In reply to Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer, Crikey, 16 March 2026
Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer write with typical forensic precision about the catastrophic destruction which Donald Trump is pretending to be in charge of as his government trashes the global picnic, the Strait of Hormuz, American credibility, and the rules-based order, a bad, parody of Orwellian double-speak at the best of times. Is he but the puppet of MBS and Netanyahu, a pair of homicidal maniacs?
Keane and Dyer’s analysis is sound. But there is, perhaps, a touch of accidental humanity and generosity buried in the framing, a structural alibi, that lets the principal architect of this unholy catastrophe off rather lightly.
True, Trump was “led” into this by accused felon (breach of trust, fraud and bribery) Bibi Netanyahu. As Epstein may have led him astray all those years ago aboard the Lolita Express all the way to Little St James, a Caribbean Hotel California. At Club Jeff you can check out any time you like but you can never leave. And, yes, it’s true that Mohammed bin Salman, the bone-sawyer of Riyadh, was mad keen to talk President Bone Spurs into destroying Iran. Like father like son. MBS, a man whose regard for human life makes Pete Hegseth look like a pool guard, has been whispering in Trump’s pink, porcine bullet-proof ear since before the first term. Bravo to the organ grinders. We can’t imagine how hard it’s been. We grant you your due. Trump Whisperers rule.
But the monkey chose to dance.
The “Trump was manipulated” narrative, however seductive, tends to dissolve individual agency into geopolitical determinism, and Trump has spent almost eighty years insisting he is the smartest, hottest kid in any room he enters. He should be held to that.
Trump launched Operation Epic Fury. He signed off on it. He let himself be swayed by Netanyahu, not only an accused felon but a man currently avoiding a war crimes tribunal with the diligence others reserve for evading their taxes. Bibi got through to Donald by dwelling on the huge target Trump has painted on his back. Call it the whack job channel. And it would be a walkover.
Bombing Iran into the Stone Age would be all done in dusted in a weekend. And welcomed by a grateful world. The deal was sweetened, no doubt, by MBS, who has his own reasons for wanting Iranian power obliterated. Saudi oil revenues stand to benefit rather nicely from a prolonged regional conflagration, even as his tankers share the Strait of Hormuz.
Many a catastrophe has good bones. The flotsam now clogging the Strait of Hormuz, the global oil market, and the burnt-out bases on which the US once pegged its credibility did not happen over night. It took years of patient construction, cultivation and guile. It required enablers; courtiers, a slick of oleaginous toadies. That’s before you get to the endless, trans-national transactionalism.
Cue a choir of true believers amidst a mob of magic-carpet-baggers, grifters and chancers who supplied the scaffolding and pipe-dreaming upon which a vain, chaotic, and catastrophically incurious man could climb so high; a height from which he has now blown himself up and taken much of the neighbourhood with him. And it began with a wall. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Trump’s Comeuppance is a story about a man constitutionally incapable of learning from failure, which is itself a story about America. Keane notes, correctly, that Trump is making the Iraq debacle look “astute, well-planned and legally sound.”
He is. But Dubya at least had the institutional backing of a functioning NSC, Colin Powell’s residual credibility, and a Congress that rolled over with bipartisan enthusiasm. Trump walked into this one carrying Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary, an ex-Gitmo guard whose main qualification for the role is his willingness to appear on Fox News in a manner that Trump finds agreeable.
That Trump could get to blow up the world without serious consequence (yet) or paying for any of his previous catastrophes is the deeper American story. An indulgent if erratic father handed him money and insulation. Roy Cohn, the original architect of the never-apologise, always-attack, make-the-truth-a-matter-of-stamina school of American public life, handed him a philosophy. A legal and financial system that consistently found ways to let him fail upward handed him survival. And a Republican Party that had been systematically hollowing out its own intellectual and ethical core for forty years handed him the presidency. Twice.
