Tell Us Mr. Trump

THE ABSURD TIMES

 

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Absurd Times

Our new first lady.

The election is over, more or less, so we have to learn some details and find out what this all means.  So, we have a few questions for the President Elect:

Does this mean that BLACK LIVES DON'T MATTER?  We know you talked about the movement a lot, but now we want details.

When will Hillary start serving time in jail?  You said she would, so when?

Should we invest in Greyhound?  You said you will deport 11,000,000 people to Mexico right away, so are you going to use Greyhound to get them there?  In not, what means will you use?  We should be able to cash in on this.

Will the wall be union made?  Perhaps a silly question, but a lot of your voters were Detroit union workers who were simply abandoned be the automobile industry (which also went to Mexico, BTW).

When can South Korea expect delivery on their H-Bombs?  You said they should have them – we just want a timetable.

When will Saudi Arabia get their H-Bombs?  Same thing.

When will NATO be dissolved? It is expensive and we are tired of defending a bunch of Hungarians anyway.

When will the Moslems get banned?  They need time to sell of the Mosques.

When will you make China bomb North Korea?  You said it's their problem, so we think you will do something about it.

When will people be officially encouraged to grab pussies?  And when should women get pussy-protectors?  We see a big market for that.

When will you send that wild-eyed Islamic terrorist in Pennsylvania to Turkey as Erdogan demanded in his letter of congratulation to you? 

When will you lift sanctions on Russia as Putin asked in his congratulations to you?

When will you get back the money we gave back to Iran and end the treaty with Iran thus enabling them to build nuclear weapons within the next 3 to 4 years?

Has anyone told you where Crimea is yet?

Are you going to be comfortable flying in a place without your name on the side?

We do find it amazing that so many were surprised by this.  We did expect the corporate world to make certain that the country remained under corporate rule, but Daffy Donald might do anything.  Even he doesn't know what he is going to do next, so how can you predict it?

You made certain that the same anger at the corporate world that made both Bernie and Daffy Donald so popular was ignored and frustrated by your DNC, and figured that the anger was not so deep that Clinton could not overcome it.  Well, she failed, thus becoming the first woman ever to loose the Presidency.  Truly historical.

So, many are wondering what next.  Can they actually go out on the streets? Will cops kill more blacks? Will Moslem children be more attacked?  Let us know.

Meanwhile, here is a discussion of what happened, an interview with a more objective view than mine.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, on Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders issued this statement on Trump's election. "Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids—all while the very rich become much richer."

Senator Bernie Sanders, who opposed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, went on to say, quote, "To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him." That's the statement from Bernie Sanders.

Glenn Greenwald, many have said that if Sanders had been the Democratic presidential candidate, then perhaps Trump would not have won the election.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. So, that's a counterfactual that none of us can know for certain. What I do know for certain and what I wrote about back in March or February, I believe, was the fact that all empirical evidence, which, remember, is what Democratic opinion-making elites and liberal pundits and data journalists tell us is the thing that should guide our thinking—all available empirical evidence showed that Bernie Sanders was a much more popular and a much stronger candidate than Hillary Clinton against every single Republican opponent, including Donald Trump. He was running many points ahead of Clinton on every poll, in terms of who he might run against versus her, in terms of approval rating, in terms of popularity.

Democrats insisted that we should ignore all of that empirical evidence, that it was unreliable, that once the general election campaign started, Republicans would depict Sanders as a communist, that he would have no chance, in contrast to Clinton, who has already been deeply vetted. We'll never know for certain whether those arguments were true or not, but what I know for certain is two things. Number one, that the empirical evidence, weak or unreliable or incomplete as it might have been, all pointed to the fact that Hillary Clinton was highly likely to lose, and Bernie Sanders had a greater chance of winning. And, in fact, I wrote an article, back in the primaries, saying, with Donald Trump looming, can we really take the gamble, the huge gamble, of nominating a candidate who is as weak and unpopular as Hillary Clinton? But lost that argument, lost that debate. And as a result, Hillary Clinton was the nominee, and she lost to Donald Trump.

The other point that I think is really worth making is that Sanders—that statement from Senator Sanders is actually quite remarkable, because he isn't coming out and saying everybody who voted for Donald Trump is a racist troglodyte. He's not saying that everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a misogynist who hates women and cast their vote for that reason. He's saying that there are a huge number of people who voted for Donald Trump, and not for Hillary Clinton, who have very valid grievances. And those grievances are grounded in a system of policies that both political parties have played an equal role in creating.

