09/16/15

Is Trump the Next Reagan?

The Party for Socialism and Liberation, one of many communist groups in the U.S., argues that “the long period of reaction that began in the late 1970s and greatly accelerated under Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States is drawing to a close.” Leaving aside the Marxist rhetoric about “reaction,” one has to say there may be some validity to what the communists are saying. After all, Bernie Sanders seems to be leading the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Marxist Jeremy Corbyn has become head of the Labor Party in Britain, and the socialist New Democratic Party is poised to win national elections in Canada on October 19.

On the Republican side in the U.S., the leading candidate, Donald Trump, seems to have no ideology at all. While he has made illegal immigration into an issue, his statements on other issues demonstrate no coherent outlook on the nature or size of government. On foreign policy, his claim that he could negotiate with Russia’s Vladimir Putin seems to be a reflection of his “Art of the Deal” approach to business matters. But Putin means business, and the Russians can’t be trusted. It’s shocking that Trump thinks he can somehow negotiate a good deal with Putin, whose military position has been enhanced under the presidency of Barack Obama.

In order to understand the Sanders phenomenon, I covered the senator’s Monday night appearance in Manassas, Virginia, where he spoke to a mostly young white audience. The media exaggerated the number of people who turned out, with several reporters putting the size of the crowd at 10,000. But about 2,000 people did, in fact, show up, feeling the “Bern” as Sanders took it to the “billionaire class” and demanded freebies for the “kids,” as he called the students with college debt. He knows that free college has an appeal, like the general socialist notion that government can provide goods and services at little or no cost. It’s a fable that students who should be getting a good education are falling for in increasing numbers. They account for much of the Sanders movement.

Sanders made only one mention of Russia in his Manassas speech, saying that he hoped that the U.S. would join with Russia and other countries to tackle so-called climate change. He didn’t have one word of criticism for Putin over the invasion of Ukraine and threats against other nations, including the U.S.

Russia is a good place to start when analyzing both Sanders and Trump. It is a test of what they know and would do about foreign policy. Sanders, who honeymooned in the old USSR and worked with Communist Party fronts like the U.S. Peace Council, doesn’t want to talk about it. Let’s hope Trump gets pressed on this issue during Wednesday night’s debate on CNN.

On Tuesday, we received more ominous news about Russian military advances. Reuters reported that General Frank Gorenc, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, cited “alarming” moves by the Russian military since the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and its takeover of Crimea. He made the comments at the annual Air Force Association conference.

Air Force Times headlined his remarks, “USAFE commander: Russia catching up with Air Force.” This paper quoted Gorenc as saying, “The advantage that we had from the air, I can honestly say, is shrinking, not only with respect to the aircraft that they’re producing, but the more alarming thing is their ability to create anti-access area denied areas is a challenge that we’re all going to face up to and that we’re all going to have to train to.”

So how would Donald Trump negotiate with Putin over this? It seems the only response the Russians would understand would be for the U.S. to modernize its own military, in order to maintain an advantage.

It’s clear that Sanders and Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn would get along very well. Indeed, Sanders said he was delighted that Corbyn won the election as head of the British Labor Party. Corbyn is considered so far left that it is not unfair to call him a stooge of Putin and Russia.

The Sanders success and the Corbyn victory are two reasons why a communist outfit like the Party for Socialism and Liberation is so optimistic about the future, from the “progressive” perspective.

The Marxist group proclaims, using its familiar jargon, that “A new period of resistance to monopoly capitalism/imperialism is opening up, potentially leading to a revival of not only the trade unions but the revolutionary workers’ movement throughout the world. That this initial revival of anti-capitalism and socialism is being frequently, although not exclusively, expressed through the vehicle of electoral politics is to be expected in the first stage.”

It does indeed look like the socialists and their fellow-travelers are on the move. When you add to their forces a Marxist pope whose anti-capitalist rhetoric has been matched by dealings which enabled President Obama to recognize the communist government of Cuba, one has to acknowledge that the Thatcher and Reagan years are behind us and that their enemies have managed to come out on top.

Against this trend, here in America, we have the spectacle of a businessman leading the Republican race for the presidential nomination who has flip-flopped on every significant public policy issue, including his political party identification. Indeed, The Smoking Gun website cites documents indicating that Trump switched political party affiliations many different times. While Reagan left the Democratic Party and became a Republican, he did this for solid ideological reasons.

Reagan talked issues, while Trump talks about himself, especially his hair. Reagan had a good head of hair and an anti-communist brain to go along with it.

04/3/15

Senator Ted Cruz talks about Indiana Religious Freedom Law

CRUZ: Democrats want to PERSECUTE Christians because of partisan desire to MANDATE gay marriage everywhere

01/6/15

HarperCollins Revisionist History and Geography Series

The People’s Cube

Red Square

Dedicated to HarperCollins, which recently published atlases scrubbed of the existence of the state of Israel, so as not to hurt the feelings of its Middle East customers. Reported by our friend and frequent contributor, Marion D.S. Dreyfus. Illustrated by Red Square, People’s Director.

