Monday, April 16, 2018

"Mission Accomplished?" Yeppers! A 'Wag The Dog' Show To Divert Attention

Image result for Trump screaming baby imagesMissile fire lights up the sky over Damascus. (Hassan Ammar/AP)
"BWAHAHAHA! I wanted my nice, new and smart missiles to clobber them Russians too!"

"We are tethered to a buffoon. He rages and veers, spreading ugliness, like an oil slick smothering everything in its viscous mantle. He’s about to bomb Syria. He’s not about to bomb Syria. His attention span is nonexistent. He attacks the foundations of our Republic: an independent judiciary, a free press, truth itself. His cabinet looks terrorized, the way Saddam Hussein’s once did.

President Donald Trump is dangerous. The main things mitigating the danger are his incompetence and cowardice. We live in a time that teaches how outrage can turn to a shrug, how the unthinkable repeated over and over can induce moral numbness, how a madman’s manic certainties can overwhelm reason.....Trump’s main war, beyond all the military bluster, is on truth. "  - Roger Cohen in NY Times, Saturday

When the corporo-media blabbered about Trump announcing "Mission accomplished!" after his Friday night fireworks display in Syria,  I had to settle down after howling with laughter for nearly a full minute, as wifey can attest. Why? Because those were the same dumbass words used by bumbling birdbrain Gee Dumbya Bush on an aircraft carrier - before the reality of what he started in Iraq came back to bite him in the proverbial butt.

In  the Weekend WSJ  piece 'Pentagon UrgeCaution On Syria Strike', (p.A6) we read the supposed move to strike was after:  "Mr Trump was moved by images of children with foam bubbling from their mouths, aides said."                                                                             

Give me a break. When all is said and done Trump cares more about his night time cheese burger not being undercooked than those gassed kids  foaming at the mouth in Douma.    Sorry, but at 71 - and having investigated a lot of political chicanery (as well as political assassinations) over the past five decades.   I am way too cynical a person to swallow any codswallop churned out by  "aides" quoted in the mainstream media.  So why the hell would I blandly accept that the lying thug occupying the White House suddenly found grace,  humanity and a moral conscience in response to the awful scenes of gassed Syrian kids? 

Nope, this  Friday night fireworks farce - which was almost entirely cosmetic - was all about using crass deflection to take the heat and spotlight of the media off  Trump, given the latest Mueller probe revelations.   If you need a template, Google  "Wag the Dog".  That's where this "show strike" sits.   Wait. Did I just write "show strike"? Yes, I did, after reading those exact words in the Weekend WSJ  piece .To wit:

"The military had identified potential windows for strikes including one Thursday night.  Gen. Mattis cancelled them out of concerns that anything other than a 'show strike'  risked broader escalation with the Russians in particular."

Got that? So despite Trump’s tough language,  e.g. "Get ready, Russia! The missiles will be coming!", Dotard's only  option - short of possible nuclear war-  was one with no genuine punch to damage Assad’s broader war machine.  Or  negate his government’s command and control of its forces - i.e.  beyond its chemical weapons. This is backed up by the post-strike reports  (Denver Post, April,, 14, p 14A) of Syrians pouring into the streets chanting cries of conquest at "the West's failed efforts to subdue them."   We also learned that hundreds danced and waved in the streets of Damascus Saturday morning. And why wouldn't they,  given those cruise missile strikes did nothing to really take out Assad's forces, e.g. which had since occupied Douma?

 Nor did they take out the  Syrians' most substantial military assets - including jet fighters- which had been rapidly moved into protected bunkers after idiot Trump tweeted his threats to strike days in advance.  (Yes, some of the Tomahawk missiles did eradicate the residue of chlorine gas left in drums. But let's try to remember the chlorine was one of the items Assad was permitted to keep after last year's strike, and there is no real evidence - e.g. from blood samples of purported victims - that a nerve agent like Sarin was used.)

In the same (WSJ) piece we also learned Trump was upset and "unhappy"   because "he had been pushing for an attack that would not only punish the Syrian regime but also exact a price from two of its international patrons, Russia and Iran."   The meathead had to be informed by Mattis and the other generals of the risk of accidentally killing hundreds of Russians and starting a wider conflict, even nuclear war. (See also, 'Trump Bowed to Pentagon Restraint', WSJ today, p. A1)

Clearly, Dotard never learned or read about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. However, another real possibility is that this unglued mutt wanted to make an example of a strike on Russian military  interests to "prove" there was no Russian collusion.  I.e. "How could I have colluded with 'em if I just lobbed missiles at 'em?"   Taking us all for morons.

But the generals' persistence is precisely why the attack ended up a "show strike'.  So when Doturd blabbed "This was a precisely executed strike"  - well yeah, if you regard it in the sense of  a precisely executed  "nothing burger" show strike, careful to avoid hitting Russian targets. And let me make it abundantly clear here, for anyone slow on the uptake, that I was absolutely NOT rooting for serious target strikes, or any at all! I wanted the imp to go before congress for an authorization like Obama did way back when, as opposed to using some canned executive authorization based on 9/11. As Sen. Tim Kaine put it this morning, on CBS Early Show:

"The president is wrong about being backed by the Constitution. This was an illegal military act. It is one I would have likely supported if he brought it to congress. I mean, we have a president not a king.  And it's the Constitution which says it is congress which gets to declare war not the president.

