If you had a nickel for everyone who got suckered into thinking that Cadet Bonespurs was really going to start a full-on shooting war with Iran, you could retire young. First and most importantly, bullies don't start fights with people who can actually fight back. Big part of the bully ethos.
Secondly, how many times do we have to do this dance before the endlessly credulous media saps and their panels of hacks figure it out? He did this with North Korea and Venezuela, shaking his tiny wiener at them for a while before putting it back in his pants and declaring either victory or love. The dictators of those countries are still in power, doing exactly what they were doing before numbnuts decided to splash his brilliance all over them.
It's helpful to consider the back story to all this, as well as the current ramifications of the pattern of actions with respect to Iran. It hasn't been all that long since Princess Snowflake and Big Daddy were in bed with Qassem Soleimani's Iran Republican Guard (IRGC), laundering money to build a hotel in Baku that -- get this -- never got built.
Most people who hear the phrase "money laundering" go all Office Space and start running for a dictionary definition. To be fair, the practical points of money laundering are intentionally difficult to follow. But it's essentially based on fairly simple premises -- find a cash-heavy business; falsify transactions; create nested shell entities as much as possible. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In the case of Trump Tower Baku, since high-end construction is particularly susceptible to cost overruns (or "cost overruns"), it's easy to run money through there, and chalk it up to a number of things -- materials, labor, overseas accounting practices. Think of The Sopranos scenes where they covered the "no-show" jobs on the construction sites -- a bunch of goombahs sitting around making sure minimal (if any) work gets done, possibly waiting for someone to bring a satchel full of illicit cash to move through the process. They can launder more money if the building is finished, sure, but they can move plenty of cash even if it never gets built.
We've all made fun of Trump's many and varied branding failures -- steaks, vodka, board games, magazines, airline, and so on. Then there's the actual business, the Taj Mahal casino, that he famously bankrupted.
It would be more surprising than not to find proof that all of the above failures were in fact not failures, but simply vehicles for laundering mob cash. Trump's dad got him in with the Italian mob early on, and when they all went to prison or got killed, and the Russians took over in NYC, Fat Donny got in bed with them. It didn't matter if Trump Vodka took off or not -- in fact, it was probably better off for all that it got written off as another speculative failure.
In his 2016 book, David Cay Johnston chronicles the account of how, when the Taj Mahal was bleeding cash and Donald was facing foreclosure, Fred Trump bought $3 million worth of chips to keep him afloat. That's money laundering.
(Incidentally, if you haven't read that book, you really should. It's a very quick read, and it ably shows how Trump's rise to power was greased not by the decades of mendacious fundamentalism of the Republicans, but rather by associations with Democratic politicians, corrupt state gaming boards, and most of all, a gullible NYC media that, as Jimmy Breslin noted long ago, could be bought with a simple return phone call.)
So he's more than corrupt enough to allow himself to have a "business association" with the suddenly psychotic Soleimani. (Don't get me wrong -- Soleimani was certainly not a good guy, responsible for many deaths, but somehow Trump manages to express his love regularly for openly, prolifically murderous despots such as Putin, Kim, and the Filipino thug Duterte, who brags about his extrajudicial slaughter.)
By the same token, Trump is also corrupt enough not only to rent out American troops to the Saudis as mercenaries, he's even craven enough to boast about it. So what's the going rate there, and whose bank account gets the payments? (Certainly not the troops themselves; they are free to fight while their stateside families live on food stamps in base housing. Oo-rah!) What's the payout when someone dies? Does it depend on whether the death was violent, or an accident, or illness or heat stroke once the summer comes? Does the family get some of that sweet Saudi cash then, or is it all for Jared? How does Erik Prince feel about having competition for his services?
Seriously, if we're so energy independent, why are we literally renting American troops to a bunch of inbred petrocrats in the country which spawned the monsters that perpetrated the worst attack on American soil? Anybody in our librul corporate media want to ask them that, or are they just gonna sit there and encourage the Secretary of Defense -- 'scuse me, the acting SecDef, we no longer have an actual functioning gubmint with accountable professionals in identifiable positions of employment -- to lie to them some more about just how many of our embassies Qassem Soleimani was planning to attack?
(Personally, my money is on all of them. It may take a few more days for them to ratchet the lie up that far, but they're nothing if not persistent.)
Compare and contrast with a couple months ago, when a Saudi military trainee murdered three people at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, while two other Saudis filmed the incident, and all Mister Tough Guy did about that was apologize on behalf of the Saudi princes. Yeah, real fucking American hero there.