This is what US exceptionalism looks like without the mythology: not a shining city on a hill, but a system so thoroughly captured by money, spectacle, and the cult of the deal that it can produce a commander-in-chief who mistakes bluster for strategy, flattery for intelligence, and a Netanyahu phone call for geopolitical wisdom. And that’s before we get to what Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs calls the normalisation of violence and mass-murder in America’s public discourse.
The hubris here is not merely Trumpian. It is systemic; the belief that American military, economic power and CIA chicanery are so overwhelming that no adventure can truly go wrong, that the world will eventually fall into line, that China will cooperate when called upon and allies will follow when commanded. Trump simply stripped away the clothes and left the assumption standing there, blinking in the harsh light of a hundred-dollar barrel of oil. (Now $150 in Asian markets.)
It is worth naming one or two of the supporting cast. Not in the spirit of retrospective punishment, we are too far gone for that but because they will, when the history is written, attempt to slip away unnoticed, and they deserve not to. And for the light they provide on our veneration of the dark arts of naked pragmatism; doing whatever it takes. Transactionalism. We can start at home, a subsidiary of Woodside Petroleum. Wesfarmers, PwC, and ASX.
Take a bow, Joe “Hello World” Hockey, our man in Washington through Trump’s first term. Hockey was by most accounts a more capable diplomat than his earlier career as a cigar-puffing, budget-slashing Treasurer might have predicted. He read the Trump field early, went against his own government’s instincts to contact the campaign, got Greg Norman to supply the mobile number, and generally demonstrated more operational nous than Canberra deserved from its Washington posting. Credit where it is due.
And yet. There is in Hockey’s account of those years, in his memoir, in his public commentary, in the warmth of his retrospective regard for the man he managed, a studious refusal to name the thing plainly. He soft-pedalled both impeachments, hinted at voter fraud in 2020, and came to the strange conclusion that of all the countries doing business with Donald Trump, Australia did best.
That this was achieved largely by the diplomatic equivalent of not making sudden movements around an unpredictable large animal is left, perhaps wisely, unstated.
Hockey standing bare-headed in the Washington chill of January 2017, in the light rain that fell throughout the first inauguration, is a serviceable image for the posture of Australia’s conservative political class toward Trump generally: turning up, head uncovered, in the hope that something useful might be extracted from proximity to the man, and telling themselves afterwards that it was all in the national interest.
Craven enabler and accomplice-patsy all fit well, too.
But Hockey is a mere warm-up act. The principal performance in Australian Trumpism, the role that will require the most sustained critical attention when the reckoning arrives, belongs to our own epic-narcissist; the-man-who-would-be-an-entire-cabinet and yet an incredible Bunnings catalogue, Dad our own tea-table ukulele maestro, Scott Morrison.
Morrison did not merely admire Trump from a distance. He recognised him. Two men shaped by an absolute conviction of their own righteousness, armoured against contradiction by a theology; in Morrison’s case, literal, that interprets setbacks as spiritual tests and success as divine endorsement.
Two men who had constructed public personas of prodigious artifice: the marketing man from Cronulla doing the daggy-dad routine, the Manhattan developer doing the working-class hero, each performance calibrated to constituencies they quietly held in varying degrees of contempt. Two men for whom the politics of division, sovereign borders here, the Wall there, asylum seekers on Nauru and Tamil families on Christmas Island as the Pacific analogue of the caravan at the Rio Grande, was not an unfortunate necessity but a first instinct. You could see the same burning cross of certainty in both of them: in Morrison’s Pentecostal congregation with its eagles and prophecies, in Trump’s rallies with their own revivalist heat and their own chosen enemies.
When Morrison won in 2019, Trump respected him for it. He loves winners, we are told, and Morrison’s miracle election, achieved largely because the Australian electorate preferred not to think too hard, qualified him for the inner circle. The state dinner followed. The Oval Office warmth. When Trump was later out of office and the legal machinery of New York was grinding toward him, Morrison flew across to express solidarity, to note approvingly that the former president retained his true appreciation of the alliance, and to share warm words about the pile-on Trump was enduring.