Look at what he is describing: jobs going overseas, industries being destroyed, Wall Street being protected. You can go back into the '80s, into the era of Reagan and trickle-down economics and the destruction of unions, to find the genesis of it. And then you look into the '90s, with NAFTA and free trade mania and the liberation of Wall Street from all kinds of constraints, and into the 2000s, when in the post-2008 economic crisis the Obama administration prosecuted not a single Wall Street executive responsible for that crisis, while continuing to build the world's largest penal state, largely for poor people, people with no power. And it's this inequality, this oppression of huge numbers of people in the name of globalism and free trade, that Bernie Sanders is describing in that statement as why Trump won.

And it's the Democrats and the Republicans who played a huge part in constructing that system, and Hillary Clinton, probably above every other politician who could have run, is the symbol of safeguarding that system, of believing in it, of advocating for it and, most of all, of benefiting from it greatly. And so, you sent a Democratic nominee into the general election, in this climate, who could not have been more ill-suited to voice the kind of systemic critique that Donald Trump, being the con artist that he is, was able to voice and that Senator Sanders has spent his entire career trying to advocate for. And I think you see the contrast really well in terms of how Senator Sanders would have run against Trump in that statement that he just issued versus how most Democrats are reacting to this Trump victory.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you have the media part of this—right?—where you have the unending Trump TV, not the new Trump TV, but all the networks' Trump TV, when it came to Donald Trump. They showed more footage of his empty podium, waiting for him to speak, than they ever played of the words of Bernie Sanders. So you had the endless platform for Donald Trump, but rarely did you have Bernie Sanders showing, in any way, the extent of the speeches that he gave. You'd have whole speeches of Donald Trump. But when it came to Bernie Sanders, that famous night, March 15th—that was, what, Super Tuesday 3—every single victor and loser that night, from Rubio to Kasich to Clinton to Cruz to Trump, all their speeches were played—except for Bernie Sanders, who was speaking to thousands and thousands and thousands of people that night in Arizona. This is just emblematic of the rest of the coverage. They never played a word that he said that night.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right, and I think there's a lot to unpack there in terms of how the media functions and in terms of the media role in this election. So, let's begin with the fact that Donald Trump's public persona prior to this election was consecrated and constructed by one of the most powerful media organizations in the world, if not the most powerful media organization in the world, which is NBCNews, which—or NBC, rather, which for many, many years paraded Donald Trump in the format of a reality TV program, watched by tens of millions of Americans, that portrayed him as the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit. He marched into boardrooms, in charge, and unflinchingly fired people who weren't working up to standard performance. He built new businesses. He was the embodiment of everything that Americans are taught to revere. And this is the person who, for decades, has been a racist, a demagogue, a con artist, and yet NBC turned him into this swaggering hero at great profit to itself.

And so, already, he was a byproduct of media worship. And then, once the campaign began, the media, as you said, nonstop fed on Donald Trump, to the exclusion, certainly, first and foremost, of Bernie Sanders, but even to the other candidates, who got far less TV time than Trump did, because he was a ratings gold mine. And they would literally wait on the tarmac and excitingly and breathlessly show his plane about to land. And this built up this image in Americans' minds that Donald Trump was this all-consuming, towering new presence on the American political landscape. And the American media did a critical job in building him up during the primary and entrenching in the minds of Americans that he was not this out-of-the-norm, radical, extremist, dangerous, racist authoritarian that he was, but instead was this new and powerful figure who was going to come in, revolutionize American politics and the American political culture, that so many citizens of the United States have come to despise.

And I think that what you just contrasted, in terms of how Trump was treated and how Sanders was treated, shows a really important truth about how media operates, which is, if you talk to most journalists who work at major media outlets or newspapers, as you know, and you say to them, "You have all kinds of ways that you censor certain opinions, that you have of excluding certain viewpoints," they'll insist that that's not true, that they never are told what to show or not to show, they're never told what to say or not to say. And, of course, that's true. And yet, embedded within all of their editorial judgments about who is worth hearing from and who isn't worth hearing from are all kinds of ideological and partisan biases. So the idea that Donald Trump, the billionaire, celebrity, TV star, should constantly be heard from, whereas Bernie Sanders, the old Jewish socialist from Vermont, who nobody took seriously, doesn't need to be heard from, with all of his boring speeches about college debt and healthcare and the like, in that choice is a very strong and pedantic ideological choice that the American media embraced and played a huge role in enabling Trump to march to the primary.

