Trump Muslim Ban Shows (Again) Why He's Unfit to Lead

"Mr. Trump claims to be serious. Seriously tough and seriously clever, 'the best in the world at finance'. But Mr. Trump is not at all serious. He is a clown and an increasingly sinister one. His shtick is to describe a make believe, fallen America, beaten by everyone, emasculated, and immiserated by having the worst government in the world. Then he proposes outlandish ideas to make America great again. 

Mr. Trump's biggest fans are middle-aged or older, white, rather poorly educated and disposed to be awed by a shouty billionaire.". - The Economist, Dec. 5-11, p. 27)


Let us accept as a proposition that any presidential candidate who doesn't know or who actually rejects the Constitution is unfit to lead this nation. After all, our country is built on that document which is not "just a piece of paper" as Gee Dumbya Bush once referred to it. Thus, the rational citizen - of which I still believe there are many - must see Donald Trump as unfit to lead this country after his "Muslim ban" outburst yesterday, i.e.

"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of all Muslims entering the United States...We have no choice"

Note that Trump's proposal targets Muslim Americans, i.e. who leave the country say on holiday then return, not just immigrants.

This insane, out of touch with reality blather brought instant condemnation not only from Democrats but from the whole Republican establishment, including Dick Cheney.

When you have Cheney weighing in against your proposals you KNOW you're a grade A dingbat and a-hole and really not presidential caliber. Cheney said:

"the whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims and just ban a whole religion goes against everything we stand for and believe in"

The Donna spewed his offal in South Carolina, before a crowd that actually reminded me (as they chanted "Trump!, Trump!, Trump!")  of the Hitlerites in  Leni's Reifenstahl's film 'Triumph of the Will' bellowing "Sieg Heil!" as the Fuhrer unleashed a torrent of insane bollocks  -  just like Trump. See e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvVEr7xtqf0

Not coincidentally the South Carolina GOP Chairman, Matt Moore, may have likewise recalled or referenced those images from the past as he said:

"Donald Trump's bad idea and rhetoric send a shiver down my spine"

Well. as they should any citizen aware of history and George Santayana's famous words: 'Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.'

And for reference, let's indicate the parts of the Constitution - namely in the Bill of Rights  - that Trump's vicious and anti-American proposal has inveighed against:

First Amendment:

"Make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.."

Fourteenth Amendment:

"Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. "

Trump's proposal would trample these rights as well as due process as provided for in the 5th amendment.

Worst of all, which had to be on Cheney's mind, and was certainly on war correspondent Richard Engel's (last night on MSNBC),  is the clear security issue involved. While Trump bellows loudly how he will protect the people, his proposal would in fact make us much more likely to suffer attacks. The reason, as Engel noted when he said:

"The reason there are five thousand people in western Europe that have joined ISIS and left Europe is because they feel ghetto-ized. They feel they are not part of the community. The reason we only have two hundred and fifty people who have gone to join ISIS is by and large they feel they are getting a fair shake and they have a shot at the American dream.

If you change that equation you will change the numbers"

Also, by belligerently keeping people of a particular religion out you will ensure those who remain become much more secretive, less willing to divulge critical information to authorities - and hence eliminate a whole swatch of human intelligence ("humint") This puts the nation at far greater risk without knowing what's going on.

As I believe I made clear in an earlier post, while it's true the Qu'uran contains outlandish statements from the Prophet in terms of  "jihad" and  "infidels" it is also true that most Muslims today don't literally accept those statements any more than  Christians literally accept the extreme sanctions such as stoning homosexuals or adulterers to death as seen in Deuteronomy or Kings. For instance, 2 Kings 2, 23:24 allows children to be slain by wild animals ("she bears")  if they insult their elders or any authority  (in this case a prophet).  Similarly, by Deut. 22:22 both John Edwards and his former girlfriend (Riele Hunter) would have been stoned to death.

