Friday, March 03, 2017

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: COLUMNIST SAYS BE PATIENT ABOUT TRUMP'S NOT YET PURGING WASHINGTON'S "POWER MINISTRIES"- I HOPE HE IS RIGHT BUT HERE IS EXACTLY WHY I TEND TO DOUBT IT


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY GILBERT DOCTOREAU IN RUSSIA INSIDER


“Patience: Trump Is Waiting For the Right Time to Purge Washington's 'Power Ministries'”

I very much hope the author is right, but I am not at all sure that he is.

Trump is clearly under attack from elements of the security establishment.

The endless whining of Democrats and a self-righteous and irresponsible press, which feels displaced in its privileges, Trump can take with no trouble. He has an exceptionally strong mental and emotional constitution and amazing energy for a man of his age.

But the security forces are another matter. The CIA is loaded with bright psychopaths with access to virtually endless resources, restrained by little accountability, endowed with a quasi-religious sense of purpose as though coming from God, and possessing, as with all psychopaths, no conscience or ethics whatever.

Of course, we have the old-boy networks in the State Department, too, and those are people who work hand-in-glove with CIA in embassies abroad. Trump has culled a small number, but there are likely hundreds of questionable figures in significant positions.

The Democrats and the press - and now I include huge hi-tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon as a new hybrid branch of the press as well as cooperative partners with CIA - give the weirdos at Langley lots of contacts and support.

The situation much resembles when an undercover spy abroad works on building a local network. In this case, there already is in place a vast and well-resourced network.

If the author's analysis is valid, we must see the $54 billion giveaway to the already-bloated Pentagon as something with which to buy the military's loyalty as he comes gradually to confront "the enemy within."

But any such scenario does sound more like a novel from someone like Robert Ludlum than what usually goes on in Washington. It means really big fireworks ahead.

But I really am quickly coming to the conclusion Trump is going to change nothing much worth changing.

America will go right on trying to order around everyone on the planet, fighting and killing just to change some situations its establishment doesn't approve of, spending countless billions on a trouble-making military and security establishment which is itself far more of a genuine threat to what Americans like to think their country is about than any imaginable threat from abroad.

Democracy and freedom and human rights cannot, absolutely cannot, flourish in a vast garrison-security state. You do not get Thomas Paine in East Germany with the Stasi.

Trump, in my eyes, is coming to resemble Obama redux, only with a decidedly different tone.

“The swamp” - which very much includes the Pentagon and the psychopaths in Langley, Virginia, - is far more treacherous than Trump or his followers ever imagined.

Meanwhile, nothing he has done - outside of his personal war with the corporate press and stirring up a lot of unhappiness around migrants, neither of which is of any immediate concern or help to average Americans or to peace in the world - is much different to what – ugh! - Hillary Clinton might have done.

More money to the bloated Pentagon.

Threaten Iran.

Threaten China.

Keep up tensions with Russia.

Keep the horror in Syria going.

Give the war criminal leading Israel whatever he wants.

So far, absolutely nothing of consequence for the American people.

It is all very disheartening, tending to confirm the idea that America is ungovernable, fat and layered, as it is, with privileged and unaccountable classes and groups who bend its wealth and influence to serve only their own interests.

I dearly hope I'm wrong, but I am not a religious or ideological person who sets hopes for things which likely cannot be. I believe what I see and experience.