The behaviour of a man who, having watched Operation Sovereign Borders become the template for cruelty dressed as policy, had no difficulty whatsoever recognising a kindred administrative spirit.
What Morrison saw in Trump, and Trump in Morrison, was the same immense and self-sufficient amour propre, the armour-plated self-regard that can accommodate God, an eagle, a Sharks jersey, a Hawaiian holiday during a national catastrophe, and the Robodebt scheme, without registering a moment of genuine moral disturbance. Both men were immune to the kind of internal conflict that the examined life produces. Both had found, in their respective political traditions, permission structures that elevated this immunity to a virtue. Morrison called it faith. Trump called it strength. History is likely to call it something else entirely.
The Liberals’ broader genuflection toward Trumpism was not confined to Morrison. There was a period, not long ago, when the smart set in Australian conservative circles was urgently debating how the Liberal Party could become “more transactional”, the preferred euphemism for importing the Trumpian method without having to acknowledge its ethics or its consequences. More deal-making. Less idealism. Border politics as a permanent campaign tool rather than an occasional emergency. The question was never asked of these analysts: transactional toward what end, and at whose expense? Because the ends were visible enough in the American original, and the expenses were always borne by people who did not attend the relevant think-tank lunches.
As for Netanyahu: Bibi gets what Bibi always gets. The nuclear option remains on the table. The ICC prosecutors remain at a safe distance. The domestic legal jeopardy that drove him toward this war in the first place, the corruption charges, the coalition arithmetic, the brinkmanship that has become indistinguishable from personal survival, all of it continues to be managed by the simple expedient of keeping the war going. There is always another target. There is always another escalation rung. And as long as Washington follows Tel Aviv’s lead, Bibi never has to face a courtroom. The organ grinders are doing fine.
Now the bill has arrived. Not for them, of course, it never is. The bill arrives at the door of the Strait of Hormuz, in the fuel price at the bowser in Ararat and Albury and Bankstown, in the interest rate decision the RBA must now make with one eye on an oil shock it did not cause and cannot control, in the cargo ships sitting idle outside a waterway that the world’s most powerful military cannot guarantee safe passage through.
And now Trump begs China to save him from his own misjudgment. China, which has spent two decades quietly building the leverage that America has spent two decades squandering. China, which watched the rare earths, the batteries, the renewables, the robotics, and the AI pipeline come online while Washington was busy with its reality television governance. China, which has absolutely no obligation to pull Trump out of a hole he dug, jumped into, and then expressed surprise about. It is, as Keane notes, a glimpse of a possible future where all traces of the unipolar moment have vanished; and not a future that any of the enablers, Australian or otherwise, paused to consider when they were busy stroking the ego that helped bring it about.
Nobody in this cast, not Netanyahu, not MBS, not the American hawks who convinced themselves the Iran adventure was really about containing China, not Hockey with his golf games and his mateship narrative, not Morrison with his burning certainties and his borrowed Trumpian political theology, not the Australian commentariat that urged the Liberal Party to be more transactional and meant it as a compliment, nobody is going to stand up now and acknowledge their share of the scaffolding.
That is what history is for. And history, unlike Pete Hegseth, is not taking reassurance from anyone.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
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David, this article is one of the reasons I subscribe to independent news media.
Most of us know and loathe Trump and Morrison and their ilk.
But Joe Hockey is in a class of his own. His sense of entitlement would put the man who used to be known as “Prince Andrew” to shame.
The “lifters, not leaners” ideology he sprouted in his first and only budget speech, followed by him and his fellow grifter puffing on fat cigars showed his true self.
That he has been so rewarded demonstrates how our current system works.
It’s rarefied air those lifters breathe.
Hi, Leona. One of the low points in my career as a public servant was having Joe Hockey as my minister. He was a lying, conniving, snivelling lump of waste.
Brilliant article, thanks David. Couldn’t agree more.
Comments on J Hockey are too kind, for, having met him long ago at Nth. Sydney, be assured he is a self-fixated, egofixated pile of sty droppings. Money, pose, self, then more, was his drive, his stance. Uncaring, detached, avaricious.
