IMPress Polly
04-15-2017, 07:36 AM
"I think he shouldn't have settled; personally I think he shouldn't have settled. Because you should have taken it all the way. I don't think Bill [O'Reilly] did anything wrong." -The "reformed" Donald Trump last week, defending sexual harassment and assault again, days after proclaiming April Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month
I'm sure we've all noticed that the American news media has become far more supportive of the Trump Administration since the unprovoked, blatantly illegal bombing of a foreign government last week. (Thank goodness things are back to normal! :rollseyes:) The corporate press claims that this action and other recent shall we say loosenings of the rules of engagement somehow show that the White House is, of all things, "moderating" its views. (I'm not kidding.) Let's examine what the merits of this claim are.
First, how did we get here? After Trump "won" November's election, corporate America responded with sustained excitement in anticipation of even more pro-corporate policies than have already been established, as shown not only in the subsequent statements and actions of a great many business executives, but also, and perhaps more profoundly, in the stock market's seemingly endless series of rallies that have followed ever since. Normally, the for-profit press goes along with its corporate masters (i.e. advertisers) for painfully obvious commercial reasons, and indeed that's initially what happened. The initial period following the election saw the news media broadly call upon those of us in the streets to sit down, shut up, and get in line with the new normal. Then, immediately after the inauguration, they got a taste of what the new normal means for them when the new Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Trump's Chief Strategist Steve Bannon declared all-out war on the news media, proclaiming them "the enemy of the people" and renewing threats of official censorship. That seemed to have FINALLY changed their attitude. Survival instincts now kicked in and suddenly we in the Resistance were to be generally respected and the administration to answer for its unprecedented for-profit status, its increasingly evident collaboration with a hostile foreign government, racially charged travel and border policies, health care cuts, tax return concealment, etc. The polls indicate that the press clearly won this war with the White House for credibility, as the public has consistently indicated greater trust in the news media than in the word of the new president. Then along came a bombing.
The bombing of a government air field in Syria contradicted the new Secretary of State and former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson's endorsement of the Assad regime the preceding week, which had been followed by the regime's decision to stage a large-scale chemical attack in the city of Idlib, subsequent to which former Breitbart executive Steve Bannon was fired from the National Security Council and a volley of cruise missiles was sent in the direction of the air field that had launched said chemical attack. (The latter developments were particularly remarkable given that Mr. Trump had not been so concerned about the implications of the Syrian regime's much larger 2013 chemical attack, subsequent to which he repeatedly warned Obama against responding militarily. One then questions what the real motive here was.) The press has taken the decline of Bannon within the administration as a sign that Trump is tempering his views.
Before becoming the Trump Administration's top advisor, Steve Bannon ran the ethno-nationalist and male supremacist online newspaper Breitbart following a career as a naval officer, Goldman Sachs vice president, and creator of the whacko Biosphere 2 project and documentaries like Occupy Unmasked. He has also been charged with domestic violence and embraced a postmodernist variety of Leninist Marxism (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-guy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist.html) that apparently is compatible with capitalism and "identify politics for white people, Christians, and men". (For further examples of the fascistic trajectory that Marxist theory has been on since the end of the Cold War, see my recent commentary on that subject (http://thepoliticalforums.com/threads/78982-From-Marxism-to-Fascism).) It was Bannon who crafted the Muslim ban (all versions) and whose ideas have served as the general ideological center of gravity for the Trump Administration up until last week. Bannon's influence over Trump could be felt not only in his chief strategist position, but also in Donald Trump's many statements calling for a rapprochement with the world's dictators in favor of using the American military to help them police their subjects instead of overthrowing and replacing them as per neoliberal doctrine. The administration's unwillingness to criticize Russia for anything and its endorsement of the Assad regime two weeks ago served as early examples of that perspective in action that probably would have led to something much worse yet. One of my many particular concerns about this not-so-much-anti-imperialist-as-anti-democratic perspective was that it might very well ultimately position our military in diametrical opposition to the Kurdish-led anarchist uprising in Rojava, Syria (since said uprising is as least tacitly opposed by Assad's government), which is one of the only bright spots in the world today in my view.
