Why Robert Kennedy would've hated Donald Trump

[Cliff Varnell]

My comments in red.

Martin:

From what I have seen of Trump, which is several debates and a couple of speeches, he thought the Bush invasion of Iraq was a mistake since it destabilized the Middle East.

The cable news industry gave Trump and his surrogates many billions of dollars in free air-time to repeat lies unchallenged.

One of his biggest lies is that he opposed the war in Iraq.

He was for it as long as the stock market held up.

He wants to have better relations with Putin and Russia.

He could be a paid agent of the Russian Federation for all we know, but if he reaches the oval office the Anglo/American Security State will have all the puppet strings attached.

You think Trump has the smarts and heart to stand up to the War Party?

Guess again.

Something which worked pretty well with Obama.

Better than most acknowledge.

Obama and Putin negotiated the removal of weapons of mass destruction from Syria and Iran, thus removing the top rationale for War Party action.

Where he goes off the edge is his extension of an anti terrorist campaign inside the USA: the abandonment of civil liberties in pursuit of terror suspects, and also stop and frisk.

Trump went off the edge from the moment he announced. From there it just got progressively worse.

Denying climate change, the banning of Muslims, the deportation of 11 million undocumented, the use of torture for torture's sake, punishing women who assert control over their own bodies, stripping out Wall St. regulations, stripping out food safety regulations, stripping out clean water regulations, maintaining Citizen's United.

For starters...

But if you take a look at what Hillary Clinton's ideas about foreign policy are, and who she consults with, I mean it is very hard not to call her a neo conservative. In fact, Obama made a very bad mistake appointing her as Secretary of State.

What she did in both Libya and Honduras was pretty bad. And what she wanted to do in Syria was, gratefully, reversed by Obama. Her views on the Middle East and Israel are pretty much AIPAC's down the line.

Libya, I think is an object lesson in how short sighted, and shallow and neocon she really is. And Obama was really dumb to go along with it. Gaddafi almost had the rebel opposition defeated. And there was no such thing there as "mass slaughters and atrocities". That was all manufactured to demonize him. Then, the three witches out of MacBeth-- Clinton, Power and Rice-- bamboozled Obama into his NATO intervention. During which Gaddafi called Tony Blair twice and said, this is not what you think it is. These guys are part of Al Qaeda, you will have an extension of that in north Africa if they win.

He was right. And we do. There could have been a settlement there in which Gaddafi stepped down, was offered safe harbor and his son be allowed to take over. But this was turned down, even though guys in the Africa military command were for it. But now, Libya is a disaster, a nightmare state.

Her ideas about Russia and the Ukraine etc. that is all out of the neocon playbook. And BTW, she consults with jerks like Kagan and Kissinger. Who, IMO, JFK would have urinated on.

So although Walinsky has a tendency to overwrite, he was like that with RFK also, generally speaking, I think he is correct here. Although I would not go as far as he does and vote for Trump. If I am in California, I vote for Stein. As a protest vote.

That is all we have left in America, isn't it? Once Bernie Sanders lost the nomination we have nothing but futile protest.

I'll stipulate to any negative critique of Clinton based on facts, but to pretend that she's any where near as fucked up as Trump is absurd.

This election is a referendum on whether or not we want a new form of government headed by a fascist strongman.

I'm a Woody Guthrie American -- and this machine kills fascists.

[Scott Kaiser]

You think Trump has the smarts and heart to stand up to the War Party?

Haahaha! For a rich man, Trump sounds pretty stupid, lol....

