Should We Liken Trump to a Little Hobbit?

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What do journalists, the Clinton machine, Democrats and the Republicans have in common? Trump defeated all of them. However, some are proclaiming him to not be their president. Will the civil disobedience spread? On the other hand, will he be able to drain Mordor’s swamp?

The sounds echoed through the hallways, allowing everyone to hear her and know she was there way before they saw her. The sound was a deep breathing sound, almost as if something was stuck deep in her chest. The first time someone saw her, the focus was immediately on the eyes. A blue colour, but not the colour of Elton John’s song, nor the colour of a beautiful summer sky, no, these were the eyes of a dead fish. There was life, but they weren’t alive. As she moved to about, she would scream out for anyone to hear… Precious! Where is Precious? Of course, because she had changed her accent and speaking pattern over the years, pandering to whomever she was speaking with, or more likely at, and because of her health problems, it sounded more like… Power! Who has the Power?

She realised that she once had it, but in one of her greater battles, she’d lost it, and now she was doomed to search for it forever. Furthermore, search for it she did. In fact, there’s a legend that on certain nights, she could be seen wandering the halls of the DNC headquarters, crying out crying out at night-time… Precious! Who has my Precious? Now, if this sounds like a modern-day retelling of The Hobbit, you’d almost be right. You could easily cast Hillary Clinton as Gollum, Bill Clinton could be Saruman, Donald Trump could be one of the funny-looking little hobbits with red hairy feet, and Mordor would be Washington DC. What about Sauron? Who knows… maybe, it’d be a toss-up between or a mix of John Podesta and Huma Abedin, or maybe even Paul Ryan. This is, after all, a modern-day retelling, no need for a strict canonical interpretation.

Now, if you haven’t been paying attention this week, Donald Trump shocked the entire world when won election as the next President of the United States. For better or worse, he’ll take the helm in January. To hear some tell the story of president-elect Trump’s rise, it all began back in 2011. In fact, the New Statesman just ran a story that suggested:

I invite you to cast your mind back to that year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, when President Obama and comedian Seth Myers roasted a member of the audience, calling him a political charlatan and suggesting he had a “dead fox” on his head. Seth Meyers, a comedian best known for being on TV way after most working people have gone to bed, took it one step further when he said, “Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican… which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke”. While those lines on the face of it are pretty funny, the subject of the joke apparently took it to heart. With that, he decided to run for office.

According to a number of articles on the web, Trump was a joke, but he had money, so politicians were friendly with him. The NYT, in a background piece wrote:

Repeatedly underestimated as a court jester or silly showman, Mr Trump muscled his way into the Republican élite by force of will. He badgered a skittish Mitt Romney into accepting his endorsement on national television, and became a celebrity fixture at conservative gatherings.

In fact, when describing a negotiation between Romney and Trump, the article at the NYT went on to quote Ryan Williams, a former spokesman for the Romney campaign, as saying:

The self-professed genius was just stupid enough to buy our ruse.

Yup, according to him, Trump got the raw end of the deal. That’s right. A spokesman for Mitt Romney, the guy who was best known for his single handily destroying companies and putting tens of thousands of working Americans out of work, hiding his hundreds of millions of blood-money offshore, and oh, who hasn’t been seen since Obama kicked his butt back in 2012, suggested that Trump was the idiot.

Speaking of idiots, its left many in the press wondering what just happened. Continuously pointing to polls, coordinating talking points and talking the Trump camp down, they’re now left holding the bag with a collective wailing and gnashing of teeth. Was it because, as VOX reported:

Trump’s win is a reminder of the incredible unbeatable power of racism?

Or, was it because, as CBS wrote:

(The press was) all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

The press biased? No, say it ain’t so, Joe. That article continued by noting:

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing… its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic. We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.

Just remember that dear citizen… the press knows better than you, so shut up and think what you are told! Speaking of thinking what they are told, or rather, not, in this case, Rush Limbaugh pointed out an interesting fact recently when he said:

I’m talking about the demise of the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party since 2010, the midterm elections in 2010, they lost 900 seats in that election in the House, in the Senate, go to governorships, mayors, town council, if you go all over the country, they got a shellacking. Hillary Clinton got six million fewer votes than Barack Obama in 2012. In 2014, the next set of midterms, the Democrats lost another 700 seats. It decimated the Democrat Party. They have no bench. They don’t have anybody bringing up the rear in case Hillary lost. A minority has governed us against our will, and the illusion has been that they are the majority and gaining the majority and growing the majority.

