Losing a war upends governance

 

“War is hell,” said General Sherman, and he was winning. It’s worse than hell when you lose, especially for the folks at the top who always promise glorious triumphs when sounding the trumpet to get the war going.

Biden may be old and sick, but if he were presiding over victory in one of his wars, I’m not sure anyone could have browbeaten him into stepping aside. FDR was half dead in 1944 when he ran for his fourth term, and he carried 38 states.

When wars go badly, the disgruntled tend to keep quiet about it even in countries where dissenters aren’t shot. Loyalty to the boys (and girls) in uniform requires that citizens keep “supporting” them long past the point when doubts about the outcome are impossible to ignore.

Unhappiness about the progress of warmaking is therefore likely to be sublimated, channeled into other forms of discontent. I lived through an illustrative episode in my adolescence watching support for LBJ, a wildly popular figure in 1964, collapse.

Of course, there were others factors aside from the Vietnam quagmire. Johnson pushed through major civil rights legislation and alienated racists. Some people disliked the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid although there was a broad national consensus in their favor. He was an effective horse-trader and acknowledged to be a master politician.

But Johnson’s decision to gamble everything on war in Asia did him in. The death toll was unacceptable—of Americans, that is. (After Vietnam, the war party kept the body counts way down.)

Nixon promised to put an end to the war and then, once in office, escalated. It wasn’t for a proud militarist to preside over humiliating battlefield defeat. Eventually, he too was ousted, ostensibly over electoral shenanigans that would be scarcely noticed today.

The unpopular war had undermined two presidents. Young draftees kept dying—until compulsory service ended in 1971. Atrocity tales filtered back home, even before the notorious My Lai massacre came to light. The secret expansion into Cambodia sparked new horrified amazement.

All the while, official discourse was dominated by Kissingerian types promising that things were going just fine, that we should stick with the leadership just a little longer, and that dissent aided the enemy. Extreme militarists continued to denounce grumblers and call for even heavier bombing of North Vietnam’s cities and ports, even for nuking them. Demagogues encouraged blue-collar workers to attack antiwar protests and to hate “draft dodgers” and peaceniks.

But a substantial minority of the population viewed all this as profoundly immoral as well as stupid. Happy talk about progress on the battlefield wasn’t as convincing in 1971, ‘72, ‘73, even as Nixon racked up a historic electoral victory over George McGovern. Nixon’s support was broad but paper-thin. Less than 2 years after his historic 49-state victory, Nixon was out.

Fast forward to today: we’re doing great in Ukraine; Russia is a gas station parading as a country (Nigeria with snow); its soldiers are drunks; and its equipment is all rusty. No one can challenge mighty NATO with the greatest fighting force in history behind it. Any day now, the Ukrainians will bounce back and chase Putin/Hitler’s armies back into Russia, which will then collapse and shatter into various parts, just like in 1991.

And Joe Biden is at the top of his game and not at all senile.

The defeat of the West in its European war of choice will be far more destabilizing than the ragtag departure from 20 years of occupation in Afghanistan. No one will take the blame for the debacle because in this country we don’t do responsibility. But someone will have to preside over it, and a likely candidate is someone expendable, a last-minute placeholder pushed into the spotlight at exactly the worst moment.

In 1974 it was Leslie Lynch King, Jr., who had been shoehorned into the vice presidency just months before after an old-fashioned cash-in-shoeboxes scandal. Leslie was better known by the name he adopted after his mother got remarried—to Gerald Ford, Sr.

Poor Leslie/Gerald was left holding the bag as the helicopters sailed away from the rooftop of the Saigon embassy. Who will get that undesirable job when the U.S. decides that Ukraine is Europe’s problem and walks away from another ignominious debacle?

Welcome, President Kamala.

 

Pending Questions

By coincidence, I just finished James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. It led me to wonder aloud—and comment to friends—about the possibility of assassination—pre-July 13.

Douglass compiled a mass of information about the 2-plus years of Kennedy’s presidency, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, and Kennedy’s readiness for neutrality in Laos and allegedly Vietnam. Everything that the war party hated.