I once tended to defend people like Vladimir Putin and Bashar Al Assad against their Western opponents who were obviously motivated by profit-driven imperial ambitions (as in the case of Crimea's yes free and valid decision to join the Russian Federation, for example). My opinion of them has soured though in the last couple of years. I defended Putin, for example, when he was proposing to expand Russia's public welfare system and ostensibly destroying Syria's chemical weapons supplies. More recently though, we have seen that Putin has embraced austerity budgeting against the Russian poor while simultaneously managing to find plenty of money with which to launch a full-scale, 150,000-troop invasion and occupation of Syria with the express permission of its ostensibly nationalist government. And the supposedly destroyed chemical weapons have resurfaced. Putin's early endorsement of and (yes apparent) collaboration with Trump's presidential campaign hasn't helped his image with me either. Neither has his recent decriminalization of domestic violence in Russia. These sorts of things have changed by baseline opinion on Russia and the subject of the Syrian Civil War. Concerning the latter, I really only consider myself supportive of the Kurdish-led forces in the north of the country at this point, to which end I suppose you can say that I am a bit relieved by the Trump gang's new policy in that country, as it seems unlikely now that there will ever be a confrontation between those forces and ours. That said, none of this means that I actually support the recent American military action against the Assad puppet government either. Neither should anyone. Its motivation obviously comes from a place of seeking to get the Russia collaboration story out of the news. Remarkably, it has largely succeeded despite some of the most alarming developments yet having come out of the investigations since. For example, Donald Trump's campaign manager for most of last year, Paul Manafort, has now decided to formally register as an agent of the Russian government and Britain's intelligence services have revealed in recent days that they have evidence of Trump-Russia collaboration going back not only to last year, but as far back as 2015! Apparently the investigations are no longer news though now that we can see that Mr. Trump has only illicitly conspired with Putin's government rather than actually being fully controlled by it. :rollseyes:
The implications of Bannon's decline should not be exaggerated. The commercial press is casting it as a move away from the ethno-nationalist "alt-right" politics the administration has pursued up to this point. Only in this one area is that true, however. Bannon, Miller, and Sessions are all still in the administration, people, and Sessions' escalating deportation policies indeed seem to enjoy the full blessing of Trump himself. The administration is also still pursuing the implementation of Mr. Bannon's proposed Muslim ban through legal channels. And frankly, even if all these ideogical lite fascists were expelled from the Trump White House (as they should be), the president's personal volatility by itself would continue to render him intrinsically exceptionally authoritarian and dangerous regardless of the group he might surround himself with. Take another look at the quote at the top of this post if you don't believe me.
Besides all of this, it just seems pathetic to me that I now have to feel relieved about a return to the sort of neo-conservative military policies that were pursued by the Bush Administration; that I must now regard THAT as moderation and progress! It is absolutely pathetic to turn on CNN and watch an interview with a traditional Reagan Republican like Arnold Schwarzenegger and feel like he sounds almost reasonable now compared to what modern Republicanism represents even though the Reaganites were once themselves regarded as dangerous ultra-right lunatics! I find it pathetic that that's how far to the right the definition of centrism has moved, and I DON'T feel like accepting it. Trump is still an exceptionally corrupt, deceitful, and dangerous president regardless of Bannon's personal stature within the White House.
The ease with which the press has come back around to Trump's side is a testament to how low its standards actually are, how unreliable an ally it is, and how divorced its collective mentality is from that of the people. Throughout this whole episode, Trump's approval rating has remained upside down by a margin of 15 points, town hall meetings have begun heating up again, and today's Tax March calling on Trump to finally release his tax returns so we can see what he's hiding in them is expected to be the largest anti-Trump rally since the Women's March on January 21st, with hundreds of thousands expected to participate across the country. That's how interested the population is interested in a rapprochement with the White House. It appears that all the corporate press needed though was a more liberal, "pro-democratic" brand of militarism. The news media should go back to doing its job. Maybe a little rude awakening from the actual public today will help supply the needed motivation.