The point is that enlightened followers of a religion do not mindlessly follow its every admonition, phrase injunction or prescription. Even most Catholics I know no longer follow the idiotic anti-birth control dogma. (Which to be fair, is nowhere in the Bible anyway.) I've also met Catholics that no longer believe in papal infallibility but they still remain nominal Catholics. Why can't the same be true for Muslims? Just because their book says "slay the infidels" doesn't mean they need act like zombies or robots and obey it any more than Xtians need follow an injunction from Leviticus to slay homosexuals. We have to give religious people a modicum of credit for common sense and temperance.

Thus,  it is baseless to inveigh against and vilify an entire religion based on what a minor subset of radical fundamentalists (who adhere to every word) do.

Trump, in order to try and justify his nonsense, cited a "poll of Muslims" that purportedly reveals "ominous levels of support for Islamic Supremacists' Doctrine of Shariah". But it is well to point out the source of this poll: none other than the right wing Islamophobe Frank Gaffney, Jr. The Southern Poverty Law Center - which always keeps one eye on the hate mongers, describes Gaffney as "one of the most notorious Islamophobes".

The take of The Economist (Nov. 30- Dec. 4, p. 24) is that this bout of protracted nativism (recall Trump earlier called for a "registry" of Muslims) follows earlier episodes of religious intolerance. It cites, for example, how at the turn of the 20th century Catholics were almost universally reviled as "papists" who gave allegiance to a foreign power (the Vatican) and conducted their services in a strange foreign language (Latin).

That Catholic rejection eventually settled down as Catholics became ever more integrated into their communities. Also, it eventually dawned on American Protestants that Catholics were Christians too.

Whether the current mindless intolerance of Muslims can be resolved in the same way is an open question. As long as terror attacks are mounted by Muslim extremists it will be difficult to get the demographic that supports Trump (mainly non-college educated whites)  to trust that faith or its followers.  That means their being led even more down the path of paranoia and hate by Trump.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/p-m-carpenter/65166/once-disdained-hitler-references-are-now-deserved-and-we-can-thank-the-right

And:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/michael-winship/65120/trump-s-bigotry-revives-fears-of-it-can-t-happen-here

And:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-boehlert/65103/trump-the-press-and-how-to-treat-a-liar

YES! Americans Deserve to Know What the CIA Did In Our Name!

Today, the report prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee is due to be released. Already the national security state fetishists are going bonkers squealing how it will entice attacks and ruin our reputation. They ought to have thought of that, namely the odious Bush-Cheney ilk, before they approved torture in our name.

Look, I seldom agree with Sen. Dianne Feinstein - especially in her yen to go after patriot Edward Snowden- but in this case she is 100 percent correct that Americans need to see this report, if for no other reason to inject a citizen zeitgeist to prevent this from ever happening again - namely by never electing the wrong people to govern them again, as in 2000. (Ok, technically, Bush -Cheney weren't elected but appointed by five radical Supremes who halted the FLA vote count. More technically, Jebbie Bush  - who now wants to run for Prez, had his then Secretary of State Katherine Harris, put tens of thousands of black on Choicepoint Felon Lists so they couldn't vote - thereby stealing the FLA electoral votes for his criminal bro.)

All this is now germane with this report. A bit of backstory for those who forgot. In mid-March of this year the CIA  (according to Feinstein,  in a forty minute tirade on March 11th),  broke into the Senate Intelligence Committee computers and eliminated the key files of the Panetta Report. In this report, the Senate  Intelligence Committee  had the goods on just how vile the CIA torture and rendition program really was under the vermin Bushies.   What we do know now, in retrospect,  is that it was in early December when the Central Intelligence Agency began to suspect it had suffered what it regarded as an embarrassing "computer breach."

Investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, working in the basement of a C.I.A. facility in Northern Virginia, had obtained an internal agency review summarizing thousands of documents related to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Parts of the C.I.A. report cast a particularly harsh light on the program, the same program the agency was in the midst of defending in a prolonged dispute with the intelligence committee. In other words, exposure of the secret internal report would have exposed the spooks as being duplicitous and excessive (and likely unlawful) in their methods of extracting information (well depicted in the film Zero Dark Thirty, btw, which saw the spooks blowing a gasket when it came out, asserting things never went down like that. Now we know they likely did!)

