John Bolton

A review of my article on Donald J. Trump written on the eve of the 2016 U.S. election, previewing this one

I shall attempt to briefly review the article I wrote on the eve of the last U.S. presidential election in 2016, and see how my expectations of candidate Trump compare with president Trump. It was difficult to understand why I titled it "There is none that calleth upon justice, neither is there any one that judgeth truly...". However, it didn't take me long to realise that I was in the phase of titling all my articles after Bible quotes. That didn't last long, sadly, but I might well pick it up again.

The quotes seem to have been directed at the U.S. bishops, for their attempts to muddy what should have been quite a clear option between a candidate who professed a preference for very many good things and had no intrinsic evils in his campaign platform, and one who promised all sorts of intrinsic evils in her campain, with none of the goods that Trump had.

Everything I wrote about Hillary Clinton applies equally to Joe Biden, except with Biden we have the extra scandal of him being Catholic. He is, of course, not Catholic in any meaningful sense, but as he has not been excommunicated and was baptised Catholic, we have to live with the fact that he can identify as such, as indeed can Bergoglio. That is what makes both Biden's and Bergoglio's preferences for perversions and evils that much more condemnable, and damnable.

In the article was a list of top 10 reasons to vote for Donald J. Trump. He won the elections, as it turned out. I rather expected him to do it, and truth be told I am even more confident that he will win it this time, once again defying the polls which seem even more fake this time than they did the last. As little enthuasiasm as there was for Clinton, there virtually none for Biden. At least she had the novelty of being the first female presidential candidate. With Biden, all they can muster is "At least he's not Trump." I do not dismiss that those who hate Trump do it fervently, but it is difficult to see how it translates into waiting in line possibly for hours, and possibly in the rain, in order to vote for a man one more than likely finds distasteful. In just over a day or so, we shall see if the disgust for Trump among the anti-Trumper's translates into votes for creey Joe and his ghoulish running mate.

For full disclosure, I must preface this by writing that I am not a particularly big fan of Donald Trump, though I do find him amusing. I am definitely not a NeverTrumper, but nor am I an AlwaysTrumper. I am, however, a NeverBiden, and cannot fathom what would ever possess me to vote for a man as morally distasteful as Biden. In other words, I think I can offer a relatively dispassionate analysis of Trump's record.

So, what will follow is a walk-through of my 10 points with grades on how right I was compared to Donald Trump's actual record. Given Trump's erratic nature and lack of interest in details, it can be difficult to know just how much blame or credit we can give him for his record. Still, he appoints his underlings and signs off on the checks, the bombings and the priorities. His record belongs to him, and if nothing else, it allows us to see where his priorities lie, whether he has met success in his endeavours or not.

The points will be in bold text, with the score next, and the analysis below. Mind you, this is an analysis of how I predicted, or thought I understeood, candidate Trump's versus how president Trump has actually done. Of course, my analysis has do do with his campaign pledges, so it cannot be entirely divorced from what he actually pledged, but still, it is not a grade of how president Trump has succeeded versus some impeccable standard of perfection.

1. Donald Trump  is not a career politician. He is a man who has built a fortune on hard work and taking risks, and done a good job at it. In fact, he has managed doing what I would argue 99.999% of the world wants to do in a much better way than 99.999% of the world has managed. (7/10)

More of a statement of fact than anything else and hardly gradeable. I would define a career politician as someone willing to do anything and rid himself of any principle to get to the very top, regardless of whether it is good for his country or not. That would score a 0, so 7/10 means I think Trump has not behaved as a career politican would. Sadly, however, on many of the big decisions - big banking, military-industrial complex, continuing wars - he has toed the line of the political schemers.

He has still managed to incur the wrath of many of the right people, and often by being unconventional, so I'll give him a pretty high grade and conclude that I was right in claiming that he didn't behave as a career politican.

2. The man seems genuine. When he speaks, one gets the impression that he means what he says, and not that he is saying it because pollsters told him it would be good to do so. (5/10)

If Trump had not shut the country down in March, he would probably have got an 8 on this point. However, shutting down a country on account of a 'pandemic' he obviously did not believe was going around simply because he thought it more politically expedient to do so will in many ways come to become his defining moment - at least of his first term, if he should lose the re-election bid.

The one good thing about Trump is that he is not a particularly convincing liar when reading off a script. It has therefore been quite easy...

A psychopathic warmonger is fired and virtually everybody is happy, except...