Thanks David,another ball biter of an article,stripping the pretenders bare.
Thank you, David!
It seems the veil of accountability is finally being lifted amongst all the audacious buffoonery that passed for Governance.
We are still dealing with that at the moment and it seems to me that this mob are just as blind to their own trickery and fakery….
https://michaelwest.com.au/rates-up-dollar-down-reserve-bank-diminished-by-dud-review/
The graphic accompanying this essay needs to be sent to America for distribution on the basis of you get what you give, following Trump’s depiction of the Obamas.
Max Blumenthal has expressed and supported a view, in an interview with Chris Hedges, that Trump was the victim of a sophisticated and well-planned psy-op, by Israel, that developed a fear of assassination within Trump and exploited it, to drive him to ‘I got him, before he got me’.
Max goes into amazing detail, all of which he supports, but as with many things, a lot of it goes to things like malpractice of the FBI and complicity of a number of Trump’s own administration.
It is a plausible explanation, but I wouldn’t try to defend it from an accusation of ‘yeah, right and JFK was assassinated by the Israel mafia in the USA’. A possibility but we don’t have the means to prove it one way or the other, and defer to our authorities in charge of investigating these things.
Just the same, the evidence that Burgess says ASIO holds that he says implicates Iran in arson on Australian soil needs to be made public, as it is being used to justifying being a part of this illegal war with Iran.
If the truth of what has been going on is to ever come to light it would rely on testimony from Trump himself. I wonder if he will end up sharing Epstein’s fate.
Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank have exposed Western media as not just biased but, in many cases, invested in deceiving the Australian public.
Our ABC continues its biased coverage, imo, of International affairs in the Middle East. Today it reports the killing of a migrant worker and 3 Palestinians in Israel by separate missile strikes from Iran. Yet, despite having correspondents on the ground in Israel it said nothing, on its website, of the execution of a West Bank family that merely went for a Sunday drive. Mum, Dad and their two children were shot in head by plain-clothed Israeli security.
The ABC continues to mainly frame Iranian strikes on Israel as strikes on civilian areas but makes no mention that the US and Israel have hit some 7000 Iranian civilian targets. Has our ABC called Israel’s invasion and obvious intent to steal a huge part of Lebanon what it is, an “invasion” – I must of missed that bit. How many times do you hear or see our ABC frame the global impact on oil supplies as a consequence of US-Israel war of aggression, but rather as Iran’s actions?
WOW! Well nailed Wronski!
“Although President Donald Trump says he has ‘destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military Capability’, the 0% that remains is playing havoc with the global economy.”
-The Economist
When the entire world is sniggering, you’re finished.
Americans like Max Blumenthal et al are not taken seriously in Europe nor by qualified analysts; at best he is a journalist with strong opinions.
At worst he went off piste 2015 after fallingbour with his father & sofa surfing followed by a visit to Moscow then returned to set up the Grayzone contradicting many of his earlier liberal positions (Vatnik Soup, Russian Disinfo Unit, Tampere University, Finland)
Good one, on Trump puppet, MBS and Netanyahu, misses the other guys…..especially Putin to make the three amigos who with Trump featured in Bibi’s pre Covid election campaign 2019?
Other relationships missed onshore have been Kushner linked to the three amigos and MBS. The latter with Gulf states are well p*ssed off with Trump & Netanyahu, while Saudi invested $2 billion in Kushner’s investment fund, for access; that’s gone well, not, and one (& Ukraine) hopes Saudi will divest….
Gulf States and Israel are being hit by Iranian Shahed’s with Russian targeting intelligence vs US assets, but Trump doesn’t care. Now his people and Netanyahu’s are asking for Ukraine interceptors, tactics and support ie up to date expertise after several years of Russian Shahed’s targeting Ukraine infrastructure and civilians (guess Gulf States will help Ukraine with weapons?).
