TBR News February 6, 2019
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8
Washington, D.C. February 6, 2019:” The Rapture is a term most commonly used to describe an event in certain systems of Christian eschatology (study of the end times) whereby all true Christians are taken from Earth by God into Heaven.
Although almost all forms of Christianity believe that those who are “saved” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, the term “rapture” is usually applied specifically to those theories saying that “Christians alive before the end of the world will be taken into heaven,” and there will be an intermediate time frame where non-Christians will be still left on earth before Christ arrives to set up his earthly kingdom.
The word “Rapture” is not found in the Bible. There is also no single word used by the numerous biblical authors to describe the prophetic factors which comprise the doctrine. Roman Catholics and nearly all of the main-line Protestants do not accept the concept of a rapture in which some are “taken up into Heaven” before the end of the world; this idea did not exist in the teachings of any Christians whatsoever until the late18th, and early 19th centuries, so it cannot be said to belong to Apostolic Tradition.
The legend of the Rapture is not mentioned in any Christian writings, until after the year 1830. Whether the early writers were Greek or Latin, Armenian or Coptic, Syrian or Ethiopian, English or German, orthodox or heretic, no one mentioned a syllable about it. Of course, those who feel the origin of the teaching is in the Bible would say that it only ceased being taught (for some unknown reason) at the close of the apostolic age only to reappear in 1830 But if the doctrine were so clearly stated in Scripture, it seems incredible that no one should have referred to it before the 19th and early 20th century.
This does not, in and of itself prove conclusively that the story is wrong, but it does mean that thousands of eminent scholars who lived over a span of seventeen centuries (including some of the most astute of the religious scholars of the early Christian and, later of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods) must be considered as grossly incompetent for not having either knowledge or understanding of a teaching viewed by fringe religious groups as so central to their beliefs. This lapse of seventeen centuries when no one mentioned anything about it is certainly a serious obstacle to its reliability or its acceptance by the less credulous.”
The Table of Contents
- Democrats dismiss Trump’s call for comity as more broken promises
- Why should we fall for Donald Trump’s lofty State of the Union rhetoric of unity?
- Trump has been unimpeachable in uniting a country – in horror
- AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s Claims in State of the Union Address
- MAGA Misses the Eurasia Train
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
Democrats dismiss Trump’s call for comity as more broken promises
February 6, 2019
by Michael Scherer
Washington Post
Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said President Trump had “abandoned not just our people but our values.” Sen. Kamala D. Harris, a presidential candidate, dismissed his “insecure appeals to unity.” And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered her criticism with exasperated looks and pointed applause behind the president’s back.
Emboldened by Trump’s poor polling and the coming presidential campaign, Democrats firmly rejected his call for a bipartisan reset in his State of the Union address Tuesday, responding with fierce criticism and a dramatically different vision for the country.
The Democratic response, at times stoic and at others defiant, amounted to a statement of strength by a party that recently took back control of the House and forced Trump to back down during a 35-day partial government shutdown he had hoped would pressure Congress to fund a new wall on the southern border.
Even before Trump began speaking, Democrats had started offering their rebuttal. The party warned in a Tuesday afternoon tweet that the president’s speech would “be filled with blatant lies and broken promises.” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) predicted Trump was going to just take his annual break from “364 days of the year dividing us and sowing a state of disunion.”
It was a marked contrast in tone to Trump’s. He delivered a speech that offered few new policies or routes to compromise but nonetheless repeatedly called on Democrats to work with him. They rejected those appeals.
“The shutdown was a stunt engineered by the president of the United States, one that defied every tenet of fairness and abandoned not just our people but our values,” said Abrams, the former Georgia state House minority leader who delivered the official Democratic response. “We know bipartisanship could craft a 21st-century immigration plan, but this administration chooses to cage children and tear families apart.”
As Trump spoke, nearly a dozen declared and potential Democratic presidential candidates watched from the gallery, often unmoved during his applause lines. All of them have made clear that they believe themselves to be better suited for bringing the country together. Unable to speak at the event, they made their views known with their invites to the chamber.
Harris (D-Calif.) brought a recent victim of the California wildfires, who had been furloughed by the shutdown. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) brought a young girl from Guatemala who had been separated at the border from her mother under a rescinded Trump policy. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) brought a transgender Navy officer who could be banned from serving under a Trump order.
