War-ons and Wargasms

So Clownstick spends $90M last night lobbing five dozen Tomahawks into a pre-cleared Syrian airfield with no follow-up plan or policy, literally the lamest and most obvious sort of fo-po theater, and the dipshits at CNN fall for it right away. Someone should tell Chris Cillizza and Fareed Zakaria that the wingers who want to hear empty, mewling genuflections are already watching Fixed Noise for that shit.

No, Clownstick did not "become president" last night, anymore than he did a month ago when he used a KIA Navy SEAL as a prop in a (gasp!) teleprompter speech. He will never become president, not in any meaningful way, because it's never going to be in his skill set. He's going to fuck something up in the next three or four days, because he can't help himself, and this dopey, useless distraction will be forgotten.

When news broke of the sarin attack the other day, two questions immediately popped to mind, neither of which has been adequately answered, near as I can tell:

1. Wasn't the key to Obama supposedly abrogating his "red line" stance on Syria the promise from Putin that Syria's chemical weapons would essentially be taken away from them -- in which case, how did they get them back?
2. What strategic purpose for Assad would be served by using chemical weapons? After all, he's been dropping barrel bombs -- which cause plenty of damage and carnage -- for years, and no one's said shit. He could wipe out a hundred people easy with one or two of those. So what's in it for him to use the chemical weapons that were supposedly taken from him in the first place?

Assad's an amoral monster just like his old man, but he's neither insane nor stupid. The dynamics of the Syrian civil war are beyond the grasp of most Americans because the corporate media sucks balls and is comprised of a bunch of armchair Hemingway types whose dicks get as hard as a full-blown jingo's at the sight of a few lobbed missiles.

But the nutshell version is this:  the Assad family and their regime are mostly Alawites (Shi'a), ruling an overwhelmingly Sunni populace with generations of brutality and coercion. Push comes to shove and the regime topples, Assad and his family might get out, hand over a suitcase of cash to Putin and spend the rest of their days at a dacha outside Sochi. But the sultan's dogs would meet a fate not unlike that of many in neighboring Iraq after we kicked over their applecart, revanchist death squads roaming Baghdad with cordless power drills to run through the faces of their victims.

Of course, the missile strikes don't affect the equation or outcome in the slightest, because there will be no follow-through, because Clownstick is a dipshit and an oaf, and thinks strategically like old people fuck. He has no second move. He seriously thinks that the missile launch serves multiple purposes, and will signal the Chinese and North Koreans (and who knows, probably the Iranians while we're at it) that He Means Business. I'm sure Xi Jinping is trembling in his boots.

Xi is headed to a state dinner at the fucking Maga-Lardo country club, with its iceberg wedges and lobster mac-and-cheese and rich-asshole lemon parties, for one thing only -- a price. Xi will tell Clownstick what his foreign policy expectations are from us, and will make Clownstick an offer, and they'll haggle over the final amount, and Clownstick's little crime family will line their pockets once more (just like they are by holding official events at his business). That's all that is; Xi couldn't care less about the "show of strength" in impotently throwing money into a military runway that's already been repaired and is operational again, less than thirty-six hours later.

Xi is not going to get rolled or bullied on North Korea. Even a retard fake negotiator like Clownstick has to realize that the Chinese are in a position of strength here and we are not. There are no manufacturing jobs being repatriated from China, nor is there going to be a tariff slapped on Chinese imports. Everyone seems to get this but the master negotiator. There is no way to do those things without damaging the American economy, bigly. That's not politics, that's math.

Clownstick is such a joker and a loser that even his closet-case alt-right cargo cult is all butt-hurt on this one, insisting that the "globalists" headed by Clownstick's J-O-O son-in-law and daughter pushed him into this move on (heh-indeedy) humanitarian grounds. Setting aside Clownstick's Being There garden jabber about the "beautiful babies" being killed by the chemical weapons, it again occurs to one that more of those babies will be killed by the next round of barrel bombs, and again no one will say or do jack shit.

Observers are overthinking this whole thing. The alt-right cuck-tards are postulating a neolibcon takeover of their movement, pushing out Foster Brooks Steve Bannon in the purge. Even more stupidly, the putatively librul corporate mediots are proposing an even more ridonkulous theory -- that the missile strike is the opening gambit of some sort of grand strategy or (for fuck's sake) doctrine.

You wanna know what the fucking Clownstick Doctrine is? Here it is -- and listen close, 'cause it's a wild one:  make money bigly. I mean, there's some of the usual narcissistic self-aggrandizement baked into everything he does or attempts to do, because that sort of shit is to him what breathing and taking a dump is to us mere mortals. When he talks about being the smartest and bestest at every damned thing, remember that he's talking to himself, not to us.

But it shouldn't even need to be said that there's nothing at all beyond that, certainly not a strategy. Good grief, when it comes to strategery, compared to Clownstick, even Fredo W. Arbusto is fucking Garry Kasparov. Clownstick doesn't do strategy; he'd probably lose two out of three to a tic-tac-toe-playing chicken at the county fair. It's all id and impulse, there's no other gear with this guy. There is no strategic interest for the United States in Syria right now, other than containing ISIS and al Qaeda and the rest of that lot. But the continuation of those groups has as much to do with the Gulf states paying them protection money, and Turkey controlling all the water for the region, as it does with the atrocities of the Assad regime.