I hadn’t known how eager Kennedy’s military chiefs were to follow up the Bay of Pigs with an invasion and, in some cases (Remember Curtis LeMay?) to launch a nuclear strike on the USSR. They hated JFK’s compromises in Southeast Asia and resisted disarmament.

They weren’t called neocons back then, but the mentality is recognizable in the unified war party of today, those calling always for more escalation, more belligerence, more “force projection,” and of course more spending on all the supposedly necessary weapons.

Today, like back then, anyone resisting or questioning the drumbeat of war was and is quickly labeled a wuss and a softie for starters, followed by accusations of doing the enemy’s bidding, a virtual or actual traitor (a la Russiagate). Back then, you were smeared as a pinko or outright commie; today’s equivalent is “agent of Putin,” someone who fails to see him as the new Hitler and probably has a secret bank account in rubles. Kennedy had a hard slog getting Senate approval of the Test Ban Treaty until it became clear that he had a potent ally: the American people.

Douglass’s thesis is that the war party—what we have begun to call the Deep State now, headquartered at the CIA—hated JFK and had him whacked. They then covered up the inconvenient facts, threatened and harassed skeptics and witnesses, and quietly eliminated any who wouldn’t shut up. (That list is extensive.) He marshals disturbing evidence to support his conclusions.

Douglass shows through 400 pages how a conspiracy at that level can work with relative ease once people realize the power of the forces determined to impose their official narrative. Many people had important facts that undermined the Oswald-as-assassin story, but they quickly saw how dangerous it was to stick to their stories, even for the first autopsy pathologists who clearly saw the front-entry bullet wound in the president’s remains and later allowed themselves to be misinterpreted.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the July 13 shooting, and old-fashioned incompetence should never be dismissed as an explanation. Why should the Secret Service function any better than the rest of our crumbling institutions?

That said, in piecing together the truth about the attempt on Trump’s life, we should be alert to stonewalling, crazy claims of easily disprovable facts, and especially pressures on eyewitnesses to unsay what they’ve already stated on the record and on camera. We should watch the composition of investigative bodies, check the members’ connections to the intelligence and Homeland Security agencies, and pay attention to the handling of forensic evidence.

We should listen carefully for news of the dead shooter’s recent movements and contacts and an explanation of his curiously opaque past.

Meanwhile, I am frankly shocked by how many people close to me find the attempted murder worthy of kinda-sorta jokes about how close the shooter came. Spare me your sick humor—assassination is no substitute for politics, and also, be careful what you endorse. What goes around, comes around as  Trump—himself the proud assassin of an Iranian general—should recall.  

2024: A Space-out Odyssey

 

 

Joe Biden’s debate meltdown exposed the lies we’ve been systematically fed for months—probably years—about his health and mental capacities.

That’s one set of lies. There are others.

Narrative management is a useful skill, perhaps more highly developed here given our foundational relationship to the art of selling. We really know how to establish a story line and pitch it relentlessly.

At the same time, all those generations of commercial culture have induced in us a certain degree of skepticism. Growing up as consumers, caveat emptor comes with our mothers’ milk. We know how the game is played: you paint me a fantastical picture, and I discount two-thirds of it. We expect to be hustled and fed a line by everyone—peddlers of cars, toys, stocks, or flood insurance, office-seekers, and now modernity’s latest curse, paid “influencers.”

But while we understand that success isn’t dependent on a pitch’s attachment to facts, that doesn’t mean we like being cheated. Plenty of Biden sympathizers are royally pissed off that the party pooh-bahs shepherded rickety Joe through rigged or non-existent primaries to keep him carefully screened off from anything that would have exposed his disqualifying frailty.

Our cowed and complicit news outlets played along even though they must have known. Announcing that the emperor not only had no clothes but no working mind meant professional ostracism at least, as experienced by Axios reporter Alex Thompson, one of the few who dared to go off script.

The debate debacle leaves the Democrat establishment with no pleasant options. Early polls are predictably bad and set to get worse as safe blue states—New Hampshire, Colorado, Minnesota, Virginia, New Mexico—move into the toss-up column, and that’s after just one week. More are likely to follow. Dumping Biden might stop the bleeding—or make it worse. At this rate Trump could pull off a Nixon- (1972) or Reagan- (1980) level landslide.