Talking about the minority dictating to the majority, Fox News just reported that:

The CEO of Grubhub, an online food delivery service, just sent a company-wide email suggesting employees who agree with President-elect Donald Trump’s behaviours and his campaign rhetoric should resign.

Matt Maloney, Co-Founder of Grubhub, specifically wrote:

If you don’t agree with this statement, then, please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here. We don’t tolerate hateful attitudes on our team.

Because, you see, tolerance is just a buzzword and we’ll ruthlessly punish anyone with a different opinion. Or, fired, in this case. As the new normal sets in, many people wonder what the future will bring. Will President Trump, as strange as that sounds, be able to make America great again? Or will he, as many have proclaimed, leave the country bankrupt, as he has many of his companies? What of those that say that Trump doesn’t represent them… that continue to riot in the streets? Will the discontent grow? Although we can’t know the fate that the future holds for us, we do know that Trump not only took on the media, but also the most powerful 16 Republicans, and won, he also crushed the vaunted Clinton political machine and destroyed the Democrats. To quote Trump in a speech days before the New Hampshire primary:

A lot of people have laughed at me over the years. Now, they’re not laughing so much.

So, what do you think… should we liken Trump to a little hobbit?

11 November 2016

Jay Johnson

Sputnik International

 https://sputniknews.com/radio_connecting_the_pieces/201611111047341633-should-trump-be-likened-to-little-hobbit/

12 November 2016. The End of the Bush/Clinton Duopoly

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Trump won because “more of the same” wouldn’t wash in Peoria. Full stop. The Clintons are dead politically. Chelsea Clinton will be a glitzy party animal in the usual NY Metro circles, nothing more. She might win a safe Dem congressional seat… that’s all. On the other hand, the Bushes have the financial and social creds to soldier on (they’re not parvenus like the Clintons… the Real Rich locked them out of Tarrytown). However, watch the Bushes “trim their sails”… they didn’t survive backing Hitler in the 30s for nothing. They’re survivors… like the Gardiners (a prominent NY family).

Nevertheless, the Bush/Clinton domination of American politics since 1988 is over. Obama was simply Hilly’s frontman… his foreign policy and domestic policy was hers, right down to the last jot n’ tittle. He did nothing to aid ordinary people in his administration… but he did wage war at Hilly’s instigation. Don’t forget that Vickie Nuland was Hilly’s protégé, and Obama obediently rolled over and played dead for every aggression that the Clintons and Bushes wanted. The American people voted out these two Mafia families. The Bushes have more savoir faire, but that’s because they’re Old Money. The Clintons are more open in their powerlust (do look at their associates such as Carville… I need say no more). Both Bushes and Clintons “triangulated”… both spat on their parties’ bases. Well… the American people spoke this year.

“No more Clintons”… “No more Bushes”… the Clintons will become tabloid nonentities (but they’ll always be in the news like the equally powerless Kardashians) and the Bushes will return to being one of the Old Money Set (trust me, they’re Social Register, and that’ll NEVER change). However, both are out of real politics. The people have seen through them…

BMD

As John Robles Sees It… USA Bans OSCE Observers: What are They Trying to Hide?

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The American states of Texas and Iowa {both have undemocratic Republicans as Governors: editor} openly stated that OSCE Election Observers will face criminal prosecution if they come anywhere near election polling locations. What hypocrisy! The country that lectures the world on “democracy” is afraid to allow international observers to view its election process. That speaks volumes and brings into question the very fundamental legitimacy of that power. The world superpower that natters to every country on earth about democracy, transparency, and the rule of law, the country which attempts to justify aggressive invasions and the assassination of leaders of countries it doesn’t care for, for one reason or the other, by throwing around the word “democracy”, whilst it launches invasions and arms terrorists to remove rightful leaders, looks absolutely absurd and hypocritical in light of the fact that it’s attempting to intimidate and bar international elections observers from observing its “democratic” presidential election process.

Once again, the USA violates another international treaty or agreement it has signed or is bound to. This isn’t unusual and is more the rule for the USA than the exception, examples includes the Geneva Conventions, the Vienna Conventions, international anti-racism agreements, agreements regarding the treatment of indigenous peoples, prisoners of war, and scores of other agreements. Other areas where the USA does as it pleases include international standards and laws regarding the declaration of war, international arrests, territorial and sovereign integrity, pollution, labour practices, extra-judicial executions, and the list goes on. This time however, the double standards and absolute hypocrisy couldn’t be clearer.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) plans to deploy up to 100 elections observers all around the USA on Election Day to monitor polling and other associated processes. This comes after a warning, according to the web site thehill.com was issued to OSCE official Daan Everts earlier this month by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCHR), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) regarding “a coordinated political effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans, particularly traditionally disenfranchised groups like minorities”. Rather than welcoming international observers, as one would logically assume any country would do which claims to be the world leader in “democracy”, rightwing and “conservative” groups, include the supposed anti-election fraud group “True the Vote”, have come out screaming against international observers.