So this is where Genius Q. Dealmaker's brilliant, once-in-a-lifetime negotiation skills have gotten us -- instead of having the Iranians under a flawed yet effective deal that pushed their nuclear ambitions out to 2030 at the earliest, there is now no deal. And of course they have every incentive to pursue and finish a nuclear weapon as soon as possible, and their previously somewhat restive population is now firmly behind the mullahs.
All because that soggy, senile bastard couldn't handle the possibility that BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, A DAMNED KNEE-GROW, had managed to coordinate a better deal than he, Fuckface John Von Clownstick, Genius At Work, and the smartest, bravest, handsomest human ever to grace the earth with its tiny footprint, could have done. The fact is that any single member of our intrepid media could, way back in 2015 when this was all just a big joke, simply asked Mister Dealmaker to take us through just one (1) example of his countless masterful deals, and let the camera roll and the clown car empty itself, maybe we could have avoided this.
But we are where we are, and we're going wherever we're going. Just because he probably doesn't have the balls or brains to get into a boner-fied invasion of Iran doesn't mean that he isn't just monstrous enough to, say, nuke one of their cities to make an example of them. He's already spooked them into accidentally shooting down a passenger jet, and you can bet that he won't lose a wink of sleep over the dead. It's beyond arguing whose fault it was -- he literally does not care. At all.
Nixon had his "madman theory," but the subtext was always that he was actually a rational actor, but simply unwilling to publicly be seen prematurely taking anything off the table as a negotiation point. Trump is the other way around, pinballing wildly from one reaction to the next, coming off like a more cartoonish Lethal Weapon Mel Gibson, where you're not really sure what he wants or what all he's willing to do to get it.
What would be a sensible rationale for Iran to sign on to a deal with the very person who wiped his ass with the previous deal they had in place? What sane person even bothers discussing anything with someone like that? What's in it for them? Not getting nuked? Might want to check with yer boss Pootie-Poot then, chief; who does Trump suppose sold those centrifuges to Tehran in the first place?
On top of it all, the Iraqi government has urged that we remove all our troops from their country, to which Commander Babyfingers wasted no time in responding, fuck you, pay me, making us now an occupying force, an unwanted guest.
It's about to get worse, probably in multiple ways, in multiple areas, and this jabbering buffoon can only see how he and his scummy family and friends can wet their beaks from the mayhem. Since nearly half of us learned nothing from the Cheney regime, it's probably what we deserve.
Secondly, how many times do we have to do this dance before the endlessly credulous media saps and their panels of hacks figure it out? He did this with North Korea and Venezuela, shaking his tiny wiener at them for a while before putting it back in his pants and declaring either victory or love. The dictators of those countries are still in power, doing exactly what they were doing before numbnuts decided to splash his brilliance all over them.
It's helpful to consider the back story to all this, as well as the current ramifications of the pattern of actions with respect to Iran. It hasn't been all that long since Princess Snowflake and Big Daddy were in bed with Qassem Soleimani's Iran Republican Guard (IRGC), laundering money to build a hotel in Baku that -- get this -- never got built.
Most people who hear the phrase "money laundering" go all Office Space and start running for a dictionary definition. To be fair, the practical points of money laundering are intentionally difficult to follow. But it's essentially based on fairly simple premises -- find a cash-heavy business; falsify transactions; create nested shell entities as much as possible. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In the case of Trump Tower Baku, since high-end construction is particularly susceptible to cost overruns (or "cost overruns"), it's easy to run money through there, and chalk it up to a number of things -- materials, labor, overseas accounting practices. Think of The Sopranos scenes where they covered the "no-show" jobs on the construction sites -- a bunch of goombahs sitting around making sure minimal (if any) work gets done, possibly waiting for someone to bring a satchel full of illicit cash to move through the process. They can launder more money if the building is finished, sure, but they can move plenty of cash even if it never gets built.
We've all made fun of Trump's many and varied branding failures -- steaks, vodka, board games, magazines, airline, and so on. Then there's the actual business, the Taj Mahal casino, that he famously bankrupted.
It would be more surprising than not to find proof that all of the above failures were in fact not failures, but simply vehicles for laundering mob cash. Trump's dad got him in with the Italian mob early on, and when they all went to prison or got killed, and the Russians took over in NYC, Fat Donny got in bed with them. It didn't matter if Trump Vodka took off or not -- in fact, it was probably better off for all that it got written off as another speculative failure.
In his 2016 book, David Cay Johnston chronicles the account of how, when the Taj Mahal was bleeding cash and Donald was facing foreclosure, Fred Trump bought $3 million worth of chips to keep him afloat. That's money laundering.
