Requiem for a Sold Out Nation
Donald
v. Hillary, Ben Rhodes
And
the Myth of Media Integrity.
Spoiler Alert: This is not an
endorsement of Donald Trump. Although I have to admit that if Donald had any
class at all, he could have waltzed into the White House. He doesn’t.
This is also not an endorsement of
Hillary Clinton. Although I have to admit that if Hillary had any integrity at
all, she could have waltzed into the White House. She doesn’t.
At
this point, I also have to underscore the Paradox: Trump is the only Republican
that Hillary would ever have a chance of beating. Clinton is the only Democrat
that Donald would ever have a chance of beating. They are two sides of the same
coin: The Coin of US. Start there.
So…as
a prelude to what is turning about to be the political version of Alien versus Predator, I would like to
continue my tale by pointing to a dream I had a few nights ago.
In
my dream, my nightmare really, America had just become a one party country—and
our future President of the United States had just allowed himself to get
dragged down into a petty pissing contest with an American Muslim Gold Star
father of a fallen hero—tweeting and whining and doing interviews—and constantly
getting his butt kicked!
Oh,
wait a minute! I wasn’t dreaming. It actually happened because it was just
another day in the life of Donald Trump. And thanks to “The Donald” we now have
a one party system—the Democratic Party—because Trump just finished
obliterating the GOP and turning it into a feckless, disjointed amalgam of
rabble and political cannibals, thumping their bibles, waving the flag and basically
living in the past. This was more than evident in Cleveland just two weeks ago,
when any Republican with any class—including two ex-Presidents and the Governor
of Ohio—stayed away from this wreckage of lost souls that looked more like the
deck of the Titanic than any kind of convention. And they did so for several
very good reasons. Because, if the Republican Party is to survive at all (and
it might not!) reasonable people are going to have to salvage something from
the political carnage that will be left behind on November 8, 2016.
The
irony of all this is that by getting into an unwinnable argument with Pakistani
American Khizr Kahn, Trump and his paper-thin ego and petty genetic matrix fell
right into the clever Machiavellian trap the DNC had cleverly laid for him.
Anyone with any sense at all could see it coming: A Pakistani Muslim with an
Army Captain son martyred in the cause of freedom bitch slaps The Donald with a
copy of the Constitution and then utters that unforgettable phrase…”You have
sacrificed nothing!” And of course the Nominee of the GOP just couldn’t resist
the taunt.
Frankly,
if one dares to step inside Donald Trump’s demented perspectives of privilege,
why should he? He seems able to dive down into a bottomless pit of rude, crude
banalities and slough off the debris as if it had all been a misunderstanding. And
he pulls it off every single time.
An
entire field of 16 Republican candidates couldn’t take him down. Even from the
first debate, Trump lured some very talented people over into a name-calling,
nasty series of mindless exchanges that soon became the political equivalent of
mudwrestling. And he did it without saying one intelligible thing, while
candidates who tried to have message and purpose and some kind of game plan
went ignored and eventually fell by the wayside. Mitt Romney—with the most cogent,
classy 10-minute, line-item denunciation ever delivered to a listening audience—couldn’t
do it. John Oliver with a year’s worth of case building satire couldn’t do it. Bill
Maher couldn’t dis him away. Neither could Ted Cruz, Colin Powell, George Will
or the best efforts of the entire RNC.
It
is certainly not lost on me that people are frustrated. I get the fact that all
of us have been betrayed by the political party hacks on the left and right so
long that we no longer trust any of them. Our institutions are being destroyed.
Our schools have eviscerated American History. Common Core has middle class whites taking "Apology Courses." Christian symbols have been removed from some schools
while Muslim prayer rugs are introduced into others. Black Lives Matter gets
non-profit status for turning protests into riots. And our financially gutted
military are cranking out “girlie men.”
I
also understand why those on the Right have looked to outsiders like Trump to
fix this broken system, because Trump somehow symbolizes our lost national
backbone. I completely understand why The Donald’s millions of followers
respond to his Billionaire Tourette’s Syndrome as if his semi-coherent fulminations
had been etched into stone tablets on Mount Sinai. I have even gotten used to
the fact that his public demeanor is a mashup of Don King, Mussolini and Biff
Tannen… and that he won’t be able to follow through on a single thing he
promises to do. Trump is a classic example of what we used to describe in Texas
as “Big Hat. No Cattle.” And it’s not that Trump is outrageous that bothers me.
