Fake President

Image by Alan Davey

Allowing The Donald to adjust to his new upcoming role as POTUS by giving him the benefit of a honeymoon period is tempting; something we would do for most people in the early stages of a new relationship. In this case, since we've been through the courtship stage already and ended up in an unhappy forced marriage, we aren't going to reward the lout with a happy honeymoon. We are going to make him crave an annulment.

Multiple grounds exist for annulling his illegitimate claim to the Presidency.

• He was elevated to that office with the help of a foreign adversary with whom he has business and political ties.
• His tax returns over several years may show that he has evaded his responsibility to the U.S., but he refuses to disclose them to the public.
• His foundation was caught abusing the system and failing to report truthfully to the IRS.
• He personally dishonors American military heroes by disparaging their sacrifices.
• The elections were rigged, by his own admission.
• His conflicts of interest would make him ineligible, under longstanding ethics rules, to participate in any material decisions regarding numerous entities potentially affected by the oval office.

A similar set of disqualifications was compiled by activist Nancy Altman and Ira Lupu, an Emeritus professor of law at George Washington University. They break these down into transgressions of political legitimacy and moral authority and list four presumptions we should all hold regarding communications, activities, subordinates, and decisions of the head huckster. They conclude by calling for his opponents in Congress to set the tone for the resistance movement and for a provisional withdrawal of the customary respect due the office of the President:

At noon on January 20, 2017, we will have a new president. The office of the presidency deserves respect, but the new occupant has relied on illegitimate means to seize power, and he deserves moral contempt.

In his speech, The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplain urged soldiers to resist brutal leaders who treat them as machines. Trump's objectivist worldview lends itself to such high-handedness. As a career U.S. military officer, it is discomfiting to my imbued sense of rank and honor to treat the President that way, but Trump may well not have been elected President without the nefarious designs of Putin and his den of liars and thieves. The fact that Trump will hardly even acknowledge that Russia was involved in hacking or propaganda marks him as a self-serving crook undeserving of respect at home or abroad.

The Big Twit

Donald Trump is already beginning to measure up to one of his presidential models. Like Ronald Reagan before him, he adroitly falls back on the plea of ignorance, as in his Time "Person of the Year" interview in which he claimed that he did not believe that Russia interfered in the election. Where you stand depends on where you sit, and sitting in the cat-bird seat means that Trump doesn't have to take a stand on much of anything that doesn't comport with his own designs.

His designs appear to lean toward undermining democracy in America, just like the Russian cyber-warriors he tacitly defends. He and his party have nearly squelched the recount efforts aimed at reforming our election process to be more equitable and less prone to gaming. His high tempo tweeting habit gives him a special connection to a significant segment of the American public - setting him up to be some sort of Dear Leader, but undermining the traditional connection of lawmakers to their constituents. Twitter also gives him precision targeting capability against any person or other entity that inflames his ire. That comes with built-in laser designator capability for his followers to mount secondary carpet bombing attacks and kill verification.

Photo by Gian Luigi Perrella

Now that he will be in command of our nation's military, it's too bad Trump never served in it. There he might have learned the first principle of psychological operations, i.e. you don't conduct PsyOps against your own citizens. Instead, our future fearless leader borrows from his reality TV show experience where psyching out your opponents and teammates is all part of the game.

The Truth Shall Set You Free

The disclosure of how Russian hackers have systematically undermined democracy in the U.S. by flooding the Internet with false or misleading stories has unmoored me. Not that I think the U.S. doesn't sometimes intentionally deceive Russians, but it would be hard to curate a portfolio of our blatant lies on the Internet as mendacious as that of the Russians. Besides, information fed to the Russian people weighs far less than that fed to the American public, since Russians are less empowered than U.S. citizens to influence or participate in their government. It's OK, though. I get it. Even if your country is defeated economically, information is one other means to conduct a cold war.

The cold war was plainly on again after Russia helped take down Malaysian flight MH17 over Ukraine. It was then that I noticed many of the websites that I was using to help make sense of current events accepted the Russian version of things with no hesitation. Regardless, I persisted for years in reading many of their views, dismissing their Russophilia as misdirected, but not malign. Now that the Russians' schemes are patent from investigative reports, I realize that these websites are, for whatever reason, beholden to the Russian disinformation apparatus and many are not worth visiting.