Finally, Kushner is well embedded with Moscow elites via Roman Abramovich’s ex wife friendship with Ivanka & Jared, quelle surprise, and used to be quite liberal now not. The ex wife is now Murdoch’s step daughter and Murdoch was Kushner’s mentor for Trump 1.0 turning him onto Charles Murray’s ‘The Bell Curve’ on IQ &/or eugenics……
Uhm ….. Having watched the ”All the President’s Men” movie last night on television, I was reminded that Republican corruption during the Nixon re-election campaign included all levels of American government to some depth of appointments.
Nothing has changed in 50+ years. The Republicans believe that they have a D#g-given right to ”rule the world as they see fit”.
Somebody forgot to tell the Iranians who still remember the overthrow of the Mossaddegh regime that wanted to refine fossil fuels in Iranian jurisdiction to keep some/most of the profits in Iran.
Pavlov’s Dog, right on cue.
Andrew Smith is dismissive of the reference by Thommo to Max Blumenthal, saying that Blumenthal has no credibility in Europe.
Of course, in true Andrew Smith style, there’s no rebuttal of any opinion expressed by Blumenthal, because Smith never rebuts anything, he just casts aspersions.
There are plenty of analysts in Europe who come to the same or similar conclusions to Max Blumenthal.
Smith has presented this nonsense before, and I’ve corrected him before.
He does not care.
He would rather repeat falsehoods from Vatnik Soup.
Sorry I might be suffering from brain overload fatigue and more than a bit concerned that Bibi (if he is still alive?) might push the button for the Samson option…. but who or what is “MBS”? More Bull Shit?
MBS is the hacksaw-wielding journalist-murdering butcher of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.
Thomas, a puzzle for me also til a quick search found Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). Imagine the hassle of the full moniker, one supposedly longer than Muhammad bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud…
Some overload:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_bin_Salman#:~:text=Mohammed%20bin%20Salman%20Al%20Saud,Crown%20Prince%20and%20Prime%20Minister.
Thanks Steve, I wouldn’t have known about Andrew Smith’s unsubstantiated smear of Max Blumenthal, as I lost interest in reading Andrew’s posts a long time ago.
I agree with what you have to say and would add my own experience in challenging something Andrew Smith said about Jeffrey Sachs.
He had smeared Sachs and, for once, gave supporting evidence. Andrew did not reply to defend that “evidence” against my rebuttal. Instead, I noticed he later repeated his smear of Sachs only without any support whatsoever.
Does this stem from The Grayzone’s piece exposing Vatnik Soup (Pekka Kallioniemi) as a registered fraud, disgraced porn profiteer and a grifter?
https://thegrayzone.com/2025/10/13/pekka-child-profiteer-ukraine-disinfo/
I find it sad as I’m all for exposing the link between events and the Atlas Network, Heritage Foundation and whatever vested interest, and challenging statements from journos but, as you said, with rebuttal not just innuendo.
Thommo, the connection between Smith and Grayzone is that Grayzone is a strident critic of US foreign policy, while Smith is a defender.
Assange, Chomsky, Blumenthal, Sachs, Mearsheimer, Kampmark, anyone who hits US propaganda hard, gets the smear treatment.
While useful idiots like Snyder, Applebaum, get the royal treatment.
And thanks for bringing up the article on Pekka — I made a note of it somewhere but couldn’t find it.
I’ll file it more carefully this time.
Cheers
The US has had a “new” Strategy towards Iran since 2009. In “Which Path to Persia?”, 2009 Brookings Institute, there are options for airstrikes, regime change, invasion and as a last resort containment of Iran. Trump followed the “Osiraq” airstrike option last year demonstrating that this strategy analysis policy paper is guiding the strategy that is currently being implemented by the US. However, most of the options were assessed as unlikely to succeed without a great deal more investment in time, manpower and preparation that would be so immensely costly and unpopular that it would be extremely unlikely to win the support of the US people unless Iran committed a 9/11 magnitude attack on the US.
