In today’s issue:
- Harris and Trump fight to steer the train
- In foreign policy, stupidity is dangerous
- Enemies everywhere but Washington, DC
The dots don’t matter. It’s the pattern that counts.
Harris? Trump?
One, full of bile and bald-faced untruths. The other… empty as a beer can… hollow as a rotten log.
They are on different trains, with different dumbbell slogans and different egregious lies… but both are headed to the same destination, a rendezvous with a perverse and unpleasant destiny.
And yet, the American people will stand in line — even in the cold and rain of November — and vote for them.
What has happened to us all? Did we suddenly awake, one dark and woebegone morning, and decide to be stupid?
Or, is it just part of the pattern? The dots come to think what they need to think when they need to think it. And as an empire ages, its people — both leader and followers — become paranoid delusionals.
How else to explain it? The general level of dumbness is breathtaking. Americans think they can improve their economy by banning imports… cutting taxes and interest rates… and spending money they don’t have on things they don’t really need. Their national debt approaches the critical ‘meltdown’ level… and they just spend more. And neither Republicans nor Democrats even mention it.
But it is on foreign affairs — and the relentless drive for confrontation — that the stupidity is most obvious… and most dangerous.
It was surely no coincidence that the day Donald Trump was in the sights of a loopy 20-year-old from Butler, PA, the press delivered a bombshell report, CNN:
Secret Service ramped up security after intel of Iran plot to assassinate Trump
“Secret Service learned of the increased threat from this threat stream,” [an] official told CNN.
No evidence was presented. No motive proposed. Instead, the ‘news’ item merely reinforced the idea of a ‘threat stream’… that foreigners are behind it… and that the Iranians (whose annual military spending represents just 4 days of the Pentagon budget) are ‘bad guys’ who need to be kept under control.
Secretary of State Blinken continues to beat the war drum: “Iran is one or two weeks away from reaching capacity of producing fissile material for Nuclear Weapons” he claims.
Blinken seems to have taken Colin Powell for his model. Twenty-one years ago, Powell had this to say:
‘We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction; he’s determined to make more.’
In the years since Colin Powell lied to the world about Iraq, the US dug such a deep hole of debt it can no longer get out. The increase — $29 trillion — is almost exactly equal to the amount spent on the empire adventure.
Between the two of them — war and debt — the US is stuck. It desperately needs to cut spending to avoid going bust… but you don’t count the pennies when you’re up against an ‘axis of evil!’
Colonel Douglas Macgregor, talking to Tucker Carlson:
‘Over and over, we’ve been told that the Russians are evil… that their army is incompetent… that we’re winning the war. None of it was true.’
Among the most obvious untruths was that Vladimir Putin was a modern-day Hitler intent on conquering Europe. Putin explained the situation many times, urging a negotiated settlement that would guarantee Ukrainian independence and neutrality. American warmongers — notably Victoria Nuland, wife of arch neo-con Robert Kaplan — preferred war, betting on the superior power of NATO forces to defeat Putin.
It didn’t work out that way. As many as 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died playing Ms. Nuland’s war game… and it now appears that Putin has won anyway.
But nobody in US power circles seems much interested in the history of the Ukraine, its complex ethnic make-up, or the legitimate national interests of the Russians. No learning, no understanding, no historical perspective necessary. They just need fuel for their war machine.
And now, China provides a useful enemy. Foreign policy hack, Mary Kissel explained that China aims to “upend our way of life and to dominate and change our way of life.” They are “committed to destroy(ing) us.”
Really? Is it the Chinese… the Russians… or the Iranians who will destroy us? Or, can we do the job ourselves?
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Fortune & Freedom