Now, the only other point I want to add to this immediate issue is that I do think that media behavior changed fundamentally with regard to Donald Trump once he became the nominee. So, you have the primary period, where they treated him like a normal candidate. They revered him. They gave him endless free TV time. But once he became the nominee and they took seriously the prospect that he might be president and they started to realize and internalize the responsibility they bore for enabling him to get that far, I think they went all the way to the other extreme, where they completely united in this kind of mission of destroying Donald Trump, of preventing his victory and ensuring that Hillary Clinton was elected. And in a big way, that also played a role, unwittingly, I think, in helping Trump, because, of all the institutions in the United States, the institutions of authority that are hated, the American media leads the way. And so, when people saw the media basically trying to coerce them or dictate to them that they should turn their backs on Donald Trump, that they should vote for Hillary Clinton, I think a backlash ensued, where people believed that the media was being unfair, and were not going to you take marching orders from these media institutions, that they also have come to regard as fundamentally corrupt. And, unwittingly, I think that played an important role, as well, in ensuring that he could win.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, there's the leaked Clinton campaign memo to the Democratic National Committee from last year regarding Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. The memo said, quote, "We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are the leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously." Glenn Greenwald, your response to that?

GLENN GREENWALD: There are a lot of fascinating insights in those Clinton emails. I know Democratic partisans are furious that they ever saw the light of day, and they're furious precisely because they contain a lot of really important and interesting insights about how political operatives manipulate the media, about how the media aids certain factions and tries to work against others, about how campaign operatives within the Democratic Party manipulate public opinion.

And one of the more interesting aspects is exactly that, the fact that the Clinton campaign did view certain Republican candidates, like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, as being serious threats to them and to Hillary Clinton's election, and, in what they thought was a very clever maneuver, wanted to elevate the candidates that they thought were less threatening, such as Donald Trump, to the top of the pack. And in a lot of ways, they have reaped what they have sown, because Donald Trump did end up essentially becoming the nominee because of the media's treatment of him, and, in retrospect, he probably was one of the more threatening candidates, because the Clintons know how to defeat conventional Orthodox Republican candidates like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. They can do that in their sleep. Donald Trump was a very unconventional candidate. I think he animated parts of the voting population who either haven't voted in the past or who haven't voted Republican to vote for him. And the strategies that the Clintons anticipated they would use, because they've always worked in the past, simply didn't work this time. And you could conclude that, in some ways, they sort of outsmarted themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break, then come back to this discussion. And after we finish with Glenn, we'll be joined by 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben on where the environmental movement goes here, with a president-elect who calls climate change a Chinese hoax and is calling, among other things, for permitting the Keystone XL pipeline. Glenn Greenwald is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, one of the founding editors of The Intercept. This is Democracy Now! Back with Glenn in a minute.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Our guest is Glenn Greenwald, who wrote the piece, "Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit."

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Glenn Greenwald, in that piece, you write, quote, "that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people." You point also to the many analogies between Brexit, the decision by the British public to exit the European Union. So could you say a little about those analogies and how Trump fits into wider public sentiments, not just in the U.S., but also in Europe?

GLENN GREENWALD: It's incredibly striking, but also very alarming, how similar the path of Brexit was to the election of Trump, because just like with the U.S. election, in the U.K. during the Brexit debate referendum, British elites, outside of this kind of circle of populist, right-wing Murdoch types, pretty much were unified across ideological and party lines. You had the Liberals and the Labour centrists and the sort of more establishment Conservatives united in opposition to Brexit. And they essentially stayed online all day on Twitter telling each other how smart they were and praising each other's columns, saying that Brexit was this grave threat and this unique evil. And the opinion class that is considered respectable, meaning not the right-wing tabloids, essentially unified, just like the opinion-making elites in the U.S., outside of Sean Hannity and Fox News and Ann Coulter, that wing of Fox News and that right-wing circle, were unified, as well. You had leading neocon intellectuals and establishment Republicans and then the sort of establishment liberal pundits all in agreement that Trump was this grave evil, constantly praising each other and citing each other in this endless echo feedback chamber.

And so, the people who were supporting Brexit and the people who were supporting Trump weren't really ever heard from; they were just talked about in very contemptuous tones. These were the troglodytes. These were the uneducated idiots. These were the people motivated by malice and racism and xenophobia. And so they were sort of looked at like zoo animals, like things that you dissect and condemn.

And because this opinion-making elite was so unified, it led so many people, in both cases, to believe that their victory was certain. Nobody thought, in the opinion-making elite classes, that Brexit would win, and the same is true of Trump.