[Peter Lemkin]

Donald Trump: The Dress Rehearsal for Fascism

Posted on Oct 16, 2016

By Chris Hedges

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at an event hosted by the Republican Hindu Coalition in Edison, N.J., on Saturday. (Julio Cortez / AP)

Americans are not offered major-party candidates who have opposing political ideologies or ideas. We are presented only with manufactured political personalities. We vote for the candidate who makes us "feel" good about him or her. Campaigns are entertainment and commercial vehicles to raise billions in advertising revenue for corporations. The candidate who can provide the best show gets the most coverage. The personal brand is paramount. It takes precedence over ideas, truth, integrity and the common good. This cult of the self, which defines our politics and our culture, contains the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation, and incapacity for remorse or guilt. Donald Trump has these characteristics. So does Hillary Clinton.
Our system of inverted totalitarianism has within it the seeds of an overt or classical fascism. The more that political discourse becomes exclusively bombastic and a form of spectacle, the more that emotional euphoria is substituted for political thought and the more that violence is the primary form of social control, the more we move toward a Christianized fascism.
Last week's presidential debate in St. Louis was only a few degrees removed from the Jerry Springer TV showthe angry row of women sexually abused or assaulted by Bill Clinton, the fuming Trump pacing the stage with a threatening posture, the sheeplike and carefully selected audience that provided the thin veneer of a democratic debate while four multimillionairesMartha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper, Clinton and Trumpsquabbled like spoiled schoolchildren.
The Clinton campaign, aware that the policy differences between her and a candidate such as Jeb Bush were minuscule, plotted during the primaries to elevate the fringe Republican candidatesespecially Trump. To the Democratic strategists, a match between Clinton and Trump seemed made in heaven. Trump, with his "brain trust" of Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, would make Clinton look like a savior.
A memo addressed to the Democratic National Committee under the heading "Our Goals & Strategy" was part of the trove of John Podesta emails released this month by WikiLeaks.
"Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to the majority of the electorate. We have outlined three strategies to obtain our goal …," it reads.
The memo names Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Ben Carson as candidates, or what the memo calls "Pied Piper" candidates who could push mainstream candidates closer to the positions embraced by the lunatic right. "We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."
READ: WikiLeaks Should Be Applauded for Removing the Mask of U.S. Power
The elites of the two ruling parties, who have united behind Clinton, are playing a very dangerous game. The intellectual and political vacuum caused by the United States' species of anti-politics, or what the writer Benjamin DeMott called "junk politics," leaves candidates, all of whom serve the interests of the corporate state, seeking to exaggerate what Sigmund Freud termed "the narcissism of small differences."
However, this battle between small differences, largely defined by the culture wars, no longer works with large segments of the population. The insurgencies of Trump and Bernie Sanders are evidence of a breakdown of these forms of social control. There is a vague realization among Americans that we have undergone a corporate coup. People are angry about being lied to and fleeced by the elites. They are tired of being impotent. Trump, to many of his most fervent supporters, is a huge middle finger to a corporate establishment that has ruined their lives and the lives of their children. And if Trump, or some other bombastic idiot, is the only vehicle they have to defy the system, they will use him.
The elites, including many in the corporate press, must increasingly give political legitimacy to goons and imbeciles in a desperate battle to salvage their own legitimacy. But the more these elites pillage and loot, and the more they cast citizens aside as human refuse, the more the goons and imbeciles become actual alternatives. The corporate capitalists would prefer the civilized mask of a Hillary Clinton. But they also know that police states and fascist states will not impede their profits; indeed in such a state the capitalists will be more robust in breaking the attempts of the working class to organize for decent wages and working conditions. Citibank, Raytheon and Goldman Sachs will adapt. Capitalism functions very well without democracy.
In the 1990s I watched an impotent, nominally democratic liberal elite in the former Yugoslavia fail to understand and act against the population's profound economic distress. The fringe demagogues whom the political and educated elites dismissed as buffoonsRadovan Karadzic, Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudmanrode an anti-liberal tide to power.
The political elites in Yugoslavia at first thought the nationalist cranks and lunatics, who amassed enough support to be given secondary positions of power, could be contained. This mistake was as misguided as Franz von Papen's assurances that when the uncouth Austrian Adolf Hitler was appointed the German chancellor in January 1933 the Nazi leader would be easily manipulated. Any system of prolonged political paralysis and failed liberalism vomits up monsters. And the longer we remain in a state of political paralysisespecially as we stumble toward another financial collapsethe more certain it becomes that these monsters will take power.

