After weeks of speculation and desperate hopes that Donald Trump might be preparing to pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and/or WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange before leaving office on January 20th, what the latest round of presidential pardons has delivered is about as far from that as you can conceivably imagine.
But surely, Noam Chomsky - who urged everyone to vote for Biden because Trump is the "worst criminal in human history" - can't be wrong, can he? I mean, he's got a big brain and he wrote some very complicated things about linguistics, so... yes, Chomsky was wrong and foolish to say those things.
I don't agree with Chomsky about giving your vote without a demand. But his point wasn't about Trump (which I don't think he would portray much differently than Caitlin) but about the GOP - and his point was about them pushing the accelerator on climate and/or nuclear annihilation in an unprecedented way. I don't know that he's right about that either (specifically that the Dems would be any more receptive to popular pressure or willing to slow the march to oblivion in a meaningful way) but it is not an unreasonable perspective. And I agree 💯 with Caitlin's take on Trump-the-president (for whatever that is worth).
I based my comment on: "Prominent American academic and intellectual Noam Chomsky has described US President Donald Trump as "the worst criminal in human history." He made his claim in an article in the New Yorker this week." I didn't agree then, and I don't now. Dubya invaded Iraq, costing maybe a million Iraqi lives. That itself makes him a worse criminal than Trump. I have a feeling that Leftists and liberals really detest Trump because (a) he's crude and of low cultural tastes and (b) his Coronavirus victims, while far fewer than those who died in, say, Iraq, Hiroshima or Vietnam, are American citizens and thus of much higher value.
Obama's record on climate change is pretty dismal, too. He pushed fossil fuels, fracking, Arctic drilling and so forth, and the Paris agreement is close to worthless - it has no teeth and its mild goals would make little difference even if they were enforced. And he began modernising the USA's nuclear arsenal, itself an act of gigantic, historic criminality.
"Coronavirus victims?" He didn't create SARS-CoV-2, nor did he order nursing homes to accept actively infected Covid-19 patients prematurely discharged from hospitals who were better equipped to isolate them. It was Fauci, Gates and the WHO who spearheaded fraudulent efforts to discredit the HCQ+zinc+zPak cocktail that has been proven effective in several clinical trials testing it on outpatients, before the cytokine storm takes hold, and it was the medical establishment, not Trump that discouraged the use of corticosteroids, encouraged the use of deadly ventilators and ignores the potential of Ivermectin. But yes, Trump's Warp Speed vaccines will likely create many deaths and injuries.
Sorry - did I read you correctly? You're defending Donald Trump's response to the pandemic? The evidence is overwhelmingly against you.
"Trump went days without mentioning the pandemic other than to celebrate progress on vaccines. The president by then had abdicated his responsibility to manage the public health crisis and instead used his megaphone almost exclusively to spread misinformation in a failed attempt to overturn the results of the election he lost to President-elect Joe Biden.
“I think he’s just done with covid,” said one of Trump’s closest advisers who, like many others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal deliberations and operations. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with covid. . . . It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”"
"Trump may have tweeted that wearing a mask was now “patriotic.” But meanwhile he counselled that coronavirus is “totally harmless” in ninety-nine percent of cases, predicted that the virus will “sort of just disappear,” and – in a reality-bending assertion – claimed “large portions of our country” are now “corona-free.”
“Masks cause problems, too,” Trump said soon after his heralded first mask use, in explaining why he opposed a national mask mandate. And on July 27 Trump shared a video (a “must watch,” he said) which simply advises: “You don’t need masks.”"
Thanks for providing additional evidence that Trump tried to keep Americans calm rather than panicking and creating hundreds of thousands of excess deaths due to suicide, OD and untreated medical conditions such as heart attack, stroke and cancer. He hasn't been 100% consistent, and his sponsorship of Warp Speed was a huge mistake, but he tried to resist the overwhelming pressure of the establishment. India has finally got it right. They used Hydroxychloroquine to save lives until something better was discovered, Ivermectin. They are now distributing it free to anybody suspected of being exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Their IFR is one of the lowest in the world.
