US EXCEPTIONALISM

RAY McGOVERN—we can expect no let up from the media and the national security miscreant leakers who have served as their life’s blood.  As for the anchors and pundits, their level of sophistication was reflected yesterday in the sage surmise of Face the Nation’s Chuck Todd, who Aaron Mate reminds us, is a “grown adult and professional media person.”  Todd asked guest John Bolton: “Do you think that the president is afraid to make Putin mad because maybe Putin did help him win the election, and he doesn’t want to make him mad for 2020?”

When Norton was in Venezuela, it was not long after President Donald Trump’s administration tried to install opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country’s president. Norton said it would be hard to overstate “how ridiculous the media coverage is of Venezuela.” “There’s not that much violence happening,” Norton recalled. “I didn’t see any violence when I was there. I barely even saw police. It’s just so surreal.”

SCOTT RITTER—This doesn’t mean that someone in the bowels of the CIA with an axe to grind against Trump’s plans to withdraw from Afghanistan, or who was opposed to Trump’s efforts to normalize relations with Russia, didn’t try to breathe life into these detainee reports. Indeed, a finished “product” may have made its way to the National Security Council staff — and elsewhere — where it would have been given the treatment it deserved, quickly discarded as unsubstantiated rumor unworthy of presidential attention.

Trotskyite groups are notorious throughout the world for their extreme sectarian tendencies. The organizations rarely last long, frequently splintering into tiny groupuscules over political disagreements. Unsurprisingly, then, the so-called “left” opposition in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba — which is celebrated by Trotskyite groups like the ISO — is in fact infinitesimal and insignificant. Nils McCune, a socialist and environmental activist who has lived in Nicaragua for years, explained in an interview on our podcast Moderate Rebels that one of these parties, the Movement for the Renovation of Sandinismo (MRS) is a tiny group that is irrelevant in the country. Unable to mobilize popular support, this “left” opposition can only lobby the US government for regime change.

ERIC ZUESSE—America’s Government leads a “coalition” or “alliance” of gangsters. Any Government — such as the U.S. regime’s foreign allies — that adheres to U.S.-imposed sanctions, is thereby participating in international war-crimes, because the imposition of what are called “secondary sanctions” constitutes in today’s world the very first stage of international aggression, just before the coup-attempt stage, which comes before the final invasion stage (if no coup succeeds), and all of these international aggressions are war-crimes because they are not in retaliation for having been aggressed-against by any of those targeted nations.