It is that he’s just not very bright.
But
he is bright enough to manipulate the media and feed their greed for ratings,
making them de-facto accomplices in his fractious rise to power.
I’m
also convinced that, deep inside his soul of souls, candidate Trump doesn’t
really want to be POTUS and is trying in every Freudian context to take himself
out of the race. Either that, or he has an undiagnosed case of hypomania, which might medically
disqualify him out of the gate…and would certainly be enough to deny him any access
to the nuclear football.
On
his reckless run at the White House (and some bizarre courtship with political
martyrdom), The Donald has already thrown South Korea under the bus while
encouraging North Korea’s Kim Jung Un (the 21st century Ramsey
Bolton) with offers of a summit. He offers torture as a military alternative,
wiping out families of terrorists, and using nuclear warheads. He has praised
Putin and Saddam Hussein and dumped on JFK. We already have his laundry list of
insults to women, the physically impaired, Muslims and the entire nation of
Mexico. Now, almost on a daily basis, The Donald has added “stupid” to his list
of disqualifiers, noting that Russia will not go into Ukraine (even though they
took the Crimea back in 2014). Meanwhile he somehow proposes the use of “nukes”
without the slightest understanding of the Nuclear Triad…or even what it is.
In
fact, in the wake of the Khizr Khan fiasco last week, Trump had such a catastrophic
five days in a row that the press ended up calling it “the worst week in
anyone’s run for President ever.” There’s only one thing wrong with their critique.
They said the same thing about The Donald at the end of March—and the end of
April, the end of May…and the middle of June. In fact, get used to it: this guy
is the Terminator. He just keeps coming back, and he stays within the margin of
error because mainstream America is scared to death when faced with the
alternative.
The
alternative is Hillary Clinton. And I finally understand that she is a serial
prevaricator who has lied about virtually every issue ever put in front of her.
We have her on tape. We have her on film. We have her on daily news—repeating her
lies on continuous loop without one iota of shame—and it doesn’t matter! It
doesn't matter in the least because the public has become inured to them,
because the term “lying politician,” has become a pleonasm in the daily
discourse of running our dysfunctional government. And HRC’s notorious
flip-flops are now being looked upon simply as business as usual for the
political scumbags inside the Beltway. So, We the People rationalize that Hillary
is no different…and therefore not that much worse than anyone else. (That’s how far we have lowered the bar.)
I
also get the fact that her Kool-aid brigade are willing to dismiss Hillary’s
Brian Williams Category 1 pathological “dodging sniper fire” lies with the same
kind of numb vestigial shrug we often witness from Wildebeests in the Serengeti
when hyenas devour their young…which goes a long way toward explaining the
former Secretary of State’s bizarre Benghazi “Video” McGuffin and her disappeared
30,000 emails. Because as history has taught us: “Nothing succeeds quite as
well as a big lie.”
Aware
of this, Hillary pulled it off, just as she pulled off all her deleted
connections to the Clinton Foundation, because she knew that neither the FBI Director
James Comey nor anyone in the press would challenge her on it. In fact they
enabled her felonies right before our eyes, and we all accepted it. We accepted
it because we have been numbed to the congenital dishonesty of our press and
our government officials—all of them—including and especially our Security
Agencies.
Somehow,
I’ve almost gotten over the fact that I shudder every time Hillary opens her
mouth, not just because she reminds me of the Bride of Chucky (which she does),
but also because she is more like Richard Nixon than any other politician
before or since. Like Nixon, Hillary doesn’t like people very much. And like
Nixon, she is the only candidate in either party who possesses the political
genetics to walk into the Oval Office on day one, sit down at her desk and be
ready to run the country. And like Nixon (a closet liberal BTW), HRC would be
able to do it with the same ruthless efficiency and marginal ethics that will
be just enough to allow the fractured engine of Democracy to continue on its
troubled course, chronically ill but not yet ready to die. She is in fact the
recruitment Poster Marine for the Corrupt Continuum. And that seems enough for
some…
It’s
a continuation of corruption that “We the People” are embracing because—like
the battered wife or the kidnap victim— we have become the enablers of all that
we detest…because at our core we’re terrified of what we might lose if we opt
for change.