And then, both before and after you had this result, what you saw is not any notion of accountability. Why are there so many people wanting to leave the EU? Why are there so many people supporting this person so far outside the norm? No accountability, no self-critique. Only a way to distract attention from their own responsibility by just spouting hatred and disgust for the people who are being insubordinate.

And what you have as a result are these decades of trends that we began by talking about, that Senator Sanders described, in which tens of millions of people have been trampled on by these policies of Western institutions of authority, who are essentially invisible and ignored. And the more you ignore them and the more you scorn them and the more you tell them that their grievances are invalid, the more they're going to be susceptible to scapegoating, the more their bigotry will be inflamed, and the more they'll want to destroy the systems and the institutions that they believe are responsible for their suffering. And so, a lot of people who voted for Brexit, a lot of people who voted for Trump understand exactly all the arguments that were made about why each of them is potentially destructive and so dangerous, and they did it, not despite that, but because of that, because they want to punish and ultimately destroy the institutions who no longer have any credibility with them and who they believe are responsible for the suffering and the lack of security that they experience in their lives without anyone really caring about it at all. And until we start to address that and until institutions, elite institutions, take responsibility for it, those things are going to continue to fester and grow, and it very well may be the case that Trump and Brexit are just the beginning of this very alarming cycle, rather than the peak of it.

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Turkey, Nice, and Black Lives Matter

THE ABSURD TIMES

NB.: Latuff is banned in Turkey.  (So you know he's right)

TURKEY, NICE, &

By

Czar Donic

Too much going on for just a succinct title.

Erdogan is demanding the mastermind of the recent "coup" to be sent to him.  This mastermind is ensconced in the hotbed of Islamic Thinking, Pennsylvania, the Pocono's, on a farm.  Oh yes, he planned the coup and ordered it.  "I send people to the U.S. all the time," he said.

Kerry, Secretary of State, explained that there are procedures to go though first.  What a wimp.

So, to save the country for himself, er Democracy (sorry), Erdogan jailed about 2,800 soldiers and about as many judges.  Pity our democracy does not allow Obama to just throw Clarence Thomas in jail, but we have so much red tape, don't you know? 

But at least Turkey is still a good place for the U.S. to launch jet bombers and drones over Syria. 

Nice (Neece)

A guy got into a truck and drove it down the road in Nice, France, killing about 200 and wounding many others.  He was killed.

Now, it turns out he had a wife who divorced him and threw him out of the house and got a restraining order against him.  Of course, France locked her up.  She shouldn't have pissed him off, I guess.  She was NOT arrested, just "detained".  She is still "detained". 

ISIS snapped into action and claimed he was a "Soldier in their cause," although from what little has come across about his life, he was a two-bit thug that no self-respecting mobster in the U.S. would hire.  But then, perhaps standards are different in Nice.

As of yet, no judges have been arrested in France.

BLACK LIVES MATTER

Not until self-proclaimed hero of 9/11, Rudy Gulliani, said that "Black Lives Matter is racist" did it seem worth investigating and explaining what that phrase means.  It can be confusing, even to some well-meaning people of privilege, as an immediate response seems to be "Of course, all lives matter."  Such a reaction, however, shows a lack of reflection.

It should be clear, even to such literalists as our staff, that the motto is an affirmation that police kill blacks as if they do not consider them human.  The phrase is a way of calling attention to the fact that they are.

So place this recent rise of racist sentiment with the election of Obama, but such thinking does not take into consideration the proliferation of hand-held devices that can record and even transmit live sense of killing and beating of blacks by white officers.  The reverse incident in Dallas is much more rare, but still the hand-held cameras are what made it so prominent.

We have had enough for now, thank you.

Turkey, Daesh, Isilanity, Erdogan, Putin

THE ABSURD TIMES

The Emperor and the Holy Man

Latuff

Scorecard

by

Arthur Schopenhauer

A well-know American expression is that you "can't tell the players without a scorecard," an expression going back to pre-portable radio days of baseball, still applies today when trying to follow the Mid-East.  This is a modest attempt to provide one.  Everything here follows from my indisputable treatise on life called "The World and Will and Idea," or  Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, if I remember accurately.  In other words, everybody is defining reality they way they want to.

Turkey just shot down a Russian fighter jet.  That much is objective reality.  After that, everything become a matter of interpretation.

Erdogan wants to be an Emperor.  Ever since his party gained a majority, he feels invincible and all-powerful.  He says that he shot down the Russian jet as an act of "self-defense" as the jet was in Turkey's airspace for over 30 seconds, yet was warned 10 times.  Fast talkers, these Turks.

