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punditman says…
It’s hard to keep up.
Now that there’s been a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump just nine weeks after the first attempt, one has to conclude it’s a nasty zeitgeist out there.
Civil discourse was on the decline long before Trump, and unfortunately political violence is where that leads.
Blame technology, human nature, neoliberalism, proto-fascism or whatever, but dialogue and debate was at least down to the school yard bullying level before Trump arrived, but alarmingly, the age of Trump has lowered it to the level of toddlers in a sandbox. What to expect when a man-child presidential nominee tweets “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” (as far as we know his latest would-be assailant wasn’t a Swiftie).
Last Tuesday’s US presidential debate was the last one in the campaign (hopefully not the last one ever) so better late than never to offer a few of Punditman’s impressions. I’ll try to stay in my lane.
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After rambling on about how he’d been treated unfairly by the courts when challenging the results of the 2020 election, ABC News moderator, David Muir, asked Trump about his recent comments that he “lost by a whisker.”
Trump said he was being “sarcastic.”
To which Muir replied: “I did watch all of these pieces of video. I didn’t detect the sarcasm.”
It’s hard to imagine Trump coming up with genuine sarcasm because pretty much everything he says is tethered to how “incredible” he is. I’m betting he wasn’t being sarcastic when he said he “lost by a whisker”— at least in this interview with Lex Fridman. But rather he was just saying what he thought he should say in the moment, as usual. In other words, he just makes crap up, on the fly, knowing he can always offer a “reinterpretation” later.
Imagine never having to worry about anything you say no matter how wrong or unhinged—safe in the knowledge that at least 70 million people will give you the benefit of the doubt.
With Trump, it’s hard to tell where he’s headed when he gets into his rambling “stream of unconsciousness.” It's usually wild hyperbole, delusion, bald-faced lies, but occasionally—like a stopped clock that is right twice a day—he stumbles upon a truth, which his ego then promptly mangles.
The legacy media have been feigning hatred for him for at least 8 years now while loving him for the ratings. Comparatively, Team Blue is tightly controlled in its messaging, with their own unique b.s. talking points that apparently only people without Trump Derangement Syndrome can spot. In the age of clickbait, the Democrats’ demonstrable falsehoods are either too obvious, too complex, or too boring for prime time when compared to Trump's insane, unhinged whoppers.
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It’s no secret that far too many American voters exist in echo chambers, not unlike the political candidates they vote for.
How to explain Kamala Harris's blind spots on Gaza? During the debate, she repeated a series of falsehoods about Israel and Palestine starting with her statement “Well, let's understand how we got here. On October 7…”
No surprise. Almost the entire American establishment and political class on both sides of the aisle ignore the history of Israel’s brutal 75-year occupation, as if the trouble all started on October 7, while downplaying the ongoing genocide. And because the media is on board, the moderators from ABC News let her get away with it.
For the same reason, corporate media totally ignored the fact that on September 11, another person self-immolated, this time outside the Israeli consulate in Boston.
Harris mentioned Israeli deaths on October 7 as being 1,200 (though it is now widely acknowledged that Israel killed many of its own citizens that day, not just through the fog of combat, but also due to the Hannibal Directive). This is not to say Hamas didn’t commit atrocities, of course they did. But rather to contrast Harris’ comment with the scale of carnage in Gaza. In particular, when referring to Palestinian deaths, she merely invoked the talking point of “too many.” What is an okay number? Current estimates range anywhere from from 41,000 to tens of thousands, with no end in sight.
Despite Harris’ insinuation, there is no evidence Putin will march on Poland because that would trigger Article 5 in the NATO charter, and Boom! We’re all dead in 20 minutes. It’s called the nuclear age and I think most viewers have heard of it. But hey, long live the absurd Domino Theory!
Putin is an autocrat and a war criminal, but no serious analyst thinks he’s suicidal. I’d like to have heard about how Harris intends to end that meat grinder war beyond fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.
As George Beebe and Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft wrote back in February, in an extensively researched paper entitled The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine, “Ukraine’s best hope lies in a negotiated settlement that protects its security, minimizes the risks of renewed attacks or escalation, and promotes broader stability in Europe and the world.” The situation for Ukraine has only worsened since then.
Actually a very good summary of just how juvenile the whole debate’s foreign policy discussion was can be found in another Quincy Institute article by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos. Or just read her intro:
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris not only proved last night that they have no fleshed out foreign policy visions of their own, but that they feel most comfortable pantomiming like they do, using bafflingly cartoonish language about each other, playing so fast and loose with history, facts, and figures so as to make the entire debate over what to do in Ukraine and Gaza absolutely incoherent.