(Incidentally, if you haven't read that book, you really should. It's a very quick read, and it ably shows how Trump's rise to power was greased not by the decades of mendacious fundamentalism of the Republicans, but rather by associations with Democratic politicians, corrupt state gaming boards, and most of all, a gullible NYC media that, as Jimmy Breslin noted long ago, could be bought with a simple return phone call.)
So he's more than corrupt enough to allow himself to have a "business association" with the suddenly psychotic Soleimani. (Don't get me wrong -- Soleimani was certainly not a good guy, responsible for many deaths, but somehow Trump manages to express his love regularly for openly, prolifically murderous despots such as Putin, Kim, and the Filipino thug Duterte, who brags about his extrajudicial slaughter.)
By the same token, Trump is also corrupt enough not only to rent out American troops to the Saudis as mercenaries, he's even craven enough to boast about it. So what's the going rate there, and whose bank account gets the payments? (Certainly not the troops themselves; they are free to fight while their stateside families live on food stamps in base housing. Oo-rah!) What's the payout when someone dies? Does it depend on whether the death was violent, or an accident, or illness or heat stroke once the summer comes? Does the family get some of that sweet Saudi cash then, or is it all for Jared? How does Erik Prince feel about having competition for his services?
Seriously, if we're so energy independent, why are we literally renting American troops to a bunch of inbred petrocrats in the country which spawned the monsters that perpetrated the worst attack on American soil? Anybody in our librul corporate media want to ask them that, or are they just gonna sit there and encourage the Secretary of Defense -- 'scuse me, the acting SecDef, we no longer have an actual functioning gubmint with accountable professionals in identifiable positions of employment -- to lie to them some more about just how many of our embassies Qassem Soleimani was planning to attack?
(Personally, my money is on all of them. It may take a few more days for them to ratchet the lie up that far, but they're nothing if not persistent.)
Compare and contrast with a couple months ago, when a Saudi military trainee murdered three people at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, while two other Saudis filmed the incident, and all Mister Tough Guy did about that was apologize on behalf of the Saudi princes. Yeah, real fucking American hero there.
So this is where Genius Q. Dealmaker's brilliant, once-in-a-lifetime negotiation skills have gotten us -- instead of having the Iranians under a flawed yet effective deal that pushed their nuclear ambitions out to 2030 at the earliest, there is now no deal. And of course they have every incentive to pursue and finish a nuclear weapon as soon as possible, and their previously somewhat restive population is now firmly behind the mullahs.
All because that soggy, senile bastard couldn't handle the possibility that BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, A DAMNED KNEE-GROW, had managed to coordinate a better deal than he, Fuckface John Von Clownstick, Genius At Work, and the smartest, bravest, handsomest human ever to grace the earth with its tiny footprint, could have done. The fact is that any single member of our intrepid media could, way back in 2015 when this was all just a big joke, simply asked Mister Dealmaker to take us through just one (1) example of his countless masterful deals, and let the camera roll and the clown car empty itself, maybe we could have avoided this.
But we are where we are, and we're going wherever we're going. Just because he probably doesn't have the balls or brains to get into a boner-fied invasion of Iran doesn't mean that he isn't just monstrous enough to, say, nuke one of their cities to make an example of them. He's already spooked them into accidentally shooting down a passenger jet, and you can bet that he won't lose a wink of sleep over the dead. It's beyond arguing whose fault it was -- he literally does not care. At all.
Nixon had his "madman theory," but the subtext was always that he was actually a rational actor, but simply unwilling to publicly be seen prematurely taking anything off the table as a negotiation point. Trump is the other way around, pinballing wildly from one reaction to the next, coming off like a more cartoonish Lethal Weapon Mel Gibson, where you're not really sure what he wants or what all he's willing to do to get it.
What would be a sensible rationale for Iran to sign on to a deal with the very person who wiped his ass with the previous deal they had in place? What sane person even bothers discussing anything with someone like that? What's in it for them? Not getting nuked? Might want to check with yer boss Pootie-Poot then, chief; who does Trump suppose sold those centrifuges to Tehran in the first place?
On top of it all, the Iraqi government has urged that we remove all our troops from their country, to which Commander Babyfingers wasted no time in responding, fuck you, pay me, making us now an occupying force, an unwanted guest.
It's about to get worse, probably in multiple ways, in multiple areas, and this jabbering buffoon can only see how he and his scummy family and friends can wet their beaks from the mayhem. Since nearly half of us learned nothing from the Cheney regime, it's probably what we deserve.
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