As
it is, I witness this pandemic Stockholm Syndrome that has infused the American
mindset in the last 12 months, and I am haunted by the words of French counterrevolutionary
Joseph de Maistre who said: “In a Democracy people get exactly the leaders they
deserve.” De Maistre knew this only too well. Flourishing from 1751 to 1821, he
survived that bloody orgy of anarchy called the French Revolution, witnessed the
career arc of Napoleon and lived to become part of France’s eventual return to
sanity.
The
question is, will we? (Return to sanity, that is.) And let’s face it: This
presidential race that has left us with the two most deplorable choices for POTUS
in modern history is purely an extension of our consciousness as a
nation—nothing more, nothing less. As Americans, We the People have become
narcissistic, overfed, undereducated and uninformed, overloaded with
technology, manipulated by media, radicalized by extremists on both sides and
turned into mindless “World War Z” fodder for the demagogue. We’ve been drugged
and doped and media saturated out of most of our national initiative. And we
cannot get our head out of our apps long enough to recognize it. We know
something is wrong, but we’re in denial about the fact that “we” are what is
wrong.
With
340 million inhabitants (4.9% of the global population) we consume 18% of the
world’s food (and throw away 40% of it). We use 24% of the world’s energy, own
68% of the world’s cars and trucks, and 40% of its TVs, smart phones, and
electronics. 58% of the US food chain is GMO, 69% of the country is overweight,
and 120 million of us are now defined as morbidly obese. What we have become is
a monster of consumption that is truly devouring the world. And yet we are
convinced that somehow we need more.
Bernie
Sanders fed into that need. And for a year, he transplanted his Socialist roots
deep down into the Democratic brand, using that platform to convince legions of
the disenfranchised that they weren’t getting theirs while barking the standard
Socialist mantra to rail against the low-hanging fruit of that “elite” 1%. (Of
course, the 1% includes anyone who makes over $320 K a year, who usually work
their butts off to get there and who pay 19% of all income tax and employ 24%
of the workforce.) Very little of this mattered to Bernie who applied his “more
free sh*t for everyone” game plan, until the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Shultz
threw him under the bus …but not before his legion of angry faithful rose such
a stink at the Philadelphia Convention Center that the Democrats had to build a
six mile wall around the complex to prevent Bernie’s “Brownshirts” from
storming the doors.
None
of this showed up on camera because the media conspired to scrub down the
Democratic Convention into a Norman Rockwell mural of patriotic harmony and Big
Umbrella brotherhood—with eloquent speeches from shiny people and Hillary
appearing on stage like Lady-Bountiful/Grandmother of the Year, locking arms with
celebrities, singing Kumbaya and simply pleading to be allowed to serve her
country “one more time.”
Meanwhile,
the DNC allowed Bernie Sanders to push the Democratic party platform so far to
the left that the America we know will never appear on the horizon again.
Instead, it will die of a strain of economic HIV that will take us down
generation by generation until nothing of the Capitalistic matrix will be left.
That’s
not what troubles me most about Hillary Clinton (although there is much there
to dislike). What haunts me to this moment and will forever is her opening
statement when announcing her run for the highest office in the land: “To continue
the great work begun by Barack Obama.”
And
OMG!! I remember thinking at the time. I personally couldn’t imagine a scarier
thing in the world! Forget the fact that in just the last ten days, this guy
signed the Monsanto Protection Act and got nailed for indirectly selling
helicopters to ISIS—just on foreign policy alone, the Obama legacy has become
the political equivalent of a live grenade.
When
recently asked on PBS about his greatest foreign policy achievements, Barack
Obama immediately answered without pause: “Our restored relations with Cuba…and
the Nuclear Arms Deal with Iran.” When I heard him say this, I went into a kind
of retro-shock that after 7 years in office our Nobel Laureate POTUS had those
two things in the realm of foreign policy for which he was proud.