For those not blinded by the constant rhetoric and aware of the racist agendas of the far-right, this isn’t surprising. It’s one thing to suppress minority voters and throw up every barrier one can think of to keep them from the polls, and have them disgruntled and screaming racism, it’s yet another when that’s documented and observed by respected members of a respected and solid international inter-governmental body like the OSCE. After the election débâcle of 2000, when George W Bush’s brother Jeb Bush suppressed minority votes in Florida leading to George Bush’s winning the presidency in the Supreme Court, raised the interest of the international community as to the fairness of the American system, the OSCE was invited to observe American elections by George Bush himself in 2004, after UN observers were refused, although they’d been doing so since 2002.

The states in question, which threatened OSCE observers with arrest and imprisonment, currently include Texas and Iowa, with others likely to follow. Iowa has stated that it will arrest OSCE observers who come within 300 feet of polling locations with Texas issuing similar threats. The USA, as one of 56 OSCE members is supposedly committed, as are other member countries, to allow its elections to be observed, this has been true since 1990. Although the USA is supposed to allow observers, the OSCE agreement isn’t legally binding, and includes wording that calls for domestic laws to be followed, which allows individual US states and local authorities almost carte-blanche to do as they see fit.

According to the web site the Axis of Logic the head of the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), Ambassador Janez Lenarčič, wrote a letter to the US State Department of State and Hillary Clinton denouncing threats made against OSCE observers. He wrote, “The threat of criminal sanctions against international observers is unacceptable. The United States, like all countries in the OSCE, has an obligation to invite observers to observe its elections. Our observers are requested to remain strictly impartial and not to intervene in the voting process in any way. They are in the USA to observe the elections, not to interfere in them”. The USA has a lot to hide when it comes to elections, much more than most of the international community realises. The fact that domestic American human rights organisations have requested international observers should be triggering alarm bells worldwide.

The problems with the American election process are many. Starting with the actual voting process, the USA has shown that there are problems with electronic voting machines, such as the Diebold machines, which caused widespread scandals during the Bush elections, including counting votes for Bush, when the other candidate was selected, which are known to be easily manipulated. Then, there’s the fact that there are locations where there are no paper ballots and, hence, no reliable way to verify votes. Another problem is that observers aren’t allowed in many polling stations in many locations where there are paper ballots; to observe that the actual ballots are placed in the boxes and that they’re sealed and not tampered with. There are scores of other suppression and illegal tactics taking place in the steps leading up to the actual voting booth. Amongst these are limiting who’s allowed to vote, and actions taken by right-wing “conservative” racist groups to keep segments of the population away from the polls, as a rule, black and minority voters, along with the poor and the elderly, that is, voters who generally vote for Democratic or third party candidates.

Such tactics include varied and widespread voter purges which have been manipulated all over the USA, including those supposedly purging felons, voter ID laws that target the poor and elderly, and an array of activities designed to intimidate and otherwise keep minorities, the poor, and the elderly away from the voting booth. For example, there are reports in areas with large concentrations of Spanish speaking voters of leaflets distributed by rightwing groups with the wrong date of voting printed on them. There are also widespread reports of billboard campaigns stating that improper voting or mistakes in the voting booth may be felony offenses, a clever move to frighten people into thinking if they make some little mistake then they may go to prison. There are also rightwing groups deploying millions of “observers” who may intimidate “selected” voters by making them provide proof of their identities before allowing them into polling stations.

According to the site CNSNEWS.com, “The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and others urged OSCE observers to deploy in states where they allege there is ‘a coordinated political effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans’, especially minorities and low-income groups”. Of all of the problems there are also complaints about the arcane and archaic Electoral College system, the re-zoning of electoral districts in many states such as Texas, where votes are taken away from minority and poor areas and moved to “white” areas, and even claims that there are only 32 counties in the US that’ll decide the vote, and 41 out of 50 states are being ignored because they are either red “Republican” or blue “Democratic”.

Another problem in the USA is access to the media, only available to candidates with millions, if not billions of dollars, effectively making it impossible for third party candidates to compete. Then, there’s the entire presidential debate process, which is decided by private corporations, and third party candidates are effectively banned from participation. Unfortunately, these aren’t the only problems. There are also a slew of problems making it almost impossible for many third party candidates to get on the ballots in many states. Add to that, unfair federal funding practises and impossible thresholds that are supposed to be met, and you have a system that only benefits the wealthy and is completely controlled by those who are already in power.