Daesh, is pretty indefinable other than to say it is sort of a religion, best called Isilanity.  It is derived from Wahabism, a form is Islam invented in the 18th Century by a nut called Wahabbi, a guy whose father and brother said to him, to translate freely, "You're nuts!"  It is also the practiced religion of Saudi Arabia and other gulf states that call it Islam.  It includes such ideas that a thousand lashes and a fine is appropriate as a reaction to a blogger who says things you don't like.  Isilanity is similar, but more idiotic.

Erdogan supplies Daesh with money in exchange for safety and cheap oil.  In this respect, Daesh is similar to the Mafia, but lacking the moral compass.

Putin is the leader of Russia and does not like his country's interests or people to be harmed.  If any entity does that, he will inflict pain on them, but in his own way so as to deter them from further activities in that direction.  No western country has shot down a Russian plane since the 50s, so now, about 60 years later, it is time for Russia to make sure that it does not become a habit.  One should also realize that the last would-be Emperor to attack Russia was Napoleon, and he was not successful, far from it.  Putin will not attack Turkey with bombs -- yet.  But Turkey will be the worse for this action.

Daesh attacked a Russian passenger plane over Egypt, and the next day almost 200 Daesh targets were hit.  Daesh then claimed responsibility for the bombing and another 200 targets were hit.

The United States thinks that Assad needs to leave, but Putin disagrees.  Some call Assad the "lesser of two evils," but such a notion has not relevance here.  Without Assad, Daesh takes over. 

Since most of our readers are in Europe, there is some confusion about the Republican candidates.  Donald Trump claims he had a vision and predicted 9/11 and also saw people cheering as the towers went down.  Objectively, this never happened, especially in New Jersey (still noted as the place that took the Orson Welles' Broadcast of the War of the Worlds as real), but that did not happen.  It does not matter, if Trump says it happened, people believe it did.

The black guy running is named Ben Carson, no relation to Johnny Carson.  There is no truth to the rumor that he had to retire from medicine as a result of dementia (at least so far as we know).  He also saw the "film", but that was a video clip that was ten years old at the time.

There is no point to any further explanation right now.  The entire thing is absurd beyond words.  We only need to close by saying that the only refugees that posed a significant danger in North America came over on the Mayflower and gave the indigenous population small-pox, a disease lethal to them and that is what is being celebrated here in the U.S. this holiday.

Napoleon (er, Erdogan) and Turkey

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: Erdogan, Emperor of Turkey and the World

Napoleon (er, Erdogan) and Turkey

by

Czar Donic

            Someone pointed out that this is November and there has been no edition for this month, so here goes.

            A Russian airliner crashed in Egypt.  ISIS and God have claimed credit for it.  Seems to be a retaliation for Putin's action in Syria.

            Assad said, recently, in a PBS interview with Charlie Rose that Erdogan thinks of himself as an Emperor.

            The natural follow up was not asked, but perhaps now it is more obvious.  Does he thing of himself as the new Charlemagne, Napoleon, Saladin?  

            He managed this by a combination of playing on fear of ISIS and his persecution of Kurds (who, by the way, are the Polish joke version of the Middle East). 

            Latuff's illustrations clearly indicate both.

Oh, yeah, here is Alexander Cockburn's discussion of the event.   

AMY GOODMAN: In a stunning development in Turkey, the Islamist party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has regained its parliamentary majority in national elections. On Sunday, Turkish voters elected Erdogan's Justice and Development Party—the AKP—to the majority of the Parliament seats. It's a major comeback for the AKP, after losing its majority in the last campaign five months ago.

The victory will help Erdogan strengthen a hold on power that critics say has become increasingly authoritarian and divisive, with harsh rhetoric against opponents, a crackdown and raids on the media, and allegations of vote rigging. Turkish voters went to the polls in a climate of violence and fear. Since the June election, Erdogan has resumed the government's war on the Kurds and escalated strikes on the Islamic State. Turkey also suffered its worst-ever terrorist attack with a bombing that killed over a hundred people at a peace rally in Ankara last month.

Despite his victory, Erdogan fell short of the super-majority needed to change the constitution and expand the powers of the presidency. But it's still a surprising and divisive win for a leader who came under major protest with the Gezi Park demonstrations two years ago. Erdogan's most vocal opponent, the leftist Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party, or HDP, retained its parliamentary bloc by again winning over 10 percent of the vote—but just barely.