Perhaps the Harris campaign has calculated it’s best to pander to the large Polish vote in Pennsylvania because of the Ukraine War rather than the large Muslim vote in Michigan because of Gaza due to the large Zionist vote everywhere? Only the number crunchers know.
Trump missed all sorts of opportunities to go after Harris who may as well be the incumbent Biden, like maybe pouncing on how she bragged about how the Dark Lord himself, Dick Cheney, is endorsing her. But he was too busy trying to “out hawk her” or brag about how nothing bad in the world would’ve happened if he’d been left in charge.
Harris spewed nonsense when she said there was “not one member of the U.S. military in active-duty in a combat zone —in any war zone around the world— for the first time this century.”
It was an absurd statement for the would-be commander in chief to make. In fact there is this video circulating of deployed US troops watching the debate and when she says that, one of the astonished soldiers says: “What? So where the fuck are we?”
Official war zones determine eligibility for awards, hazard pay, and other benefits that members of the military receive. And according to the US Department of Defense, current official war zones include Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, (three reservists were killed there earlier this year at a poorly defended outpost). As far as Iraq, the US is the thing that won’t leave, with 2,500 troops still in-country, seven of whom were hurt in an ISIS raid earlier this year. Hundreds of US troops remain in Syria.
Even more newsy lately is the fact that a significant portion of the US Navy has been bombing Houthi fighters in Yemen. It’s called Operation Prosperity Guardian.
Then there’s the “unofficial” nature of American involvement in the war in Ukraine, in which U.S. soldiers are assisting the Ukrainian army in training and maintenance, and probably more. Also, it’s safe to assume that US is assisting Israel in its assault on Gaza beyond their support for Netanyahu in the form of an endless supply of arms and political and diplomatic support.
Of course Trump had nothing to offer other than an even harder pro-Zionist line. And the ludicrous statement directed at Harris that “she hates Israel.”
In any case, Trump was too fuzzy-headed to call her on this blatant falsification that the US is kinda sorta at peace. It would’ve been a great opportunity for him to spew even bigger nonsense, like how he’d use his “stable genius” powers to end the Forever Wars in a day.
If Harris manages to squeeze out a victory and the US doesn’t implode, and aliens don’t land and hand out cosmic gummies to chill everyone out to avoid civil war, I don’t see much change as far as US foreign policy is concerned. Expect more kowtowing to AIPAC and the far-right government of Netanyahu, more genocide in Palestine, more feeding of the war industry, and more risk that the shooting wars in Ukraine and the Middle East could blow wide open. Harris remains in her own bubble on foreign policy, call it Biden 2.0. And that remains a weak spot.
At least her domestic ideas appear to be more appealing to Americans than Trump’s Project 2025 denialism, which probably accounts for why polls indicate Harris beat Trump hands down.
Incidentally, if you think I’m not being tough enough here on the Orange Clown, his blather was so delusionary that I thought I’d spend more time critiquing who I actually think will win, at this juncture anyway.
Besides, Trump was mostly focused on the migrant crisis, relying on his same old xenophobic play book. Speaking of which, if you’ve read this far you can thank Punditman for ending this rambling rant on a funny note. In case you missed this, I bring you:
The Kiffness - Eating the Cats ft. Donald Trump (Debate Remix)
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Well written Wayne.... Life is becoming more surreal all the time, in a Charles Lutwidge Dodgson way but with bad zeitgeist.
The fact that both Dick and Liz Cheney have endorsed Harris is not a good sign. They are incorrigible warmongers and authoritarians themselves. But they want *efficient* militarism, not bumbling personal corruption and blowhad posturing, which is about all Trump is capable of.
If Harris wanted to distance herself from them, she could adapt the line Ronald Reagan used to (pretend to) distance himself from the far-right John Birch Society, along the lines of: if they are endorsing me, it means that they are endorsing my policies, not that I'm adopting theirs. But she won't do that. At least I haven't noticed her emphasizing "bipartisanship," aka, doing what Republicans want.
To adapt another Reagan phrase ("trust but verify"), my view on Harris' foreign policy is hope-but-verify. But the US will keep blundering into military conflicts unless her administration can inject a new dose of pragmatism into foreign policy. That's most important with nuclear weapons proliferation. But the support of Israel's chronic war policies is a real detriment to the US - and funding an actual genocide is intolerable. Also, if the US really believes its own official policy that China is the biggest strategic threat, then it has to make a big change from getting caught in endless wars in the Middle East and get the Ukraine conflict settled rather dragging it out indefinitely. I really hope Harris and her team do take a "next generation" approach to foreign policy and stop trying to replay either the Cold War or the post-1989 world. But it will take real public pressure to move her in that direction.