A few minutes into the presidential address, House Democrats offered a real-time fact check of Trump, who had arrived at the Capitol aiming to reintroduce himself as a post-partisan dealmaker.
“The agenda I will lay out this evening is not a Republican agenda or a Democrat agenda,” Trump said, before listing major policy areas like health-care prices, infrastructure and immigration. “There is a new opportunity in American politics, if only we have the courage to seize it.”
As Republicans stood to applaud, the new House majority members remained in their seats, hands at their sides. The president’s words, an offer that the White House had telegraphed with promises of “comity,” would not come to pass. The nation’s political leadership, poisoned by years of fierce disagreement, was beyond all that.
The worldviews of the two sides were so different, so poisoned by ill will, as to make the annual ritual of a prime-time address seem extraordinary. In a room familiar with the occasional distance between words and reality, Trump’s outreach sometimes appeared less like an olive branch and more like the setup for another round of recriminations over which party is to blame for political dysfunction.
Democrats, led by Pelosi, had arrived in the chamber confident of their political position and determined to transmit their disapproval of the president and their belief that many of his words carried little meaning.
When Trump declared that the “state of our union is strong,” Republicans stood and broke into “USA” chants that most Democrats did not join. Pelosi sat behind Trump and shook her head, as if in disappointment.
When Trump decried “ridiculous partisan investigations” the new Democratic House has launched, Pelosi sighed in a pantomime of exasperation. When he called for rejecting the politics of “revenge, resistance and retribution” and embracing compromise, she stood, pointed at him and applauded loudly, as if to indict him for doing what he now decried.
The only true moment of bipartisan celebration came when Trump praised the record number of women serving in Congress. Then both sides of the chamber joined in chanting “USA.” “That’s great,” Trump said.
The president did little to back away from the policies he knows his opponents decry, and he returned to the same set of talking points that led to the government shutdown, which Trump has threatened to repeat in the coming weeks. In Trump’s worldview, undocumented immigrants are a top national threat, a wall on the southern border is a necessity, and the military needed to be deployed there to protect Americans from criminals on the march.
In the Democrats’ view, the danger was personified by Trump’s behavior in office and his racially charged efforts to divide the country. The Democratic Party warned in a Tuesday afternoon tweet that the address would “be filled with blatant lies and broken promises.”
Nearly everything about the country, down to its economy, seemed in dispute Tuesday night. For years, Republicans had argued in the Obama era that improvements in economic statistics like the unemployment rate and median wages only concealed a deeper sickness in the economy that was hurting voters. Now Democrats argued the same, as Trump took credit for continued improvements.
“In Georgia and around the country, people are striving for a middle class where a salary truly equals economic security,” Abrams said. “But instead, families’ hopes are being crushed by Republican leadership that ignores real life or just doesn’t understand it.”
The State of the Union address remains one of the few traditions of the presidency fully embraced by Trump, an accomplished student of televised spectacle. Starting with his 2017 joint address to Congress, he has set aside the disruptive attitudes of his day-to-day presidency to play to the script — expressing hope, extolling unity, embracing optimism for the future.
But this time, in subtle ways, Trump seemed to acknowledge his diminished position of power after the midterm elections. In his 2017 address to both houses of Congress, he had said “A new chapter of American greatness is now beginning.” A year later, he had declared the mission well underway.
But on Tuesday, he posed the slogan that has defined his political career more as a question — uncertain and as yet unachieved.
“The decision is ours to make,” he said. “Tonight, I ask you to choose greatness.”
The Democrats, quite happy with the choices they had already made, appeared as if they had not heard him. As Vice President Pence rose to applaud, Pelosi flipped through her copy of the speech. Then, hesitantly, still sitting, she put down the paper and brought her hands softly together.
Why should we fall for Donald Trump’s lofty State of the Union rhetoric of unity?
By calling for unity and appealing to bipartisanship and compromise President Trump hit many of the right chords for a State of the Union address. Unfortunately, the life span of what he said is probably rather short.
February 6, 2019
by Michael Knigge (Washington)
DW
As in his two previous speeches before a joint session of Congress, President Trump chose to stick to the manuscript on Tuesday. And as a result Trump delivered what can be described as a fairly traditional State of the Union address instead of the typical presidential stream of consciousness that usually characterizes his speeches.
