In light of the whole Trump/Putin controversy, my thoughts regarding the carnival that is Washington DC remain unchanged.
I remain uninterested in the whole debacle, though perhaps I’m now a bit more embarrassed than I used to be.
Some thoughts, here:
1) The office of the President isn’t important anymore, except perhaps symbolically.
The US President these days is largely a figurehead. He’s more of a symbol than a political force. The real power in DC these days rests in the hands of Wall Street, the military, the narco barons, and the intelligence agencies. Long gone are the days when people seriously thought that the US President ruled the world.
That’s why I find all of this talk of these controversies being the next “Watergate” amusing. Watergate was important because back then, the President actually was someone, as opposed to being a mere puppet of others.
Back then, people actually cared if the President did “bad things”. Not so much, these days.
2) All of this stuff really does seem like a re-enactment of Rome’s final days.
It’s just amazing how many controversies are being thrown around these days in DC, and how very little 99% of the people have in common with them. It’s just oligarch stuff, all of it. The problems of the rich and famous.
Here in the world of the normal people, it’s the economy that matters. It’s the retail meltdown and immigrant displacement of Americans that people are thinking about, and not any of the stuff that’s in the news, whatever that stuff might be. TBH, I don’t know all the details of these controversies because 1) frankly, they don’t interest me, 2) I have nothing to do with them anyways, and 3) there are so many controversies these days that to keep them all straight would require a part-time job’s worth of time investment in reading the fucking newspapers, which I never do anyways on principle.
This stuff is playing out very, very much like a drama ripped from the history books about the last days of Rome. A drama selected, perhaps, to exemplify how out-of-touch and childish the ruling families really were in Rome’s final days.
“The people” (in this case, the conservative base) are not rallying around Trump. Not one iota. And why would they? What has Trump done for anyone? For his own base, ever?
Where is the wall? Where is the Wall Street crackdown? Where are the plans for ANY of the things that he promised us that he would start to work on?
There is no reason for anyone to rally behind Trump in defense of him. He’s just a billionaire at this point, fighting some other billionaires like Soros and Bezos, as well as a few hundred millionaires in Congress, Hollywood and the media.
Honestly, who cares, really?
3) The “professional” conservatives like Coulter certainly seem relived to have a distraction that will allow them to rally behind the GOP again.
I still think that this isn’t carrying over to the base, at all. Coulter has a lot invested in Trump. I mean, she wrote a book in support of him. But I can count on one hand the number of real-life conservatives that I know that have written anything in support of Trump, ever (I don’t need the hand).
For Coulter, Trump means book sales and speaking engagements. For everyone else, Trump means zilch.
Let’s compare this controversy to Watergate, again. Nixon was a very important man, historically. I won’t rehash all of what he did, as Wikipedia can do a better job than I can at that, but suffice to say that we wouldn’t have our country looking the way it does today without him. His one act of de-pegging the dollar from gold is more important than anything that Trump has done in his entire life, easily.
That being the case, yes, Watergate was important. But why the hell should any common person care about any of this Trump/Putin shit? What has Trump ever actually done as President, good or bad? Where are his achievements of any kind?
Why would anyone rally to the defense of someone who has nothing to do with them?
Does anyone not professionally or emotionally invested in this stuff actually care about any of this?
4) ISIS is obviously not a threat to us, except in that way that it’s a tool of the CIA, which apparently hates us.
The whole “ISIS” thing is going over like a lead balloon in much the same way that all of the North Korea crap did. Nobody cares about ISIS, because 1) it is so obviously a tool of the ruling families that it is absolutely laughable that anyone would pretend otherwise; 2) it is very, very hard to take Trump’s claims of ISIS being a threat seriously because literally nobody else in the oligarchy agrees with him, perhaps because ISIS is clearly only a tool for attacking poor whites and others that the oligarchy hates; and 3) as usual, the cognitive dissonance between the two messages that people are getting about Islam only serves to distance the public from the ruling families.
What I mean is the drive to push radical Islam into America, some of which is coming from Trump’s own family, like his own daughter, is obviously at odds with the idea that ISIS is some kind of existential threat to America.
What we have is a situation in which the President apparently thinks that radical Islam is the most dangerous thing ever, but apparently, his own daughter, who is on his staff as one of his chief advisors, thinks otherwise, to the point that she’ll literally go on national TV and broadcast that idea to the entire world.
This is very, very hard for people to wrap their minds around. Why? Because it makes no fucking sense.
It’s like if Eleanor Roosevelt had went and pleaded on TV for the rights of Nazis that were being bombed by Allied forces.
It makes no fucking sense.
5) I could go on, you know. I think we all know that, by now. But, I won’t. It’s late and I need to get up early tomorrow.
Ugh.