The runaway train gains speed

During the days of the George W. Bush presidency when the country was dragged into disastrous wars on the lies propagated by Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and others, Tom Tomorrow had a cartoon where he ‘explained’ how it came to be that Bush and Cheney had embarked on this disastrous course. The cartoon said that the two had actually been pot-smoking hippie radical friends in their youth and carefully planned a long time ago to pretend to be arch-conservatives so that they could rise to power and destroy the US from within by advocating policies that would destroy it.
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What is the matter with these people?

Fox News seems to one ghastly pit of sexual misbehavior and harassment. Now comes yet another story alleging that Eric Bolling, Fox News host and ardent fan of Donald Trump, sent photographs of his genitals to co-corkers. I must admit I find such actions hard to fathom. If these were adolescents, I could understand. Young people do risky and foolish things all the time, oblivious to possible negative outcomes. It might also be understandable behavior by an adult if it was sent to an intimate partner who expected or asked for such things, though even there one would expect prominent people to hesitate given the fact that emails are hardly confidential anymore.
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Donald Trump and religion

One of the cardinal rules of American politics is that if you want to gain high office, you have to express religious beliefs. If you are not a believer or are lukewarm, then you have to fake it. Some fakers are better than others at conveying sincerity but it does not really seem to matter even if you are a pretty obvious phony. All that the religious base cares about is that you pay lip service to the Christian god. If you also push for the policies that the religious right favors (anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-LGBT, and anti-sex), then it does not matter even if you do not go to church regularly or mangle your religious references.
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The revolving door in Afghanistan keeps spinning

The film War Machine (2017) that I reviewed recently is a satire on US efforts to win the war in Afghanistan that follows a cyclic pattern. A president gets increasingly frustrated with the fact that the war is just dragging along in a stalemate, decides that what is needed is a new strategy and new leadership, fires the existing military commander and appoints a new military commander who has a sterling reputation gained elsewhere, that person says that he needs more troops to deliver a crushing blow to the enemy, gets the troops but the blow fails to be effective, gets fired, and then gets replaced by a new commander and the process begins all over again.
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The leak of the Trump transcripts

Today’s big news in White House leaks are the transcripts of the phone calls made by Donald Trump to other world leaders showing how what Trump says in private is in stark contrast to what he says in public. Much has been made of the conversation with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto as early as January 27 where Trump acknowledges that the wall is not important and that Mexico will not pay for the border wall but demands that Peña Nieto not keep saying in public that Mexico will not pay for it because it makes him look bad.
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The Alex Jones phenomenon

I am of course aware of Alex Jones and the loony and even vicious ideas he promotes, such as that the Sandy Hook massacre of elementary school children and their teachers was an elaborate hoax. What is more incredible than what he says is that so many people seem to believe him. But I do not watch or listen to his show because life’s too short. So I was grateful to John Oliver for providing an in-depth look at the Jones phenomenon, perhaps telling us more about him that we may have wanted to know. Make sure you wait for the ‘infomercial’ that begins at around the 19:30 mark.
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McCain’s successor as the fake maverick

It looks like the state of Arizona has become the breeding ground of the fake Maverick Republican. Now that John McCain has been diagnosed with brain cancer, he is unlikely to run again and senator Jeff Flake is staking his claim to becoming the Republican that the media fawn over for being willing to issue statements and quotes that seem to go against his party’s dogmas while voting almost entirely along party lines. Flake has come out with a new book that seems to say some things that deviate from Republican orthodoxy and is making the rounds of the media.
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