During his first address to a divided Congress, Trump did not insult or ridicule anyone, he did not threaten to annihilate a foreign country, he did not even declare a national security emergency in order to build his promised wall along the US border with Mexico. In fact, he did not even utter his campaign slogans “Make America Great Again” and “America First” once.
Instead, Trump’s speech at its core was one long call — interrupted by a fearmongering and dark passage on undocumented immigration, some Iran bashing, brief rebukes for stingy NATO allies and boasting about making them pay — to overcome partisan strife for the sake of a new national unity.
Ending the ‘stalemate’
Trump urged Congress to break the “political stalemate,” “bridge old divisions,” “heal old wounds” and to “adopt a spirit of compromise and cooperation.” Only together, went Trump’s argument to Congress, can America end the deep divisions tearing it apart. Only together can we solve the longstanding problems that plague millions of Americans like access to affordable healthcare or jobs that pay a living wage.
And guess what, Trump is right. He is right that only cooperation and compromise can overcome the political divisions in this country. He is right that lasting solutions to problems like America’s decrepit infrastructure, costly and inaccessible health care, its immigration system and many others can only be reached through bipartisan action and compromise.
The great divider
The problem is that Trump, as his record shows, is the last person who is interested in and capable of achieving real compromise. If there is anything the world has learned in his more than two years in office, it is that true compromise and bipartisanship are anathema to Trump. In fact, he has done more to divide the country than any of his recent predecessors.
Just before the speech, the New York Times reported that Trump held a private lunch for television anchors and delivered a blistering and at times personal attack on leading Democrats like Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. That’s hardly a recipe for bipartisan harmony.
A more consequential example of Trump’s unwillingness to reach compromises is just a few weeks old. Trying to force Democrats to fund his “big, beautiful wall” Trump triggered the longest government shutdown in US history regardless of the consequences his uncompromising stance had for millions of Americans.
Trump always had this “my way or the highway” approach — during his career as a real estate developer and during his time as president. Trump has said repeatedly that for him everything revolves around winning at all costs.
Tame Trump won’t last
To be sure, the words Trump spoke during his State of the Union evoked bipartisanship, unity and compromise. And to give credit where credit is due, Trump speechwriters crafted some clever and poignant bipartisan passages, for instance when Trump addressed the fact that more women serve in the new Congress than ever before. As a result some observers will probably conclude that Trump finally sounded presidential and that perhaps this speech could mark a turning point in his tenure.
Hope never dies. But let’s not again get carried away by one formal speech. According to everything we have learnt from Trump so far, the words uttered during the State of the Union do not reveal the real Trump. The real Trump is revealed daily on Twitter and by his actions, not biannually in a lofty and tame teleprompter addresses. Consequently his call for bipartisanship and compromise may last only until his next tweet.
Trump has been unimpeachable in uniting a country – in horror
The US president was wasting time in his second State of the Union speech, he just wants to talk about Trump
February 6, 2019
by Richard Wolffe
The Guardian
Just one year ago, Donald Trump stood in front of an exhausted nation to deliver a pick-me-up of bipartisan love.
Yes, several thousand Americans had just died after his botched recovery in Puerto Rico. Yes, he was kowtowing to the Kremlin and kneecapping the FBI. But why, he wondered, can’t we just get along?
“It is not enough to come together only in times of tragedy,” he lamented. “Tonight, I call up on all of us to set aside our differences, to seek out common ground, and to summon the unity we need to deliver for the people we were elected to serve.”
Trump’s leadership has been utterly flawless on this front. You might even say unimpeachable.
In the last 12 months, he has brought Washington together in horror by separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents and detaining thousands more in secret prisons. He has dismayed both sides of Congress by bragging about a government shutdown that began while his party controlled the whole ball game. Republicans and Democrats alike stood aghast as he cozied up to North Korea, forced out his respected defense secretary, and pathetically petted Vladimir Putin.
He has never wavered from setting aside his calls to set aside our differences. He has resolutely failed to seek out common ground. And his idea of unity is to rally as many old white men as he can find on a golf course.