Perhaps, the USA could take lessons from Russia on democracy and running fair elections? Russia, for example, has web cameras in the polling stations allowing anyone to observe, transparent voting boxes with an observable secure process from start to finish, hundreds of thousands of observers, nine parties, all with equal television air-time, inclusive debates, and the right of every citizen to vote. That’s unlikely, the USA has a fine-tuned system to keep the wealthy white class in power and keep everyone else as subjects. “Everyone else” includes all “minorities” (who are, in fact, not minorities in many states), American Indians, the poor, the disabled, the young, students, migrant workers, displaced people, the elderly, and everyone else not fitting the wealthy white ideal.

Lastly, the USA has become a country controlled by corporations and big money, they control the government and the political processes, this is a fact few would argue with. The system is designed to suppress a huge segment of the population on racist and other lines. According to any dictionary, by definition, the USA has slipped into a state of Fascism, or neo-Fascism, if you prefer. Of course, such a system wouldn’t welcome election observers. They can’t allow the “secret” to get out of the bag.

6 November 2012 (MSK)

John Robles

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_11_06/US-bans-OSCE-observers-What-are-they-trying-to-hide/

Editor’s Note:

Most real ethnic Orthodox are Democrats, as the Republican bosses treated them badly (and cheated them horribly) when they came to this country. Quite often, this persists even if they become affluent, as they remember the base cruelty, greed, and racism of most Republicans.

The konvertsy are mostly Hard Right anti-government loon Republicans. They have nothing in common with us socially or politically. They’ve made common cause with the remnants of the Hard Right anti-commie loons in the ROCOR… for now. You see, the ROCOR anti-commies will come around to reason… their ethnos/narod will trump their politics. Then, the konvertsy will stand alone…

Be patient, God IS sorting things out…

BMD

 

A View from Moscow by Valentin Zorin… US Elections: The Bets are Laid

Get out and vote… the Neanderthal rightwingers are going to… but don’t lose heart, we DO outnumber them.

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The presidential election campaign in the USA reached a pivotal stage; it’s a decisive week that‘ll determine who’ll lead America in the next four years. The Republican National Convention nominated former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to run for president, along with his choice for VP, Paul Ryan to run against Democratic Party nominees Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The Republican leadership is gambling on political hawks, enablers of the American military-industrial complex. This choice sets the tone for the campaign. Mitt Romney is a successful businessman, fabulously rich, one of the pillars of Boston’s financial community. However, recently, during the current election campaign, it came out that the Republican presidential hopeful is dodging taxes by stashing funds in overseas banks. Nevertheless, those who back him are unperturbed. He backs their aims, he suits them; he’s “their guy”.

A 42-year-old member of the US House of Representatives, reputed to be eloquent, Paul Ryan won the affection of business tycoons thanks to his calls for limits on government regulation of the economy, cutting social programmes, and introducing more tax loopholes for the wealthiest Americans. Media releases portray Ryan as a competent economist, sorely needed in the wheezing American economy. In reality, volubility seems to be his main and only asset. He has no practical or theoretical knowledge of economics. In nominating presidential and vice-presidential candidates, the Republican National Convention offered no clear-cut election programme. Whilst underscoring their commitment to traditional American values in their speeches, both nominees emphasised the need to increase military spending and reinforce the tax cuts for the rich initiated by the Bush administration. A telling detail that testified to Romney’s intention to continue Bush’s failed policies rejected in the last election was the fact that former Florida Governor Jeb Bush (George Bush’s brother) was one of those whom the Republican leadership instructed to support Mitt Romney at the convention. By the way, Jeb Bush played a dubious role in George Bush’s victory in the 2000 election.

The Republican leadership needed to invoke the political legacy of one of the country’s most disastrous presidents in order to woo Big Business’ support, especially, the military-industrial complex. As for the majority of American voters, the Republicans are trying to appeal to the overall public discontent about the current economic situation in the country. In America, they say that people vote with their wallets. As wallets grow thinner and thinner day by day, of course, some blame this on those in power. As it happens, the Republicans think that they see an opening… they’re betting on economic issues. It’s what they’re banking on; it’s their main hope. What will win in the end? Will it be the storyline broadcast by a powerful and lavishly-funded propaganda machine, or, will it be the common sense inherent in most Americans? It’ll become clear fairly soon.

8 September 2012

Valentin Zorin

Voice of Russia World Service

http://rus.ruvr.ru/2012_09_05/Stavki-sdelani/