For more, we're joined from Istanbul, Turkey, by Patrick Cockburn, the Middle East correspondent for The Independent, who's been reporting on the elections in Turkey.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Patrick, from Istanbul. Talk about the significance of these elections.

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, this means that President Erdogan is back, with an impressive mandate. His powers seem to be under pressure. But he got 49 percent of the vote. And although there are allegations of vote rigging, I think that this is pretty real. But it's sort of a consequence, in the eyes of critics, that he won because he whipped up an atmosphere of fear, of crisis, confrontation with the Kurds, you mentioned. We had two devastating ISIS, Islamic State, bombs. And people were fearful, so they clung to the existing authorities. Now, the ruling party, the Justice and Development Party, had pushed the line that they were the only people who could deal with this. The opposition party said, "Yeah, because you're the guys who provoked this over the last five months." But if they did so, that's been pretty successful. So there's no doubt that this is—you know, this is a tremendous victory for Erdogan.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the repression? What about the repression of the Kurds, using, for example, U.S. support, saying they're fighting ISIS but going after the Kurds, who are actually allies of the United States? The attack on the media? Can you describe the climate there?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, you know, it's sort of edgy. I mean, it's understandable. There wasn't in the—during most of the campaign, there were no rallies on the part of the opposition, because a demonstration in Ankara on the 10th of October had been hit by Islamic State suicide bombers that killed 102 people. Earlier, there was another suicide bomb close to the Syrian border in Turkey that killed 32 people. So this made people very nervous. The fighting in southeast Turkey were in Kurdish-majority areas. That had been a sort of shaky ceasefire before this resumed. The Turkish Air Force was attacking the Kurdish guerrillas, the PKK, so-called, both in southeast Turkey and in northern Iraq. And people were watching on television every night the funerals of soldiers and police.

So, there's no doubt that Erdogan was playing the nationalist card and portraying the Kurdish parliamentary opposition as being hand-in-glove with people who were shooting Turkish soldiers and police. So, you have this sort of edgy, fearful atmosphere. But, you know, we'll now see how long that goes on. Do things escalate? Do they get a bit quieter now? What does Turkey do over the Syrian Kurds having taken over northeast Syria? And now they control half the 550-mile-long frontier with Turkey. Whatever Turkey wanted to happen in Syria, it certainly wasn't that.

AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Cockburn, I want to thank you for being with us, speaking to us from Istanbul, Turkey, Middle East correspondent for The Independent. His latest book is The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution. He's been reporting on the elections in Turkey. His most recent article, which we'll link to at democracynow.org, "President Erdogan tightens his grip on power in surprise landslide victory."

Legacy

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: Carlos Latuff from about a week past. Israel is begging for it and they will most likely get it.

Legacy

by

Czar Donic

Too much to digest, actually, but here is a bit of it:

A bombing killed 130 people or more in Turkey during a peace demonstration. The governments there were only, ONLY, 97 killed and blamed it on ISIS. We can wonder about this as we can not remember a single bombing that happened that ISIS did not take "credit" for that they accomplished. They did not take "credit" for this.

The Turkish government snapped into action immediately. They blocked Twitter. You have to hand it to Erdogan, the Emperor is not one to sit back on his laurels. Smirk

The U.S. Government also snapped into action. After spending half a billion dollars training some Syrians to fight ISIS, these well-trained, lean, mean, killing machines, promptly got captured, joined the enemy, or simply got lost somewhere out there and died. Not to be deterred, we dropped 50 tons of weapons and ammunition on the so-called Free Syrian Army. Rumor has it that the spectacle of 50, or was it 50,000 tons of stuff dropped from the sky scared the Free Syrian Army off towards Turkey and the weapons were picked up by Assad's troops. Well, if they dropped 50,000 tons of stuff like that on you, wouldn't you run like hell? I'd sure get outta there.

Stateside, the looney tunes segment of Congress, the Republicans, along with a few kind words from the Pope, convinced John Boehner to quit both as Speaker of the House and member of Congress, effective in 2 weeks. The problem is that the appointed replacement said that the Benghazi committee was convened for political purposes to discredit Hillary Clinton. We had long ago said that the only reason for such a committee would be to investigate why the hell we removed Gaddafi in the first place. Well, anyway, he was telling the truth about the committee and thus committed a gaffe. A gaffe is defined as telling the truth when it is to your disadvantage or pisses someone off.

The situation now is that nobody wants to be speaker, even though it is third in line, the President, the Vice-President, and the Speaker of the house, in case of a string of deaths. In addition, there is no rule that one need be in congress to be speaker. We would like to suggest Tiger Woods for the position as we have never had a Buddhist speaker.

