Is Trump Complicit in Attacks?

Donald Trump Is A Swine
Donald Trump Is A Swine.

Look, I hope this is not true, and just a figment of my febrile, over-caffeinated mind, but think about this: how many times has a politician or public figure made a huge deal about something that later it turned out they themselves were doing? How many televangelists railing against homosexuality have later been outed as gay? How many times has a teabagger made a claim that really was about themselves? How many times did Bill Cosby criticize fornicators?

After reading Jane Mayer’s piece on Trump and his machinations and duplicitous personality, is it really so far fetched of an idea that Donald Trump and some of his mobster friends are hiring or manipulating hitmen to target police? I would not be shocked to find evidence of this in 2020 or even sooner. 

Last month, as the nation was grieving the mass murder of 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, offered his own analysis of what had led the gunman, Omar Mateen, to open fire. “We’re led by a man who is very—look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump said , theorizing as to the real reason President __Barack Obama has not used the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” “There’s something going on.” Those four words returned again this week in the wake of another tragedy—this time, the killing of three police officers by a black shooter in Baton Rouge over the weekend—when the billionaire recycled the same phrase to hint yet again that the Democratic president of the United States might have somehow been involved.

“YOU JUST LOOK AT THE BODY LANGUAGE AND THERE IS SOMETHING GOING ON, THERE IS SOMETHING GOING ON.”

“I watch the president and sometimes the words are okay but you just look at the body language and there is something going on, there is something going on,” Trump said Monday in an interview with “Fox and Friends,” when asked to comment on the assertion made by Steve Loomis, the head of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, that Obama has “blood on his hands” in the aftermath of the Baton Rouge shooting and another attack by a black gunman on police in Dallas earlier this month. Pressed to explain what he meant, Trump continued, “There is just a bad feeling, a lot of bad feeling about him.”

While the real-estate mogul has long played into right-wing conspiracy theories about the nation’s first black president, Trump’s racial dog whistle has in recent weeks grown louder and more explicit. In June, after Trump came under fire for suggesting that Obama didn’t use the term “radical Islamic terror” because he sympathizes with America’s enemies, the G.O.P. nominee revoked The Washington Post’s press credentials for what he called a “dishonest” headline about his comments. Shortly thereafter, however, he doubled down on his insinuation by tweeting a Breitbart story in support of his outlandish claims.

(click here to continue reading Trump Again Suggests that Obama Is Complicit in Attacks | Vanity Fair.)

Just saying I hope it isn’t true because police shouldn’t be pawns in Donald Trump’s vanity campaign for emperor. 

What Is a False Flag Attack

I have nothing to add to the discussion re: the horrible events at the Boston Marathon, so I’ll echo what Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

United States of Peace
United States of Peace

I did wonder what the phrase: false flag attack meant. The right-wing nut jobs accuse the government of setting the bombs off for whatever twisted reason the nut jobs came up with. Seems ludicrous to you and me, but then we are sane. 

Philip Bump of the Atlantic explains:

What is a “false flag” attack?

The term originates with naval warfare. For centuries, ships have sailed under a flag identifying their nationality. During times of war, ships would sometimes change the national flag they flew in order to fool other vessels that they sought to attack or escape from. They would fly, in other words, a “false flag.” The term then expanded to mean any scenario under which a military attack was undertaken by a person or organization pretending to be something else.

What the questioner was asking, then, was: Did the United States government orchestrate this attack, pretending to be a terrorist organization of some sort, in order to justify expanded security powers?

Is There Historical Precedent for Such a Move by a Government?

There is.

The most famous example, however, is contentious. Conspiracy theorists (of which there are a lot in America) often suggest that the 1933 fire at the Reichstag in Berlin was a “false flag” operation by the Nazis to consolidate power and undermine the Communist Party. This is still a subject of debate among historians, some of whom think the man convicted of the crime, Marinus van der Lubbe, was actually responsible. In 1998, a German court exonerated van der Lubbe.

The nexus of fascist government manipulation and phony disasters has proven difficult for theorists to resist. Following most attacks similar to Monday’s bombings, there have been accusations that they serve as a tool of government oppression.

