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Trump Wanting to Buy Greenland Is Yet Another Sign of Putin's Puppetry |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43437"><span class="small">Richard Wolffe, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 26 August 2019 08:18 |
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Wolffe writes: "Greenland didn't just bubble into Trump's mind randomly - it's very much on Russia's radar for its unknown supply of oil, gas and rare metals."
Icebergs float behind the town of Kulusuk in Greenland on 16 August 2019. (photo: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images)
Trump Wanting to Buy Greenland Is Yet Another Sign of Putin's Puppetry
By Richard Wolffe, Guardian UK
26 August 19
Greenland didn’t just bubble into Trump’s mind randomly – it’s very much on Russia’s radar for its unknown supply of oil, gas and rare metals
 he last time Americans felt hostility to anything remotely Danish was when the pompous old Duke of Weselton launched a trade-war-turned-palace-coup against the warm-hearted ice queen known as Elsa. Even the prepubescent fans of Frozen know that trade wars are doomed and that strong female leaders are unstoppable.
It’s tempting to look at Donald Trump’s ludicrous desire to buy Greenland – and the Danish spat that followed – as just another sick joke of the Trump presidency: an aberration that the world will forget with tomorrow’s distracting tweets on some other outrage.
But after two and half years of this corrosive nonsense, it’s time to admit some unpleasant truths. The madness of Donald Trump is getting worse, not better. The presidency has not normalized him, it has only normalized our numbed reaction to his excesses. We cannot see through the fog of disinformation and distraction how much of the world’s instability is directly linked to his abject failure as a president.
Let’s just pause to look at Greenland, shall we? On the face of it, the notion of buying the Arctic autonomous territory seems like just another brain fart from the cavities inside Trump’s cranium: “an absurd discussion”, as the new Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, put it on her trip to Greenland on Monday. “Thankfully the time where you buy and sell countries and populations is over. Let’s leave it there. Jokes aside, we will of course love to have an even closer strategic relationship with the United States.”
Sadly, the days of buying and selling other countries are far from over because Trump himself seems to be easily bought by his Russian and Saudi friends. He’s so cheap you only have to dangle the idea of a Trump Tower in Moscow to win his undying support for lifting sanctions imposed after Russia invaded and annexed part of Ukraine.
Greenland doesn’t just bubble into Trump’s mind randomly, unless Fox News is airing obscure weekend segments on Arctic politics. But it is very much on Russia’s radar. Earlier this year, Russia revamped its Arctic circle military base on the tiny Kotelny Island, which sits close to the shipping routes that are opening up as the polar region warms catastrophically.
There are unknown quantities of oil, gas and rare earth metals in the arctic, and the region’s powers – Denmark among them – can either green light a global free-for-all or restrain the usual human plunder of one of the last pristine frontiers on the planet. You can guess where Russia sits on this spectrum of environmental concerns in the middle of our climate crisis.
It is one of the sickest Trump jokes that his half-baked idea of buying Greenland should be seen as American machismo when it is yet another sign of Putin’s puppet American presidency at work.
Denmark is a loyal ally within the organization that Russia loathes: Nato. So the downside to trashing a state visit, complete with a royal dinner, is not what it normally would be for an American president who supposedly leads the greatest global alliance in military history. He did, after all, suggest withdrawing US troops from Nato just last year.
One of the many gobsmacking cons of our current crop of so-called nationalist leaders is how happy they are to surrender their national interest in subordination to any foreign strongman who offers to grease their personal interest. It’s almost like they’re not serious about America First or Global Britain at all.
It is too much to expect rational public thought from the 45th president of the United States. But you have to wonder if he ever admits to himself that the only reason the Arctic is opening up is because of the climate crisis he used to call a Chinese hoax.
More recently he told CBS News that “something’s happening” to the climate that probably isn’t a hoax but definitely has nothing to do with human actions.
“I wish you could go to Greenland, watch these huge chunks of ice just falling into the ocean, raising the sea levels,” Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes told him. Maybe Trump just wanted to buy Greenland to make sure nobody could there to see the ice melting.
“You’d have to show me the scientists because they have a very big political agenda, Lesley,” Trump said, fabricating yet more lies to cover up his own political agenda. In other words, another day in the Oval Office.
