For those who are calling for Trump’s impeachment and mean ‘removal from office’, look who’d be the 46th President of the US of A: a Christianist Evangelical for Global Supremacy…by any means necessary.
From John Wight’s ‘Mike Pence declares war on the world at West Point’, RT.com, May 29, 2019:
“The commencement address Trump’s VP, Mike Pence, gave to West Point graduates recently goes down in history for all the wrong reasons.
It was an address [< Time Magazine’s coverage w/ the ID politcs featured] littered with war talk that was so extreme it was more compatible with a speech you would expect to hear from a character in a Hollywood spoof than from a leading politician and government official.
This was no spoof, though, be assured, and as such the world needs to wake up to the fact that this administration is staffed with enough cranks and crackpots to fill an entire ward.
Here, for your consideration, is one of the more tame sections of Pence’s West Point commencement address: “It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen. Some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.”
The country that instantly springs to mind upon reading the above passage is Venezuela, which for the past few months has existed in the crosshairs of US aggression, subjected to savage economic sanctions which according to Washington-based think tank, Center for Economic and Policy Research, have killed more than 40,000 people since they were introduced by the Trump administration in 2017.”
Indystar.com has the transcript of the speech; I’ll add a few more:
VP last week to grads: Be prepared to be ridiculed for being Christian
“…just a few months ago, your Commander-in-Chief proposed the largest defense budget in American history: $750 billion to ensure the strongest fighting force in the history of the world becomes stronger still. We fund an end strength of more than 2 million active and reserved military personnel. We’ll modernize w armored brigade combat teams, and we’ll also provide resources for 12 battle force ships, 2 large unmanned surface ships, and 110 fighter aircraft.
And with that renewed American strength, the United States is once again embracing our role as leader of the free world. We’re standing with our allies and standing up to our enemies.
America will always seek peace, but peace comes through strength. And you are now that strength.
Some of you will join the fight against radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific, where North Korea continues to threaten the peace, and an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence in the region. Some of you will join the fight in Europe, where an aggressive Russia seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. And some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.
Now Nick Turse had famously dug deep into past budgets, and had discovered that the actual money the Pentagon spends is just shy of double the publicly stated budget. But back to John Wight: He’d said that no one could be faulted for thinking Pence’s speechwriter was drunk, but Pence sure wasn’t as he delivered it. Me, I’d guess the speechwriter was sort of amphetamine…or both.
“On a more serious note, empires are sustained over the long term by the force of their idea not the idea of their force. And when the idea is no longer sufficient to sustain them and all they have left is force, nothing can halt their decline. Of this, history leaves no doubt.
Consequently, it is now self-evident that the Empire of our time, emanating from Washington, is in decline. And in decline it has entered its mad dog days, lashing out at enemies it has cultivated in the course of trying to force and sustain its writ across the world, growing ever more aggressive and bellicose in a desperate effort to maintain and sustain the hegemony it has enjoyed for far too long.”
A burgeoning and out of control military budget, which this year is set to reach $750 billion, one that’s bigger than the military budgets of every other advanced country and economy combined, sends a message to the world, not of strength but weakness, not of security but insecurity, and not moral superiority but moral inferiority.
It also constitutes an attack on the American people themselves, on the basis of the sentiments enshrined in former President Dwight D Eisenhower’s ‘Chance for Peace’ speech in 1953:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Wight ends by advising Mr. Trump, John Bolton, Mr. Pompeo and neocons everywhere to heed Eisenhower’s message for the sake of us all and yourselves, and to choose Life…instead.
(cross-posted at caucus99percent.com)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Love ‘Masters of War’ sends chills down my spine…and it’s message is more relevant than ever.
When a guy like Pence says “It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen. Some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere” it’s always you you you because he has certainly has no intention of putting himself or his sons and daughters in harms way. That’s for the deplorables and ghetto dwellers who are promised a college education and a way out of poverty if they “serve America” (more like serving the bipartisan elite and global capitalism) by killing the foreign equivalents of themselves and their families and risking coming back in a body bag or permanently damaged. God bless America!
The people who are so eager to get rid of Trump at any cost really ought to be careful what they wish for. It seems many of them have been driven into a frenzied panic by the media and the Democratic Party overlords who paint Trump as the most dangerous POTUS ever and don’t think about what kind of people are waiting in the wings to replace him.
Trump is an asshole, a (somewhat reluctant) war wonger, a bigot and probably a sociopathic narcissist of some sort. He’s a more impulsive and cruder, but less hawkish, Joe Biden. His half-hearted war mongering and apparent reluctance to start new wars is his one redeeming quality but the media and Democratic elite punish him for this! This is madness and makes them certifiably insane. No wonder they aren’t worried about a Christian jihadist like Mike Pence. I really fear for the future of this country. The longer this craziness continues, the further down the rabbit hole we go and the harder it will be to get back on to stable ground.
yep, and as far as i’m concerned, bradley owns that song now, simply shiver-inducing cover as you say. welcome to the café, and glad you’re at least temporarily sane ;-) i however am finding it harder and harder to watch the empire loose-cannonry as it may sense, but does not grasp, that amerika is so isolated on the world stage by failing to yield to a multi-polar world…and does what it does as it if human lives are inconsequential. well, to capital, they really are pretty negligible, aren’t they?
smartest thing ever was: ending the draft, as now paid military and signing bonuses is a sick ‘jobs program’, goddam.
yeah, over yonder at c99 it’s: oh, impeach, pence’ll be easier to beat! i’m not so sure, given history of evangelicals, neocons, and wars since reagan’s time. but this guy gives me the absolute willies. but over yonder i’d finally pinged: he’ never mentioned china, although maybe threats and destroyers and battle carries are enough to bluff with?
and gads yeah, the D team and trump’s #treasonSummiits? lord love a duck. i just looked it up, but the green party won’t even give a green hopeful the nod for months and months yet, but i’m countin’ on howie hawkins, at least he’s a socialist, though i can’t care for his running on the green party green new deal, pffft.