A group of Saudi Royalty types went to visit Putin to tell him to stop helping Assad. That may be the funniest event of the month. We do not have a direct transcript of the meeting, but we are convinced it is hilarious. He did offer to sell them some military weapons, however, so they can protect themselves from all the angry women in their country.

You may have noticed that every November there is a spate of discussion on who killed JFK. Is was a long time ago and today the truth seems even more absurd than it did at the time, but a new book rather clears things up. Our Donald Trump, let's just say Donald Trump, says that Hillary Clinton was the worst Secretary of State ever. Well, he was wrong as he does not remember John Foster Dulles. His brother was Alan Dulles, head of the CIA. Fortunately, this book has just been published and we print a transcript of the interview here as it tells us who really started the crap with Iran and Cuba, why the CIA hated JFK and wanted to stab him in the back repeatedly and how it was behond all the real crap that went down before they finally decided that Kennedy was just to great a liability for the United States (despite the fact that he tried, halfheartedly, to go along with a lot of this crap):

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2015

The Rise of America's Secret Government: The Deadly Legacy of Ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles

It's been more than 50 years since Allen Dulles resigned as director of the CIA, but his legacy lives on. Between 1953 and 1961, under his watch, the CIA overthrew the governments of Iran and Guatemala, invaded Cuba, and was tied to the killing of Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first democratically elected leader. We speak with David Talbot, author of "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government," about how Dulles' time at the CIA helped shape the current national security state.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: It's been over half a century since Allen Dulles resigned as director of the CIA, but his legacy lives on. Between 1953 and '61, under his watch, theCIA overthrew the governments of Iran and Guatemala, invaded Cuba, was tied to the killing of Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first democratically elected leader.

A new biography of Allen Dulles looks at how his time at the CIA helped shape the current national security state. Biographer David Talbot writes, quote, "The Allen Dulles story continues to haunt the country. Many of the practices that still provoke bouts of American soul-searching originated during Dulles's formative rule at theCIA." Talbot goes on to write, "Mind control experimentation, torture, political assassination, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance of U.S. citizens and foreign allies—these were all widely used tools of the Dulles reign."

Well, David Talbot joins us now to talk about his new book, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. He's the founder and former CEO and editor-in-chief of Salon. David Talbot is also author of the best-seller, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.

It's great to have you with us, David.

DAVID TALBOT: Great to be here, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: What an astounding book. Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden—how do they relate to Allen Dulles, the longest-reigning CIA director?

DAVID TALBOT: Well, as I write in the book and as you just pointed out, all the practices that we are wrestling with as a country now, the intelligence and security measures—including, I might add, the legacy of the killing fields in Central America that your guest was just discussing, in Guatemala and so on—that all had its roots, not after 9/11, but during the Dulles era and the Cold War. He was a man who felt he was above the law. He felt that democracy was something that should not be left in the hands of the American people or its representatives. He was part of what the famous sociologist from the 1950s, C. Wright Mills, called the power elite. And he felt that he and his brother and those types of people should be running the country.

AMY GOODMAN: John Foster Dulles, secretary of state.

DAVID TALBOT: Exactly. They were a dynamic duo, of course: His brother, Foster, as he was known, was secretary of state, as you say, under Eisenhower; he was the head of the CIA. It was a one-two punch.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's go to Allen Dulles in his own words, speaking in 1965, defending the actions of the CIA.

ALLEN DULLES: The idea that it is necessarily nefarious, it's always engaged in overthrowing governments, that's false. That's for the birds. Now, there are times—there are times when the United States government feels that the developments in another government, such as in the Vietnam situation, is of a nature to imperil the—the safety and the security and the peace of the world, and asks the Central Intelligence Agency to be its agent in that particular situation. ... At no time has theCIA engaged in any political activity or any intelligence activity that was not approved at the highest level.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Allen Dulles in 1965. "At no time," he says. So, talk about the history, that is so intimately connected to us today. Often countries that have been—their leaders have been overthrown, know this history in a way that Americans don't know.

DAVID TALBOT: That's right.

AMY GOODMAN: '53, '54, go through it.

DAVID TALBOT: And, of course, Allen Dulles was a consummate liar and was, you know, very adept at manipulating the media, the American media. That particular interview was one of the ones that actually he got posed some of the tougher questions, by John Chancellor of NBC News. And he actually went on to say, "You know, I try to let the Congress know what I'm doing," when Chancellor asked him, "Is there any political oversight of the CIA?" "But whenever I go to Congress," he says, and he starts to tell the secrets of the CIA, members of Congress would say, "No, no, no, we don't want to know. We don't want to talk in our sleep." So that, of course, was his cover.