After Democrats took control of the House in the biggest mid-term landslide in decades, Trump has united the country to the point where a clear majority won’t even consider voting for his reelection next year.
It’s reassuring to know that the climate may change, the economy may tip into recession, but Trump’s entirely empty calls for comity go on year after year. It’s almost as if his speechwriters aren’t reading his tweets.
“Together, we can break decades of political stalemate,” Trump declared on Tuesday night, after breaking the spirits of so many federal workers with his self-imposed stalemate over his imaginary border wall.
“We can bridge old divisions, heal old wounds, build new coalitions, forge new solutions, and unlock the extraordinary promise of America’s future. The decision is ours to make.”
Sadly Trump himself made his own decision earlier on Tuesday when he called Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, a “nasty son of a bitch”. Perhaps that counted as a new wound to be healed at some indeterminate point in the future. At next year’s state of the union, quite possibly.
Those comments came at the president’s traditional lunch with news anchors. So it was an entirely confidential attempt to build new coalitions, forge new solutions, etc.
If Trump didn’t have such obvious trouble breathing through his nose, you might say this state of the union was breathtaking.
After losing so many children at the border, turning away so many asylum seekers, and distorting immigration law into a tool of punishment, Trump had the chutzpah to say: “We have a moral duty to create an immigration system that protects the lives and jobs of our citizens.”
Moral duty are the words that will surely be carved into the opening paragraph of his obituary. Along with words such as “failure” and “complete absence”.
“No issue better illustrates the divide between America’s WORKING CLASS and America’s POLITICAL CLASS than illegal immigration,” he said with the kind of rhetorical flourish that would have made Demosthenes cry. “Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards.”
This counts a zinger on Planet Trump. If a doorman is good enough for Trump Tower, why not place doormen all along the southern border? There really is nothing quite as down to earth as a populist billionaire.
Trump was sorely in need of more zingers on Tuesday, if not a pile of crushed amphetamine. He was, in his own words, extraordinarily low energy.
He halted at the end of every half-line as if surprised by the phrases and policies that followed. Almost like he was reading the speech from his prompter for the first time. Almost like he’s spent the last year watching cable television and rage tweeting instead of bringing people together or boning up about policy.
His hand gestures were expansive in ways that his policies obviously aren’t. His words were elastic in ways that his mind obviously isn’t.
Without a trace of irony, he insisted he would not shy away from those who threaten the Jewish people. “We must never ignore the vile poison of anti-Semitism, or those who spread its venomous creed,” said the man who described the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville as some very fine people.
The only life in the speech came from the split decision on the faces of the two people seated behind him. Vice-president Mike Pence smiled with all the sincerity that his android builders had hardwired into his circuit boards. House speaker Nancy Pelosi puckered up like she was enduring a full gallon of fresh lemons.
The Trump doctrine, such as it is, found its fullest expression in the carefully crafted – and sometimes rhythmically rhyming – phrases that tripped and slipped from Trump’s lips. Channeling his inner Charlie Sheen, and as much tiger blood as courses through his veins he insisted “America is winning each and every day”.
But wait. There are clouds on the horizon: strange celestial illuminations that portend no good. They could imperil us all, or perhaps just those among us who go by the name of Trump.
“An economic miracle is taking place in the United States – and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics, or ridiculous partisan investigations,” said the Trump patriarch. “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.”
As rhyming slogans go, this is notch below “BUILD A WALL & CRIME WILL FALL!” But in terms of proto-national emergencies, Mueller’s many-headed investigations and indictments are far more pressing to this president than the one he’s faking at the border.
Which helps explain his curious choice of guest: a schoolboy who shares his last name and has been sadly mistreated by his school friends as a result. The whole schtick about inviting guests to a state of the union is to open the aperture to the world outside. In Trump’s case, the world outside extends to people with the same name suffering from his own reputation.
Let’s face it. The state of the union bores President Trump as much as he bored us while delivering it. All that time wasted talking about the state of the union, when he really wanted to talk about the state of Trump. Perhaps he could rebrand it in time for his final delivery next year.
AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s Claims in State of the Union Address
WASHINGTON —
The Associated Press is fact-checking remarks from President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech. Here’s a look at some of the claims we’ve examined:
MIDDLE EAST WARS
TRUMP: “Our brave troops have now been fighting in the Middle East for almost 19 years.”