As the world knows full well with each passing day of this presidency, Trump cannot project national strength because he is so chronically, personally weak. He told reporters on Wednesday that he dropped out of his Denmark state visit because its prime minister was “nasty” and “not nice” in rejecting his advances on Greenland.
On a playground full of pre-schoolers, this language might make sense. On the world stage, as the Danish would say, it’s absurd.
Like so many weak souls who never grew out of the playground chapter of their lives, Trump tries to pick on other weak souls to demonstrate the strength he so clearly lacks.
The weakest of those victims are the children fleeing for their lives from Central America.
Trump is not content with ripping them from their parents, orphaning some of them by losing track of their parents forever, and exposing others to unspeakable abuse in so-called shelters. He now wants to ignore the courts and detain them indefinitely in private for-profit prisons with or without their families.
His administration claims the old court-ordered Flores agreement is “outdated and fails to account for the massive shift in illegal immigration to families and minors from Central America”, according to a written White House statement.
That conveniently ignores the fact that the “outdated” court agreement is named after Jenny Lisette Flores, who was a 15-year-old fleeing El Salvador in the 1980s when she was arrested by US officials, handcuffed and strip-searched and placed in a for-profit prison for two months. The US refused to release her to family members, claiming they were protecting her, but the ACLU said the Reagan administration was just trying to arrest parents and punish children.
So obviously there are no similarities to Trump’s policies at all.
From the self-inflicted crisis at the border to the self-inflicted spat with Denmark, so much of the global chaos that numbs us all is the product of this mindless and malignant American leader.
The world is staring at a global recession triggered in large part by Trump’s pointless trade wars. It’s watching mini-Trumps grasp for power in Britain and Italy, inspired by his own undemocratic example, including all his trademark incompetence and ignorance.
Without Trump, how much of the stupefying sense of chaos would evaporate?
Perhaps not all of it, but enough for Scandinavia to return to sleeping soundly. Villy Søvndal, a former Danish foreign minister, said that Trump was “a narcissistic fool” because of his decision to cancel his trip. But he explained that this clown wasn’t funny. “The problem is that he is the president of the most powerful nation in the world,” he said.
That’s a problem for the whole world to suffer. But it’s a problem that only American voters can solve.
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Trump Has a Vicious New Primary Challenger - and Drooping GOP Support |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5903"><span class="small">Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Monday, 26 August 2019 08:18 |
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Tomasky writes: "Trump's numbers among even Republicans are starting to drop, and while Joe Walsh is not going to win the primary, he'll be launching feral attacks and calling out the lies."
Joe Walsh. (photo: The Joe Walsh Campaign)
Trump Has a Vicious New Primary Challenger - and Drooping GOP Support
By Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
26 August 19
Trump’s numbers among even Republicans are starting to drop, and while Joe Walsh is not going to win the primary, he’ll be launching feral attacks and calling out the lies.
 onald Trump likes to tout his ironclad support among Republican voters. And the media often play along with the idea that he could, as he has famously said, shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not have any of his backers actually care.
The political reality, however, is far bleaker for the president as we head into 2020. The news of Joe Walsh underscores that. Joe Walsh, yes, that Walsh, who is challenging Trump in the Republican primary.
So, what to make of this?
On the one hand, Walsh is obviously not going to win the Republican nomination for president. He served a mere one term in Congress. He may not raise much money and thus may not be able to run anything like a conventional campaign.
And now, the other hand. Walsh is most definitely no hero to anybody outside the hard-right fever swamps—his history of racist tweets about Barack Obama and other topics, which George Stephanopoulos pressed him on, are evidence enough of that. (He did at least admit they were wrong.) But more recently, he has been a Rottweiler biting Trump’s corpulent ass. I’m sure you’ve seen some of his tweets over the years. They’re vicious. So the guy ain’t afraid. And though he’s a pretty rabid right-winger, most of his tweets about Trump read as if they could have been written by anybody with politics more like mine—they’re almost entirely about what a lying, unprincipled hulk of condemned meat Trump is. He has a large Twitter following (207,000) and a nationally syndicated radio show.
And it was Trump’s mendacity and boobery Walsh emphasized on Sunday, not his ideology, such as it is. “I’m running because he’s unfit; somebody needs to step up and there needs to be an alternative. The country is sick of this guy’s tantrum—he’s a child,” Walsh said. In other words, his case, it seems, isn’t going to be ideological, but characterological.
