Those were the days, my friend...

"The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."

~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1910.

Try. Just try and imagine Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or Ann Coulter or Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump saying that today.

You can't, can you?

The "true conservative" of today is the radical reactionary of 1910, the Gilded Age plutocrat to whom the very idea of taxing unearned inherited wealth is horrific, and to even suggest to the unwashed masses that they should be the "master" of property and "control the mighty commercial forces" is worse than the worst collusion with hostile foreign powers.

Just your daily reminder that these people are your enemies. They are not "fellow citizens", they are not "Americans" in the sense that the ideals of this nation define citizenship. They are the ci-devant aristos, the allies and minions of the malefactors of great wealth. They see you as their cattle, their prey, and will gleefully use your stupidity, venality, racism, and more than anything else, your fear, to prey on you.

For the promise of this nation to be realized the GOP must be destroyed.

It's really that simple

Update 1/30: Paul Waldeman of the WaPo does a good job of explaining this:

"The real contested ground is the upper left or populist quadrant (29 percent of the electorate), where social conservatism meets economic liberalism...where there are persuadable voters — those who might choose either candidate — that’s where they’re mostly located. The battle for those votes will likely shape the race.

Democrats will go after them by arguing that Trump pulled a con on them in 2016, an argument that has the benefit of being perfectly true. Trump has been more eager to do the bidding of the wealthy and corporations than any president in modern times, and has run a spectacularly corrupt administration.

Trump’s strategy to hold on to them will be simple: race and immigration. He ran a campaign of xenophobia and hatred in 2016, tried unsuccessfully to do the same thing to save Republicans in 2018, and he’s going to do the same thing in 2020."

Here's the thing; that racism, xenophobia, and hate is a hell of a drug. The fascist parties of Europe have been using it to slam the economically populist parties successfully over the past decade.

A LOT of Americans are racist shitheels. The Trumpkins are counting on that, and I'm not convinced they're wrong.

Destroying the modern GOP is essential to the American Dream.

Doing it is going to be somewhere between "damned difficult" to "virtually impossible".

It's not the racism so much as the fucking vicious and fucking stupid.

So, apparently, some sort of Catholic school trucked its porch monkeys down to DC for the annual Save The Babies march thing.

While there, the spawn - probably bored shitless of listening to a bunch of tight-assed white people fulminating about sluts aborting snowflake babies

(while, frankly, if they were anything like I was at 17, randomly daydreaming about how they could get to make a snowflake baby or three if they could ever get enough Long Island iced tea into Suzy Creemcheese, the head cheerleader at St. Mary Magdalene)

got all in the face of a couple of black guys and drew the attention of an elderly native American who was there for a veteran's thing.

The little bastards then got all up in his face, doing all sorts of Fightin' Whities nonsense like the Tomahawk Chop, chanting "Trump" and "Build The Wall".

Okay. Seventeen-year-olds are goddamn stupid. I was. Hell, that's why we draft 'em; because they're too stupid to realize that they're not the heroes of the movie that gets to come home to Suzy Creemcheese with tales of his war but more than likely to come home in a rubber bag, instead.

The fact that a bunch of teenagers, bored (what's that Chesterton line about tormenting the cat?), restless, and stupid took out all that on a bunch of bystanders who represented things their white asses disliked is about as shocking as finding gambling at Rick's Cafe' Americain.

No. What's irritating is the reason they felt that it was just fine to do this in public. Because of the people who currently run this country, and, especially, the jackass whose MAGA hat represents every vile stupid thing these kids put on show last week, have told them that White is Right and that they need to "stop apologizing" for it. That "we won" means the right, and the need, to rule like conquerors and punk everyone they hate.

What's insanely irking is realizing that these morons are just the fingertip on the idiot fist of the Trumps and Millers and Bannions and all the other MAGAts that our ridiculously goofed up electoral system foisted on us two years ago. These people are crawling out of the woodwork like roaches out from under the baseboards because they believe they are led by the bigger vermin at the top.

I mean, how fucking stupid do you have to be to chant about building a wall to prevent illegal immigration at someone who, if their ancestors had any idea of what was coming and even the dimmest sense of self-preservation, would have build themselves a wall and exterminated yours the moment their pasty asses fell off the boat?

REALLY fucking stupid, that's what.

That's the infuriating part. I've worked for some people I had very little respect for. I've worked for some people who I didn't trust, or who worried me. But nothing was as frightening as realizing that the people who were your boss were just too goddamn stupid to see trouble ahead and too goddamn vicious to avoid it even if they did.

I've said this before in this place, but that while I loathed and despised Dick Cheney I also gave him the fearful respect for a true Evil Boss. He was a bastard, but a cunning bastard. He did things that harmed people and things I loved and I hated him for that. But I also knew that his acts were done with some dark intelligence to further his aims. I disagreed with those aims, but not with his skill in working towards them.

These people? They're ALL like these idiot kids, from Mango Mussolini all the way down. They just want to dance around and preen for their fellow racist morons and Ayn-Rand-fapmeisters. It's feels like being the astronaut realizing that you're the monkey in the Planet of the Apes.

Except these aren't the sentient apes of the movie. They're just goddamn poop-flinging, chest-thumping, banana-gobbling moron monkeys that managed to find themselves in the executive suite and are going to show their whole ass to the humans.

I could stand being ruled by Evil. I'd hate it. I'd fight against it. But I'd at least have some respect for my enemies.