What this analysis paper makes perfectly clear is that the US has had options for more than 17 years to use Israel as a disposable excuse for attacking Iran and taking the blame and suffering the consequences. There is an option called “Leave it to Bibi” where the US plan was to let Israel attack by itself with covert US assistance such that the US would be spared retaliation or blame for the outcome. Another option was for Israel to attack first followed by the US, another was a combined attack, and there was also an option for the US attacking by itself from its base in Diego Garcia.
The point is that this paper makes it clear that the US is the Organ grinder and Israel is the monkey. The US has long wanted to attack Iran and it wasn’t tricked into it by Israel. Israel provides the US with plausible deniability for responsibility for anything that goes wrong, for all international condemnation of its unprovoked attacks and because Israel has a notorious reputation for genocide and the wilful murder of children it is the perfect scapegoat for US committed atrocities like their “double-tap” attack on the Menab school, although they have now been exposed as the real perpetrators of that particular atrocity.
Blumenthal and other social media commentators represent the desperate attempts to blame Netanyahu, Israel, Trump and the Epstein Files for bringing this catastrophe upon the world, and to absolve the US and the US Corporations that not only commissioned and funded these long term policies, but also fund both Republican and Democrat election campaigns to ensure continuity of policy agenda by all Administrations. (Note how no US politician is opposed to overthrowing Iran, they just argue about how it should be done). These US Corporations are the well known beneficiaries of US warmongering. Blumenthal et al prefer to blame the far less financially endowed Israel lobby or the Rothschildts or even the British Empire and the City of London, such are their ridiculous attempts to deny obvious US responsibility for bringing the world to the brink of disaster.
It’s also possible that the US intended to deliberately create this global economic crisis by not only blocking the straits but also in rendering the oil and gas fields throughout the gulf states inoperable. Oil and gas storage is critical and if it is not moved out of the Gulf the wells will have to cease production and it will require a lot of time and effort to restart production. The US believes it is energy sufficient and while the rest of the world is plunged into recessions and depressions the US might be able to cling to its tottering position of global primacy a little bit longer. However if that is so, there are now signs that Trump is having second thoughts.
Iran is prepared to allow trade to pass on condition that oil and gas is paid for in Chinese Yuen instead of US dollars. Pity Albanese chose to side with the aggressors again, that option may not be open to Australia. The US won’t like that at all and may have to resort to attacking those ships that are allowed to pass. Watch what happens.
Thommo and Steve, one simply applies the academic CRAAP* source test on ‘journalists’, especially US based pontificating on far way events, ‘bowling out of their lane’ with unclear financial backing, dubious peers and sharing talking points with Fox News?
What exactly is the geopolitical expertise of these high profile American writers or astroturfers in Blumenthal & Máté at Grayzone, Mearsheimer (Koch & Putin), Sachs (Rockefeller) et al. vs related academics with a research track record?
They follow the same fossil fueled Koch climate science denial and Tanton anti-immigrant agitprop tactics by avoiding science and research expertise in favour of beliefs, sentiments and opinion of non experts; promoted word of mouth by ‘followers’.
*You can respond with the ‘CRAAP’ Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy and Purpose.
One will take an assessment by post grad researchers at Tampere University over any American grifters eg Mearsheimer and Sachs who received awards from Tone’s chum PM ‘mini Putin’ Orbán…..
Sachs is listed on the Russian fossil fueled, anti-EU & anti-Ukraine Hungarian MCC Gongo allied with Budapest Danubius Institute & Koch Network’s Heritage; nice people?
Andrew Smith should learn to quit when he’s only slightly behind.
He states — “One will take an assessment by post grad researchers at Tampere University over any American grifters eg Mearsheimer and Sachs…”
Here’s the qualifications of Pekka Kallioniemi, the illustrious driving force behind the Vatnik Soup site that Andrew regularly quotes as a credible source.
In Andrew’s words months ago — Finnish academic, post graduate researcher and misinformation (esp. Russian) expert Pekka Kallioniemi.
