Your browser may have trouble rendering this page. See supported browsers for more information.

This page shows the source for this entry, with WebCore formatting language tags and attributes highlighted.

Title

Russophobia: the Lunatics are at the Helm

Description

I am so tired of hearing of scintillatingly smart people who can't seem to ever say anything that is even tangentially well-informed. We knew that the Bush administration was a booby-hatch full of cantankerous old farts who hadn't been right about anything or even had an original thought since before it became illegal to beat your wife and black people, not necessarily in that order. That doesn't excuse them in any way at all, but they didn't even really have a veneer of intelligentsia to them. And now we have a new administration full of supposed young guns, ready to take on the 21st century. Not only is the Obama administration a moral and ethical failure throughout the whole spectrum but this supposedly technically savvy and hyper-informed and educated pile of Rhodes and Constitutional scholars can't even seem to grasp the basics of human interaction beyond that which you would find in any neighborhood sandbox. They are a bunch of kindergartners who don't know enough to shut up and let the grownups handle things. They are so seduced by what they continue to cling to as U.S. hegemony and power that they coast along, not even bothering to make up a story that even halfway jibes with reality. We end up with policy that is not only criminally stupid and dishonest and offensive to anyone with half a brain and half an education who's read half a history book or even half-paid attention to current events, but it will drag the hubris-laden vessel of the U.S.---and likely a lot of the rest of world with it---to very murky depths before they're through. There is no need for diplomacy when you can just stamp your foot and scream and make up all of your own history and facts and information and have the sails of your stupidity belled out by the hot air blown in vast and steaming amounts by a slavish corporate media intent on selling lies that will buoy their bottom lines for the next quarter. And to hell with the rest of it. I got mine, jack. Obama stood in front of an assembly in Bruges and dribbled out the most spectacularly uninformed and nuance-free drivel you could imagine, all but starting World War III with seemingly nary a thought that others on the planet may not have the global domination of the U.S. as a core guiding principle. His advisors and helpmeets are no better, with the bevy of women he's appointed to relatively high office doing absolutely nothing to provide evidence to support the theory that if women ruled the world, we'd have less violence. To the contrary, Samantha "boom-boom" Power nearly fell on her Russian counterpart with savage blows before she got herself under control. There is a severe problem when the lunatics run the asylum. It is even worse when they forget where reality ends and their own propaganda begins. John Kerry is another such laughable idiot---a buffoon if there ever was one---who doesn't waste a single second trying to convince anyone of anything---instead averring with such a self-assured knowledge that he is telling the gospel truth that it is hard to believe that he could even tell the difference anymore. All of these fools steamroll right past the ironies, hypocrisies and shocking double-standards that abound in all of their argumentation, assuming that we are so much stupider than they. It may well be that most people will simply go along with what these scholars say because they feel that such smart people could not possibly be deluded on so grandiose a scale. Those believers are sadly mistaken. This is not the first time that the lunatics are at the helm. It is arguable that it has always been thus. That does not in any way make it more palatable. Perhaps these leading lights of the U.S. State Department are justified in their cynicism. But I simply want it noted that people who are purportedly intelligent but spend all of their time grubbing for power and saying the most mind-bogglingly inane and provably false things should not be heeded. Their original intelligence does not matter because they are not employing it. At all. That they know better but are cynically manipulating the world for their personal gain is not even cold comfort. Far better if we could just get them to leave us alone. And don't think that this vapidity is confined to the administration and its hangers-on. The Republican love of Putin is a pure knee-jerk reaction <i>against</i> the Obama administration, nothing more. They are not handling this any better nor are they exhibiting any greater level of intelligence than does a plant when it leans toward the sun. Putin is not a grand guy but he is rational, he can be eminently reasonable and he seems to have the best interests of his country at heart. He has also exhibited absolutely no designs on taking over other countries. Crimea was not a takeover. The situation was forced on him by any logical reading of the events. That the U.S. paints this in any other way is so disingenuous and cynical that it's nearly warping the space-time continuum. Be that as it may, all of the things listed above could be used as levers by diplomats worth their name in order to come to an agreement with Russia. But an agreement is not what is sought. What is sought instead by the U.S. is utter domination and degradation and capitulation on the part of any other country that has a whit of power remaining. Countries like Russia and Chine will not bow so easily---nor do they have any reason to, when one looks at the facts and the reality rather than the mythic world of American exceptionalism. The Idiocracy that is America is shooting itself in the foot time and again, thinking that it can create history and bend reality and facts to its whims. The rest of the world tires of these spoiled-child antics and just wishes the U.S. would go away. Kerry leaps to support the rebels in Venezuela---but it is a rebellion of the rich against the poor, throwing a temper tantrum because they want their country back in the hands of a few oligarchic families. But the OAS was recently asked by the U.S. to vote for intervention and overthrow of Maduro in Venezuela. The U.S. received a resounding NO, with only Canada and Panama voting in favor. Everyone else in the