All the horserace talk, while amusing, obscures the other acts of narrative massage that are about to blow up messily. For example, we’ve been promised that our mighty (and expensive) military machine would power noble Ukraine to victory against Russia.

I remember an early panel discussion featuring Axis-of-Evil speechwriter David Frum (now a Democrat since it’s the war party). Frum confidently predicted that the Russian army would collapse as the troops were offered pleasant lives in Barcelona in exchange for deserting. Biden himself crowed that the Russian ruble would soon be “rubble.”  

Two years later, Russia is dictating terms of surrender, which become more humiliating with each iteration. That one will be harder to spin, and the panic over Biden’s Madame Tussaud act will pale in comparison.

Like the Biden dementia taboo, no one was allowed to question the fairy story about Ukraine’s imminent triumph. No one could doubt that Russia was a gas station parading as a country, “Nigeria with snow,” a failed, beaten state with drunk soldiers and rusty weapons. No one could suggest a compromise settlement or question the ongoing war and slaughter. That was all considered naïve Putin-enabling, the equivalent of cheering the Munich surrender of 1938.

We will pay a high price for the successful suppression of critical engagement, the homogenization of permitted speech, and the proliferation of bogus “disinformation” monitors, a.k.a. censorship boards policing our public debates. Like feeble Joe wandering off the public stage, we have been reduced to repeating stock lines and expecting rounds of stormy applause.

Reality has begun to bite. It won’t be pretty.

 

Cheap Thrills

 

The manifest delight among the anti-Trump camp over his conviction in the hooker payoff case will be short-lived.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s pursuit of Trump on the flimsy case of felonious falsification of business records in furtherance of some vaguely defined higher crime has produced a frisson of satisfaction among assorted Democrats, liberals, and those who find the man appalling for a variety of good reasons. But it will undermine the case against him that really matters—his conspiracy to steal the election of 2020.

Among the people I have seen send cheers heavenward at the jury’s multiple guilty verdicts, remarkably few—none in fact—can explain to me the details of the accusations or the legal reasoning behind condemning him 34 times for essentially a single episode. To all appearances, they don’t really care. He’s guilty, he's a felon, and that’s that.

His supporters, equally removed from or uninterested in the tedious minutiae of the case, think he’s being prosecuting for paying off a hooker, which they don’t see as a crime (correctly) and are easily persuaded that he’s being singled out in a political vendetta. The convoluted reasoning that convinced a jury to convict escapes them, as well it might. I’ve read a lot about it, and it escapes me.

As for criminalized sex, Bill Clinton pretended not to know where his cigar ended up, and Republicans made endless damp hay out of that. In the end, nobody really cared.

Yeah, I know, it’s not the sex per se but Trump’s signature on documents that called the payoff legal fees—the sort of thing that Hillary’s campaign did to obscure its role in the origins of the Russiagate hoax.

As CNN summarized, “The FEC concluded that the Clinton campaign and DNC misreported the money that funded the [Steele] dossier, masking it as ‘legal services’ and ‘legal and compliance consulting’ instead of opposition research.” The DNC eventually coughed up $113,000 in fines, but no one faced prosecution over it. Given the number of documents signed by various DNC officials covering up the oppo research as payments to lawyers, the Clintons’ allies would certainly be looking at hundreds of felonies under the Bragg jurisprudence.

But the hundred grand was worth every penny as the Steele dossier, secretly funded by the Clinton campaign, led to years of propaganda over Trump’s alleged “back channel” to Moscow and “Russian interference” in the 2016 election, fact-free concepts most Democrats still revere to this day, their team’s happy BlueAnon conspiracy.

The Clintons got off Scot-free after years of peddling these far more consequential falsehoods, utilizing the full power of the surveillance state to do so. Do we think dumb middle Americans didn’t notice?

Unfortunately, a whole slew of Trumpians also think that some combination of phony absentee ballots and computerized vote manipulation caused Trump to lose several key swing states in 2020, that he really won, and that any attempt to disprove their paranoid certainties is bogus, biased, partisan trickery.