Enraged that their 'cover' was blown, Agency officials began scouring the digital logs of the computer network used by the Senate staff members to try to learn how and where they got the report. Their search not only raised constitutional questions about the propriety of an intelligence agency investigating its congressional overseers, but has also resulted in two parallel inquiries by the Justice Department — one into the C.I.A. and one into the committee.

Feinstein, for her part, maintained the documents were given to the Committee, not pilfered from computer networks, which I am inclined to accept.  And while Obama officially ended the black site rendition and torture program  — which began in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks and expanded into a network of secret prisons in Thailand, Romania, Lithuania and elsewhere — he never followed up by prosecuting the ones that did it, starting with GeeDumbya .  It was left to Leon Panetta to drive an internal review of exactly how far the spooks stepped over the line. 

In the wake of the buzz concerning the report, many European nations vowed again that Cheney and Bush would end up in prison for crimes against humanity if they ever set foot in their countries. In the meantime, these two weasels have remained vocal in defense of the misbegotten program even making rationalizations as recently as last night on the news.

The ABC News segment last night noted that the White House supports the release of the report - which they should - and also that it is "extremely graphic". It includes CIA practices of sexual debasement and torture as well as their waterboarding - which btw, has been regarded as torture since the era of the Inquisition (which used it on heretics and apostates.)  The most vile part is that the torture continued even after the interrogators concluded there was no more useful information to be had. In other words, like the Inquisitors who laughed as they sliced off the breasts of lesbians, these foul insects enjoyed what they were doing to their captives. 

Also equally, the majority Senate Intelligence findings concluded that the CIA "misled the Bush administration about the methods and the results of the coercive interrogations conducted at so-called black sites outside the U.S."

And now that these leaks on the report are known concerning how his bunch was misled, how does Bushie boy see it in retrospect? According to Martha Raddatz reporting in the segment:

"The former President is standing by the CIA"

In other words, he is as complicit as the CIA and likely even knew what they were doing then but approved of it, hence ought to have been prosecuted and thrown in the slammer - or at least shipped out to the International Court in Hague to stand trial with his pal Cheney. Asked for a comment for the news segment, Bush is seen saying:

"These are patriots and whatever the report says, if it diminishes the contributions to our country, it is way off base."

Really? Revealing vile sexual tortures is way off base? I do recall some transcripts sent me from the Nuremberg Tribunal trials by my German friend Kurt Braun back in '85 and how several of the Nazi higher ups made the exact same arguments regarding the methods used by the Gestapo. "These were patriots!"  After all, they found out who was bad mouthing der Fuhrer and who was hiding Jews in their attics.

But, of course, this merely confirmed for me that Bush is as noxious a pig as when I beheld him as President. 

Of course, Cheney isn't far behind in being reprehensible in defense of this torture program and not releasing information about it (why wouldn't a rat want to conceal his evil deeds?)  According to Raddatz reporting in the same segment on how slimeball Cheney also piped up:

"He told the New York Times today that the harsh interrogations were absolutely, totally justified, dismissing accusations in the Senate report that it was a rogue operation as a bunch of hooey"

Raddatz adding "but make no mistake there are things in this report that will shock many Americans"

I want to see them - and YOU should too! Just as I wanted to see the actual autopsy photos of JFK's head wounds after the CIA punks had him offed in 1963..

And btw, if the CIA could stoop to such methods now, don't think for a moment they wouldn't have taken out Kennedy back in 1963. As I showed in my book, 'The JFK Assassination - The Final Analysis',  a direct causal line exists connecting the assassination to what went down in the wake of Sept 11, 2001.  This is further supported by the work of long time researcher Peter Dale Scott, in his book: 'The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 And the Deep Politics Of War.'

The more we know, the more we can act the part of citizens. 