But in Pekka’s own words we see — “My career as a researcher is divided and I also give many lectures on interactive technology. I do not have a specific research project on disinformation right now. It is more of a passion and a hobby, but a pretty big hobby nonetheless,”
Hmm.
A hobbyist.
Against Mearsheimer and Sachs, who are experts of international standing in the fields of political science and economics.
But it gets worse.
The academic web-site with which Kallioniemi is associated lists his academic works — “2019, Promoting local culture and enriching airport experiences through interactive storytelling. 2019, CityCompass VR – A Collaborative Virtual Language Learning Environment. 2019, Exploring Globally Inclusive Online Collaboration for Indian and Finnish Schoolchildren. 2019, What Are Others Looking at? Exploring 360° Videos on HMDs with Visual Cues about Other Viewers.”
Not exactly the research area necessary for giving informed commentary on the resistance to an empire that is totally out of control.
Thommo gave a link earlier to an article about Pekka’s exploits before venturing into political commentary.
If half the assertions are true, we’ll have a pretty good idea as to just who is the grifter.
Smithy, that’s all acronym and no iceberg as usual.
Feel free to explain how your CRAAP assessment of the video of Jeffrey Sachs reaction – a loss of words and momentary pause to maintain composure – to an Italian Senator aggressively calling him a liar in relation to an interaction, between Jeffrey Sachs and a couple of other people, to which the Senator was not privy, and would have no way of knowing the veracity of, indicated he is ‘supposedly’ an unreliable source, as opposed to someone subject to a concerted campaign to smear him. Because that was the support that you gave on the ocassion I mentioned.
Speaking of organ grinders and monkeys, what’s this about John Lyons being shifted off air by the Lobby?
The US has always been severely corrupt. Their Constitution formulated by the Founding Fathers (maybe foundering fathers) 1787-9 was and continues to be a dog’s breakfast of convenient loopholes and dysfunctional amendments. It boasts of separation of powers, and yet its electoral process is an abject disaster promoting opportunities for monied vested interests and political opportunists.
Throughout its sordid history, the most significant power it exerts has been to coerce, kill, maim and destroy in the name of their own designer (white) god. All one needs to do is refer to The Star Spangled Banner, what a gruesome bloodthirsty anthem written c1814, and adopted 1931, no doubt as an accurate retrospective of American greatness (not) – the icing on the cake of endless (Puritan) Christian propaganda.
Separation of powers is a sad joke today, with the arrival of the long planned white fascist PROJECT 2025 by the Heritage Foundation, which is now in full swing. Casting aside all conventions and diving deep into the Constitutional loopholes to obtain absolute autocratic control. All they had to do was find their organ-grinder’s monkey ….. Trump … prefect. And with the executive power of a corrupt POTUS, we’ve seen meddling in the Congress, the judiciary (incl SCOTUS), in and by the Churches, the bureaucracy and international norms (esp the UN), either casting their power aside or harnessing them to the wiles of POTUS.
After WWII, there were glimmers of hope for a fulsome, productive and peaceful future (people mistakenly thought the lessons of WWI & WWI had been learned). But off the back of the US unilateral bloodbath of killing and destruction in Vietnam. The US found itself with the contemptible Ronald Reagan in league with the fascist moron Margaret Thatcher flipping coins over the Cold War. Thatcher ruined Britain mercilessly, whilst Reagan grovelled on citing God – Reaganomics (‘trickle-down’), new arms race rejecting detente, and doing deals with Gorby that would never last.
Seems Reagan kick-started neoliberalism/neoconservatism. And when he wasn’t sure he could win another election, he enfranchised and gave political power to the fringe religious orgs and evangelists. They lapped it up, became incorporated, joined with the Zionistas, and now run amok as MAGA etc. They may well decimate America, and are certainly having a good go at the rest of the world.
Here’s an interesting take on it by journalist and author William J. Kole on ABC’s Late night Live, well worth a listen:
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/guns-usa-evangelical-christian-religion-glyphosate-roundup/106407042