I'm sure we've all noticed that the American news media has become far more supportive of the Trump Administration since the unprovoked, blatantly illegal bombing of a foreign government last week. (Thank goodness things are back to normal! :rollseyes:) The corporate press claims that this action and other recent shall we say loosenings of the rules of engagement somehow show that the White House is, of all things, "moderating" its views. (I'm not kidding.) Let's examine what the merits of this claim are.
First, how did we get here? After Trump "won" November's election, corporate America responded with sustained excitement in anticipation of even more pro-corporate policies than have already been established, as shown not only in the subsequent statements and actions of a great many business executives, but also, and perhaps more profoundly, in the stock market's seemingly endless series of rallies that have followed ever since. Normally, the for-profit press goes along with its corporate masters (i.e. advertisers) for painfully obvious commercial reasons, and indeed that's initially what happened. The initial period following the election saw the news media broadly call upon those of us in the streets to sit down, shut up, and get in line with the new normal. Then, immediately after the inauguration, they got a taste of what the new normal means for them when the new Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Trump's Chief Strategist Steve Bannon declared all-out war on the news media, proclaiming them "the enemy of the people" and renewing threats of official censorship. That seemed to have FINALLY changed their attitude. Survival instincts now kicked in and suddenly we in the Resistance were to be generally respected and the administration to answer for its unprecedented for-profit status, its increasingly evident collaboration with a hostile foreign government, racially charged travel and border policies, health care cuts, tax return concealment, etc. The polls indicate that the press clearly won this war with the White House for credibility, as the public has consistently indicated greater trust in the news media than in the word of the new president. Then along came a bombing.
The bombing of a government air field in Syria contradicted the new Secretary of State and former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson's endorsement of the Assad regime the preceding week, which had been followed by the regime's decision to stage a large-scale chemical attack in the city of Idlib, subsequent to which former Breitbart executive Steve Bannon was fired from the National Security Council and a volley of cruise missiles was sent in the direction of the air field that had launched said chemical attack. (The latter developments were particularly remarkable given that Mr. Trump had not been so concerned about the implications of the Syrian regime's much larger 2013 chemical attack, subsequent to which he repeatedly warned Obama against responding militarily. One then questions what the real motive here was.) The press has taken the decline of Bannon within the administration as a sign that Trump is tempering his views.
Before becoming the Trump Administration's top advisor, Steve Bannon ran the ethno-nationalist and male supremacist online newspaper Breitbart following a career as a naval officer, Goldman Sachs vice president, and creator of the whacko Biosphere 2 project and documentaries like Occupy Unmasked. He has also been charged with domestic violence and embraced a postmodernist variety of Leninist Marxism (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-guy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist.html) that apparently is compatible with capitalism and "identify politics for white people, Christians, and men". (For further examples of the fascistic trajectory that Marxist theory has been on since the end of the Cold War, see my recent commentary on that subject (http://thepoliticalforums.com/threads/78982-From-Marxism-to-Fascism).) It was Bannon who crafted the Muslim ban (all versions) and whose ideas have served as the general ideological center of gravity for the Trump Administration up until last week. Bannon's influence over Trump could be felt not only in his chief strategist position, but also in Donald Trump's many statements calling for a rapprochement with the world's dictators in favor of using the American military to help them police their subjects instead of overthrowing and replacing them as per neoliberal doctrine. The administration's unwillingness to criticize Russia for anything and its endorsement of the Assad regime two weeks ago served as early examples of that perspective in action that probably would have led to something much worse yet. One of my many particular concerns about this not-so-much-anti-imperialist-as-anti-democratic perspective was that it might very well ultimately position our military in diametrical opposition to the Kurdish-led anarchist uprising in Rojava, Syria (since said uprising is as least tacitly opposed by Assad's government), which is one of the only bright spots in the world today in my view.
