The Chris Moeller Archives

Transforming this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace

Good news! Bipartisanship is returning to the capital! The national news media can stand down. After almost three long months, the military state (along with the Kushners, we're told) is pulling Donald Trump back into the folds of the Washington political consensus.

Tomahawk missiles were launched against Syria early Friday and Senators McCain and Graham, Schumer and Pelosi, the Clintons, and nearly the entirety of the Fourth Estate approve of Trump's handling of the imminent global threat that is Bashar al Assad, one of the few secularist leaders in the Middle East, a man who’s fighting, with the aid of the Russians, against the Islamic State and other rebel groups backed by Saudi Arabia, but a man who never once made a financial contribution to the Clinton Foundation. Trump, the man we were told was a mental incompetent, is now showing that he’s worthy of respect, don’t you understand, as NBC’s Brian Williams marvels at how "beautiful" is America’s firepower. Fareed Zakaria declared on CNN over the weekend, regarding the military strikes, “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States” (last night). Bombing translates to maturity in Washington circles. The grown-ups inside the shadow government are back in charge.

Don't lament, though, liberals. Your representatives inside the Beltway are still committed to bringing down the president. Don’t go limp on them now. They just have to switch tactics to continue the crusade. They don’t have the moral authority to criticize the violation of international law that’s he has committed because it’s well-known that their man, our man, former President Obama, wanted to do the same thing-- that is, target the Syrian government with his attack. The Obama War Department had already dropped a number of bombs on Syrian innocents, but the Democratic president was rejected by the Senate in his bid to target Assad installations. Assad is the target now by stated purpose, and unlike the terrifying missiles seeking blood and death that Trump now deploys, the 26,171 bombs that President Obama dropped on Muslims just during the calendar year of 2016 alone were filled with candy hearts and gum drops.

The agreed-upon justification is that Assad gassed his own people-- you know, those same people we now care deeply enough to defend militarily but that can’t be accepted within our borders as refugees. (The old “bomb-and-ban” from the post-9-11 playbook.) This alleged crime by Assad came less than two months after Obama's National Security Advisor Susan Rice boasted to National Public Radio that the U.S. had succeeded in getting the Syrian leader to surrender his stockpile of chemical weapons. I guess the investigation is complete as of Friday.

The Democrats have been played for fools again as Trump executes his politically-motivated hit upon the Syrian government and the host of innocents. They can’t criticize the attack because their militaristic posturing since 2001-- including Hillary Clinton’s repeated criticisms of Obama for failing to target Assad-- preclude it, yet Trump only stands to gain in the polls at home by starting a war. That one never fails to fly here. As Trump targets Vladimir Putin’s top ally in the Middle East, the bombing also does damage to the Democrats’ claim that Trump is Putin’s puppet. Because the Democrats can’t shake themselves of their “Putin controls the White House” narrative, they’re left to grasping at conspiracies with new angles, that Trump warned Russia about the Syrian strike before it was carried out. Ooh. I guess they don’t consider that “heads-up” an act of diplomacy, though Russia is-- applicably noted in this context-- not a country we’ve declared war against.

Especially confusing in these topsy-turvy political times is how Democrats transformed themselves in just one day last week from proponents of the argument that Trump is a dangerous sociopath to getting behind the greatest example to date of the supposed mad man’s violent aggression. All along the campaign trail, the man said he would bomb the hell of 'em, and that he is doing. He said he would target the families of terrorists, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t do that exactly with his targeted strikes in Yemen back in February. And now he’s the Commander-in-Chief for all of the people. Presidential. He unleashed the missiles and unzipped the missile from his pants.

Democrats and Republicans continue to have everything in common in respect to military and foreign policy. Neither party has a plan for peace other than to continue the bombing and killing of innocents. They murder to posture. It took Trump fewer than 100 days to break his campaign promise and rally behind the U.S. tradition of forcing "regime change" upon other sovereign nations, less than three months to involve us in another war that does not impact our national security in the slightest, except as it serves to create more terrorists. This particular attack is historically notable in that it commenced exactly 50 years and three days after Martin Luther King delivered his speech at Riverside Church and his historic declaration that the United States “was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

posted by CM @ 8:15 PM