Thank you for clarifying and including your source. I definitely agree with everything you said. Just hard for me to do a hard turn on chomsky even if he has had his share of cringe moments with this election cycle.
The GOP is not evil, and they are clearly more democratic than the Democratic Party, as it was possible for an outsider that no establishment politicians trusted to win its nomination for President. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is completely irredeemable.
Jimmy Carter was an outsider when he won in 1960 so the party fixed it so that won't happen again. Trump became the candidate of the ultra right Federalist Society and handed it control of the federal courts and the anti-enviromental corporations to whom he delivered the means to set back whatever advances had been made in the environment. And then he became the pawn of the ultra right deep pocketed Zionists in the US like but not limited to Sheldon Adelson,
I never said Trump wasn't evil. He was and is, so I didn't vote for him. I already criticized him for appointing neocons and other swamp creatures in my first comment, and subsequently for Warp Speed. You are of course correct about Zionism and Adelson, but I see no need to list everything he's done wrong. Caitlin's point, which I agree with, is that **virtually** everybody is polarized. Either Trump can do nothing right or Trump can do nothing wrong. The few good things Trump tried to do were fiercely opposed by Democrats. Why? Because it could not be admitted that he did anything good: TDS.
Carter an outsider? Really? He was a favorite of Hyman Rickover and in line to become the captain of one of the first two nuclear subs when he resigned from the Navy to return to Plains. He entered politics ten years later in 1963 and was elected governor of Georgia in 1970. The only sense in which he was an "outsider" was that he was the first Southerner to become President since the Civil War. He was perfectly acceptable to the elites, who had as you wrote "fixed it" so that no candidate unacceptable to the Democratic elites could ever be nominated, immediately after the McGovern fiasco in 1972. Carter was perfectly acceptable to them. He was not an "outsider," and he was responsible for both the "Carter Doctrine" and the long US involvement in Afghanistan.
Carter has been a far better ex-President than he was a serving President.
My argument didn't list all of Trump's faults but enough to indicate he wasn't like previous presidents as Caitlin, at the very minimum, implied. And that was the short list of what made him different, the most important of which, we may come to realize, has been his use of, for want of a better description, fascist style phrases to deliberately stir up his supporters to the point where they now constitute a serious physical threat to those who they view, collectively, as their socialist enemy. No president since the Civil War has come to that behavior.
True, he did appoint at least two neocons, Bolton, because he was pressured to do so by his benefactor Adelson, and Abrams, but most of the neocons backed Clinton, like PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan who wrote that she was one of them when it came to foreign policy. I am not really sure what Trump seriously tried to do in a positive sense that was short stopped by the Democrats.
Yes, Carter was an outsider, not to much that he came from the South was not as significant as the fact that he was not part of the Democrat political establishment and hence, not cognizant of the interests of the party's major funders who happened to be liberal Jews who strongly supported Israel. Thus, Carter's efforts to achieve the Camp David agreement which would win him a Nobel prize were not welcomed by the Jewish political establishment which, despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary was not eager to give up the Sinai, even for peace with Egypt. Nor were they enraptured when, in 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon, he warned Begin that if he did not withdraw Israel's troops, promised US aid to Israel would be in jeopardy. No Democrat establishment player would ever have made such a threat. All that, plus his call for a Geneva conference to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict which would involve the Soviet Union was the death for America's Jews who gave him 48% of their vote, the lowest tally by far in modern times.
The Carter Doctrine and the intervention in Afghanistan, which was the brainchild of Zbigniew Brzezinski, I will not try to defend and I would largely agree with you that he has been better as an ex-president.
"I am not really sure what Trump seriously tried to do in a positive sense that was short stopped by the Democrats."
Democrats screamed bloody murder when Trump talked to Putin in Helsinki. The same people who criticized the CIA for lying about Iraqi WMDs were livid that Trump would doubt made up reports of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Democrats screamed bloody murder again (twice) when he made noises about withdrawing troops from NE Syria, and yet again, even passing legislation to prohibit it when he announced a withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Democrats failed to criticize, sometimes even applauded most of the awful things Trump did in international relations such as bombing Syria twice after false flag chemical attacks. Their response to recognizing Guaido was, "Yeah, Maduro is a tyrant.