On the other hand, I tend to believe Clownstick also had sincere motives in lobbing the missiles for those beautiful babies. That is clearly how his mind works -- he's an addled, sundowning old man who gets every drop of his "information" and "knowledge" from the teevee. So he saw that shit on the teevee and had to Do Something. Coupled with his idée fixe that nothing says "diplomacy" like a big swinging dick (even when all can see that it's just a shriveled orange worm), he timed it against the Chinese state visit for maximum effect. But there's no doubt he seriously thinks that his show of force got ol' Assad all a-skeert and what-not. Sure. Problem solved. No more bombed babies.

Imagine your foreign policy and geopolitical strategy run by Mark Burnett. That's what you've got here, with less polish and suspense. He's gonna fuck this up just like he's fucked up everything else he's touched in his too-long life. It is the universe's weird, ironic sense of humor that his skeevy avarice and utter incompetence at the simplest of things will end up being the main things that keep us out of a nuclear war or an even greater depression than Shrub got us into a decade ago. Maybe.

Velikaya Voyna, Letom Akuly

So, now that some time has actually passed since Malaysia Flight 17 was shot down, by Russian-backed separatists using Russian-supplied weapons, have we actually learned anything new?

Putin is a bastard. Well, no shit. Good thing he got the Winter Olympics this year, and the 2018 World Cup. Sanctions are one way to hit this prick, another is to delegitimize his prestige goals. So we'll see how many of these outraged countries boycott the World Cup in 2018. But that's a pretty effective way to take the piss out of the guy.

Despite what armchair tough-guys Poor Ol' Straight Talk and Huckleberry Closetcase are braying every Sunday morning on the network circle-jerk, we aren't going to war with Russia. Here is where The Googul, or a history book, or even a decent memory, is helpful. Despite being in some sort of conflict or other since World War 2 ended, almost none of those military actions have been against countries that can actually fight back. Oh, your Iraqs and Vietnams and such like can muster enough guerrilla insurgency to wear us down and make us leave, but I'm talking about countries who can strike back in the US. That hasn't happened, and it ain't gonna happen.

Russia may be something of a Third World despotate (albeit an enormous one), in terms of laws and life expectancy and such, but they aren't in the same league as the banana stands and oil cans we're used to knocking over with our swinging dick.

What we're seeing in Ukraine is a civil war, pure and simple, and it's one that at least in part could have been avoided by more prudent action on the part of the US and Europe. Continuous instigation to get Ukraine into NATO and/or the EU, or to get them on the IMF debt hook, was always going to be unacceptable to Russia, just as Soviet incursions and overtures into (for starters) Cuba and Nicaragua were completely unacceptable to us. Do these people not recall the Saint Reagan years, or was it all just a collective coke-fueled dream?

"So what?", you might say, and not without some justification. "Fuck the Russkies, we run this popsicle stand, baby! USA! USA! Dee-fence, unh-unh! Dee-fence! We're the hegemon, we run the show, we call the shots."

Well, ah, yes and no. This is a classic case of "we got the guns, but they got the numbers"; yes, we have 11 aircraft carriers where no other nation has any, and we have state-of-the-art machinery in every phase of war -- land, sea, air. Hell, our killbot roboplanes are more sophisticated than all but a few conventional manned air forces.

But this has all come at a cost. Fat, drunk, and stupid, as Dean Wormer acidly observed so long ago, is no way to go through life, son. Militarists can jabber on about how the defense budget is at or near an all-time low as a percentage of GDP, but that is meaningless in the context of banana-republic levels of economic inequality and mobility. It is a zero-sum game; all those aircraft carriers and killbots come at the price of something else along the line -- a school, a road, a bridge, an educational grant, something to give someone in the lower dalit strata of 'murkin life an opportunity besides working multiple shit jobs just to survive, or worse yet, becoming a Juggalo.

In the meantime, they attempt to whip the maroons into a jingoist frenzy about Russia, or Syria, or whoever. Ambrose Beirce famously said that war was God's way of teaching Americans geography, but he would be disappointed to know that that is no longer even true, as in order to teach someone something the other party has to be willing to learn. And Americans just don't give a shit about where any of the multifarious objects of this or that week's Two Minutes of Hate are, or what the history or context might mean.

(Or that, uh, it ain't just Ukrusky separatists that shoot down passenger jets. There's your inconvenient truth, podna.)

The thing is, you're supposed to completely ignore the fact that the owners are screwing you over, every day in every way, that quite literally the more people they fuck over, the wealthier they get. Instead, you get bombarded with either a barrage of "the world is going up in flames" stories, again devoid of meaningful context or analysis, or completely meaningless features on the comings and going of "royals", or how some imperceptible change in yet another interchangeable comic-book movie franchise is, like, rilly rilly important.

When 1% of the people control more assets than the bottom 90%, it's a recipe for destabilizing levels of inequality. An increased level of anxiety and fear becomes systemic, and must be, via the corporate propaganda machine, projected onto The Other as much as possible. Whether it's assholes in a country you can't find on a map, or teeming hordes of Central American maras coming to steal your flat-screen teevees and virgin daughters, it's always someone else's fault. Pay no attention to the leveraged-buyout specialists behind the curtain.

Not to fear, though, gentle reader -- though your job has been outsourced to Bangalore, you will still be able to purchase the item you once manufactured for less money, so long as it doesn't exceed your gubmint assistance allowance. But hey, those Apaches are swell, aren't they?

The 1% needn't worry about any of this, mind you -- they can and have put millions of their countrymen out in the street without a care in the world, because increased capital mobility. And if there's one thing they know, it's that large groups of people will literally go live in tents before they'll mobilize and at least try to do something, anything about the fuckers that put them there.

And on the off chance we actually were to send any sort of ground force into Russia, or Ukraine, or anywhere else for that matter, there won't be any one-percenters' kids in the action. There is never any rich skin in this game.

Also, too.