Cheney & Other Neocons Ought to be Keeping Silent - Not Trashing Obama

"Never mind the fact that the perpetrators of this enormous fraud, this smash-and-grab robbery, this looting of the Treasury, this act of first-degree murder on a massive scale, all walked away scot-free to pursue new careers and live lives of comfort. Amazingly enough, that's not the worst part. The worst part is that they're all on my television again, trying to blame President Obama for the circumstances created by their own feckless, murderous decisions." - William Rivers Pitt, in 'They Belong in Prison, Not on TV' on smirkingchimp.com

I still have my mouse pad given to me as a gift some years ago: it shows Dick Cheney's snarling mug on one side and that of his spitting image - a snarling "Satan" on the other, e.g.
Given this piece of filth was largely the Maestro of the Iraq invasion, one would have thought he'd be keeping a low profile, as opposed to actually having the nerve to pen an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal daring to insinuate Obama committed "treason" for "betraying the future of our country". What the fuck is he talking about? He and his fellow Neocon vermin betrayed the country by destabilizing Iraq and opening the doors to real terror. He and the necons were actually WAR Criminals, who ought to now be rotting just outside the Hague - but because of the overly good graces of Obama, these scum were never prosecuted or turned over! One must question where the thanks are now. Have they no shame? No they don't!

Let’s recall here (for the memory-challenged) that it was Cheney who originally had a plan underfoot to bogusly attack Iraq from 1992  (under the banner of the 'Project for the New American Century') operating under the presumption that Poppy Bush (George the First) would be re-elected. Well, he wasn’t.  Clinton took the election thanks to Ross Perot splitting the ‘puke vote. This meant Cheney’s plan had to be put on hold until another Bush could get in, and that wasn’t until 2000 – when five treasonous Supreme Court justices interrupted a Florida recount to hand the election to Junior, aka Dumbya.

Even then it wasn’t a done deal, a pretext still had to be found for invasion and occupation. The gift fell into the laps of Bush, Cheney and their Neocon warmonger cohort with the devastating 9/11 attacks. People will argue over 9/11’s real origins until their dying day but one thing we do know: the Bush Criminals profited handsomely in the wake, with Bush’s approval rating shooting up into the 90s (from below 35%) even as the national security state and military –industrial complex got the go ahead for the biggest spending in 60 years. At the very least, while many of us don’t believe these vermin deliberately blew up the Twin Towers, we do think it highly probable they KNEW what was coming and sat back and did nothing. In other words they let it happen.  It was simply too great a benefit ‘plum’ to do otherwise. See also: http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-responsible-was-bush-for-911.html

It also finally enabled the original Cheney Iraq invasion-occupation plan to be put into motion. All the Neocon memos surfacing from just after 9/11 (many from Paul Wolfowitz & Cheney) showed repeated underscored emphases like: “TIE SADDAM TO 9/11! HOW?” Indeed, how? Since Saddam was a resolute secularist who had no tolerance for religious extremists of either the Sunni or Shi’ite Muslim stripe. But the traitor Cheney and his Neocon ilk were determined to make the connection and have the corporate U.S. media coopted to assist in the PR blitz that lasted from October, 2002 until March, 2003 when the Cheney-bred dogs of war were unleashed. To that end, the Cheney-directed Neocons employed every sort of ruse - from 'yellowcake' to aluminum tubes and alleged claims of WMD (from an Iraqi traitor rat named 'curve ball') - to pump up a bogus case for invasion just like Hitler and the Nazis did (using faked imagery of German fraus being raped by Poles) to justify an invasion of Poland in 1939. Once he had the U.S. corporate media on his side it was merely a matter of drum beating a sheep-like American public into giving him the poll numbers he desired to launch an invasion in March, 2003.