It's being ruled by Stupid and Vicious that utterly galls the hell out of me.

Manbij bombing - OPSEC fail, or just "forget it, Jake, it's Syria"..?

Lots of bloviation about the bomb assassination of a bunch of Kurdish "Manbij Military Council" militiamen and four of the U.S. liaison team meeting with them at a kebab shop in the Kurdish-held Syrian town, most of it pearl-clutching about whether "...this means the Islamic State isn't really defeated!!!"

That's not my question. No, duh, the IS isn't "defeated". They're pissed-off Sunni tribesmen. So long as the governments in Baghdad and Damascus are Shiite in some form the zero-sum politics of the Fertile Crescent means that pissed-off Sunni tribesmen are going to be killing people. You can't "defeat" that without giving the Sunni tribesmen alternatives to killing people, and that fucking ship has sailed.

No. My question is; how the hell does some Islamic State bomb squad get the intel on where and when this meeting is being held in time to get their fall guy there in time to blow everybody to hell? Is there some sort of IS pizza-delivery bomb taxi squad sitting by the phones, vests on, ready to burn rubber to where one of their spies has just called in a big meet between the YPG and the gringos? Is Manbij that porous, that IS guys can drift in and set up bomb-making and bomb-delivery units just where-ever, and that their guys can spot juicy targets and hit them at a moment's notice?

Or is the MMC OPSEC so damn poor that the IS guys knew about this a couple of days in advance?

Frankly, IMO all this does is make the case for grabbing a hat. If the only people in Syria trusted enough to embed GIs with can't do a better job of securing their own territory then it can't be done. We got the hell out of Iraq for the simple reason that we couldn't get the place down to civil levels of violence without Roman methods. This suggests that the northeaster corner of Syria is likely to be just as impossible.

No, boys. The Islamic State is never going to "be defeated" if by that you mean that they will be unable to kill people. If that's your endstate the U.S. might as well make Syria the fifty-first goddamn state, because we're going to be there forever.

The Grifters and The Mark

Buried under the flaming dumpster that is the Trump Shutdown was a pretty remarkable bit of policymaking that took place in Cairo the other day. SecState Pompeo delivered a little oration that was remarkable either for its' 1) mendacity, or 2) delusion. What fascinates me is that I'm honestly not sure which it represents.

You can read the full text of the remarks at the link, but the gist of Pompeo's remarks was that:

1. The U.S. is, and always has been, a "force for good" in the Middle East,
2. That Iran, OTOH, is massively evil and stinky and bad.
3. That Obama was almost as bad and stinky as Iran because he tippy-toed around in the Middle East while "apologizing" for bad U.S. behavior,
4. Unlike Trump, who is a real Man and loves him some muscular Christian war against eeeeevil Islamist terrorism and Iran,
5. That Real Muslims like y'all love, too!

Fred Kaplan sums up the problems with this nonsense better than I can, so I can't do better than quote him:

“America is a force for good in the Middle East,” Pompeo said at the start of his speech. But to the extent he defined good, it was solely in terms of helping certain allies (mainly Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) while hurting certain enemies (ISIS, terrorists, and especially Iran). There was no recognition of complexity: Nothing was said about the Saudi bombing of Yemen (only Iran was painted as a force for bad, contrary to human-rights organizations); nothing was said about Trump’s divisions with Europe over Iran; nothing was said (one way or the other) about the role of Russia or Turkey in the Syrian conflict, or the Saudi murder of a U.S.-based journalist.

Obama may have been naïve in hoping that the pursuit of common ground and mutual interests might soothe the ancient tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims or upend the chessboard of Great Game geopolitics that have played on those tensions for centuries. But Pompeo’s speech makes clearer than ever that Trump has no interest in trying to soothe anything: He wants to take sides in the conflict, join the war—but even here, he has no idea how to do so with authority or effectiveness. He is indulging in partisan mythologies that bear little relation to the actual past and shed little insight on a fruitful way forward."

My question, though, is this - is this really "indulging in partisan mythologies"?

Or does this joker - and, by inference, his Orange Master - truly believe this nonsense?

I think the difference makes a difference, and that, in turn, goes back to the issue k about the difference between Trump and the Trumpkins words, and deeds.

If this Pompeo word salad is simply an attempt to blow more smoke up the Arab world's backside, that's one thing. Propaganda and blather can be simply the bodyguard of lies that can be re-arranged, or abandoned, as needed. A realistic Middle Eastern policy can be crafted with one hand whilst the other performs silly magic tricks to distract the rubes Arab "street".

But the precedent here is the Bushies. I truly believe that the bulk of the Bush cabal really, truly believed their neo-conservative nonsense about smoking guns and mushroom clouds and letting freedom reign. The cynics, the Cheneys, were the minority. I think the bulk of the Bush coterie were captured by their own rhetorical disinformation and air-castle fantasies.

The trouble with sussing out the difference is the long history of piss-poor U.S. geopolitical strategic thinking. It's damn deadly difficult to determine whether the mistakes are deliberate and caused by a boneheaded idee fixee' driven into the policymakers heads by some political philosophy (whether Ayn Randian free market fantasies or "liberal interventionist" fantasies really makes no nevermind...), or whether they were simply mistakes driven by poor intelligence analyses and craptacular institutional structures of the U.S. geopolitical decisionmaking apparatus.

I think it makes a big difference whether these people are the fools, or the fooled.

But I'm damned if I can figure out which.