We Are Doomed and Our Leaders Are Insane
Not one of our presidents, least of all this lunatic, can resist starting wars.
took three days off for the first time since Barack Obama’s first term this weekend, turning my phone on just in time to read our President announcing the U.S. Navy “will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.” Great. We’ve reached the Gorilla Flinging Its Feces Through the Bars stage of the Donald Trump experience, with years to go and many new lows within reach. There was once a gallows humor/amusement factor to go with America’s decline, but we’ve even been robbed of that.
The word disaster comes from “bad star,” but 21st-century Americans weren’t born under one. Instead, we’ve been maneuvered under them by cycles of dimwit leaders, each adding unnecessary horror to what should have been an era of fat contentment. How does an empire go from a no-lose catbird seat to doom in three decades? It wasn’t easy:
After the Soviet collapse America had no rivals. The Romans would have envied us. Bill Clinton celebrated Cold War victory by promising a shift away from “making armaments” toward a domestic windfall. Almost immediately he junked the “peace dividend” plan in favor of investing in a more activist military to fight wars of boredom, pitched to us as “humanitarian” interventions.
That soured enough voters on Democrats that in 2000, a half-literate goof in George W. Bush was elected after insisting, “I don’t want to be the world’s policeman.” Then 9/11 happened and Bush became history’s all-time booster for world-policing, invading Iraq for reasons so obscure, academics still have trouble figuring out what they were.
Bush went in despite the fact that one of the war’s chief proponents, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, sent a memo to him listing 29 ways the plan could completely go to shit. Nearly all came true, including “The Arab street could erupt,” “US could fail to restrain Israel,” “US could fail to find WMD on the ground in Iraq and be unpersuasive to the world,” and my favorite:
- US could fail to manage post-Saddam Hussein Iraq successfully, with the result that it could fracture into two or three pieces, to the detriment of the Middle East and the benefit of Iran.
The WMD fantasy was over in nine months. “Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here,” testified former Head of the Iraq Survey Group David Kay before the Senate on January 29th, 2004, after joining what would become a storied tradition of “We fucked up” security state resignations.
Did this public admission that the war was a sham move the Democratic Party to put forward an “Oops, let’s end this” candidate? No, they circled wagons around a guy who voted for the Iraq resolution and showed up at the party convention saluting the same army he made his name renouncing (hold that thought).
By the next election in 2008, the twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were historic fiascoes. Rumsfeld’s prediction was coming true. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (a.k.a. AQI) was surging, atop a radical Islamicist movement that hadn’t existed there before we arrived, and was on its way to future glory under the ISIS rebrand. If you think Trump is a pollster’s joke now at 36%, consider that Bush’s approval rating sank to an astonishing 25% in late 2008.
Did the parties see the errors of their ways and throw support behind less interventionist candidates? Nah. John McCain literally doubled down on George Bush’s prediction that troops might be there 50 years. “Maybe 100,” was McCain’s guess. Meanwhile, Democrats initially threw weight behind Hillary Clinton, whose idea for ending the war “responsibly” was identical to McCain’s, saying the “failure to send enough troops” had been the problem while promising to “redouble our efforts against al-Qaeda.”
Young Obama read the room and campaigned as a new kind of politician, representing fundamental “change.” Promising a “light footprint,” he heavily emphasized his “constitutional lawyer” background and promised to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and roll back the War on Terror. His defeat of Clinton in the primary was the first hint of populist rebellion, with many “Reagan Democrat” districts later won by Trump key to victory. His win over McCain by ten billion votes or whatever had every reporter on earth (including me) kissing his ass, while foreigners hurled plaudits and unearned Nobel Prizes into a White House still prosecuting two major wars.
Like the rest, Obama began reversing every promise right after election, expanding extrajudicial assassinations to Americans while saying things like “It turns out I’m really good at killing people.” He brought Hillary in as Secretary of State. She promptly birthed a giant new shit-ball in Libya and advocated for at least one more regime change war in Syria before leaving to gorge on bank cash and prepare for the 2016 Faceplant. Obama then completed an epic Circle of Non-Change by replacing her with Kerry, an all-time hack who entered office with an astonishing re-re-repudiation of his beliefs, saying both he and Defense Minister Chuck Hagel “opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq” as Senators, an all-time lie.
That brought us to Trump. What’s left to say? Already his is one of the most depressing stories in human history, but it’s not without suspense. If we’re lucky Donald will go down as a merely revolting footnote to an otherwise polished historical turd, like one of the rapist Popes or a literary inspiration like Vlad the Impaler. As long as he carries the nuclear football, though, the possibility still exists that he could end up a national dunce cap for America on the scale of what Hitler is to Germany. Doubtful, but who the hell knows? On the level of a cosmic joke, the verdict is in. We made colossal fools of ourselves, so it’s fitting we have one as President.
The story is hilarious. I’m having a hard time laughing as yet, since it may come at the expense of my career, but there’s no denying the scale of God’s punchline. From the moment Trump came “down that escalator” (a phrase destined to be as overused as “The Michael Jordan of”), there was one thing that everyone, love him or hate him, agreed on: he was different. We never saw a politician who behaved like Trump, issuing press releases like “As of this date, Mr. Trump’s net worth is in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS,” riffing about how Hillary got “schlonged by Obama” or saying, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters!” The “Did you hear about this?” Poconos delivery is still incredible.
He defied every law of gravity. At the time, in the first of about a dozen false revelations I thought I experienced over him, the ease of his conquest of the Republican field just seemed like proof that our idea of what mattered in politics was invented nonsense from media goons. Voters, it seemed reasonable to conclude, had a clearer idea about what mattered to them than the press, and the reason people supported him almost by definition had to be because he was so inappropriate. Even if he was deranged and a con man, he was not a product of the more disgusting American political system. Better an insane person than an insane institution!
This had to be what people thought as Hillary struggled to tell a fiftieth version of How My Iraq Vote Happened (by mid-2016 this resonated like a face lifted too many times) while Trump said some vague things about “endless wars.” He got elected, helped by those same frustrated votes that launched Obama, only with a far more graphic anti-systemic bent. After election he was the subject of a truly lunatic pursuit by the remnants of the security state for eight long years, allowing him to eventually run and win again as something relatively less dangerous than the American political machine, even after J6. The proxy war with nuclear-armed Russia during the Biden intermission (which ended with lame-duck launches of ATACMs missiles into the Kursk region) helped the comeback.
The punchline? Trump in his second term is no longer an affront to the system. He is the system, a crazy person merged with the crazy institution, our worst nightmare. Now we are just more unrestrainedly ourselves. It turns out that the phony gravitas that attended previous presidencies was useful. It offered some restraint. We took more time to bomb places. We at least pretended to have reasons, even though they melted under the faintest scrutiny, like the “rape as a weapon of war” story we cooked up about Qadaffi issuing Viagra to soldiers. Now, we’re an empire in schism about to pour our vanishing treasure into a $1.5 trillion defense budget that’s got eyes on Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Greenland, Colombia maybe (it’s “very sick,” says Trump), and of course there’s still that Russia thing… Why not Mexico? It’s close, has great beaches, though of course it’s full of Mexicans. Anything is possible. We had no rivals and no enemies a second ago, now we’re surrounded on all sides by both. Awesome!
Now is bad. What comes next is bad. Hug your kids, America.