LOOSE CANNON

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Paul Edwards

In the Napoleonic Wars, the English Man of War was a fighting ship, and the largest had a hundred gigantic cannon.  Weighing tons, they were mounted on tracks to control their massive recoil.  It happened, occasionally, that one would break its restraint and run wild in the gun room, killing gunners and wreaking havoc.

Time, and love of metaphor, have given the term “loose cannon” many applications, one of them to any man whose zany, chaotic behavior is his defining quality.  The Empire elected one.

Trump, a strutting cartoon, a Punch clone in his own puppet show, is the incarnation of that idea.  In less than a month in office, he has taken the most vacantly infantile, daffily unhinged actions in the history of our criminal presidency, and boorishly, brainlessly, alienated the entire world, including those sorry irrelevancies of the EU, and supine, suck-up UK, our “allies”.

Listing them is confounding because they’re so implausible, so vulgarly improbable.  Did he say that?  It began with the fatuous notions of annexing Canada, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico; ideas that might emerge from the drooling gob of an imbecile.

Then, he launched diktats from the realm of mental impairment with his threat to “take back” the Panama Canal, and to wrest possession of Greenland from its inhabitants and Denmark, which legally possessed and supported it for generations.

One can say these fantasies are just con man bullshit; diurnal emissions, and unmoored rantings, that he never intends to execute, that they are a kind of Frat House mental flatulence, his silly “art of the deal” ploy, demanding the whole enchilada, which works only with bigtime leverage.  He has none.

He hit Canada, Mexico and China with blanket tariffs—Americans will pay the freight on them—that will do nothing to revivify zombie U.S. industries.  He slapped steel and aluminum tariffs on the EU, which has been forced to buy The Empire’s pricey LNG instead of cheap Russian gas from the pipeline Biden blew up.  This, unsurprisingly, put EU’s mediocrities’ knickers in a knot.

He presented the greatest harlequinade of enthusiasts, fanatics, shape-shifters, and wife-beaters in memory as cabinet nominees, to the most corrupt, constipated Congress ever.  His party, which drags and flaps behind him like dirty rags and cans tied to a hillbilly “just married” jalopy, bows limply and hails its Duce, and  sleazeball Dems rubber stamp Swamp Monsters like Rubio.

For his Israel, he had serial killer and Interpol star, Netanyahu, in, and in an act of staggering folly, blithely promised to buy Gaza, and move two million Palestinian survivors—to Biarritz or Acapulco, maybe?—where they’ll be “happy” in a “beautiful life”.

Whiny Elizabeth Warren: Ferocious critic of Trump, but only representing the  liberal imperialist wing of the same rotten Empire, whose betrayals, ironically, made Trump inevitable. (Credit: Paul Tong)

This is not your normal deviant thinking.  This is clinical insanity, and has been recognized as such, by Arab states, and the rest of the world, the leaders of which are gobsmacked at the lunacy of this imperial simpleton.  They tremble, stare, and stand mute.

Jordan’s mini-king and Egypt’s dictator, two whores high on the list of the bribed and fed, both declined to consider the madness of importing a brutalized people like a shipment of toxic waste.

Americans, serfs of the Capitalist tyranny, have had so many lying bastards for Presidents, like the last sorry swine who, besides being The Empire’s house slut all his life, was absurdly impaired, that they are inured to it, but Trump is testing that.

His brag to shut the Ukraine farce down “on day one”, aborted. The deluded bullshit his Mad Men “intelligence” fed him, would have made Putin tell him to stick it where the sun don’t shine.
He took his usual out, declared policy bankruptcy, dumped the bloody hogs-nest on Europe, and knuckled under to reset.

There is always something to be said for reckless flexibility in love and politics, but what that is, depends on results.

Trump, and his Avenging Angel, are not wrong about the grossly cowardly falsity, criminal corruption, and terrified control-freakery of the snotty, Neo-Liberal Deep State under the toxic Dems.

Going after AID, that spook nest, that buys The Empire’s favorite dictatorships and autocracies, and undermines real democracy everywhere, has merit.  Sniffing out massive theft in the giant graft shops of the sacred War Machine would, too, but how likely is that?  If your plan is to cut waste, start by defining your waste.

The Great Question is, do they really intend to reform our Big Donor’s ATM machine with their fiscal sabres, or are they just doing a hostile takeover to turn the machine over to their own posse?  Given Trump’s sleazy, flimflam bidness record, and Musk’s bizarre Dr. Strangelove kinks, it don’t look good.

Whichever it is, Trump faces a daunting challenge.  He must try to keep his mush-minded MAGAs focussed on his punishing of those they hate, while all the time they are fucked without being kissed by the kook billionaires who despise them, his bankers.

It is, unquestionably—very unexpectedly to the old powers that were, the “liberal consensus”—a time of breaking and battering, when all bets are suddenly very certainly off, and a wrenching, tearing sound blots out the melody of The Way We Were.

There is, in spite of so much treachery, deceit and evil done to us and our polity by the Grand Old Monoparty, the Republicrats, who have, for so long, propagandized our dull, impotent people, and inflicted their murderous, soul-destroying Capitalist Empire on a suffering and ever hopeful world, still a dogged will for good.  A resolve not to to despair.  As Hopkins urged himself, in his darkest hour: “to hope; wish day come; not choose not to be”.

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