U.S. coups

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...

The gullibility of Catholics when presented with false opposition continues to horrify me

There has recently been a coup in Bolivia. If you only get your information from more established news sources, or even most Catholic alternative sources, you are probably under the opinion that it was an overthrow by the people of a violent government, instead of a military coup.  You are mistaken.

I had certainly heard of the protests in Bolivia for a while but I did not expect them to lead to the overthrow of the government. It took me quite some time after the coup to realise that it was actually a military coup the likes of which the U.S. had unsuccessfully attempted to implement in Venezuela, but which bore much greater success in Bolivia when the army issued what essentially was an ultimatum to Evo Morales: Resign or be removed, or worse.

It shocks me not one bit that the established media has carried the line of the U.S. government - selling state ideology being its primary role, with the choice of whether to use a leftist or rightist lens seemingly being the only one left open to debate. What has shocked me is how positively the news of a military coup, the violent consequences of which are ongoing, has been received by Catholics who should know better. I am not talking about EWTN types, who get their news from Fox News in Catholic drag, but from those who at first hand don't seem to swallow every government lie unquestioningly.

As anybody familiar with Evo Morales will know, he is the source of the infamous communist crucifix with which Bergoglio was gifted on his state visit to Bolivia, I would presume. I believe Morales has also been at the Vatican a few times. He is the first elected indigenous president of Bolivia, or so I have been informed. I have also been informed that Bolivia is about 60% 'indigenous' - i.e., the majority - with most of the rest presumably being either wholly or partially of Spanish descent. He was a 'populist' figure in the true sense of the word, as proved by his multiple election victories. He had just won his 4th term, reportedly with the required margin of more than 10% which prevents a candidate having to have a run-off election. Under his rule, the levels of poverty drastically reduced and the native population of Bolivia was left much better off, in a country which had experienced one of  the  highest rates of economic growth in South America under his leadership, if not the very best. In other words, we cannot accuse him of having failed his base, unlike many other populists, some of whom are quite popular with Catholics right now.

Those are the facts. Now comes the conjecture.

I do now know whether the man is Catholic. Nothing of his public behaviour has implied to me that he is - his close relationship with Bergoglio would naturally imply that he is not Catholic, but he may well be. I do not know anything about Bolivia's record on the rights of the unborn, nor of Morales' stance on killing or saving them, and I have not bothered to look it up as it is not relevant to this piece. He is said to have lost a referendum on running for a 4th term yet ran anyway as the ban was ruled unconstitutional by the high court - or something to that effect. Regardless of that, his victory margin was well in line with the vast majority of polls ( I have read figures of 5/6 from one source). Whatever people may have felt at the time of the referendum, that he would win the presidential election seems to have not been in any doubt.

It is widely assumed that the CIA was behind this coup, and I have not come across anyone - for or against - who even questions this assertion. The fact that Donald Trump - himself somewhat of a victim of a CIA coup attempt - was one of the first to congratulate the new junta in charge, and the fact that Juan Gaido - the self-appointed president of Venezuela, a CIA stooge - also joined in should be enough to alleviate any doubts about who was behind it.

One would expect Catholics who claim to be against globalism and in favour of nationalism and populism to support a man who was obviously popular in his own country, and who had obviously improved the economic conditions of the poorest sections of his country. Yet, that is not what seems to have happened. Here is where the dreaded pachamama comes in.

It has been reported that one of the leaders of the coup declared “Pachamama will never return”, which was evidently enough to get Catholics on the bandwagon . Then we had the self-declared president posing with what seems to be to be a liturgical book and what is reported to be the Gospels, and that was enough for others to give jump over to her side. Even Gloria.tv, which is generally against americanist interventions and American imperialism, has not criticised what is obviously an externally-orchestrated coup and has reported on the anti-Pachamama statements and the holding-the-Gospels show without much question or suspicion.

It seems that Catholics, even those against NOChurch, are quite easily fooled. All you need to do is utter some words against pagan statues, and hold a liturgical book, and all of a sudden you will have even battle-hardened Catholics jumping for a coup like a bitch in heat. To me though, the ostentatious anti-paganism is in and of itself a mark of the whole thing being plotted from abroad.

What seems obvious to me is that the coup plotters would have been following what happened at the syond of the Amazon. They would know that a lot of Catholics would have been against pachamama. They would have known that it was a trending word so they had one of their guys stand in front of a camera and say something against...

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