Trump is not a fascist or a racist. More blacks voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016 and more than for any other Republican candidate in the 20th or 21st Century. He actually lost support among white males.
You've provided an excellent example of precisely what Caitlin wrote about. Thank you.
Spot on, Caitlin, especially since you wrote, "Trump's entire term has revealed that **virtually** everyone, all across the US political spectrum." (my emphasis)
Hillary had demonstrated, through her actions on Libya and elsewhere, that she was the embodiment of evil. Trump's campaign rhetoric, that war was OK if you "take their oil," that torture is OK and that it's OK to punish the innocent families of terrorists, was evil. For that reason, I could not vote for him, and he consummated every one of those promises by authorizing the raid that killed Nora al-Awlaki, appointing Gina Haspel and keeping US troops in Syria precisely to "take their oil." So I'm with you on that.
But I'd go further in criticizing the Democrats. They actually made Trump worse by trying to attack him "from the right," praising his illegal cruise missile attacks on Syria, legislatively blocking withdrawal from Afghanistan, encouraging further sanctions on Russia and attacking him for even negotiating with North Korea. Finally, they took evil to an entirely new level I didn't realize was possible throughout 2020 by using Covid-19 and George Floyd's death to sow chaos to destroy the credibility of the election. They were willing to destroy this country and others to get rid of Trump.
Of course you're right about Trump appointing swamp creatures and neo-cons. How anybody could think Trump is a peacenik after appointing John Bolton and assassinating Soleimani is beyond me, but there are people who still believe he is. On the other hand, do you think there was the slightest chance he ever could have gotten Bruce Fein or Jonathan Turley confirmed as AG or Supreme Court justice?
Though I will never support it or participate, it's possible that civil war is the only possibility for changing the system in the US, as the Constitution is written in such a way that it's almost impossible to amend it, especially now that all political power, at least at the federal level, is controlled by billionaires. There is a small possibility that local sheriffs and chambers of commerce can revolt. That would perhaps be marginally less bloody than all out civil war, but I see few signs that it will happen. More likely, we are headed for full scale totalitarianism first.
I guess you’re right about everyone being polarized. I’m guessing that since almost no one sees their own issues clearly you are likely unaware of how cartoonishly polarized everything you say is.
Do you know what meta-cognition is? Do you think you have an accurate view of what your level of intelligence is or to what degree you are able to think critically? Do you have a normal relationship with anyone who doesn’t believe in this stuff? Do you have normal interactions with people outside the internet? What were you like and what was it like inside your head before all this started? Do you ever think to yourself “I don’t know enough about this particular thing to say anything meaningful about it” particularly when that thing produces an emotional response in you? What is your highest level of education and what kinds of grades did you get and were you in the remedial, normal, or advanced track?
What is missing here in an otherwise inciteful essay are four things that come immediately to mind and apparently are not as detectable as far away as Australia.
First, Trump has NOT been like any other president in that he has ripped off he mask to reveal the true ugly face of American imperialism and national chauvinism which one president after another, and most notably, Obama had disguised.
Second, he removed the lid from the garbage can which had 'contained' the white supremacist racism that has been a cornerstone of the US existence from the beginning so that only those who had been subjected to its violence were fully aware of it.
Third, his cabinet appointments were clearly intended to set back or erase environmental standards that had been steadily improving in the US since Richard Nixon introduced the Environmental Protection Act 50 years ago, and finally, with guidance from the reactionary Federalist Society and a pliant, Republican-controlled Senate, he was able to appoint over 200 federal judges, known for their right-wing leanings, to lifetime positions, including three to the Supreme Court, which is destined to have a negative impact on the federal court system and its decisions for decades.
Democratic senators were involved in writing Ecuador and urging that they not keep Julian Assange in the Embassy. Both political parties are implicated in what is happening to him.
Just a thought: can Presidents pardon people at any time, despite the convention of doing it as they leave? If so, Biden could pardon Snowden and Assange on day one.
But surely, Noam Chomsky - who urged everyone to vote for Biden because Trump is the "worst criminal in human history" - can't be wrong, can he? I mean, he's got a big brain and he wrote some very complicated things about linguistics, so... yes, Chomsky was wrong and foolish to say those things.