Given the partisan trickery involved in the Bragg prosecution, they have a point. When the Dem-leaning establishment gets around to their criminal cases against Trump and his minions for things like organizing fake slates of Republican electors for VP Pence to accept as valid, egging on the Georgia secretary of state to “find” Trump another 18,000 votes and flip the state, and encouraging his loyal yahoos to break into the Capitol to intimidate congress members into voting their way, the whole thing will fall flat. It will look like yet another lame excuse to “get” Donald Trump and prevent him from staging a comeback campaign.

Trump deeply discredited himself with the post-vote events of 2020-21, and a disciplined political and legal team could have pursued Trump for trashing our electoral process. He and his sleazebag lawyers did plenty, and there was no need to make shit up.

Instead, they put on a series of judicial spectacles so that they can label Trump a felon during the campaign and thereby can keep their jobs for another four years.

Ever since Trump sailed down the escalator to announce his bid in 2016, we have relentlessly heard how his candidacy was a joke, how the “walls are closing in” on his fake presidency, and how his comeback for a second term is doomed. The chorus of imminent victory over Trumpism is now about as credible as the Ukrainian vow to retake Crimea.

Any American not living in a cave knows that there is plenty of felonious behavior taking place around us, especially at the top of our get-it-while-you-can political establishment. A few of us even think things like instituting a torture regime, sending off troops to conquer foreign countries for no reason, smashing the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to bits, and presiding over a genocidal slaughter of defenseless civilians are also arguably criminal acts. Slamming a political enemy over crimes of the willie while ignoring the mountainous slurry of sleaze threatening to drown our fragile polity is a good way to discredit everything for which we once held a modicum of respect.

Why I have been silent — and why now I won’t shut up

 

A Cold War era joke went like this: A Russian from the USSR sitting next to an American on a flight to New York is asked a question about why he is visiting the United States. He answers that he has come to study American expertise in propaganda.

“What propaganda?” asks the puzzled passenger.

“Exactly,” concludes the Russian.

We have witnessed a magisterial deployment of narrative management over recent months and years that is worthy of study by future generations. In fact, it is the sole triumph notched by our otherwise mediocre political class in the entire course of the European war that they sought, confident of victory, and got. The populace bought the official line without even realizing that it had made a purchase. Edward Bernays would be proud.

However, the sheen on this bright object has become seriously dulled to the point where dissident voices have begun to break through. They were always present, but now they have infiltrated the uniparty, mostly through the populist/extremist/MAGA (choose one) wing of the GOP. There was never a possibility that war funding would get bottled up in a Congress that has long been an affiliate of the MICIMATT complex*. But remarkably, a subset of troop-saluting, flagpin-wearing, war-cheering Republicans resisted the idea of tossing another $60 billion into the bottomless Ukrainian pit as they noticed that the war is lost and that its partisans have no strategy for success or exit.

With this window into a fuller debate now wedged open (supercharged by the appalling crimes occurring in Gaza) and major changes looming, the environment for previously unwelcome questions is more benign. We can observe, speculate, and attempt to analyze without inevitably having to face abuse and name-calling. The campuses are again hotbeds of dissent and rejection of the Received Wisdom descending from above.

Furthermore, we are entering an electoral season during which we are theoretically invited to engage in debate about our proper course as a nation. Despite the crudity of what passes for political discourse on most issues of importance, we may still manage to share some thoughts and feelings about current events without promptly turning purple.

No doubt there will be lingering accusations that dissent is attributable to Putin-worshipping Russophilia. That’s an old story. In the Vietnam war days, we were called socialistic, drug-addled hippies too cowardly to “fight for our country.” Before that, MLK and his followers were “outside agitators” (a phrase making a remarkable comeback), who had set out to disturb the amicable social relations enjoyed by all in the Jim Crow South. Over Gaza, objection to genocide is painted as resurgent antisemitism, often by the same neo-Confederates indignant over discussions of American slavery in the classroom.

I think there is—or soon will be—considerable appetite for outsider views on our nation’s rapidly changing place in the world. It opens up all sorts of opportunities for useful dialogue, and I am, at long last, feeling like participating in it once again.

*Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank complex, h/t former CIA analyst Ray McGovern of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

In dangerous countries far away, they throw popular politicians in prison

 

In April 2022, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted in a no-confidence vote engineered by his enemies. The U.S. was suspected of meddling in Pakistani politics because Khan visited Moscow on the very day of Russia’s Ukraine invasion. (We recently learned that the fat thumb of Washington was very much involved in tipping the scale.) 

Then on August 3, Khan was jailed after conviction on the charge of “illegally selling state gifts.” He was promptly rearrested by an anti-terrorism court on charges related to a May, 2023, riot in which his supporters attacked an army office.

Khan remains extremely popular in Pakistan as an outsider to the two-family duopoly that has pretty much owned the country since its birth in 1947 in cahoots with its highly politicized military. Though temporarily freed, Khan is likely to be in and out of detention and effectively blocked from contesting the next election despite his tens of millions of backers. While Pakistan retains the outward shell of an electoral democracy, there are few illusions about who rules the place.

Donald Trump, a former president, now faces 91 felony counts, which cumulatively could put him in prison for decades. The charges range from the silly, like the felony of conspiring to pay off a hooker, to the genuinely disturbing—trying to drum up a precise number of votes needed to flip a close election and stay in power.

The U.S. is not Pakistan. But the end run to avoid allowing the popular will to be heard is unsettlingly similar. In both cases, lawfare is at work to jigger the results of the next election. This is true whether or not Khan is guilty of keeping state swag and egging on his supporters to riot or whether Trump is guilty of attempted vote-stealing.

The situation did not suddenly materialize out of nowhere. The steady decline of what passes for democratic process did not originate with Trump, despite the fervid beliefs of his anti-partisans. Amidst the deafening clamor about electoral manipulation, one rarely hears the merest reference to one indisputable fact: Our presidents are not elected by the majority of voters. And no one seems to care.

The year 2000—not 2020—marked the modern wave of democratic collapse. Not only did we witness the Supreme Court’s judicial coup handing power to George W. Bush, but the Democrats, after the briefest of fussing, said, Okay fine. They then embraced Bush as a legitimate president, absolved him for 9/11 (imagine the blame-howling if Gore had presided over that nightmare), and saluted his decision to invade, conquer, and destroy a country halfway around the world. War-making, not the detail of who was to preside over it, was the overwhelming consensus. Defying the popular will didn’t matter.

But, many will argue, elections do matter, and the orange guy tried to subvert it. He made up fake stories, declared the winner illegitimate, and sent his minions to intimidate election officials and even Congress itself. True, and perhaps punishment is in order.

And when will accountability arrive for those who claimed the 2016 election was rigged, delegitimized him, then cooked up a phony link to a foreign power using the full resources of the intelligence/security state and slavish collusion by most media? The long-running Russiagate scandal was orders of magnitude worse than Watergate, but that subversion of the electoral process is still given a full pass. Take a moment to view Matt Orfalea’s mash-up video juxtaposing Trump’s inflammatory statements about 2020 with Hillary’s and her minions’ claims about 2016. (Watch it quickly as YouTube has flagged it again as a violation of its policy for “glorification, recruitment, or graphic portrayal of dangerous organizations,” despite the content consisting solely of video clips of public statements.)

The pursuit of Trump’s wacko election denialists is selective prosecution, the definition of a rogue state no longer subject to the rule of law. Trump did try to subvert the electoral process, but he wasn’t the first to do so, only far clumsier at it. He is also unprotected by the uni-party war state, unlike Team Dem.

The U.S. is not only approaching Third World-levels of income and wealth inequality but also the WWF approach to electoral showmanship we associated with it. For example, Senegal has a sorta-kinda democracy with regularly scheduled elections, but its main opposition figure, Ousmane Sonko, is now on hunger strike after being indicted again, this time for “undermining state security, criminal association, and creating serious political unrest.” That sounds a little more tinpot-dictator-ish than what’s happening here, but not by much.

