John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY LAWRENCE DAVIDSON IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“The U.S. secretary of state is a Christian zealot who sees the U.S. as incapable of doing ill”
“Mike Pompeo’s Deranged Foreign Policy”
Yes, it is deranged, and it is quite dangerous.
But it is not specifically Pompeo’s.
And not even Bolton’s or Haspel’s.
It is Trump’s foreign policy.
It is Nancy Pelosi’s foreign policy.
It is Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy.
It is Elizabeth Warren’s foreign policy.
It is Obama’s foreign policy.
It is even, very much, Bernie Sander’s foreign policy.
I just cannot agree with any version of the often-expressed idea that “if only we could get rid of this or that bad guy in Washington, everything would be fine and back to normal.”
America’s entire power establishment supports this ugly stuff.
It is the stuff of a global empire, not of men in frock coats speaking in high-toned words in the 1790s.
America’s power establishment is corrupted by money in politics, arrogant in their imperial assumptions, and they effectively display little concern for their own people, let alone any others.
Exceptionalism, that most dangerous notion, is firmly implanted in the consciousness of all of them, likely with many of them not even fully realizing the fact. It is the air they breathe.
“Back to the drawing board” would the only real answer were the United States any other kind of enterprise.
But I think we can agree that’s about as likely as the Second Coming.
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Response to another comment:
Yes, Obama was a very dark figure.
He just happened to have a boyish smile and a baritone voice and he enjoyed the indulgence of people happy at the idea of America's first black president.
But his arrogance at times was insufferable. People forget that or somehow never noticed. There are many pictures of him with his finger pointed up in some other leader's face while he lectured. His body language has him sometimes leaning into other people’s personal space in a rather aggressive posture. His dismissive words about Russia and some others were appallingly bad judgment.
He bombed every day of his eight years.
He created the CIA's industrial-scale extrajudicial killing program. He created a dangerous and destructive coup in Ukraine. He ran tanks up to Russia's borders. He destroyed modern Libya. He tried to destroy Syria.
His really nasty sidekick, Hillary Clinton, did some extremely dirty stuff in Libya and Syria, including the secret transport of weapons and cutthroats. Seymour Hersh told us she even sent samples of Gaddafi's chemical weapon stocks to be used for Obama's "red line" threat in Syria.
As for Jefferson and factionalism, there was a man whose words on almost anything cannot be taken at face value.
He was a founding father of factionalism.
As Secretary of State he hired a scoundrel to edit his faction's newspaper in attacking the policies of his boss, George Washington.
Washington was hurt by some of this activity, but it just continued.
Earlier, Jefferson, as a governor, came pretty close to openly advocating secession for his state, long before the Confederacy. When he opposed a policy, he was ruthless.
When he was President, he literally hunted down Aaron Burr in a vendetta. He hated the man for almost winning the election as president under the goofy Electoral College system, even worse then than now.
When Napoleon invaded France’s revolting colony of Haiti, Jefferson gave them all the assistance he could. So much for all those PR lines about freedom and rights.