“I really fear for the future of this country. The longer this craziness continues, the further down the rabbit hole we go and the harder it will be to get back on to stable ground.”
whooosh,and we may never get back on stable ground as long as the duoply runs things. what i fear most is that those who can stop us are those who can and must. but at least some competitor nations have great diplomats, my fave being sergei lavrov.
hope ya come again, got a comment or two to answer over yonder before closing time, so i’ll close with this anti-orwellian tonic; g’night.
Well said, Sir! the reason the Repugnant’s fight so hard to deny Women birth control or access to abortion is that the rich must have plenty of ‘Cheap Labor slaves’ Maids, chef’s butlers, etc factories full of Happy slaves, and of course plenty of “Cannon Fodder” for our ‘tidy little Wars’….
Americans must realise that evil degenerates like Pence, Bolton and Pompeo don’t just appear. They are selected – just as the deplorables – Trump and Clinton – were selected by the shadow government to be presidential candidates. Since FDR the only president to show any opposition to the Nazis – the Dulles brothers, Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush – was JFK – and they had him assassinated. But even earlier- during WW2 – there was plot to take over the government or assassinate FDR. General Grantley Taylor exposed the plot to a committee – which did nothing. As a result the Nazis who should have been tried for treason gained power. John Foster Dulles became Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, Allen Dulles became head of the CIA, Prescott Bush was elected senator and Averell Harriman became the US Ambassador to Russia.
In that sense the Nazis won the war – and according to Webster Griffin Tarpley – every president from Harry Truman has been a puppet of Wall Street – which is why there has never been an American president since FDR who was a statesman with ethical standards and moral principles. Instead America has had three pathological liars as president – Nixon, Clinton and Obama – a couple of psychopaths in LBJ and George H W Bush- a neoliberal in Reagan – and assassins in Eisenhower and Ford. Americans have lived under the pretence of democracy since WW2 – which has been a history of infamy. It is continuing. The shadow government have already shown their hand by selecting the degenerate pedophile – Joe Biden – as – unbelievably – the democratic candidate – and of course Trump will be running. This will continue until Americans take control of their own nation – and their destiny – and kick out the vermin who represent the warmongers and the 1%.
thank you for your considered comment, ken w. simpson. i might quibble a bit about fdr and fighting nazis, but it seems that both the nato council and CFR give or withhold blessings on candiates globally, as i’m sure the cia does. but now it’s down to the contracted media, as well, as well as the bought out human rights industrial complex owners.
but thanks for the histories i hadn’t known, amigo. sorry to be so late, but as it turns out, i’m not only not getting emails from the site…i’m not getting emails period. (i just tried ending myself a couple links, even.) thanks, bill gates!
kick out the warmongers? well, some say t. gabbard, but i’ve called bullshit on that any number of times. but who will vote third party? very few. usians say they hate war, but no one asks them ‘how strongly anti-war’ figures in to their electoral choices, do they? i kinda think amerikans love both military brass and the uber-wealthy.
best to you,
wd
People who do not learn History are doomed to suffer the lack of it’s lessons. I would suggest reading the many Essay’s published by Mr. Louis Lapham, and subscribe to Lapham’s Quarterly Magazine, I have every issue published; all lessons on history, every subject. Books: Money and Class in America, Imperial Masquerade, The Wish for Kings, and more, believe me he is enjoyable to read…..
good on you, alaskaman. i can’t read dead tree any longer, sadly. lapham has essays online, though, and he adds the most evocative art to his work. i’d almost wrote up one of them, but dang if i can remember which one (my memory is more holes than grey matter).
i’ll answer more of your great comments later, but i have chores now, and then i’ll work on my NDAA 2020 diary as i can.
ha; i was just perusing my inbox for quotes and lists i’d sent myself, and here is the lewis lapham i’d hope to ping from: ‘Due Process’, Lamenting the death of the rule of law in a country where it might have always been missing.
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/rule-law/due-process
Ii is frustrating. As you say Americans seem to like brass and the ‘uber’ wealthy. Collectively they don’t possess a moral compass. They just accept the status quo – which invariably produces creatures like Trump and Clinton – and the economic policy of continual war. . Americans are being exploited and they appear to like it – or they just don’t give a damn.
enraging, more to the point. one of patrick martin’s piece (wsws.org)
from which i’d quoted liberally on my new NDAA diary is this:
“Assuming the NDAA passes on time, it would mark the 60th consecutive year that Congress has accomplished that feat. For all the media chatter about gridlock and supposedly unbridgeable differences between the Democrats and Republicans in Washington, the two capitalist parties are united in insuring the vital interests of American imperialism. They can squabble mightily about comparatively small amounts of money while rubber-stamping three-quarters of a trillion dollars to sustain the biggest and most lethal military machine in world history.”
thanks, amigo.