and is still used to this day. It’s a rather sad reflection of the state of our press and its relationship to the government and the establishment.

Propaganda articles like this one – The Independent regularly does them to keep the term “conspiracy theorist” alive and flourishing – always dredge up the skeptics about moon landing, clearly in the eyes of most people a paranoid fringe group. We hardly need a professor’s formula to determine the validity of what is complete nonsense.

But such articles never deal with the really hard cases. The lies of Tony Blair. The murder of Doctor Kelly , a man who knew too much about WMD. The downing of Flight MH 17 and the unacceptable investigation of it. The American-induced coup in Ukraine. The murderous efforts of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel to topple Assad and turn Syria into the kind of broken mini-states we see in Iraq. The infinite lies that made a million deaths in Iraq possible. Israel’s explanations for the horrors of Gaza. And the list goes on and on.

Great powers playing dirty games lie and hide what they do every day, and calling someone a “conspiracy theorist” who says so is just derogatory, not informative.

It actually resembles, albeit in a lighter vein, calling someone who questions Israel’s brutal treatment of millions an “anti-Semite.” You might not think such a nonsense dirty tactic would work, but it is repeated day after day.

It was Hitler – one of history’s great liars and therefore an authority on the subject – who explained the concept of “the big lie.” Say even something outrageous often enough, and people will believe it, at least enough of them to matter.

Indeed that is a founding, unspoken principle of almost all advertising and of almost all our news sources today. And that is no “conspiracy theory,” just a hard fact.