Harper's Revisionist History and Geography

Hey, kids, who said History and Geography have to hurt? See how much cooler, more fashionable, and less painful they can be with Harper’s new textbook series, where every fact and location have been revised, updated and revisited. Just try these on for size!

* * *
Al Jazeera HQ have now inched across the continent to Vienna, closer to the station’s European audiences, in the hundreds of millions. Of course, Vienna has been the mighty capital of the Austro-Hungarian Caliphate since 1683, after the army of the Ottoman Empire and its fiefdoms commanded by Grand Vizier Mustafa Pasha liberated the city from the infidel occupiers who spoke in some gibberish, now-forgotten dialect. Vienna was chosen over the Islamic Republic of al-Andalus (known as Spain prior to 711 CE) due to superior in-house plumbing and more obedient servants.

Kim Jong Il, still ill, hands over the North Korean barrens to his daughter, Kim Jong Kimberly, a pretty little thing also fond of basketball. She is engaged to an American athlete, Dennis Rodman, who has just left the bedside of his former fiancée, Justina Bieber.

President Ted Cruz recently jailed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for crimes linked to Benghazi, along with an unspecified number of co-conspirators involved in the ambassadorial conflagration and deaths of many American servicemen and diplomatic corps. Her dresser and fashion consultant, Huma Abedin, was given special dispensation to visit Ms. Clinton, a widow, incarcerated as much for style abuses as incompetence in office. She has sort of renounced her Muslim Brotherhood linkage. Time will tell. (Kidding.)

The Antarctic, now in the bearish sphere of USSR influence, has been declared a Nyet-Go zone, as the Soviets under the leadership of General Secretary Leonid Putin extract minerals and precious commodities from the icy substrate, thereby increasing their country’s output to more than just oil, vodka and wooden nested dolls, to include permafrost yields.

The bastard child of Stanley Ann Dunham, a multi-married amateur anthropologist and former pornographer’s model for a petty Communist drug seller cum photographer in Chicago, was successfully aborted, following the opportune 1961 Roe v. Wade court decision. Ms. Dunham married a local boy, moved to Tallahassee, and began teaching Secret Byways of the Middle East, having instead of her first abortee tissue-waste two others, both Caucasian, moderate socialists in good standing, dabbling in comic-book culture. Both have purchased but rejected the annals of radicalism peddled by one Saul Alinsky, who piddled out before his little book gained much traction.

Saddam Hussein, still living large in his capacious palace in Baghdad, has genially handed the reins of his Iraqi domain to paradigms-in-chief, Cusay and Uday, for managerial continuity. The Hussein brothers appear often in the backrooms of clubs, dragging attractive young wives of other men into their lairs for a touch of R&R (rape and recuperation). Iraq continues its long, slow smolder as it is kept in check by the Hussein brothers.

The war in the disputed Falklands, waged by the British under PM Margaret Thatcher, assisted by an aged Winnie Churchill well past his sell-by date, was lost to the Argentineans, and the Brits turned tail and went back, frigates between their navy, to the Emerald Isle–but without their legendary millennial mini-territory. The islands are now dubbed the Malvinas everywhere, including the British texts taught to the largely Wahhabist students of the UK.

Sen. Edward Kennedy succeeded in re-election after he saved Mary Jo Kopechne from his sinking Oldsmobile following a senatorial after-hours carouse with senate aides attended by all-female secretaries and all-male Senate staffers. Kennedy is happily ensconced in a retirement home in Boca, frequently entertaining his playboy nephew, William Kennedy Jones, who is occasionally up to his old tricks, climbing trees as a prank, peering into women’s dorms. Hyannis, the longtime Kennedy family preserve, is now in the possession of Steve Jobs, still going strong in his creative electronics mold, though considerably poorer, given the failure of his pet computer innovations of the ’90s and ’00s.

Ahmadinejad, the little sad grocer in Tehran, is said to be becoming expert in the mystic arts of Hom’s exotic carpet weaving. His silken output commands fees in excess of $10,000 for a room-sized floor covering. Guaranteed to last. Diplomats to Iran’s peaceable kingdom are as usual enjoying the embassy, with its luxe pools and amenities.Having won the war, Japan has instituted mandatory Kan’ji calligraphy coursework in all secondary schools, with lunchrooms across the land featuring sushi, wasabi, and soy sauce with modified sodium. The Deutsche curricula have been suspended for the past 60 years, as the Midnight Sun emperor decided German was too taxing on the throat and vocal chords of most speakers. And since the Japanese beat all the rest of the armies in 1949, Germans and Germanica were dispensable.

The State of Israel, a never-was, has been economically excised from the atlases of Harper/Creations, to suit the mindset and offsets of their clients in the Middle East, from Sea to Bloody Sea. Funded by the recent great gas and oil finds in the Mediterranean, named al-Leviathan and al-Tamarisk, they have money to burn, among other things. Jordan, peaceful Syria, and Mahmoud Abash are currently running a quiet casino of Mafia-like accountability and incautious income. Palestinian marginals are still dispersed and hanging in with UNRWA in 57 Muslim countries. All are invited into the Magic Kingdom. C’mon down, and shukran, y’all.