Fascism, at its core, is an amorphous and incoherent ideology that perpetuates itself by celebrating a grotesque hypermasculinity, elements of which are captured in Trump's misogyny. It allows disenfranchised people to feel a sense of power and to have their rage sanctified. It takes a politically marginalized and depoliticized population and mobilizes it around a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance and an anointed political savior. It is always militaristic, anti-intellectual and contemptuous of democracy and replaces culture with nationalist and patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as diseased enemies that must be physically purged to restore the health of nation.
Many of these ideological elements are already part of our system of inverted totalitarianism. But inverted totalitarianism, as Sheldon Wolin wrote, disclaims its identity to pay homage to a democracy that in reality has ceased to function. It is characterized by the anonymity of the corporate centers of power. It seeks to keep the population passive and demobilized. I asked Wolin shortly before he died in 2015 that if the two major forms of social control he citedaccess to easy and cheap credit and inexpensive, mass-produced consumer productswere no longer available would we see the rise of a more classical form of fascism. He said this would indeed become a possibility.
Bill Clinton transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. He pushed the Republican Party so far to the right it became insane. Hillary Clinton is Mitt Romney in drag. She and the Democratic Party embrace policiesendless war, the security and surveillance state, neoliberalism, austerity, deregulation, new trade agreements and deindustrializationthat are embraced by the Republican elites. Clinton in office will continue the neoliberal assault on the poor and the working poor, and increasingly the middle class, that has defined the corporate state since the Reagan administration. She will do so while speaking in the cloying and hypocritical rhetoric of compassion that masks the cruelty of corporate capitalism.
The Democratic and Republican parties may be able to disappear Trump, but they won't disappear the phenomena that gave rise to Trump. And unless the downward spiral is reversedunless the half of the country now living in poverty is lifted out of povertythe cynical game the elites are playing will backfire. Out of the morass will appear a genuine "Christian" fascist endowed with political skill, intelligence, self-discipline, ruthlessness and charisma. The monster the elites will again unwittingly elevate, as a foil to keep themselves in power, will consume them. There would be some justice in this if we did not all have to pay.

[Albert Doyle]

The present candidates are obviously the product of years of political bs being offered to the American public instead of real democracy. What you are seeing with these two candidates is the necessary scientific result of years of offering corrupted bs as politics to the American people. Garbage in garbage out and here we are.

[John Knoble]

Bobby would have hated Trump because Bobby (and JFK) stood for compassion, understanding and basic human decency, ideas Trump would not recognize if his life depended on it.

Bobby no doubt watched the birth of dumb-downed politics when his brother had a serious debate on the issues with Nixon, Ivy League style between two capable candidates with depth and respect for the audience, with Nixon's effort wasted because of a bad makeup artist.

It's been a steady slide downhill since then.

Trump and Clinton are both products of their chosen professions. His outsized personality was cultivated for dealmaking, in the business world where you can get away with off color comments behind the scenes. He's trained himself to keep his game face on even when he's on the defensive, which is unusual in politics where a dose of humility now and then can glean votes. If there was any hint of racism or sexism in the way he actually ran his business, he wouldn't have made it this far. His point about trade deals being made by politicians instead of businesspeople is an example of what his experience could bring to the table, for a change, when the current economic paradigm of world growth through the debt of Western governments is about to collapse of its own weight.

Clinton's personality is still in the process of being cultivated for politics, where the successful ones work rooms making people feel important while looking over their shoulder for someone more important. She's not a natural at it like her husband, and some of the raps on her probably result from a desire for authenticity and privacy and a disdain for retail politics. She no doubt has impressed a lot of people behind the scenes to get this far, but it is also probably true that a hidden hand of special interests comfortable with her husband's governing style lifted her above a lot of other capable potential candidates. She would hit the ground running.

I'm not sure there is enough public information on the issues that count to make an informed decision between the two. She'll provide an establishment solution for any new economic crisis. He might do something more dramatic. He's risky for Wall Street, and that's a big source of the attacks on him. We'll have to wait for the historians to provide hindsight on which would be better.