Money, the saying goes, can’t buy love. But $10,000 will buy you the perfect Donald Trump inauguration keepsake — a coin with the words “In Trump we trust.” It’s the handiwork of a Russian mining company because, as its sales manager put it, “We see our mission as immortalizing in metal the bright events of history and modernity, not only in our country but of the whole world.”
Isn’t the Trump Regime so refreshingly honest.
Erik Price as Viceroy of Afghanistan and head of a US mercenary army and air force.
Because that’s what resolve is about: strategic extractable mineral resources… and poppies.
The former head of Blackwater(sic), aside from the ahistorical pathology, copping to the authenticity of imperial pretensions is so very … Victorian, complete with Russian involvements.
Merchant Ivory does Rambo.
Mercer-nary war… what a concept, outsource repression, and share exploitation with the Russian-supplied Taliban…
Erik Prince on MSNBC, asked for precedent for his give-mercs-Afghanistan proposal: “East India Co, not that I’m advocating colonization…”
The reason I talked about in that Op Ed, you have to put someone in charge, there has to be a … uh… uh… a lead federal official in this case almost a bankruptcy trustee that rationalizes the U.S. presence that is in charge of all policy.
Second, um, they have to stay there for a while so that you have continuity of decision making.
Burnett: OK. So, the word you use for that person was a “Viceroy” — an American Viceroy.
Prince: And I mean Viceroy — that’s a Colonial term…the last thing…
Burnett: It IS a Colonial term…
Prince: Sure…the Colonial term came from… in the…in the British Empire, they had very little communications and you had to put someone in charge that can make decisions absent a ship going back and forth. But in this case, it really means someone that can rationalize the basic mess that is U.S. policy been, whether it is in Afghanistan or Pakistan, we’re gone backwards…
Burnett: So, when you use the word, though, as you point out is a Colonial word, the definition is “a ruler exercising authority in a colony on behalf of a sovereign. “ [emphasis added].
In that case, Trump would, perhaps, be the sovereign, Afghanistan an American Colony? I mean, it’s a loaded word…have the Afghans…
Prince: I didn’t say that…
Burnett: Are they talking to you about this, are they open to it?
Prince: I’ve talked to…to plenty of Afghans about this. When they understand that we’re not there to colonize, but merely thuh thuh thuh that Viceroy, that lead federal official term is someone that will rationalize so we don’t go through a commander every year like we have been or a different ambassador every two years … or who it… there’s been a complete fragmentation of command. That has to change! [emphasis added]
Burnett: So, I know that…that you said, you said you wrote an Op Ed, Reince Priebus, H.R. McMaster, Steve Bannon then reached out to you…
Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.
The national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, has removed three NSC aides loyal to Trump aide Steve Bannon in the last three weeks. Bannon allies inside and outside the administration have fired back, starting rumors that McMaster is on his way out the door and documenting the Army general’s deviations from President Trump.
Trouble in a 72-virgin West Wing paradise… considering the onward match of the #TrumpRussia inquiry. What would have been whiz kids in a JFK administration are now becoming voyeurs of the Steele Dossier … say cheese … whiz
Another human shield leaves as the Mike Flynn appointees get purged with the final exit of Ezra Cohen-Watnick, an apparent thorn in the side of H.R. McMaster, National Security Advisor.
The NatSec area has had some bloodletting that represent both the decline of the “Flynnstones” but a hardening that could lead to what now seems a more inevitable military action.
Cutting the Flynn crowd loose may also be important to try to firewall Agent Orange as the grand juries do their work. Perhaps Flynn will become the Dr. Evil of this shaggathon to allow Lord Dampnut to keep his mojo… because loyalty.
Regardless, malevolence will continue until morale improves.
Bannon and Ledeen may be wary of talking about Cohen-Watnick after his first, and thus far only, turn in the national spotlight. Washington got its first real look at Cohen-Watnick when he was identified as one of two White House sources who provided House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes with evidence that former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the “unmasking” of the names of Trump associates in intelligence documents. In the intelligence world, incidental collection refers to intelligence agencies obtaining, in the course of monitoring foreigners, communications that either refer to or involve Americans, whose names are typically “masked” unless officials request that they be “unmasked.”…
He is in the thick of some of the most important policy fights at the White House; he is viewed as an Iran hawk and has been characterized, for instance, as a main proponent of expanding U.S. efforts against Iran-backed militias in Syria.
This was not the first change. Last week, McMaster fired Derek Harvey, the NSC’s top Middle East adviser. Harvey was perceived as too close to Bannon by some White House aides, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis had disagreed with Harvey at times.
And another Bannon acolyte, Rich Higgins, was given the boot on July 21, as Rosie Gray at the Atlantic first reported on Wednesday. (This was before the arrival of Kelly as chief of staff.) Higgins, a former Pentagon aide, wrote and circulated a memo charging the “deep state,” “globalists,” and “bankers” with aligning with “Islamists” against the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, Bannon’s allies outside the White House are trying to put the squeeze on McMaster. On Wednesday, radio host Laura Ingraham tweeted a months-old article from the New York Times about McMaster’s “break with the administration on Islam.”
Was it Cohen-Watnick’s loyalty, security clearance, or the connections to others not mentioned … Kushner’s protection, among others not in the McMaster-Bannon line of fire.
When Trump fires Mueller — and he will — the end game begins.
If we look behind the mask of Comedy, we will find the face of Tragedy. Laughter may be humanity’s greatest survival skill, a potent weapon against despair and the Unfairness of Life.
Today, people in “industrialized nations” take it for granted that children will outlive their parents, and call it a tragedy when they don’t. We seldom think about the rest of the world, or about the whole world before the 20th century — all the people who would consider a family extremely fortunate if only half their children died before the age of five.
Edward Lear (1812–1888) was the twentieth of twenty-one pregnancies endured by his mother Ann Skerrett Lear, wife of Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker. He was their youngest child to survive. There had already been several infant deaths, and his health was delicate: his eyesight was poor, and he suffered from chronic respiratory ailments. His parents waited three years before arranging for Edward to be baptized.
Then his father’s financial reverses forced the family to rent out their home, and Edward was sent to live with his eldest sister, twenty-five-year-old Ann. But when financial stability returned, his mother left him in his sister’s care. Ann never married, devoting herself to her brother as long as she lived, but he never forgot the hurt of his mother’s rejection.
At the age of five he had his first epileptic seizure. Lear called this his “Demon.” He was so ashamed of the affliction that he would go to great lengths to hide it, even from people who had real affection for him.
But the child Edward was “tenacious of life” as Charlotte Brontë put it, and grew into adulthood. Here is a poem in which Lear satirizes his adult self, with a bird-like caricature he drew of himself with his cat Foss:
How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear, Who has written such volumes of stuff. Some think him ill-tempered and queer, But a few find him pleasant enough.
His mind is concrete and fastidious, His nose is remarkably big; His visage is more or less hideous, His beard it resembles a wig.
He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers, (Leastways if you reckon two thumbs); He used to be one of the singers, But now he is one of the dumbs.
He sits in a beautiful parlour, With hundreds of books on the wall; He drinks a great deal of marsala, But never gets tipsy at all.
He has many friends, laymen and clerical, Old Foss is the name of his cat; His body is perfectly spherical, He weareth a runcible hat.
When he walks in waterproof white, The children run after him so! Calling out, “He’s gone out in his night- Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!”
He weeps by the side of the ocean, He weeps on the top of the hill; He purchases pancakes and lotion, And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads, but he does not speak, Spanish, He cannot abide ginger beer; Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish, How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
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