If there was one prime Nazi I'd compare Cheney to it would probably be Rudolph Hess, but the malignancy of Hess pales besides that of Cheney.  While Hess likely was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands, Cheney's Iraq interference machinations led to a wasteful occupation that in the end cost us over $3 trillion and more than 4400 American lives as well as 600,000 innocent Iraqi lives (according to WHO, the World Health Organization). Meanwhile, the bloody Nazified takeover as well as hyped rhetoric (“Axis of Evil”) drove the other two members of that defined “axis”, Iran and North Korea, to develop their own nuclear weapons – realizing this would likely be the only deterrent to the crazed Amerikkan pre-emptive warmongers. So, if Iran and North Korea do have ‘x’ atomic bombs today, you can lay the blame on Dick Cheney’s lap as well as his accomplices, aka the Neocon rats like Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Richard Perle et al.

 Make no mistake that Cheney is the real traitor, whose costly pre-emptive war will cost us well into the future, including the brain-damaged vets needing aid, and benefits. But at the same time Cheney's is only one dastardly head belonging to the multi-headed Hydra Neocons. This Hydra is now raising its voice in the media to try to brand Obama responsible for the current Iraqi turmoil - as opposed to pointing the finger at themselves. For they were the architects of one of the worst geopolitical disasters in living memory.

Make no mistake I wanted all of them brought to account, especially for their torture and rendition practices - as well as launching  a pre-emptive war. I had opined at the time (just after Obama's 2008 election) that he needed to prosecute them with the full force of law - using all the resources of the Justice Dept.-  and if not hung as war criminals, then tossed into assorted slammers here in the U.S. to rot. But Obama was too gracious by far insisting we must "look forward, not backward".  Did he have any notion then of the ingratitude these degenerates would show now? Not bloody likely!

When next the neocons are tempted to go off on Obama, they need to visualize just where they'd be right now had he not been so generous and forgiving five years ago.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-rivers-pitt/56519/they-belong-in-prison-not-on-tv

Cheney Calls Snowden a Traitor? HAHAHAHAHA!

It was a hoot and a holler this morning seeing the frothing, outraged mug of Dick Cheney on network television calling Edward Snowden a “traitor”. I was so struck with the irony of it: the putative biggest traitor since Benedict Arnold calling "the kettle black", that I doubled over with laughter, even incepting another bronchitis -coughing spasm. Let’s recall here that it was Cheney who had a plan underfoot to bogusly attack Iraq from 1992  (under the banner of the 'Project for the New American Century') operating under the presumption that Poppy Bush (George the First) would be re-elected. Well, he wasn’t, Clinton took the election thanks to Ross Perot splitting the ‘puke vote. This meant Cheney’s plan had to be put on hold until another Bush could get in, and that wasn’t until 2000 – when five treasonous Supreme Court justices interrupted a Florida recount to hand the election to Junior.

Even then it wasn’t a done deal, a pretext still had to be found for invasion and occupation. The gift fell into the laps of Bush, Cheney and their Neocon warmonger cohort with the devastating 9/11 attacks. People will argue over 9/11’s real origins until their dying day but one thing we do know: the Bush Criminals profited handsomely in the wake, with Bush’’s approval rating shooting up into the 90s (from below 35%) even as the national security state and military –industrial complex got the go ahead for the biggest spending in 60 years. At the very least, while many of us don’t believe these vermin deliberately blew up the Twin Towers, we do think it highly probable they KNEW what was coming and sat back and did nothing. In other words they let it happen.  It was simply too great a benefit ‘plum’ to do otherwise. See also: http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-responsible-was-bush-for-911.html

It also finally enabled the original Cheney Iraq invasion-occupation plan to be put into motion. All the Neocon memos surfacing from just after 9/11 (many from Paul Wolfowitz & Cheney) showed repeated underscored emphases like: “TIE SADDAM TO 9/11! HOW?” Indeed, how? Since Saddam was a resolute secularist who had no tolerance for religious extremists of either the Sunni or Shi’ite Muslim stripe. But the traitor Cheney and his Neocon ilk were determined to make the connection and have the corporate U.S. media coopted to assist in the PR blitz that lasted from October, 2002 until March, 2003 when the Cheney-bred dogs of war were unleashed. To that end, the Cheney-directed Neocons employed every sort of ruse - from 'yellowcake' to aluminum tubes and alleged claims of WMD (from an Iraqi traitor rat named 'curve ball') - to pump up a bogus case for invasion just like Hitler and the Nazis did (using faked imagery of German fraus being raped by Poles) to justify an invasion of Poland in 1939. Once he had the U.S. corporate media on his side it was merely a matter of drum beating a sheep-like American public into giving him the poll numbers he desired to launch an invasion in March, 2003.