The
rapprochement with Cuba was OK, I guess. We already do business with our fair
share of sleazy dictators with deplorable human rights records, so why not
Cuba? Time to bury the hatchet, I suppose. But Iran?! The Iran Nuclear Arms
Treaty summarizes just how sold out we are as a nation and how little any of us
can do about it.
I need merely refer to the fall
out from a May 6 New York
Times interview with White
House Deputy Foreign Policy Advisor Ben Rhodes. In the article Rhodes
arrogantly proclaimed that the Obama Administration had in fact “deliberately
deceived” the American people by creating a false narrative surrounding its negotiations
with Iran.
This, coming from the White House
operative referred to by many as “Obama’s alter-ego where foreign policy is
concerned," pointed to the fact that not only was the deal apparently negotiated
in bad faith but also undertaken by intentionally
ventriloquizing the
Washington media into becoming an “Echo Chamber” for the Obama Administration’s
policies—something, Rhodes bragged, that The White House has repeatedly done
for years.
For those of us who weren’t paying
much attention, the Iran Nuclear talks were based on the premise that the US
would be dealing with “moderate” Iranian politicos, when everyone knew the
radicals were front and center from the beginning. What followed during the
next two weeks was what had to be the worst diplomatic pocket-picking since
Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in Our Time” negotiations with Hitler—an
international collapse of resolve that not only sent $150 Billion to the
fountainhead of terrorism in the Middle East, but also one so replete with
toxic spillover that even Israel and Saudi Arabia aligned against it.
As it turns out, Ben Rhodes defiantly
implicated Obama, Kerry, Valerie Jarrett and company in a conspiracy of lies
about the nature of the negotiations from the beginning. Rhodes further
denounced the administration’s previous foreign policy scout team as a
“bungling bunch of morons,” singling out former CIA Chief Leon Panetta and then
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for their incompetence.
All the while, all teams
were dealing not with moderates but with Iran’s most vociferous radicals,
including the Ayatollah Khamenei himself who showed up inbetween his daily
“Death to America” rallies to make sure the US knuckled under and, once the
negotiations were completed, immediately went out to a fully packed street
crowd in Tehran to announce that, “We got everything we
wanted!”
This is a continuum if not the nadir
of the same foreign policy disaster in the Middle East instigated by Barack
Obama and Hillary Clinton who proudly helped to orchestrate the disastrous Arab
Spring (of 2012)—the same Arab Spring that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in Libya
only to see—four years later—ISIS establish its largest base of operation in
that country, spawning the largest diaspora North Africa has ever known.
This is the same “Arab Spring” that
left our US Embassy team twisting in the wind—despite 5 different pleas for
rescue—including Ambassador
Christopher Stevens… and including Navy Seal Tyrone Woods and Service Officer
Sean Smith, all of whom were captured tortured and killed…and then lied about
ad nauseam.
There is little doubt that the
State Department knew the real cause of the attack on our Benghazi Embassy from
the outset—that it was an Al Qaeda orchestrated raid planned in advance—because
they were outed two days after the fact by (then) Libyan Prime Minister Mustafa
Aubshagur who went on ABC Sunday Morning to declare that the Obama
Administration knew exactly who had done it and why, and then defied them to
take action, threatening repercussions if they did so.
The fact that they continued to lie
about it and that Hillary somehow agreed to become the point person for this is
still murky in its source but confirmed in several books, including Ben Stein’s Blood Feud. But the bottom line is that she did
lie. She lied to the families and to the American people and (as part of her
dark contract with Obama), agreed to take the fall for it in return for his
endorsement in 2016.
That brings us nearly full circle and
underscores the hypocrisy of both political conventions and how the media dealt
with them. And I focus here on the GOP convention speech by mother of slain
Benghazi Staff Officer Sean Smith. In her impassioned Tuesday night speech in
Cleveland, Gold Star Mother Patricia Smith cried out in anguish to Hillary
Clinton for lying to her about the (bogus video) cause of her son’s death. And
for her troubles over her martyred son she was savaged en masse by the Press,
denounced for exploiting her son’s death and even threatened a time or two.
When Charles Woods, Gold Star father of Navy Seal Sean Woods (also slain in
Benghazi), came to Patricia Smith’s defense and reiterated that Hillary had
lied to him as well about the attack (either that or she was suffering from
dementia), he was subsequently ignored for having a faulty memory and for being
pressured by the Trump camp to step up.
