(I wrote a response to Booman’s recent post Rex Tillerson is Fired. It grew, so here it is as a standalone. Read on.)
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Booman wrote:
I guess the only remaining questions are whether Tillerson played a vital role in restraining the president and, if so, whether Pompeo can continue to fulfill that function.
Trump is not going to be “restrained,” Booman. Not as long as he is president and can use his “You’re fired!!!” lick. Nothing short of a massive defeat in the coming election…a virtual rejection of Trump and of his polices…will even slow him down.
And Pompeo? In the preceding paragraph you label him a “political hack.” That’s just abut right. How do you think a political hack is going to restrain Trump? He feasts on political hacks. Look at what he did to his opponents in the Republican primary for all you need to know about that idea. Pompeo will every day crawl into the Awful Office on his knees, begging not to be thrashed too badly by his master.
Plus Haspel?
You write:
I’m not overly inclined to be fair to torturers, but she was “just following orders” and no one above her in rank was ever held accountable for torturing human beings who were in CIA custody and at their mercy.
And:
Haspel ran a “black site” CIA prison located in Thailand in 2002. The site was codenamed “Cat’s Eye” and held suspected al Qaeda members Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah for a time. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture specifies that during their detention at the site they were waterboarded and interrogated using no-longer-authorized methods. Declassified CIA cables specify that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a month, was sleep deprived, kept in a “large box”, had his head slammed against a wall, and he lost his left eye. Zubaydah was deemed, by the CIA interrogators, to not be in possession of any useful intelligence.
Ye gods man!!! The same intelligence professionals whose “intelligence” regarding Russia you now overwhelmingly support were responsible for human rights violations that defy imagination. How many Abu Zubaydahs do you think there were? Thousands? More?
Haspel was “just following orders!!!??? That’s what the Nazis at Nuremberg said, goddamnit!!! The intelligence “professionals” were all “just following orders,” just the same as they were following orders in the drone wars and the illegal surveillance system set up under Barack Obama, just the same as they are now following orders in the anti-Trump wars.
What I want to know is this:
Exactly who is…and was…giving these orders?
Obama? Bush II? Give me a break. If they were the guilty parties, why are they now luxuriating in post-presidential splendor instead of sitting in a box listening to a litany of their crimes?
And…as usual…the real answer is blowing in the wind. Blowing In the hot air wind of politics as usual.
I received an email from the Sanders people this morning. Here is some of what it said.
I want to tell you about a very exciting trip that I took last weekend to Texas and Arizona. That follows the trip we took several weeks ago to Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan. Of these six states, Trump won five. And, in Illinois, where Trump lost, progressives are taking on the old and moribund Democratic machine.
The very good news is: the political revolution is on the move, not only in progressive states but in conservative areas as well. You have heard me say it a million times. This country will not change if the Democratic Party continues to ignore half the states in this country, including some of the poorest.
We’re not going to transform the politics of the United States by just doing fundraisers with wealthy people in New York and California or starting Super PACs funded by special interests. We have got to take the fight for economic, social, racial and environmental justice to every county in every state in this country.
And the good news is that is exactly what is beginning to happen. This year, there are more candidates than ever on the ballot – in progressive and conservative areas – who support Medicare for all, free tuition at public colleges and universities, a $15 minimum wage, gun safety legislation and our entire progressive agenda.
In many instances, these candidates are fighting against a political establishment that tells them they cannot win running on a progressive agenda, and they are fighting against a financial elite who will spend anything to stop them. We should work as hard as we can to elect those candidates, and I intend to [continue to do so].
–snip—
And here…on this so-called “progressive” blog…I continue to be chastised for saying exactly the same thing.
Think on it.
I know that you know better.
You do too.
AG
Just watched Conner Lamb’s “victory” speech tonight. Lamb wasn’t afraid to talk about the Democratic party of his grandfather as the party of FDR. When Bernie Sanders mentioned FDR in his campaign events, the crowd went wild. It’s a winning message for the Democrats, but the Dem elites want to forget that FDR was the best president the Democratic party produced. Eventually they will have to remember FDR if they want to survive.
If “they”…the neoliberal/neoconservadrivel DNC establishment…”remember FDR if they want to survive,” they will still lose, or at the very best win by kowtowing to the corporate interests that have already bought them while simultaneously mealymouthing their way into an empty electoral victory.
Bernie Sanders has the right idea…the only idea as far as I can see…to bring the Dems a real win, a win that will actually help the people of this country to regain some decent amount of pull in Washington.
From his most recent email. (Emphasis mine.):
And there it is in boldface. More bought-and-sold candidates like Hillary Clinton are not going to permanently solve the Democratic party’s problems with the electorate, especially the nearly 50% of the electorate who refused to vote for either presidential candidate in the last election. (The Last Election. A great name for a dystopian novel about a Trumpist character who actually manages to break the government as we now know it and truly take over.) As soon as the DNC talking heads take over…which they certainly will try to do, just as they did in 2017…the sound of channels changing and clicks clicking away will be audible all over the country. Conor Lamb’s victory in PA yesterday…still an “apparent” win according to the MSM…is just a raindrop in an empty reservoir unless it is followed through with a real revolution in the Democratic Party. And a fast one as well, please God.
More from the Sanders email:
There is a reason that the Sanders people are calling their movement Our Revolution.
Are you in?
Not just in that half-hearted, jaded way that so many good-hearted-but-basically-centrist Democrats treated the Sanders campaign against HRC.
I was then…justifiably, as it turned out…holding that idea myself, from a non-centrist point of view. I simply did not believe that the circumstances were right for that sweeping a change in the Democratic Party. Trump’s disastrous win, his equally disastrous reign…and the totally empty way that the media has tried to get rid of him without admitting the Deep State’s and their own culpability in creating that set of disasters…has changed those circumstances, and the electorate is now beginning to wake up to what went down.
Are you in?
I am.
All the way, win or lose.
You?
AG
It’s what? 52? 54? candidates that the DNC has recruited from the CIA to run in Fall, muscling aside local candidates?
Nah. Someday, he’ll crawl in and say “Thank You Sir, may I have another?”