THE FACTS: Trump exaggerated the length of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan began in October 2001, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The invasion of Iraq was in March 2003. The U.S. has been at war for a bit more than 17 years.
Also, he refers to fighting in the Middle East. Iraq is in the Middle East, but Afghanistan is in south and central Asia.
FOOD STAMPS
TRUMP, describing progress over the last two years: “Nearly 5 million Americans have been lifted off food stamps.”
THE FACTS: The number of people receiving food stamps actually hasn’t declined that much.
Government data show there were 44.2 million people participating in the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program in 2016, before Trump took office. In 2018, there were 40.3 million people participating in SNAP. That’s a decline of 3.9 million, not the 5 million that Trump talked about.
The number of people participating in the SNAP program peaked in 2013 and has been going down since that time.
Trump’s last budget proposed cutting SNAP by $213 billion over 10 years. The administration also has been pushing to give states more flexibility in implementing the program, including tightening work requirements for recipients.
BORDER WALL
TRUMP: “These (border) agents will tell you where walls go up, illegal crossings go way, way down … San Diego used to have the most illegal border crossings in our country. In response, a strong security wall was put in place. This powerful barrier almost completely ended illegal crossings … Simply put, walls work and walls save lives.”
THE FACTS: It’s a lot more complicated than that.
Yes, Border Patrol arrests in the San Diego sector plummeted 96 percent from nearly 630,000 in 1986 to barely 26,000 in 2017, a period during which walls were built. But the crackdown pushed illegal crossings to less-patrolled and more remote Arizona deserts, where thousands died in the heat. Arrests in Tucson in 2000 nearly matched San Diego’s peak.
Critics say the “water-balloon effect” — build a wall in one spot and migrants will find an opening elsewhere — undermines Trump’s argument, though proponents say it only demonstrates that walls should be extended.
The Government Accountability Office reported in 2017 that the U.S. has not developed metrics that demonstrate how barriers have contributed to border security.
TARIFFS
TRUMP: “We recently imposed tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods — and now our treasury is receiving billions of dollars.”
THE FACTS: This is misleading. Yes, money from tariffs is going into the federal treasury, but it’s largely coming from U.S. businesses and consumers. It’s not foreign countries that are paying these import taxes by cutting a check to the government.
His reference to money coming into the treasury “now” belies the fact that tariffs go back to the founding of the country. This revenue did not start with his increased tariffs on some goods from China.
Tariffs did produce $41.3 billion in tax revenues in the last budget year, according to the Treasury Department. But that is a small fraction of a federal budget that exceeds $4.1 trillion.
The tariffs paid by U.S. companies also tend to result in higher prices for consumers, which is what happened for washing machines after the Trump administration imposed import taxes.
TRADE-NAFTA
TRUMP: “Our new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement — or USMCA — will replace NAFTA and deliver for American workers: bringing back our manufacturing jobs, expanding American agriculture, protecting intellectual property, and ensuring that more cars are proudly stamped with the four beautiful words: MADE IN THE USA.”
THE FACTS: It’s unlikely to do all those things, since the new agreement largely preserves the structure and substance of NAFTA. In addition, the deal has not been ratified and its chances in Congress are uncertain.
In one new feature, the deal requires that 40 percent of cars’ contents eventually be made in countries that pay autoworkers at least $16 an hour — that is, in the United States, or Canada, but not in Mexico. It also requires Mexico to pursue an overhaul of labor law to encourage independent unions that will bargain for higher wages and better working conditions for Mexicans.
Still, just before the agreement was signed, General Motors announced that it would lay off 14,000 workers and close five plants in the United States and Canada.
Philip Levy, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a trade official in Republican President George W. Bush’s White House, says: “President Trump has seriously overhyped this agreement.”
DRUG PRICING
TRUMP: “Already, as a result of my administration’s efforts, in 2018 drug prices experienced their single largest decline in 46 years.”
THE FACTS: Trump is selectively citing statistics to exaggerate what seems to be a slowdown in prices. A broader look at the data shows that drug prices are still rising, but more moderately. Some independent experts say criticism from Trump and congressional Democrats may be causing pharmaceutical companies to show restraint.