I dropped Club Orlov years ago, as I noticed Dmitry was not only too ardently defending Russian misdeeds, but also those of other U.S. enemies and denigrating our military. I first heard Orlov on James Howard Kunstler's podcast, whose Clusterfuck Nation blog this week pooh-poohs Russian hacking as an excuse mainstream news organizations are using for not noticing Trump's ascendancy among the electorate. To his credit, he doesn't deny the impact fake news may have had on the election, so I will keep him on my reading list. Another of my favorite writers, +Albert Bates, is too chummy with Dmitry and RT for me to trust his opinion as untainted, so I will have to stop reading his blog, too.

Photo by Sophie

A website that Kunstler put me onto, The Automatic Earth, has always helped me to wake up with a pessimistic view of the financial quagmire we are in. With its constant defense of Russian virtue and links to Zero Hedge and various other false news websites, I am glad to be rid of it. I will subscribe to the Washington Post again and get my morning news from the American media establishment rather than the apparatchiki. Another writer I located through Kunstler, John Michael Greer, has been mentioned in a few of my blogs as a fellow Marylander. He is on probation now, having soured me by a recent post in which he wondered why his blog wasn't on the list of 200+ websites showing evidence of heavy Russian fake news propagation. Come on, John! I know you think the best thing for us now is to have a million points of light shining in as many directions, but by toying with ideas from the heads of Russian hackers, you are just entering a hall of mirrors.

Jill Stein is doing something especially patriotic in fighting for vote recounts based, in part, on suspicions of Russian tampering. It is keeping the issue elevated long enough for us to realize that we need to all work harder at filtering information and that we need to protect our society from the effects of falsehoods at all levels of decision-making. I suspect that a lot of the push-back she received from fellow Greens was because many on the left became too invested in the narratives that originated in Moscow to the point that they subconsciously shifted their allegiance in favor of Russian tales to the detriment of their reliance on manifest truths.

The Storm before the Calm

If you think that the suspicions of a Russia-hacked election are overblown, I'll go you one better - Trump is an unwitting Russian agent (or useful idiot, if you prefer) in their campaign to reclaim Eastern Europe. Not that I particularly care who has dominion in that part of the world (as long as they are civil), but Russia's prize is more valuable than the grave of civilization we are fighting for in the Middle East.

Photo by John Cooke

In the climax phase of the 4th Turning, we can expect a big war to occur. The trouble with Hillary's ken of going head-to-head with Russia over their jealous urge to retake old territory is that we would risk starting a major nuclear war. A major non-nuclear war in the Middle East is preferable, and that is the likely course a Trump administration will take. If the Trump's election is overturned, we might sooner find ourselves in a civil war, with all of our "well regulated" militias ready to stand their ground regarding who should run the republic.

Assuming we're stuck with Trump, the signs pointing to an escalation of our Middle Eastern military campaign are growing larger. Retired General James Mattis, as Secretary of Defense, could be the next manifestation of America's drift into a deep state controlled government of the military, by the military, and for the military. Mattis wouldn't be the first career military officer to take that position less than seven years after retiring (against the prohibition established when the DoD was created), but we aren't in a world war, either (yet). It is no coincidence that Mattis is the best we have to execute a war against Iran.

In committing ourselves to a major war against Iran, that would leave the door open in Europe, just as the EU is unraveling, for the Russians to take what they think they can. Europe, then could be dealing with a hot war at the same time we are bombing Iran. At that point, China may as well take whatever islands their own manifest destiny owes them. If each of those three powers can respect the imperial ambitions of the others, then we will, hopefully, avoid nuclear exchanges.

I don't know what Trump and Putin have been chatting about, but our man could be applying the art of the deal to grand strategy, using business argot and body language to make tacit pacts of non-interference. The pact might have included a clause for Russia's help with Trump's popularity going into the election, when the Russian PsyOp campaign may have equaled that of either major candidate. I guess Trump's win is better than raising the probability of nuclear or civil war, and I do think we need to eliminate the "revolutionary cause" posing as a nation-state in Iran, but then let's have our own green revolution.