For example, the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary were quickly labeled a “false flag” operation by conspiracy theorists, the implication being that the Obama administration wanted to use the tragedy to tighten gun restrictions. If that was the president’s goal, the Senate wasn’t on board with it.

(click here to continue reading What Is a ‘False Flag’ Attack, and What Does Boston Have to Do with This? – Philip Bump – The Atlantic Wire.)

I guess I knew what that meant after all, just didn’t know the exact historically accurate phrase. I truly doubt the government decided to use Boston marathon runners as fodder in expanding the War on Terror, or the War on Gold, or whatever the nut jobs are speculating about.

Flag

From Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon:

On his radio show, Jones speculated that it may have to do with the sudden drop in the price of gold, a favorite commodity of paranoids everywhere. “With gold plunging, what could this signify?” he asked rhetorically. He also noted that Boston has special significance in American history, and because it’s where one of the planes took off from on 9/11. “I said on air that they’re getting ready to blow something up. To fire a shot heard round the world like at Lexington and Concord, and then they do it at this same place on the same day!” he said.

As Alex Altman of Time noted on Twitter, “Today is Patriots’ Day, which has significance for militia movement. McVeigh bombed Murrah Bldg on Patriots’ Day in 1995.” Patriots’ Day, a civil holiday in Massachusetts, commemorates those battles outside Boston that sparked the American Revolution. The holiday is now celebrated on the third Monday of April, though the battles actually took place on April 19, meaning the two dates are often conflated.

In addition to the Oklahoma City Bombing, which occurred on the 19th, the date also coincides with the deadly raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. As John Avalon wrote for the Daily Beast in 2010, the day has “emerged as a ‘Hatriot’ holiday for some anti-government activists and militia groups.”

This year, Patriots’ Day also falls on Tax Day, another important date for right-wing extremists. For all these reasons, Jones predicted that while “they might blame it on the Muslims, they’re going to blame it on the Tea Party.”

(click here to continue reading Alex Jones: Boston explosion a government conspiracy – Salon.com.)

Reading Around on November 3rd through November 4th

A few interesting links collected November 3rd through November 4th:

  • Fluidr / photos and videos sorted randomly – A random assortment of my photos (via Chicago Sage)
  • The Paranoid Style in American Politics – Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, pp. 77-86.It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.
  • Authoritarians, pt 2: the Problem Broadly Outlined | Cogitations – How is it that Bush and Cheney could take us to war in Iraq with constantly shifting rationales, unleash the NSA to spy on the country at large, and with the aid of foot soldiers like John Yoo cobble together shoddy legal findings as flimsy justification for torture and other abuses of executive power?

Reading Around on July 21st through July 30th

A few interesting links collected July 21st through July 30th:

  • caravaggio-bacchus-1596.jpg
  • The Nichepaper and the Failure of the Fourth Estate – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org – “Where was the fourth estate when our political, economic, and social institutions were being systematically dismantled? What has happened to our economy parallels what Mugabe did to Zimbabwe. Was the fourth estate asleep while this happened? Like other power brokers, it was negligent — and, perhaps worse, complicit.If newspapers had protected the public interest like they were meant to, they would be more profitable. Everyone would be better off today — including newspapers — if newspapers had chronicled this transfer of value. Yet, by failing to protect the public interest, they helped create the conditions for the transfer of value away from people who do stuff, to people who speculate on stuff.”
  • hypnotism-0250-pg1.jpg
  • Plagiarism Checkers: 5 Free Websites To Catch The Copycats – “The use of this rooster of article plagiarism checking apps should be enough to make us all tread on the side of caution and keep our creative spirits intact. If you write (or publish)…do you check? Let us know.” Image: swanksalot
  • Go `Birthers’ go! – Medved has been quoted as saying that Birthers are “crazy, nutburger, demagogue, money-hungry, exploitative, irresponsible, filthy conservative imposters” and “the worst enemy of the conservative movement.” The “movement “makes us look weird. It makes us look crazy. It makes us look demented. It makes us look sick, troubled, and not suitable for civilized company.”

    Shhhh.

    If you know any Birthers, please encourage them in their efforts and don’t, whatever you do, show them these Web links (call it a Nutburgerbliography):