This actually brings us 360 degrees to
Donald Trump’s little piss-up with Khizr Khan and the ridiculous double standard
being thrust upon both candidates. Here
we have Hillary Clinton who had direct impact on the deaths of Benghazi’s
victims not needing to defend herself because the press was doing it for her. And here is the Donald being
raked over the coals by Khizr Khan and being too stupid to just shut up.
Of course, Trump is a knee-jerk
retaliator who counterpunches in every direction like a drunk losing a barroom
brawl. And now, rather than engage in any meaningful dialogue about how to fix
this nations problems, he is rattling off so many inanities daily that he’s
shaken his own campaign organization to the roots. There is little doubt at
this point that The Donald will self-immolate, and the press will be the
instrument to take him down.
It is the same media, mind you, that
made candidate Trump, that enabled him to suck all the air out of the
Republican primary by giving him 90% of their air time for months, while some
very gifted people were afforded no voice at all and were finally left to die
of benign neglect. Now, however, it is time for The Donald to go home, because
after all the man has fulfilled his purpose.
In case we ever doubt our media’s bias
for a moment I must add a footnote to the Ben Rhodes debacle that summarizes
the spirit of our national consciousness. According to a later report by The Wall Street Journal, when Ben Rhodes went off on
everyone including the Obama Administration and essentially spat in the face of
the public in the process, he was absolutely vilified by the Washington Press
Corps—not for his arrogance, not for being part of a conspiracy to deceive the
American people, and not even for his expressed contempt for the press and his
associates…but for his disloyalty to his Commander in Chief, for outing the
President and his team.
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels once famously said: “We
regard the press as an instrument upon which the government may play.” Nothing
has underscored that truism more than the last seven years.
During that time,
the press has covered up so many depredations by the Obama administration it
has been difficult to vet because there are now media filters that sieve out
unfavorable information from public view. In truth, America has been under a
virtual news blackout so insidious that one has had go to the foreign media to
find out what is actually happening in the world.
Those backing Trump are those who have
summoned enough grit to fight back. They are outraged by the daily government
assaults on our institutions; and they’re right to do so. But by choosing
Donald Trump as their standard bearer, they have anointed a shallow political
poseur who has done nothing more than master the Art of Complaint—and who has
absolutely nothing constructive to offer to replace what now exists. In doing so, they have abandoned
reason, logic and all the tools of democracy that deny good men and women the
ability to invoke legitimate change. Along the way, they’ve completely
obliterated a political party in the bargain.
That seems to
have been the plan all along. So what we are left with is some perverse
inversion of the Manchurian Candidate—the only GOP candidate that Hillary could
beat—the nominee who still chooses to attack his fellow Republicans and can’t
seem to concentrate on the real issues at hand.
Eleven
months ago, I wrote a blog: “Will Trump Trash the GOP?” http://robertahola.com/blog-posts/will-trump-trash-the-gop/
I hate to say, “I told you so,” but he has done exactly that. And by doing so,
The Donald has become the perfect conjuration of the Clinton political machine.
And they have to be high-fiving behind closed doors, because now it’s hers to
lose.
The
press helped Trump do it. The public bought it. And all the Democrats had to do
was wait. Of course, there will be some
backsliding. And Hillary’s daily conduct is always a target rich environment.
But she is the Devil we know, and now her ranks are filled with defectors from
the Republican ranks.
Barring
a miracle or a midnight revelation, in November the Democrats will win the
White House and both Houses of Congress. And for the next four years at least, they
will have tricked the nation into the one party system for which they’ve been conniving
all along. Well as the proverb prophesies: “Be careful what you wish for.” One
party “democracies” have always failed in the end and taken down the countries
that embrace them.
President
Ronald Reagan once prophetically noted a phrase that now haunts us all: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from
extinction.”
By
allowing Trump to self-destruct in geometric progressions, the Democrats are
having their way with it all the way into November. “We the People” have been the
ultimate enablers, and we have let the media help us pave the way. We have finally
demolished the GOP, severely crippled the two party system and shot ourselves
in the foot. Let’s just be sure that the next round doesn’t go straight into
the brain.