I once tended to defend people like Vladimir Putin and Bashar Al Assad against their Western opponents who were obviously motivated by profit-driven imperial ambitions (as in the case of Crimea's yes free and valid decision to join the Russian Federation, for example). My opinion of them has soured though in the last couple of years. I defended Putin, for example, when he was proposing to expand Russia's public welfare system and ostensibly destroying Syria's chemical weapons supplies. More recently though, we have seen that Putin has embraced austerity budgeting against the Russian poor while simultaneously managing to find plenty of money with which to launch a full-scale, 150,000-troop invasion and occupation of Syria with the express permission of its ostensibly nationalist government. And the supposedly destroyed chemical weapons have resurfaced. Putin's early endorsement of and (yes apparent) collaboration with Trump's presidential campaign hasn't helped his image with me either. Neither has his recent decriminalization of domestic violence in Russia. These sorts of things have changed by baseline opinion on Russia and the subject of the Syrian Civil War. Concerning the latter, I really only consider myself supportive of the Kurdish-led forces in the north of the country at this point, to which end I suppose you can say that I am a bit relieved by the Trump gang's new policy in that country, as it seems unlikely now that there will ever be a confrontation between those forces and ours. That said, none of this means that I actually support the recent American military action against the Assad puppet government either. Neither should anyone. Its motivation obviously comes from a place of seeking to get the Russia collaboration story out of the news. Remarkably, it has largely succeeded despite some of the most alarming developments yet having come out of the investigations since. For example, Donald Trump's campaign manager for most of last year, Paul Manafort, has now decided to formally register as an agent of the Russian government and Britain's intelligence services have revealed in recent days that they have evidence of Trump-Russia collaboration going back not only to last year, but as far back as 2015! Apparently the investigations are no longer news though now that we can see that Mr. Trump has only illicitly conspired with Putin's government rather than actually being fully controlled by it. :rollseyes:
The implications of Bannon's decline should not be exaggerated. The commercial press is casting it as a move away from the ethno-nationalist "alt-right" politics the administration has pursued up to this point. Only in this one area is that true, however. Bannon, Miller, and Sessions are all still in the administration, people, and Sessions' escalating deportation policies indeed seem to enjoy the full blessing of Trump himself. The administration is also still pursuing the implementation of Mr. Bannon's proposed Muslim ban through legal channels. And frankly, even if all these ideogical lite fascists were expelled from the Trump White House (as they should be), the president's personal volatility by itself would continue to render him intrinsically exceptionally authoritarian and dangerous regardless of the group he might surround himself with. Take another look at the quote at the top of this post if you don't believe me.
Besides all of this, it just seems pathetic to me that I now have to feel relieved about a return to the sort of neo-conservative military policies that were pursued by the Bush Administration; that I must now regard THAT as moderation and progress! It is absolutely pathetic to turn on CNN and watch an interview with a traditional Reagan Republican like Arnold Schwarzenegger and feel like he sounds almost reasonable now compared to what modern Republicanism represents even though the Reaganites were once themselves regarded as dangerous ultra-right lunatics! I find it pathetic that that's how far to the right the definition of centrism has moved, and I DON'T feel like accepting it. Trump is still an exceptionally corrupt, deceitful, and dangerous president regardless of Bannon's personal stature within the White House.
The ease with which the press has come back around to Trump's side is a testament to how low its standards actually are, how unreliable an ally it is, and how divorced its collective mentality is from that of the people. Throughout this whole episode, Trump's approval rating has remained upside down by a margin of 15 points, town hall meetings have begun heating up again, and today's Tax March calling on Trump to finally release his tax returns so we can see what he's hiding in them is expected to be the largest anti-Trump rally since the Women's March on January 21st, with hundreds of thousands expected to participate across the country. That's how interested the population is interested in a rapprochement with the White House. It appears that all the corporate press needed though was a more liberal, "pro-democratic" brand of militarism. The news media should go back to doing its job. Maybe a little rude awakening from the actual public today will help supply the needed motivation.