Of course, how else can the U.S. keep its near monopoly on the global arms trade and ensure that two sets of products -- Hollywood movies and U.S. weaponry -- will dominate the world's business in things that go boom in the night? It's a record to be proud of, especially since putting every advanced weapon imaginable in the hands of the Saudis will obviously help bring peace to a roiled region of the planet. (And if you arm the Saudis, you better do no less for the Israelis, hence the mind-boggling $38 billion in military aid the Obama administration recently signed on to for the next decade, the most Washington has ever offered any country, ensuring that arms will be flying into the Middle East, literally and figuratively, for years to come.)
Blessed indeed are the peacemakers -- and of course you know that by "peacemaker" I mean the classic revolver that "won the West."
Put another way...
You must be kidding!
The Race for the Generals: I mean, who's got the biggest...
...list of retired generals and admirals? Does it surprise you that there are at least 198 retired commanders floating around in their golden parachutes, many undoubtedly still embedded in the military-industrial complex on corporate boards and the like, eager to enroll in the Trump and Clinton campaigns? Trump went first, releasing an "open letter" signed by 88 generals and admirals who were bravely standing up to reverse the "hollowing out of our military" and to "secure our borders, to defeat our Islamic supremacist adversaries, and restore law and order domestically." (Partial translation: pour yet more money into our military as The Donald has promised to do.) They included such household names as Major General Joe Arbuckle, Rear Admiral James H. Flatley III, and Brigadier General Mark D. Scraba -- or, hey!, one guy you might even remember: Lieutenant General William ("Jerry") Boykin, the evangelical crusader who made the news in 2003 by claiming of a former Somali opponent, "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."
Somehow, those 88 Trumpian military types assumedly crawled out of "the rubble" under which, as The Donald informed us recently, the Obama administration has left the American high command. His crew, however, is undoubtedly not the "embarrassment" he refers to when talking about American generalship in these years.
Meanwhile, the Clintonites struck back with a list of 95, "including a number of 4-star generals," many directly from under that rubble, and within the week had added 15 more to hit 110. Meanwhile, members of the intelligence community and the rest of the national security state, former presidential advisers and other officials, drum-beating neocons, and strategists of every sort from America's disastrous wars of the last 15 years hustled to line up behind Hillary or The Donald.
If nothing else, all of it was a reminder of the bloated size and ever-increasing centrality of the post-9/11 national security state and the military-industrial complex that goes with it. The question is: Does it inspire you with confidence in our candidates, or leave you saying...
You must be kidding!
Conflicts of Interest and Access to the Oval Office: Let's put aside a possible preemptive $25,000 bribe to Florida's attorney general from the Donald J. Trump Foundation to prevent an investigation of a scam operation, Trump "University." If that "donation" to a political action committee does turn out to have been a bribe, no one should be surprised, given that The Donald has long been a walking Ponzi scheme. Thanks to a recent superb investigative report by Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek, consider instead what it might mean for him to enter the Oval Office when it comes to conflicts of interest and the "national security" of the country. Eichenwald concludes that Trump would be "the most conflicted president in American history," since the Trump Organization has "deep ties to global financiers, foreign politicians, and even criminals" in both allied and enemy countries. Almost any foreign policy decision he might make could hurt or enrich his own businesses. There would, in essence, be no way to divest himself and his family from the international Trump branding machine. (Think Trump U. writ large.) And you hardly need ask yourself whether The Donald would "act in the interests of the United States or his wallet," given his prior single-minded pursuit of self-enrichment.
So much for conflicts of interest, what about access? That, of course, brings up the Clintons, who, between 2001 and the moment Hillary announced her candidacy for president, managed to take in $153 million dollars (yes, that is not a misprint) for a combined 729 speeches at an average fee of $210,795. That includes Hillary's 20-minute speech to eBay's Women's Initiative Network Summit in March 2015 for a reported $315,000 just a month before she made her announcement. It's obviously not Hillary's (or Bill's) golden words that corporate executives truly care about and are willing to pay the big bucks for, but the hope of accessibility to both a past and a possible future president. After all, in the world of business, no one ever thinks they're paying good money for nothing.
Do I need to say more than...
You must be kidding!
Of course, I could go on. I could bring up a Congress seemingly incapable of passing a bill to fund a government effort to prevent the Zika virus from spreading wildly in parts of this country. (You must be kidding!) I could discuss how the media fell face first into an SUV -- NBC Nightly News, which I watch, used the video of Hillary Clinton stumbling and almost falling into that van, by my rough count, 15 times over four nights -- and what it tells us about news "coverage" these days. (You must be kidding!) I could start in on the constant polls that flood our lives by confessing that I'm an addict and plan on joining Pollers Anonymous on November 9th, and then consider what it means to have such polls, and polls of polls, inundate us daily, teaching us about favorable/unfavorable splits, and offering endlessly varying snapshots of how we might or might not vote and which of us might or might not do it day so long before we ever hit a voting booth. (You must be kidding!) Or I could bring up the way, after five years of assiduous "research," Donald Trump grudgingly acknowledged that Barack Obama was born in the United States and then essentially blamed the birther movement on Hillary Clinton. (You must be kidding!)
I could, in other words, continue welcoming you into an increasingly bizarre American landscape of war and peace (without a Tolstoy in sight).
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