Ah, but you say, Republicans don’t want to hear that. To which I say, well, most of them don’t, true. But I’ve noticed something interesting happening lately. Trump’s numbers among even Republicans are starting to drop, a little. That is something to watch—and it, combined with feral attacks from a primary opponent who, every time Trump lies, will stand up and say “that’s a lie,” and who will be speaking directly to Republican voters about why it’s a disgrace to have Donald Trump in the White House, could actually add up to something.
The polls. Trump of course constantly brags about his record support among Republicans. The figure he’s been using lately is 94 percent. He says this so often, plucking the friendliest, most Rasmusseniest number out of the air that he can find, and cable news just repeats it so that it’s now accepted by everyone that Republicans adore him. Right?
But just lately, a couple polls suggest a softening—that a growing number of Republicans are finally starting to admit to themselves that Trump shouldn’t be running a Best Buy, let alone the country. A Monmouth poll last week found him at 84 percent among Republicans, and an AP-NORC survey put him at 79 percent (both are discussed here).
That still sounds high, maybe. But let me break these percentages down into raw numbers, and you’ll see why 80 percent approval in a president’s own party can spell trouble.
There are roughly 230 million adult citizens in the country. About three-quarters of adult citizens register to vote, maybe a little more. So let’s say there are 175 million registered voters in the United States.
Now, party registration fluctuates, and it’s all somewhat imprecise because only 31 states require party affiliation of voting registrants. Pollsters like Gallup and Pew regularly ask people whether they consider themselves Democratic, Republican, or independent. These numbers shift with events in ways you’d expect: The Republican number bumped up after 9/11, the Democratic figure increased after Barack Obama’s election. But usually, independents are around 40, Democrats are in the low 30s, and Republicans are in the high 20s, something like that.
So let’s say 28 percent of registered voters are Republican. Twenty-eight percent of 175 million is basically 50 million. Okay, now let’s say by election time, Trump is at 80 percent among Republicans. Well, 20 percent of 50 million is 10 million. That means that 10 million Republicans can maybe be persuaded to vote against the man. Or to withhold their support from him and stay home.
Given how close the vote totals were in 2016 in a number of states, these 10 million could make an enormous difference. Florida, 110,000 out of 9 million cast; Pennsylvania, 44,000 out of nearly 6 million; Wisconsin, 22,000 out of 2.8 million; Michigan, 11,000 out of 4.5 million. If there are 10 million anti-Trump Republicans in November 2020, isn’t there a decent chance that 11,000 of them live in Michigan?
Out of curiosity I went back and looked at the exit polls over the last 20-plus years’ worth of elections. Trump got 88 percent of Republicans in 2016. Mitt Romney got 93 percent in 2012. John McCain got 90 percent in 2008. George W. Bush got 93 percent in 2004 and 91 percent in 2000.
Then we go back to 1996, when Bob Dole ran against Bill Clinton. Dole got…80 percent of Republicans. Yes, party loyalties were less metastasized then, but whatever the explanation, the fact is the fact. Dole won just 80 percent of Republicans, and he lost—by 8.5 percent, 8 million popular votes, and a whopping 220 Electoral College votes.
So 80-percent support in a president’s own political party may sound high at first glance, but it’s not. It’s shaky territory. I’m not saying Trump is there quite yet. But there are encouraging signs that he’s headed in that direction. And Walsh obviously wants to take him there and doesn’t care if he costs Trump the White House and maybe even hopes he does.
This doesn’t mean anyone should forgive Walsh his own racist history. But if he contributes to Trump’s defeat, that should be worth a few atonement points. And who knows, maybe he'll become a better person. As I've said before: They used to say a conservative was a liberal who’s been mugged by reality; today, and in the future, a liberal is a conservative who’s been Trumped by it.
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Homophobic? Maybe. But at Least Midnight Cowboy Showed Me Gay Men on Screen |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51472"><span class="small">Ryan Gilbey, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 26 August 2019 08:18 |
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Gilbey writes: "The film is 50, and the debate is on about its motives. But growing up, I hankered after images of other gay men, however they were treated."