I don't agree with Chomsky about giving your vote without a demand. But his point wasn't about Trump (which I don't think he would portray much differently than Caitlin) but about the GOP - and his point was about them pushing the accelerator on climate and/or nuclear annihilation in an unprecedented way. I don't know that he's right about that either (specifically that the Dems would be any more receptive to popular pressure or willing to slow the march to oblivion in a meaningful way) but it is not an unreasonable perspective. And I agree 💯 with Caitlin's take on Trump-the-president (for whatever that is worth).
I based my comment on: "Prominent American academic and intellectual Noam Chomsky has described US President Donald Trump as "the worst criminal in human history." He made his claim in an article in the New Yorker this week." I didn't agree then, and I don't now. Dubya invaded Iraq, costing maybe a million Iraqi lives. That itself makes him a worse criminal than Trump. I have a feeling that Leftists and liberals really detest Trump because (a) he's crude and of low cultural tastes and (b) his Coronavirus victims, while far fewer than those who died in, say, Iraq, Hiroshima or Vietnam, are American citizens and thus of much higher value.
Obama's record on climate change is pretty dismal, too. He pushed fossil fuels, fracking, Arctic drilling and so forth, and the Paris agreement is close to worthless - it has no teeth and its mild goals would make little difference even if they were enforced. And he began modernising the USA's nuclear arsenal, itself an act of gigantic, historic criminality.
"Coronavirus victims?" He didn't create SARS-CoV-2, nor did he order nursing homes to accept actively infected Covid-19 patients prematurely discharged from hospitals who were better equipped to isolate them. It was Fauci, Gates and the WHO who spearheaded fraudulent efforts to discredit the HCQ+zinc+zPak cocktail that has been proven effective in several clinical trials testing it on outpatients, before the cytokine storm takes hold, and it was the medical establishment, not Trump that discouraged the use of corticosteroids, encouraged the use of deadly ventilators and ignores the potential of Ivermectin. But yes, Trump's Warp Speed vaccines will likely create many deaths and injuries.
Sorry - did I read you correctly? You're defending Donald Trump's response to the pandemic? The evidence is overwhelmingly against you.
"Trump went days without mentioning the pandemic other than to celebrate progress on vaccines. The president by then had abdicated his responsibility to manage the public health crisis and instead used his megaphone almost exclusively to spread misinformation in a failed attempt to overturn the results of the election he lost to President-elect Joe Biden.
“I think he’s just done with covid,” said one of Trump’s closest advisers who, like many others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal deliberations and operations. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with covid. . . . It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/trump-covid-pandemic-dark-winter/
"Trump may have tweeted that wearing a mask was now “patriotic.” But meanwhile he counselled that coronavirus is “totally harmless” in ninety-nine percent of cases, predicted that the virus will “sort of just disappear,” and – in a reality-bending assertion – claimed “large portions of our country” are now “corona-free.”
“Masks cause problems, too,” Trump said soon after his heralded first mask use, in explaining why he opposed a national mask mandate. And on July 27 Trump shared a video (a “must watch,” he said) which simply advises: “You don’t need masks.”"
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/28/five-trump-failures-that-unleashed-a-pandemic/
Thanks for providing additional evidence that Trump tried to keep Americans calm rather than panicking and creating hundreds of thousands of excess deaths due to suicide, OD and untreated medical conditions such as heart attack, stroke and cancer. He hasn't been 100% consistent, and his sponsorship of Warp Speed was a huge mistake, but he tried to resist the overwhelming pressure of the establishment. India has finally got it right. They used Hydroxychloroquine to save lives until something better was discovered, Ivermectin. They are now distributing it free to anybody suspected of being exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Their IFR is one of the lowest in the world.
Thank you for clarifying and including your source. I definitely agree with everything you said. Just hard for me to do a hard turn on chomsky even if he has had his share of cringe moments with this election cycle.
(and to be fair his take on Russiagate and Syria were pretty good so he hasn't gone full D on us)
The GOP is not evil, and they are clearly more democratic than the Democratic Party, as it was possible for an outsider that no establishment politicians trusted to win its nomination for President. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is completely irredeemable.
