Imperial dreams and Greenland seams and GOP manic swings

The news cycle smashes my New Years resolution to only blog once a week. But after posting a ten-parter Newer Deal for Democrats to promise to Americans, there’s much to catch-up on. That list of proposalscovers a lot of ways to repair our nation structurally, so that this criminal madness won’t happen again.

But first… there’s so much sturm und drang over the Venezuela/Maduro raid. AND the Greenland mania. And so much of it misses core points! Sure, the core motive remains distraction from the Epstein Files! But there is so much more. Let’s start with Venezuela:

- While we all focus on the toddler brats who ordered the raid and followed it with fecal – “we’re running Venezuela for a profit!” declarations, few pay heed to what we actually saw. Which was a brilliant display of stunning competence by US military and intel agencies…

…the very same folks who Pete “Filthy Fingers” Hegseth* denounced - just 9 weeks ago - as “Too fat and too woke to fight!” Just… nine… weeks… ago. Riiiiight.

We’ve seen it before. Take another example: the incredibly skilled 2001 takedown of the Taliban - who deserved it - as did Saddam and Maduro. Only then idiotic politicians plunged us into costly quagmires - as both Bushes did in Afgh & Iraq, and as Trump will do in Venezuela (and Cuba?) as he bypasses their democracy movements and the world -recognized true winner of the 2024 Venezuelan elections, in order to make deals with Maduro’s comrades to milk their country to fill his own cronies’ pockets.

- Having said that, grow up about the damn oil! There will be no gushers of Venezuelan oil for years, maybe even a decade. They do have vast reserves, but collapsed infrastructure and very low exports. What our own petro companies are now angling after is lucrative no-bid contracts to rebuild Venezuelan infrastructure. Such contracts are exactly the cash cow that was milked in Iraq, by Cheney-linked logistics companies. And Iraq was not the cow. The US taxpayer was.

Again, show us what oil we ever got from Iraq, or likely will from Caracas! Only fools are saying “It’s about oil!” Including (alas) our jibbering fool at the top.

- Okay, removing Venezuelan oil from world markets will benefit both the Saudis and the current Russian regime. A little. Though with a potential side effect, when subsidized Venz-oil stops going to Cuba. If that regime then falls – perhaps nudged by US military action – it could enable Trump to shore up his MAGA support, even in the face of Epstein revelations. Keep your eye on Cuba.

- Putting all that aside, DO NOT fall for the trap of going all anti-military about this! They are the bright side of it. Such stunning competence daunts dark forces worldwide. Not one US death and most of the explosions in Caracas etc. appear to have been largely for show and distraction. (And to finish off any reputation of Russian-made air defense systems.) But that makes all the worse the juxtaposition, that such magnificent professionals are now at the beck and call of - at best! - cranky toddlers. And at worst our enemies.

- Trump & Hegs & company are now frantically trying to intimidate both the serving and retired officer corps. (e.g. threatening their pensions, if they speak.) And hence, officers are being forced to think thoughts that they swore never to think. And for that, I hate the toddler-maniacs, worse than for any other crime.

*(A creepy, alky boor who is unworthy to lead the men and women he berated. But why call him “Filthy Fingers”? Hegs repeatedly yammered on Fox that he doesn’t believe in germs and hasn’t washed his hands in a decade. Except perhaps in the alcohol that he spills.)

== Is there more? On to the icy frontier! ==

There’s more than I can possibly catch up on. Like MAGA screeds about Greenland/Canada etc.

Would a military seizure of Greenland tear apart NATO? Sure, and that’s a feature to Trump’s boss-blackmailer in the Kremlin. But there are so many aspects that few pundits or opponents mention:

- First, it would be disobeyed. Pure and simple. And this time, the generals and admirals must not resign! Rather, do a sit-down, until they are fired. And then demand a court martial! Watch how that, alone, would get Hegs to back down.

- It would shred the GOP – (it’s already started) - revealing with utter clarity which Republicans are blackmailed cowards and which have even a residuum of guts n’ balls. Residually Adult/Sane Republicans or RASRs, as I called them in Polemical Judo,

Sure they are rare! But even 1% of Republicans is about a million people. Picture just 200 such folks entering GOP Congressional primaries in March, flipping the ‘primary gambit’ on its head. (Luring many in GOP-gerried districts to register Republican!) Or maybe even 5000 who dare to primary MAGA dolts for state legislatures?

Are there that many?
Don’t bet on it. Anyway let’s get back to Greenland… where I set several scenes in my novel EARTH……

- The US (through NATO) already has bases in Greenland! And the once-vaunted Russian Navy has been revealed as a Potemkin paper babyshark. Just one US or British submarine could bottle them all in Polyani Inlet. So, what’s with all this ‘national security’ BS? And the moronic inability of any in media to point that out?

- There are just 50,000 Greenlanders.. Maybe 30,000 voters. Is Trump such a cheapskate that he can’t see the transactional way ahead? “I’ve escrowed thirty billion dollars that will pay out to all Greenlanders if a Join America! Plebiscite succeeds… except none of the escrowed rewards will go to those who campaigned against it!”

Hey Don, that’s as big a bargain as Alaska! Aren’t you sure you’ll get the money back from, say mineral rights?