'In the words of the theme song from Midnight Cowboy, it got everybody talkin.' It was down to me to try to make sense of what was being said.' Dustin Hoffman, left, and Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy. (photo: Alamy)
Homophobic? Maybe. But at Least Midnight Cowboy Showed Me Gay Men on Screen
By Ryan Gilbey, Guardian UK
26 August 19
The film is 50, and the debate is on about its motives. But growing up, I hankered after images of other gay men, however they were treated
 idnight Cowboy moseys into UK cinemas again next month on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, and with it comes another opportunity to ask whether this is a film about homophobia or a homophobic film. At the risk of sounding perverse, I really don’t mind. My feelings toward the film were formed by seeing it in my early teens, when I already knew I was gay and hankered after images of other gay men on screen without caring whether they were problematic or toxic – words, incidentally, that would never have been used in that context when I first saw it in the mid-1980s.
In its portrayal of the friendship between two New York City street hustlers – the budding gigolo Joe Buck (Jon Voight), tall and sweet as an ice-cream sundae, and the stunted, snivelling chancer “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) – the picture hints at the inexpressible desires in any bromance. Ratso bandies the word “faggot” around and mocks Joe for the campness of his cowboy duds. Evidently the homophobe doth protest too much, for we have been privy to Ratso’s fantasies in which Joe runs shirtless with him along the beach.
It is the penultimate scene, when Joe robs, beats and perhaps even kills a gay client, that throws the movie into disarray. The scene itself provides a snapshot of Joe’s own shame and self-doubt, and a film should be allowed to depict the consequences of homophobia without being accused of perpetuating it. But it’s the way the attack on that man is swept blithely aside in the next scene that casts doubts on the motives of the film, and on the integrity of its gay British director, John Schlesinger. So why is it that I struggle to take offence?
What we look for in our formative years can be very different from the demands we make later as analytical adults, and it was certainly more important to me that representations of gayness were complex or colourful than that they were positive, whatever that meant. As far as I was concerned, film-makers were welcome to be hostile or mocking toward homosexuality just so long as they didn’t ignore it. I would have taken animosity over anonymity any day.
What heterosexual audiences may need longer to appreciate, having grown up surrounded by reflections of their own kind on every screen and billboard, is that gay audiences will take whatever image they can get and then drain it for meaning and nourishment. Like our counterparts in other underrepresented minorities, we learn to be fastidious noticers and collectors, seizing on any old leftover and rustling up a banquet for one. That explains my affection for films that wouldn’t pass the gay equivalent of the Bechdel test.
As a child, I wanted to visit the secret nightclub in The Pink Panther Strikes Again where everyone is limp-wristed and light in the loafers. When Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau dances with another man, you aren’t meant to find it romantic – just daft. And while the club is a grotesque caricature (well, this is a Pink Panther film and not Ken Loach), the joke is manifestly on Clouseau, in his stiffness and discomfort: everyone but him is having a blast.
Similarly, no one in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever is having quite as much fun as Mr Wint (Bruce Glover) and Mr Kidd (Putter Smith), the skipping, hand-holding assassins who never forget their manners even in the middle of a murder. I didn’t mind them being psychos. Better psychos than nothing.
Colin (Paul Freeman) may be sliced up at the start of The Long Good Friday while cruising at a swimming pool, but I loved seeing the whole plot set in motion by a gay man’s desires, even if they do prove fatal. I didn’t even mind it when the mob boss Harold (Bob Hoskins), Colin’s childhood friend, says: “You know how bitchy queers get when their looks start to go.” Disparaging words can be argued with and contested. Silence can’t.
There were nuanced representations of gayness when I wanted them (Dog Day Afternoon, My Beautiful Laundrette, The Naked Civil Servant) but it was a different kind of detective work winkling out the gay bits in otherwise straight films. The flasher in High Anxiety, say, who exposes himself to Mel Brooks in an airport toilet, then squeals when Brooks flees in horror. “Don’t be so gauche,” he calls after him. “We’re all doing it!” Or the flamboyant theatre director Roger DeBris (Christopher Hewett) in Brooks’s The Producers. Max (Zero Mostel) and Leo (Gene Wilder) call in on him at his apartment. “He’s wearing a dress,” hisses Leo under his breath. “No kidding,” says Max.
In A Taste of Honey, Geoffrey (Murray Melvin) has been thrown out by his landlady for canoodling with a fella, while in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges are sweethearts in all but the letter of the script; you just have to spot the signs. There’s a mohawk-sporting biker in Mad Max 2 whose twink boyfriend is killed by a metal boomerang. And Michael Caine even kisses Christopher Reeve (Superman!) in the 1982 film Deathtrap: the first time I had seen one man’s lips on another’s.
