No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump.

Fantasies of a Trump-led fascist coup have redounded to the benefit of many -- especially those responsible for abuses far worse than those of the current president.

[greenwald.substack.com]

{The motives for concocting this Wagnerian fantasy about coups, dictatorship, concentration camps and civil war are numerous. Politics is boring, and your life unspectacular, if it’s dedicated to a goal as banal and uninspiring as empowering a septuagenarian career-politician — the centrist-authoritarian author of the 1994 Crime Bill, the credit card industry’s most loyal servant, and key Iraq War advocate — along with his tough-on-crime prosecutor-running-mate who always seems as if she just left a meeting of the Aetna Board of Directors where massive hikes in deductibles were approved.}

I've always said from the very beginning how brilliant Trump has been to use facts to propel him to the top. Speaking about fake news from the platform of one of the top TV fake news outlets opened it all up for him as he started his campaign. I never said though he wasn't any worse than all those before him. There in lays the underlining mistake of both establishment political supporters. While he was laying out the various truths in crimes and unethical practices of our governance coming from DC for 4 years, they all missed the opportunity to intellectually put the pieces together due to party tribalism and perception management from the media, which should have been giving more citizens awakening moments to abandon their deceitful system. And during those 4 years both parties continued to work in collaboration within the most horrid era of a 4 year administrative governance in history in concerns to virtually every aspect of society imaginable. !All of which were left out of the debates! As Trump's first 3 1/2 years and impeachment process was completely erased.

{Of course media outlets don’t want to declare the 2020 election over: they will milk the abundant Trumpian cash cow until the very last drop has been monetized.}

{The frightening spectre of a Dictatorial Menace also led liberal advocacy groups such as the ACLU to drown in previously unimaginable quantities of Resistance cash, frenetically donated in the name of stopping Trump’s incomparable evil. Rotted and discredited institutions like the CIA, NSA and FBI re-branded themselves as patriotic guardians of liberal democracy and stalwart protectors of a besieged population. Leaders of those security state agencies went from toppling governments, engineering clandestine coups, disseminating disinformation campaigns, illegally spying on citizens, and entrapping young Muslims in manufactured terror plots to being lavished with book deals and cable news contracts and celebrated in liberal parlors as saviors rather than destroyers of democratic institutions and Enlightenment values.}

2016 on a larger scale. The amount of books that will come out from a Trump administration will soar through the wind, with those already having come out. This dude is making a lot of people wealthy or more wealthy at societies expense. And they will all serve the same purpose as the public relation firms agendas that control information delivered to us from MSCM, likely also providing narratives in these books with the writers.

{Flamboyantly denouncing Trump as an Unprecedented Evil became a cheap, instant and easy ticket to absolution, redemption and profit no matter how barbaric and monstrous one’s pre-Trump resume had been. That’s why it seems normal, reasonable, and credible that the very same people now demanding that lists of Trump supporters be compiled so as to ensure permanent ostracization themselves justified, advocated for, implemented and presided over crimes far worse than the Trump administration got close to committing.}

In other words on the reversal. What we have going on here is another erasure of history to that of the Reagan era. If you have followed my post of Robert Parry's work from Consortium News, his coverage of Reagan and Bush Sr. tying them to crimes during the Iran-Contra scandal, the MSCM in that time wouldn't allow his work to be published out of fears of retribution. And others along with him. Which ultimately lead him to leaving MSCM and creating Consortium News, the first Internet news source. If you take a look back to the beginning of the Iraq war where a number of long time good investigative journalist were displaying a dissenting opinion on that war, many were either ball and chained to the establishment line, fired, or virtually forced to leave on their own accord. Chris Hedges and Rick Sanchez off the top of my head. And hell, even Michele Greenstein who left the Rick Sanchez show and RT who now writes for one of my top news sources The Grayzone claiming RT has moved to far right for her under new management. !When you have "left leaning news" bringing in "known right commentators" question more! Or vise versa. As the Reagan era marched in, his first agenda was to erase the history of Vietnam through a program of perception management [consortiumnews.com] in which this cycle continues to hold our society captive to their crimes and unethical practices.

{But this entire narrative is complete and utter bullshit: blatantly so. There is nothing done by the Trump administration that can be rationally characterized as a radical aberration, some dramatic break, from U.S. tradition. Quite the contrary: none of Trump’s actions and policies are in some new universe of savagery, lawlessness, or radicalism when compared to those who preceded him in power.}

{They invented new theories of secrecy to hide virtually everything they did and, worse, to bar courts from subjecting their actions to legal or constitutional scrutiny. Josh Marshall’s entire career is based on a well-documented claim that the Bush White House and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired U.S. Attorneys who were investigating their own associates, including those of Karl Rove. The Obama administration prosecuted more whistleblowers and sources under the 1917 Espionage Act — enacted by Woodrow Wilson to criminalize dissent from U.S. involvement in World War I — than all prior presidents combined.}

But we didn't hear anything about that as the MSCM attacked Trump with accusations of the same nature. Why? Because it's all window dressing. All one needs to do is look back on the relationship between Trump and Graham. Up down and now really up.

{Talk about lawlessness and authoritarianism. As I wrote in The Washington Post shortly before Trump was inaugurated, the Bush and Obama administrations “detained terrorism suspects without due process, proposed new frameworks to keep them locked up without trial, targeted thousands of individuals (including a U.S. citizen) for execution by drone, invoked secrecy doctrines to shield torture and eavesdropping programs from judicial review, and covertly expanded the nation’s mass electronic surveillance.” Indeed, Trump was able to campaign on, and then implement, escalated bombing campaigns that killed large numbers of civilians because the bipartisan framework had been laid over the prior two presidencies that empowered that.}

Now all this is in the hands of Biden. As our presence grows in Africa in which we are receiving little to no information on as it is. I'm betting he and his hawks are anxious as hell to get into the Ethiopia area. We're probably the backbone of the strife going on there now.

{If immigration abuses are to be the primary metric for determining unprecedented evil, one must also account for the fact that “Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] has deported more immigrants [in 2019] than any full fiscal year of Donald Trump's presidency, but it has yet to reach [Deporter-in-Chief] Barack Obama's early deportation levels.” And then one must compare those border abuses to the due-process-free and human-rights-abusing hellholes of Guantanamo, Bagram and other places opened by the Bush administration and maintained and defended by the Obama administration to imprison people for years if not longer with no due process rights of any kind.}

Failure to collectively observe and recognize each parties actions, to keep ourselves educated on a meaningful political scale, is a sure path to a failed voting process geared towards assuring a hidden agenda. This is the type of education the MSCM offers our citizenry. One that assures a societal failure towards benefiting only the ruling class.

{Those who have most loudly and aggressively insisted that Trump’s evils stand alone are, coincidentally or not, those who have stood to profit the most from perpetuating this ahistorical mythology. It has allowed them to deceive many into believing that their hands are as clean as their conscience, even though the huge amounts of blood will never be washed away, no matter how many green rooms they are welcomed in, or how much #Resistance cash they raise, or how melodramatic and hyperbolic is their denunciation of the Trump years.}