It has always amazed me just how wrong EWTN seems to get pretty much every news piece they report about. It's almost impressive.

EWTN is, of course, part of the problem in the Church because it has been a mouthpiece for NOChurch at least for as long as I have been watching them. However, its  views on most other issues are also misinformed. 

Perhaps I have an inkling for a mild form of broadcast self-flagellation, but I do watch some of their news from time to time. It is not one of my proudest boasts, but I also do subsribe to their YouTube channel where I am constantly bombarded with 'fake news from a NOChurch americanist perspective'.

Their reporting on Church matters misses the mark most often on account of omission, simply ignoring more obvious angles to front some viewpoint only NOChurch agents can find. When it comes to U.S. domestic policies, they are pretty much like Fox News, except they are anti-abortion and they cover more of what has been called the 'life issues', but they will generally hit and miss in roughly the same way. It is when they report on international politics that they miss the mark most, and that their reporting often veers into lies of commision, not unlike any of the mainstream press, it must be stressed. 

As most know by now, the arch-warmonger of the Trump administration - John Bolton - was fired, or quit, whatever the case may be. All the same virtually everybody was happy with this because they saw in him a man whose solution to everything seemed to be lobbing a few missiles, or starving a population. Even on Fox News there was jubilation - largely from Tucker Carlson, who is pretty much the only anti-warmonger on mainstream American television, but still. It had not occured to me that there would be mainsream 'Catholics' who would be against his fiering until I turned on EWTN.

There I was treated to this horrible show:

I still remember when he was hired. A lot of the people who voted in Trump saw it as a form of betrayal for Trump to appoint a man who has been directly responsible for much of the decision-making surrounding the 2nd Iraq war, which Trump had in a round-about way complained about while on the campaign trail.

They brought in someone who informed us that Bolton was a "great pick", I believe was the exact phrasing. It was a black woman, I remember. Normally, race would not be an issue, but I found it odd that they chose her to laud the pick of this warmonger, suspecting they did it to ease the optics given that the Trump administration (wrongly) and the neocons (not without justification) have been accused of being racists.

I should, in fairness, not have been surprised by their love-fest for Bolton upon his dismissal given how they covered his appointment, and given that EWTN is pretty much a warmongering neocon station. I normally call it Fox News for people with rosaries, or who don't mind them. They claim to present news "from a Catholic perspective", apart from any news which have anything to do with "just war", the inviolability of human life outside U.S. shores or such issues. Still, I must admit I was not expecting them to leap to his defence.

Now, some might argue that I only saw one piece of possibly many, some of which may have been anti-Bolton, and this may indeed be true. However, how we choose to present ourselves says a lot about us. If they did other critical pieces, they did not want these saved for posterity on the Internet. EWTN purposely chose to upload a piece which lamented that the Trump administration has lost a man who seemingly has never seen a war he didn't like. That says a lot, and frankly, it says all that is relevant on this issue.

If EWTN wants to propagate for war then "who am I to judge"? However, I resent most that they choose to front themselves as "news from a Catholic perspective". Never once , for instance, have I ever heard them discussing the most Catholic concept of the "just war doctrine". Their reporting on Iran is almost always uninformed when it is not outright lies, as can be evidenced in this clip. Iran kept its end of the nuclear agreementt, for instance, something which even the U.S. deep state apparatus confirmed, along with all other international organisations.

They make it clear to me why Catholics in the U.S. are so misinformed about the world at large. For instance, I have seen many reports from then on Syria, and not once have they ever mentioned that the U.S. has been working alongside Islamists to oust Assad - frequently presenting the U.S. as caring for Syrian lives. Even worse, not once have they ever mentioned - in the reports I have seen - that the Catholic and Orthodox bishops of Syria have condemned the Western intervention and are fully behind Assad. 

Here we have Catholics going out of their way to stay out of mainstream media lies, only to come to a neocon operation fronting itself as Catholic. 

It is profoundly sad that they have chosen to mislead Catholics and the only mitigating factor I can allow for is the possibility that they do this out of extreme ignorance and not out of sheer malice. 

Still, it is ignorance which obviously crosses into being sinful. The Roman Catechism is, after all, keen to stress that one  lies if one says something false believing it is true, but having been neglegent of finding out the actual truth. In other words, they have an obligation towards justice and truth to find out the actual truth instead of misleading their viewers, even if we accept the charitable notion that they misninform by accident, which I obviously do not.

 ...

Pages

Subscribe to John Bolton