OAS told the U.S. (and Canada) to go f&%*k themselves. And rightly so. Because only an immoral jackass would support a "revolution" promulgated by the upper class against the poor. When put that way, it makes sense that Kerry was for it. When Honduras was overthrown by an extreme right-wing party, the Obama administration fell all over itself to validate the revolution and welcome the new rulers into the international community---constitutionality be damned. It was the same in Venezuela during the 24-hour coup of Chavez. It was the same in Libya. It was the same in Kosovo. It was the same in Ukraine, where the U.S. once again cheerfully supports a fascist government---as long as they accept U.S. (NATO) missiles on their border with Russia. Shooting distance to Iran is also not a bad consolation prize. The lunatics are running the asylum and we're all along for the ride. The media doesn't care. They love the simple story told by the administration. Or is it that the administration loves the simple story told by the media? It's so hard to tell who's the dog and who's the tail and who's doing the wagging. The danger that the rest of the world sees is that these kindergarten-level administrators and diplomats and officials have a ton of power and weapons and influence still to burn. And they have a craven and willing media at their back, which is eager to sell a <i>ton</i> of advertising for their Cold War Redux coverage. We can only hope that Putin remains reasonable and picks his battles and doesn't get drawn into the idiocy. He has been reassuringly stable and grounded so far. It is an utter shame that we have to hope for this cypher of a man to prevent the gaggle of idiots at the helms of other countries (Angela Merkel has toned down the rhetoric considerably of late, in fairness) from plunging us all into a nuclear winter. If you've got so much time on your hands to poke the Russian bear, why don't you expend some energy on doing something about climate change? You know, instead of just pretending the problem doesn't exist because it's politically difficult in an election year. Every other year in the States is an election year. It's an excuse to never have to engage your giant brain and actually do something. And your giant brain has deluded you into thinking that no one else could possibly be as smart as you and therefore you should get all the toys and cupcakes. This is laziness and intellectual dishonesty at its core. Talk about entitlement. And pro tip: Just because someone speaks English with an accent doesn't make them stupid. Nor does it make them smart---I'm looking at you, Henry Kissinger. You are the original proponent of the take-all-the-toys-stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears-and-coast-on-your-reputation-for-smarts strategy. You and Bob Mcnamara, who admitted his oopsie only after millions of Vietnamese had died. Good timing. Lots of other people smarter than you knew that what you were doing was wrong before you even started doing it. Nobody listened to them. Just like no one is listening now, instead leaving the reins in the hands of the utter children currently in charge of the U.S. In conclusion, stop listening to people who you've been told are smart but who never seem to say anything smart or reasonable or well-informed. They are going to lead us down the primrose path of destruction and make life a lot worse for everyone. <hr> <h level="3">Notes</h> I didn't include any citations or references in the main text although there are many good ones and they all pretty much say the same thing: the mainstream media/U.S. version of events is pure mendacity. This example from the article <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/31/obamas-sleepwalk-toward-war/" source="CounterPunch" author="Paul Craig Roberts">Obama’s Sleepwalk Toward War</a> is as good an example as any. <bq>The extraordinary transparent lie that Russia sent an army into Ukraine and annexed Crimea is now accepted as fact everywhere in the West, even among critics of US policy toward Russia. Obama, whose government overthrew the democratically elected government in Ukraine and appointed a stooge government that has threatened the Russian provinces of Ukraine, falsely accuses Putin of “invading and annexing” Crimea.</bq> Paul Craig Roberts continues to report well and honestly. <a href="http://www.alternet.org/world/why-us-turned-vladimir-putin-villain">Tariq Ali</a> also described the hypocrisy as breathtaking, <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/28/why-the-eu-cant-isolate-russia/">Pepe</a> <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/how-crimea-plays-in-beijing/">Escobar</a> is always informative. <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/ukraine-and-yugoslavia/">Diane Johnstone</a> also wrote eloquently and well on the topic and drew parallels to NATO and the U.S. in Yugoslavia. <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/putins-triumph/">Israel Shamir</a> continues to provide good background. And not all members of the EU are equally deluded: <a href="http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/951.php">Gregor Gysi</a> gave a good and impassioned speech to the German Bundestag. <a href="http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/attention-deficit/">James Howard Kunstler</a> notes that <iq>In [his] lifetime, there has never been a more pointless and unnecessary international crisis than the current rumble over Ukraine, and it’s pretty much all our doing</iq> before returning to his reporting on the ongoing global financial collapse, suggesting that this might be more important (I chose climate change above). Even the text of <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/20/on-crimea-and-sevastopol/">Vladimir Putin's</a> speech to the Kremlin after accepting Crimea back into the fold, is very good and historically informative reading (and is not without humor; see emphasis). <bq>First, we had to help create conditions so that the residents of Crimea for the first time in history were able to peacefully express their free will regarding their own future. However, what do we hear from our colleagues in Western Europe and North America? They say we are violating norms of international law. <b>Firstly, it’s a good thing that they at least remember that there exists such a thing as international law – better late than never.</b> (Emphasis added)</bq>