Jimmy Carter was an outsider when he won in 1960 so the party fixed it so that won't happen again. Trump became the candidate of the ultra right Federalist Society and handed it control of the federal courts and the anti-enviromental corporations to whom he delivered the means to set back whatever advances had been made in the environment. And then he became the pawn of the ultra right deep pocketed Zionists in the US like but not limited to Sheldon Adelson,
I never said Trump wasn't evil. He was and is, so I didn't vote for him. I already criticized him for appointing neocons and other swamp creatures in my first comment, and subsequently for Warp Speed. You are of course correct about Zionism and Adelson, but I see no need to list everything he's done wrong. Caitlin's point, which I agree with, is that **virtually** everybody is polarized. Either Trump can do nothing right or Trump can do nothing wrong. The few good things Trump tried to do were fiercely opposed by Democrats. Why? Because it could not be admitted that he did anything good: TDS.
Carter an outsider? Really? He was a favorite of Hyman Rickover and in line to become the captain of one of the first two nuclear subs when he resigned from the Navy to return to Plains. He entered politics ten years later in 1963 and was elected governor of Georgia in 1970. The only sense in which he was an "outsider" was that he was the first Southerner to become President since the Civil War. He was perfectly acceptable to the elites, who had as you wrote "fixed it" so that no candidate unacceptable to the Democratic elites could ever be nominated, immediately after the McGovern fiasco in 1972. Carter was perfectly acceptable to them. He was not an "outsider," and he was responsible for both the "Carter Doctrine" and the long US involvement in Afghanistan.
Carter has been a far better ex-President than he was a serving President.
My argument didn't list all of Trump's faults but enough to indicate he wasn't like previous presidents as Caitlin, at the very minimum, implied. And that was the short list of what made him different, the most important of which, we may come to realize, has been his use of, for want of a better description, fascist style phrases to deliberately stir up his supporters to the point where they now constitute a serious physical threat to those who they view, collectively, as their socialist enemy. No president since the Civil War has come to that behavior.
True, he did appoint at least two neocons, Bolton, because he was pressured to do so by his benefactor Adelson, and Abrams, but most of the neocons backed Clinton, like PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan who wrote that she was one of them when it came to foreign policy. I am not really sure what Trump seriously tried to do in a positive sense that was short stopped by the Democrats.
Yes, Carter was an outsider, not to much that he came from the South was not as significant as the fact that he was not part of the Democrat political establishment and hence, not cognizant of the interests of the party's major funders who happened to be liberal Jews who strongly supported Israel. Thus, Carter's efforts to achieve the Camp David agreement which would win him a Nobel prize were not welcomed by the Jewish political establishment which, despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary was not eager to give up the Sinai, even for peace with Egypt. Nor were they enraptured when, in 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon, he warned Begin that if he did not withdraw Israel's troops, promised US aid to Israel would be in jeopardy. No Democrat establishment player would ever have made such a threat. All that, plus his call for a Geneva conference to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict which would involve the Soviet Union was the death for America's Jews who gave him 48% of their vote, the lowest tally by far in modern times.
The Carter Doctrine and the intervention in Afghanistan, which was the brainchild of Zbigniew Brzezinski, I will not try to defend and I would largely agree with you that he has been better as an ex-president.
"I am not really sure what Trump seriously tried to do in a positive sense that was short stopped by the Democrats."
Democrats screamed bloody murder when Trump talked to Putin in Helsinki. The same people who criticized the CIA for lying about Iraqi WMDs were livid that Trump would doubt made up reports of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Democrats screamed bloody murder again (twice) when he made noises about withdrawing troops from NE Syria, and yet again, even passing legislation to prohibit it when he announced a withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Democrats failed to criticize, sometimes even applauded most of the awful things Trump did in international relations such as bombing Syria twice after false flag chemical attacks. Their response to recognizing Guaido was, "Yeah, Maduro is a tyrant.
Trump is not a fascist or a racist. More blacks voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016 and more than for any other Republican candidate in the 20th or 21st Century. He actually lost support among white males.