Yes, overthrowing governments at will—I think one of the more tragic stories I tell in the book is the story of Patrice Lumumba, who was this young, charismatic leader, the hope of African nationalism in the Congo. And he was overthrown by a CIA-backed military coup in the Congo and later captured and brutally assassinated. The CIA's story before the Church Committee in the 1970s: "Oh, we tried to kill him, we tried to poison him, but we're the gang that can't shoot straight. We're not very good at assassinations." Well, they were far too modest. In fact, we now know that the people who beat Patrice Lumumba to death, once he was captured, were on the payroll of theCIA.

Now, Allen Dulles kept that fact from John F. Kennedy for over a month. John Kennedy, when he was running for president, was known as the advocate, a supporter of African nationalism. They knew that once John Kennedy was inaugurated—the CIA—and was in office, that he would help Lumumba, who was in captivity at that point. And I believe that his execution, his murder, was rushed before Kennedy could get in the White House. They then withheld that information from the president for over a month. So the CIA was defying presidents all the time, and particularly in the case of Kennedy, who they felt was young, they could manipulate, and they didn't need to really bring into their confidence.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have the CIA running international intelligence, and they're keeping—well, you say keeping from. What makes you believe that Kennedy didn't know?

DAVID TALBOT: That he didn't know about the murder? Well, there's a famous picture that was taken of him in the White House as he's getting the phone call from—not from the CIA, but from U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who finally tells him, a month after Lumumba has been buried and dead, about this terrible murder. And his face, as you see from this famous photograph by Jacques Lowe, the White House photographer, is crumpled in agony. I think this shows all the terrible sorrow that's to come in the Kennedy presidency. And, you know, a lot of people think that the war between Kennedy and the CIA began after the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA's disastrous operation in Cuba. That is true, it became particularly, I think, aggravated after that. But you can see from this, from day one, even before he was inaugurated, the CIA was defying him.

AMY GOODMAN: 1953, go back a few years. What is the relevance of what the Dulles brothers did in Iran with what we are seeing today in U.S.-Iranian relations?

DAVID TALBOT: Well, again, these terrible historical ripples continue from the Dulles era. Iran was trying to throw off the yoke of British colonialism. Britain, through British Petroleum, the company now known as British Petroleum, controlled all of Iran's oil resources. And under the leadership of Mosaddegh, this popular leader who was elected by his people, he began to push back against British control and, as a result, antagonized Western oil interests, including the Dulles brothers. The Dulles brothers' power originally came from their law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, the most powerful law firm on Wall Street, and they represented a number of oil companies. So, once the Western oil interests were antagonized by Mosaddegh's attempt to reclaim sovereignty over these oil resources, his days were numbered.

And so, the task of overthrowing him was given to the CIA, given to Allen Dulles. There was a very volatile situation, people supporting Mosaddegh in the streets versus the CIA-supported forces. The Shah, who was the puppet, of course, ruler of Iran on the Peacock Throne, flees, because he's not a particularly brave man. He flees to Rome. Dulles flies to Rome. He's busy shopping, the Shah, enjoying his exile with his glamorous wife. And Dulles is given the job of putting a little lead in his spine and getting the Shah to return to Iran after they finally succeed, the CIA, in overthrowing the popular leader, Mosaddegh.

Well, after that, that begins a reign of horror then in Iran. Democratic elements, the left, Communist Party are rounded up, tortured. And the Shah is installed in this terrible autocratic regime, that, of course, we know, had a terrible downfall during the Carter administration. And we're still paying the price for the bitterness that the Iranian people feel towards the United States for intervening in their sovereign interests.

AMY GOODMAN: And the U.S. would go on—the Dulles brothers would go on to do the very same thing the next year, 1954, in Guatemala?

DAVID TALBOT: That's right. They were on a roll. They thought they could do anything, exert their will anywhere in the world. Jacobo Árbenz, again, a popular, democratic leader, elected in Guatemala—

AMY GOODMAN: We only have 10 seconds in this portion.

DAVID TALBOT: The Kennedy of Guatemala is overthrown, again, by the Dulles brothers, partly because they were representatives of United Fruit. United Fruit was a major power player in Guatemala.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to leave it there, but we're going to do Part 2, and we're going to post it online at democracynow.org. David Talbot is author of the new book, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. David Talbot is founder and editor-in-chief at Salon.

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