Light It Up by James Howard Kunstler

It must be hard on The New York Times editors to set their hair on fire day after day in their effort to start World War Three. Today’s lead story, Russian Threat on Two Fronts Meets Strategic Void in the U.S., aims to keep ramping up twin hysterias over a new missile gap and fear of Russian “meddling” in the 2018 midterm elections.

The Times’s world-view begins to look like the script of a Batman sequel with Vlad Putin cast in The Joker role of the cackling psychopath who must be stopped at all costs! America’s generals have switched on the Batman signal beacon, but Donald Trump in the role of the Caped Crusader, merely dithers and broods in the splendid isolation of his 1600 Penn Avenue Bat Cave, suffering yet another of his endless bipolar identity crises. For God’s sake, The Times, shrieks, do something! The Russians are coming! (Gotham City’s Chief of Police Hillary said exactly that last week in a Tweet!)

I think they misunderstood Mr. Putin’s recent message when he announced a new hypersonic missile technology that would, supposedly, cut through any imaginable US missile defense. The actual message, for the non mental defectives left in this drooling idiocracy of a republic, was as follows: Nuclear war remains unthinkable, so kindly stop thinking about it.

Mr. Putin’s other strategic position is also misrepresented — actually, not even acknowledged — in Monday’s NYT propaganda blast, namely, to discourage the USA’s decades-long policy of regime change here, there, and everywhere on the planet, creating a debris trail of one failed state after another. As a true-blue American, I must say these are two admirable propositions. Is it fatuous to add that atomic war is unlikely to benefit anyone? Or that the world has had enough of US military “meddling” in foreign lands?

Of course the shopworn trope of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election still occupies the center ring of the American political circus. Today’s Times story includes another clumsy attempt to set up expectations that the 2018 midterm elections will be hacked by Russia, in order to keep the hysteria at code-red level. As usual, the proposition assumes that the alleged 2016 hacking is both proven and significant when, going on two years, there is no evidence of hacking besides the obviously amateurish Facebook troll farm. (And, by the way, how does that compare to the USA’s 2014 covert toppling of Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych?) Talk about “meddling!”

…[I]n public statements in recent weeks, Mr. Trump’s top intelligence officials have conceded that the president has yet to discuss strategies with them to prevent the Russians from interfering in the midterm elections this year. Mr. Trump has expressed severe doubts that the Russians meddled in 2016, contradicting the conclusions of his intelligence officials.

By inference, The New York Times has no doubts that the 2016 election was fatally hacked to defeat its preferred candidate — though there is plenty of reason to suppose that the entire Russian “meddling” story was a mendacious psyops product of John O. Brennan’s CIA. It was only a few months ago that The Times and the cable news networks were shrieking about the White House National Security Advisor (General Flynn) being caught speaking with the Russian Ambassador — as if foreign ambassadors come here for some reason other than to keep open communication lines with American officials.

What’s going on here makes the Red Scare of 1920 and the McCarthy episode of the early 1950s look sedate in comparison. It’s reasonable to suppose that officials in any foreign country watching the dismal ongoing spectacle here would conclude that the United States has lost its mind. Somebody please take us to the hydrotherapy chamber!

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New Paintings by JHK 2016 — 2017