Sonko’s party was also dissolved, which so far hasn’t happened to the Republicans. But if Democrats and their selected prosecutors have their way, Donald Trump may have to resort to a hunger strike to prevent state officials from blocking his name from the ballot based on an interpretation of Article 3 of the Constitution that is getting quite a bit of airtime. 

Imran Khan can’t participate in Pakistani elections for 5 years, and if he’s still popular by then, no doubt new charges will appear to make sure he doesn’t. Mr. Sonko might try to run for president of Senegal, but campaigning from a prison cell will limit his chances. Once upon a time, we looked upon these sham exercises as uncivilized and backward, worthy only of banana republics. Now, we’re eager to join them.

The real winner of the last election and, in all likelihood, the next is the MICIMATT*, the machine overseeing the churn of our national wealth into the lucrative business of making war. Our polity resembles less a republic than a Rome-ish state built on expeditionary legions and headed by a figurehead emperor. There’s far too much money on the table to leave important decisions in the hands of mere citizens of whatever partisan stripe. That will persist until the propaganda-induced illusions of military prowess and supremacy finally crumble and collapse. Stand by for news on that.

(*Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank Complex, h/t Ray McGovern, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity—VIPS)

 

Odors of defeat and the wages of trickery

We’re being told that the Russians are indifferent to the plight of hungry Africans because they kaboshed a deal with Ukraine in which the latter’s grain exporting ships were permitted to transit the Black Sea without interference. As usual, that’s a false reading of the situation.

The headlines were dire: “Russian Grain Deal: Why Moscow Is Being Accused of Using Hunger as Blackmail,” trumpeted Yahoo News. “A hit to global food security,” said the LA Times. As usual, the war propaganda we’re being fed is heavy-handed enough to sink one of those giant boats laden with barley and sunflower seeds. In fact, the grain deal had two major components, not just one.

Yes, the Russians agreed to let Ukrainian grain exports travel freely to alleviate food shortages in the global South. In exchange, they were promised access to world markets for their own food products and fertilizer, including an agreement that Rosselkhozbank, the Russian Agricultural Bank, would be reconnected to the SWIFT payments system.

The Russians fulfilled their part of the bargain; Europe and the U.S. didn’t. After agreeing to several postponements, Moscow finally decided that the foot-dragging had gone far enough. Now, while the Russians say the deal can come back any time the original terms are carried out, they are no longer willing to cooperate on the basis of empty promises.

Don’t expect our self-righteous pols and pundits to acknowledge that aspect of the situation any time soon. The neocon cabal in D.C. will bash Russia with letting African babies starve and further wrecking Ukrainian finances. The idea that the deal could have been carried out by all parties as originally promised won’t enter the debate.

A nasty little side secret is that the Ukrainians’ supposed relief to the tables of the underdeveloped world was a bit exaggerated. A large portion—probably the majority—of the exported grain was headed right back to Europe. It’s important for the EU struggling with a staggering food inflation problem that they have enough feed for their animal stocks. But it’s not really a huge deal for, say, Egypt. John Helmer at Dances with Bears says that poor African countries received only 2.5% of the grain freed up under the deal.

Propaganda points aside, there is a danger in consistently saying you will do something and then not doing it. When the U.S. and its junior allies finally sit down to sort out what to do about the lost war in Ukraine, their Russian counterparts are not going to be in a trusting mood. A few years ago, various final arrangements could have been discussed among the hostile parties; now, U.S. diplomats are more likely to be handed a sheet of instructions.

Recent talk about a “stalemate” that will lead to a kind of Korea-style DMZ freezing the lines in eastern Europe for another half-century might have made sense if the parties involved were capable of coming to terms. They’re not.

Biden’s neocons and their European servants like Macron and Merkel haven’t been serious about the things they put their signatures to, such as the notoriously bad-faith Minsk accords. “We just did that to buy time for the Ukrainian military build-up,” they boasted not so long ago. That would once have been considered undiplomatic, but it sounded good when western leaders were eager to out-swagger each other. It was an expensive self-indulgence.

Proving that you’re a country incapable of keeping its word has a cost once others wise up to you. It means that the future of what’s left of Ukraine will be decided on the battlefield, not the negotiation table. The grain deal’s demise is only the prologue.