- Oh, but wait a minute. Isn’t it likely Greenland would then become a blue state? Which brings us to…

I never heard or saw a pundit answer the Canada as 51st state malarky with the fact that Canada has ten provinces -- which would translate into eight new deep-blue states and a couple of purples. And two more ‘territories’ since the Inuit in Greenland get to be a state. So, bring it, dude. Bring it! Oh, and the Panama Canal Zone? Two more blues! (One on each side of the canal.) And in that case just try to leave out Puerto Rico. Where are we now, 66 states?

And hey MAGAs note this: travel from all of the above to any US city will be domestic, so no passport checks. Anyone arriving from any of those places will be assumed legal and get in. But then the “US” will have another maybe 5000 miles of lovely unguarded new borders. Have fun recruiting enough ex-cons to staff ICE, then.

But sure, there’s no ‘national security’ or ‘mineral wealth’ or climate change or such explanations. Nor even Putin ordering the Greenland thing, in order to break up NATO. (Dream-on, Vlad.)

No, there are just two real reasons for this insipidioty. The first one is widely known. Don wants immortality in the form of a huge, imperial expansion of USA territory, like the Louisiana Purchase. Especially since most map projections portray a flawed depiction of Greenland as having the same size of Africa!

As for the rest of the GOP? Even allowing for blackmailed cowardice in the upper ranks? Now I’ll explain it to you, as a pair of deeply insane syndromes.

== The maniacs who are ‘thinking’ longer term ==

Of course this is all rooted in fundamental craziness of two related kinds.

First… Thielism and the Dark Enlightenment, which I’ve dissected and scrutinized and eviscerated elsewhere. A neo-religion of ingrates who perceive themselves as Top Dogs in a New World Order, but never would be anything but kibble, in any other society than the gently permissive and spectacularly productive scientific and liberal one that gave them everything. Look up the latest sub-meme of this cult: “The Technate of North America,” illustrated in this dredged up map from a similarly fevered era, the 1920s and 30s. Part of a range of bizarre political ideas that have flourished in times of stress.

The Technocracy movement had its brief heyday in the 1930s, amid the Great Depression and disillusionment with apparently oligarch-suborned democracy. (And watch Things to Come for HG Wells’s more benign version.) The article about the Technate is fascinating (if in some places flawed). And the map creepily overlaps the vision of today’s Donald Trump + Peter Thiel White House!

Plus it illustrates the openly-expressed fantasy of Putin for a globe that’s been divided into spheres of influence, giving him Eurasia (sorry, Europe!) and ceding to China everything southward (sorry India and the rest!) With the USA converted into comfy fascism run by CEO-kings aided by the technological elite, isolationist and minding its own business…

…or else following George Orwell’s nightmare pattern of endless simmer-war among Eastasia, Eurasia and our own Oceania, which – in a stunningly creepy pareidolia – would look an awful lot like the “Technate” map. Which perhaps inspired Orwell in the first place! I riff further on this here.

Oh, these guys are such ingrates, ignoring 6000 years of utter failure by their feudal model of governance. Though that, to them, is a matter of great pride. They won’t admit to being ignoramus dunces…

…but there’s another trait that I’ve seen no one else point out. Even though it’s flaming obvious.

== The Mania is Depressing! ==

Cast your memory back as far as it will go. All the way back to the Great Depression, Republican foreign policy has featured the same trait, over and over again.

No, I’m not talking about the childish, churlish way they name things, like U.S. Navy ships… or military operations like the recent ‘Absolute Resolve,’ when the whole idea of operation names was military pragmatism and information security, not advertising slogans.

No, I refer to Republican Bipolar Disease that I first diagnosed back in the last century, but wrote about here, in 2017. The way GOP administrations and indeed all of their political leaders tend to gyrate between two states…

…either manic imperialism or depressive isolationism.

The Bush era neocons manifested the former with openly raved “We are now an empire!”... a phrase that now blares from the Trump White House. Which just weeks earlier proclaimed an isolationist “America First!” policy end to wars of intervention or nation-building and even our world network of alliances that kept the peace (mostly) for the last 80 years.

These bipolar and extreme mood swings are predictable, hypocritical and dangerous!

Are Democratic administrations guiltless, or more-sane? Well, yes, comparatively so. Certainly, less blatantly and compulsively cyclical between extremes. And in most cases – except Somalia – at least listening to professional advice.

== And finally… peacemaker? ==

Is it ‘bipolar’ that Trump brags about ‘ending wars,’ then veers to naming the “Department of War” and howling at our officers to ‘kill, kill, kill!’ and beating drums of imperialism?

Sure it is. And all we can do, for now, is challenge his idiot supporters… in order to peel away a couple of million crucial, residually sane Republican neighbors from his alliance of confederate twittery.

DEMAND your neighbors (physically or online) put up wager stakes whether Donald Trump ever actually ‘settled any wars,’ let along eight… no ten… no fifteen! I don’t care that he mistook Armenia for Albania. Bush Jr. would have done that. But for Don to claim that he settled the Armenia-Azerbaijan war is as crazy as the same claim for Burma-Thailand and all the others.

But it is the demand to NAME ONE that corners those potential RASR neighbors of yours, and may get a few of them to stop desperately suckling at the Fox teat. Like name one piece of verified, large scale evidence for an electoral ‘steal’ in 2020. And so many more, offered in my posting about the Wager Gambit.

And if you peel away from Murdochian madness even one voter, you will have done your bit for the Revolution.

But sure, it is too late for that. So… help get my Newer Deal before the eyes of Democratic pols and pundits. What will save us, maybe, is something a simple and pragmatic as better tactics.