What the president can do is defend the United States against imminent attack. But if it's a matter of going on offense, against a sovereign nation of Syria, he's got to come to congress."

 Sen. Kaine also made pointed reference to the fact there is  no overarching strategy, no long term goals that the Trump bunch has defined.  These, he added, are what determines whether a military response makes sense or not. In other words, these one off missile show strikes merely disclose Trump and his gang are ad libbing.  Or perhaps trying to get simpletons to believe he won't tolerate crossing "red lines", but Obama would.

But anyway, given Friday night's fireworks were basically....well, fireworks (at $1 m a pop), there is  unlikely to be any change in the overall balance of forces in Syria seven years into its bloody civil war.   The only real way out of the morass, as one commentator on MSNBC put it days before,  is for Trump to sit down with his pal Putin and work things out.  This is given that Putin basically controls all the forces the U.S. opposes.

What has most astounded me in the aftermath of Friday's night's show is when I read how Trump's favorable ratings had gone up to rival those in his first 100 days, making me wonder how much lower the nation's average I.Q. had dipped. (Wifey estimated just two ticks above "moron" level.) The fools who've been polled to enhance Dotard's approval seem not have processed that a  degenerate mutant isn't "moved" by any sights or scenes of human misery because: a) he really doesn't see any misery other than in reflections of his own ego, and b)  a psychopath lacks any capacity for empathy - which would be required to act on a genuine moral basis. Hence, he lacks any moral compass or conscience, operating instead solely out of a premoral mind and narcissism. That is, his only concerns are immediate and self- gratifying.  He saw the images of the kids foaming mouths-  from the chlorine gas - and decided his ego would be gratified if he used their plight as justification for a fireworks strike on Syria. This self-serving action would  then take the media spotlight  (and scrutiny) off him. Case closed.

So, the motivation for this cruise missile show strike was clearly to gain a wag the dog distraction.  Any person of basic sentience  and intellect, who can read and process analytically,  should be able to see this. You don't need  a Mensa level I.Q.,  or shouldn't.  Especially after it was revealed that the Mueller investigation now has evidence that  Michael  Cohen really did visit Prague in 2016 to meet with the Russkies, as the Steele Dossier had documented.

Yes, we are learning more and more of the Steele dossier's validity with each passing day and you can be assured the piss segment of that document will also be verified at some point. To recap:

"Trump's perverted conduct in Moscow (2013) included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel. where he knew President and Mrs. Obama (whom he hated) had  stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a 'golden showers'  (urination) show in front of him.   The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to."

There is no reason at all to doubt this account - despite the fact the breathless media has declared it the most contentious (and "salacious") part of the dossier. The reason is that the reported behavior (from Steele's  "Source E") is perfectly compatible with Trump's psychological profile of malignant narcissism, sexual libertinism and vengeful payback. It is indeed exactly what this POS would do to a bed which he knew the Obamas had slept in. And moreover, this behavior is totally consistent with that of a loathsome asshole who brags about grabbing pussies.

In many respects, one might use the metaphor of Trump grabbing the nation's "pussy" Friday night to distract it from his looming legal problems, and especially the news in the wake of the Cohen bust.   And why wouldn't he,   given the tidal wave of negative news flooding in, right up until Dotard ordered the strike? As Max Boot put it in the Sunday  WaPo:

"Friday ... brought news that Cohen is under criminal investigation by the Justice Department for a litany of offenses. That same day, the deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee resigned after the disclosure that he had paid $1.6 million in hush money to a former mistress, a Playboy playmate, whom he had impregnated. The broker of the hush money was none other than Cohen.

It is hard to imagine how Trump can do his job — for example, approving military strikes on Syria — while drowning in this rising tide of scandal. There is an old tradition, more honored in theory than fact, that issues of national security are kept separate from domestic politics, but Trump is utterly incapable of making any such distinction. For him, everything is political — and all politics is personal."

What has in the end been fortuitous for us all, the remaining sane citizens of this country, is that Trump did not actuate the wider strikes he really wanted,, namely on the Russians. Had he been enabled and done so (and make no mistake John "Ripper" Bolton was prompting him) we might not be having this conversation at all.  Let's thank our lucky stars or whatever,  that Gen. Jim  "Mad Dog" Mattis is still in the White House to exert some level of oversight on this impetuous, psychopathic, septuagenarian toddler.

See also:

‘Mission Accomplished!’ But What Is the Mission?

And:

Excerpt:

If  the US/UK/France really believed the building they targeted (and hit) in a heavily populated civilian area of Damascus was actually making chemical weapons, what do they think would have happened if all that toxic material had been dispersed by explosions throughout the surrounding neighborhoods? Hundreds if not thousands of civilians would have died. So either the "Western powers" knowingly risked killing thousands of innocent people -- or else they knew the building was not actually a chemical weapons facility.

And:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-margolis/78683/playing-with-nuclear-matches

And:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/richard-eskow/78705/7-questions-about-the-syria-airstrikes-that-aren-t-being-asked

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