That film was directed by Sidney Lumet, who made Dog Day Afternoon. Gay was very big that year, what with Personal Best (sporty lesbians) and Making Love (a married man having a gay affair). It was the Deathtrap smacker, though, that was all over the news. Was the film sensationalist, even homophobic? Undoubtedly. But at least, in the words of the theme song from Midnight Cowboy, it got everybody talkin’. It was down to me to try to make sense of what was being said.
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Trump Is Increasingly Untethered From Reality |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=8625"><span class="small">Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Sunday, 25 August 2019 13:38 |
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Robinson writes: "The flood of bizarre pronouncements and behavior from President Trump is likely to get worse, I fear. He is now completely unfiltered - and, apparently, increasingly untethered to reality."
'After Trump abruptly canceled his trip to Denmark, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hurried to offer words of reassurance to the Danish foreign minister.' (photo: Drew Angerer/NYT)
Trump Is Increasingly Untethered From Reality
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
25 August 19
he flood of bizarre pronouncements and behavior from President Trump is likely to get worse, I fear. He is now completely unfiltered — and, apparently, increasingly untethered to reality.
Quick, can you name the White House press secretary? Do you have any idea what she looks or sounds like? Stephanie Grisham has held that job for nearly two months now, but if her name doesn’t ring any bells, it’s because she hasn’t yet given a single official press briefing. Trump has foolishly decided to act as his own exclusive spokesman, putting all his prejudices, misconceptions, resentments, insecurities, grudges and fears on ugly display.
The result is what we witnessed Wednesday on the White House lawn. On his way to the waiting Marine One chopper, Trump paused and took questions from reporters for 35 minutes, unfazed by the midday 89-degree heat and smothering humidity. He made much news and little sense.
When he looked to the sky and proclaimed that “I am the chosen one,” he was clearly referring to his trade war with China. But you had to wonder whether his egomania, which we’re accustomed to, might have blossomed into full-scale delusions of grandeur.
Again and again, he tried desperately to compare himself favorably with his predecessor, Barack Obama. He did so by telling ridiculous lies that are easily disproved by the historical record — no, Obama wasn’t denied permission to land Air Force One in the Philippines. You had to wonder whether Trump, who was the loudest voice in the racist “birther” movement, might have some kind of obsession with Obama and his continuing popularity around the world.
Trump said he canceled his planned state visit to Denmark because the Danish prime minister was “Obama is scheduled to visit Denmark in September. Might Trump have feared that he would be met with protests and then have to watch Obama bask in the adulation of much bigger crowds?
We also heard Trump repeat and amplify his offensive claim that American Jews who vote for Democrats are being “disloyal” to Israel. The notion of dual loyalty is a vile anti-Semitic trope that goes back centuries. Does Trump think dredging it up somehow helps him politically? Or is it one of a host of deep-seated ethnic and racial stereotypes that he now blurts out because no one is empowered to stop him?
If the president seems to be spiraling out of control, it’s no doubt because he’s frantically worried about losing his bid for reelection — but also because the insulation that once surrounded him has been stripped bare.
Insider accounts of the Trump White House have spoken of the rages, obsessions, fixations and biases that spill out of the president behind closed doors. But there were officials in place who could temper his rashest impulses. When he was chief of staff, John F. Kelly even managed to establish some measure of control over the flow of information to and from the president — a necessity for any administration to be able to set priorities and follow through on them.
But Kelly is gone, along with everyone else who had the stature, experience and courage to at least try to make this mess into a functional presidency. The information flow? Now it’s whatever Trump watches on Fox News — or hate-watches on CNN or MSNBC — and immediately tweets about.
Trump’s most influential remaining adviser is said Wednesday the administration wants to end birthright citizenship (which the Constitution guarantees), everyone could guess where that was coming from.
Cabinet members are like the guy in the parade who walks behind the elephant with a broom and dustpan. After Trump abruptly canceled his trip to Denmark, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo soars toward $1 trillion.
The nation and the world need a competent, capable White House but won’t have one anytime soon. Instead, we’ve got a teetotaling president who sounds like the angry guy at the end of the bar, mouthing off about whatever he sees when he looks up at the television. Closing time can’t come fast enough.
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