You've provided an excellent example of precisely what Caitlin wrote about. Thank you.
Spot on, Caitlin, especially since you wrote, "Trump's entire term has revealed that **virtually** everyone, all across the US political spectrum." (my emphasis)
Hillary had demonstrated, through her actions on Libya and elsewhere, that she was the embodiment of evil. Trump's campaign rhetoric, that war was OK if you "take their oil," that torture is OK and that it's OK to punish the innocent families of terrorists, was evil. For that reason, I could not vote for him, and he consummated every one of those promises by authorizing the raid that killed Nora al-Awlaki, appointing Gina Haspel and keeping US troops in Syria precisely to "take their oil." So I'm with you on that.
But I'd go further in criticizing the Democrats. They actually made Trump worse by trying to attack him "from the right," praising his illegal cruise missile attacks on Syria, legislatively blocking withdrawal from Afghanistan, encouraging further sanctions on Russia and attacking him for even negotiating with North Korea. Finally, they took evil to an entirely new level I didn't realize was possible throughout 2020 by using Covid-19 and George Floyd's death to sow chaos to destroy the credibility of the election. They were willing to destroy this country and others to get rid of Trump.
Of course you're right about Trump appointing swamp creatures and neo-cons. How anybody could think Trump is a peacenik after appointing John Bolton and assassinating Soleimani is beyond me, but there are people who still believe he is. On the other hand, do you think there was the slightest chance he ever could have gotten Bruce Fein or Jonathan Turley confirmed as AG or Supreme Court justice?
Though I will never support it or participate, it's possible that civil war is the only possibility for changing the system in the US, as the Constitution is written in such a way that it's almost impossible to amend it, especially now that all political power, at least at the federal level, is controlled by billionaires. There is a small possibility that local sheriffs and chambers of commerce can revolt. That would perhaps be marginally less bloody than all out civil war, but I see few signs that it will happen. More likely, we are headed for full scale totalitarianism first.
I guess you’re right about everyone being polarized. I’m guessing that since almost no one sees their own issues clearly you are likely unaware of how cartoonishly polarized everything you say is.
Do you know what meta-cognition is? Do you think you have an accurate view of what your level of intelligence is or to what degree you are able to think critically? Do you have a normal relationship with anyone who doesn’t believe in this stuff? Do you have normal interactions with people outside the internet? What were you like and what was it like inside your head before all this started? Do you ever think to yourself “I don’t know enough about this particular thing to say anything meaningful about it” particularly when that thing produces an emotional response in you? What is your highest level of education and what kinds of grades did you get and were you in the remedial, normal, or advanced track?
...... and I hope that we don't expect anything different from pedophile joe biden!
Please supply evidence that Joe Biden is sexually attracted to prepubescent children. I must have missed that somewhere.
What is missing here in an otherwise inciteful essay are four things that come immediately to mind and apparently are not as detectable as far away as Australia.
First, Trump has NOT been like any other president in that he has ripped off he mask to reveal the true ugly face of American imperialism and national chauvinism which one president after another, and most notably, Obama had disguised.
Second, he removed the lid from the garbage can which had 'contained' the white supremacist racism that has been a cornerstone of the US existence from the beginning so that only those who had been subjected to its violence were fully aware of it.
Third, his cabinet appointments were clearly intended to set back or erase environmental standards that had been steadily improving in the US since Richard Nixon introduced the Environmental Protection Act 50 years ago, and finally, with guidance from the reactionary Federalist Society and a pliant, Republican-controlled Senate, he was able to appoint over 200 federal judges, known for their right-wing leanings, to lifetime positions, including three to the Supreme Court, which is destined to have a negative impact on the federal court system and its decisions for decades.
Democratic senators were involved in writing Ecuador and urging that they not keep Julian Assange in the Embassy. Both political parties are implicated in what is happening to him.
Just a thought: can Presidents pardon people at any time, despite the convention of doing it as they leave? If so, Biden could pardon Snowden and Assange on day one.
Dream on. It's because of types like Biden that both men have been pursued or persecuted, if not yet prosecuted.
He could. He won't.
Really appreciate your perspective. Thank you.