The end results were absolutely disastrous, for both the Iraqi people and the U.S.: a wasteful occupation that in the end cost us over $3 trillion and more than 4400 American lives as well as 600,000 innocent Iraqi lives (according to WHO, the World Health Organization). Meanwhile, the bloody Nazified takeover as well as hyped rhetoric (“Axis of Evil”) drove the other two members of that defined “axis”, Iran and North Korea, to develop their own nuclear weapons – realizing this would likely be the only deterrent to the crazed Amerikkan pre-emptive warmongers. So, if Iran and North Korea do have ‘x’ atomic bombs today, you can lay the blame on Dick Cheney’s lap as well as his accomplices, aka the Neocon rats like Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Richard Perle et al.


Make no mistake that Cheney is the real traitor, whose costly pre-emptive war will cost us well into the future, including the brain-damaged vets needing aid, and benefits. To call a real hero like Snowden a traitor is not only to miss the mark on the meaning of the word, but how far our own country has gone down the sewer of decline and mental damage in the last twelve years. The fact the media would put a turd like Cheney on to bloviate and cast aspersions on Snowden also reveals the extent to which the media itself have devolved into total state propaganda whores. (Evidenced even now as most pile onto Snowden, decrying everything from his lack of education, to going to Hong Kong for his revelations and being a "narcissist". Many other people I once respected have disclosed themselves to be shills, including Bob Schieffer and Debbie Wasserman-Schulz)


As for Cheney's claim that the current NSA dragnet surveillance would have stopped 9/11, don't make me freakin' laugh! The actual problem was that the Bushies ignored reams of key information, such as the August, 2001 President's Daily Brief highlighting "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."  Bush received this while at his Crawford, TX retreat. (He took more vacations than any other president in his first year alone.) And how did Bush respond to this? He gave a quick glance then went to clear some ....bush. But what ought to have made his eyeballs pop out was the short paragraph reading (9/11 Commission Report, p. 255-56):

"An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [—] service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike."



Then there was the monumental intelligence failure documented by former FBI agent Coleen Rowley who  testified in front of the Senate and for the 9/11 Commission about the FBI's internal organization and mishandling of information related to the September 11, 2001, attacks. She noted how  the FBI failed to take action on information provided by the Minneapolis, Minnesota Field Office regarding its investigation of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.

In contrast to Cheney's bullshit claims, the fact is that there was a surfeit of information and data - so much that the Bushie brats either chose to ignore it, or be over selective in what they'd attend to. But again, that's being generous, Those of us who are deep politics citizens and standard politics cynics can't leave out the conviction the Bushies allowed 9/11 to occur on their watch, to reap massive political gain. The past twelve years' growth of the military and super spy complex more than validates that, not to mention how Bush's history has now been so reconstructed at his Dallas' library that only Americans paying attention would know how much of it is bull crap.

See also:  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1544.htm

---------------
Footnote: In a live Q & A on The Guardian website, Snowden fired back at Cheney, lambasting him as the one who engineered the warrantless wiretaps - before the FISA law was revised to make the illegal, legal. See Snowden take down the lying mutt Cheney in the Q&A published at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-us-fair-trial?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20aux-1%20Mini-bento:Bento%20box%208%20col:Position1

In the course of the Q&A Snowden also gives much more background into the NSA surveillance program including the use of  "weasel words" by the spy masters to try to squirm out of what they're really up to. I guaran-damn tee you this is the only place you will see these things revealed.
Snowden also pointedly observed that to be called a "traitor" by the likes of Cheney was actually an honor, given, of course, Cheney is the real traitor!