John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Robert Mueller Is in Serious Legal Trouble - Here's Why”
https://russia-insider.com/en/robert-mueller-serious-legal-trouble-heres-why/ri27002
For me, this well-done article only adds to the evidence that Washington lacks coherence in virtually all of its thinking and behavior.
It is not just in its past and recent behavior around Trump, and the one thing I see as quite negative about articles like this is their tendency to offer support to Trump’s sympathizers, people who see him as a victim, a victim of diabolical political plots.
The fact is that Washington has been reduced to political and intellectual chaos for years. Giant noisy, spoiled children on all political sides, shouting to the world about the harm that has been done to them while they busy themselves actively harming others.
Yes, there are dark and chaotic deeds here, related to Trump's election and Hillary Clinton's loss and the nature of Mueller’s investigation and huge numbers of unanswered questions around the behavior of senior Democrats, very much including Obama, but then there are dark chaotic deeds these days in all of Washington's behavior towards the world. Why would anyone expect things to be different inside the asylum?
What is more absurd and threatening than Washington's public behavior against Venezuela? Imagine spending years of effort imposing economic sanctions and other sabotage, effort going well back into Obama’s day, to try strangling a country and then turning around, as the United States has recently, to blame Venezuela’s own government for the mess?
Imagine stooping to such low stunts as turning off most of the country’s electricity so that millions of ordinary people lose all the food in their fridges and then turning around to say the country’s government is responsible for people being hungry?
Imagine giving speech after speech about freedom and democracy in Venezuela, as they do in Washington, while you openly support an unelected man, who swore himself into office, one who goes around proclaiming himself president of the country?
A man, moreover, known to have old ties to the CIA? A man who in recent days publicly considered the idea of asking Washington to invade his own country?
Imagine stealing access to everything from a government’s bank accounts to its gold reserves and handing them over to the unelected man you say is the country’s president?
Well, all that vicious effort, and more, against Venezuela comes while making ceaseless efforts against Russia and the “threat” that it represents. Tanks clanking through Europe, planes approaching Russia’s borders, ships in the Baltic and the Black Sea on special exercises, massive war games put on not far from Russia, threatening language regularly heard from military officials, more sanctions illegally imposed against a country just to hurt it.
And there are the attempts to interfere directly in legitimate business capital projects like a new natural gas pipeline to Europe, something that is absolutely none of America’s business, except to the extent that it wants to control all relationships, hardly what anyone would describe as an appropriate or even healthy interest.
All of that in response against Russia’s measured responses to yet another coup, one clearly engineered just like the one attempted in Venezuela, a coup on one of Russia’s longest borders, with Ukraine, intended to threaten and intimidate the very country against which you have all those tanks and planes and ships making threatening movements. For Russia, it was something like what America might experience with a foreign-generated coup in Mexico or Canada, and that was precisely the intention.
And there’s the still more ferocious efforts against a law-abiding and peaceful Iran, more ferocious because they are driven entirely by an unhealthy relationship between the United States and Israel, an Israel never satisfied with the level of its domination in its region, always demanding more and getting it through immensely dangerous political leverage in Washington.
Talk about a “swamp,” that relationship absolutely is described by the word. The relationship has been at the very heart of fifteen years of Neocon wars in the Middle East, wars which have killed a couple of million people and kill more still. It is also at the heart of America’s going into the extrajudicial-killing business on a grand scale, the land of liberty and rights silently murdering thousands never charged with any crime, only having their names placed on a “kill list” by nameless officials at the CIA.
And that relationship has never been so fervently catered to than it is by Trump. Some political victim.
The clear threat of a large war against a law-abiding country? Daily threatening language, senseless in its charges and demands. Massive, intrusive, illegal sanctions levied in an effort to bring the country to its knees? An aircraft carrier and nuclear-capable bombers and more missiles all brought to bear against a country that has done nothing wrong, started no conflict?
And the destructive efforts against China? Massive new illegal tariffs laid down to pressure China to do what America wants?
How about the support for a truly blood-thirsty man like the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, a man conducting a horrible war against Yemen, a man supporting terrorists in Syria, a man now conducting record numbers of beheadings in his own country, sometimes even beheading teen-agers, and a man who ferociously represses a minority, the Shia Muslims? A man who had a journalist clubbed and cut-up alive, the pieces incinerated in a barbecue, and who suffers no diminishment of his influence for the barbarism recorded completely by sound and partly by camera?
What we actually see in all of this, and there’s a lot more we could cite, is a sputtering, stumbling, angry giant demanding he have his way, incoherently demanding oversight and control of events almost everywhere, or else. The angry giant is the American government in total, not just Trump and not just Democrats and not just Republicans. It is angry about its once central place in the world beginning to be shared by others. It is so angry that it behaves irrationally regularly, both abroad and inside the country.
So, what is special about the angry chaos in Washington concerning Trump and Mueller and Clinton and Obama and the FBI and the CIA?
Nothing. It’s just what Washington does.