The Consumer Price Index for prescription drugs shows a O.6 percent reduction in prices in December 2018 when compared with December 2017, the biggest drop in nearly 50 years. The government index tracks a set of medications including brand drugs and generics.
However, that same index showed a 1.6 percent increase when comparing the full 12 months of 2018 with the entire previous year.
“The annualized number gives you a better picture,” said economist Paul Hughes-Cromwick of Altarum, a nonprofit research organization. “It could be that something quirky happened in December.”
Separately, an analysis of brand-name drug prices by The Associated Press shows there were 2,712 price increases in the first half of this January, as compared with 3,327 increases during the same period last year.
The size of this year’s increases was not as pronounced. Both this year and last, the number of price cuts was minuscule. The information for the analysis was provided by the health data firm Elsevier.
WAGES
TRUMP: “Wages are rising at the fastest pace in decades, and growing for blue collar workers, who I promised to fight for, they’re growing faster than anyone else thought possible.”
THE FACTS: This is an unsupported statement because the data on hourly wages for private workers only go back to 2006, not decades.
But data on wages for production workers date back to 1939 — and Trump’s claim appears to be unfounded.
Average hourly earnings for production and non-supervisory workers are up 3.4 percent over the past year, according to the Labor Department. Those wage gains were higher as recently as early 2009. And they were averaging roughly 4 percent before the start of the Great Recession in late 2007.
There are other ways to track wage gains — and those don’t work in Trump’s favor, either.
Adjusted for inflation, median weekly wages rose just 0.6 percent in 2018. The gains in weekly wages were 2.1 percent in 2015.
MINORITY UNEMPLOYMENT
TRUMP: “African-American, Hispanic-American and Asian-American unemployment have all reached their lowest levels ever recorded.”
THE FACTS: What he’s not saying is that the unemployment rates for all three groups have gone up since reaching record low levels.
Black unemployment reached a record low, 5.9 percent, in May, but rose to 6.8 percent in January
Latino unemployment fell to 4.4 percent, its lowest ever, last October, and Asian unemployment fell to a record low of 2.2 percent in May. But Latino and Asian unemployment also have increased, in part because of the government shutdown, which elevated unemployment last month.
The African-American rate is still nearly double the jobless rate for whites, at 3.5 percent.
The most dramatic drop in black unemployment came under President Barack Obama, when it fell from a recession high of 16.8 percent in March 2010 to 7.8 percent in January 2017.
HUMAN TRAFFICKING
TRUMP: “Human traffickers and sex traffickers take advantage of the wide open areas between our ports of entry to smuggle thousands of young girls and women into the United States and to sell them into prostitution and modern-day slavery.”
THE FACTS: His administration has not supplied evidence that women and girls are smuggled by the “thousands” across remote areas of the border for these purposes. What has been established is nearly 80 percent of international trafficking victims cross through legal ports of entry, a flow that would not be stopped by a border wall.
Trump distorts how often trafficking victims come from the southern border, according the Counter-Trafficking Data Collaborative , a global hub for trafficking statistics with data contributed by organizations from around the world.
The National Human Trafficking Hotline, a venture supported by federal money and operated by the anti-trafficking group Polaris , began tracking individual victim records in 2015. From January through June 31, 2018, it tracked 35,000 potential victims. Of those, there was a near equal distribution between foreigners on one hand and U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents on the other.
Most of the labor trafficking victims were foreign, and most of the sex trafficking victims were U.S. citizens. Of foreign nationals, Mexico had the most frequently trafficked.
ECONOMY
TRUMP: “In just over two years since the election, we have launched an unprecedented economic boom _ a boom that has rarely been seen before. There’s been nothing like it. … An economic miracle is taking place in the United States.”
THE FACTS: The president is vastly exaggerating what has been a mild improvement in growth and hiring. The economy is healthy but not nearly one of the best in U.S. history.
The economy expanded at an annual rate of 3.8 percent last spring and summer, a solid pace. But it was just the fastest in four years. In the late 1990s, growth topped 4 percent for four straight years, a level it has not yet reached under Trump. And growth even reached 7.2 percent in 1984.
Almost all independent economists expect slower growth this year as the effect of the Trump administration’s tax cuts fade, trade tensions and slower global growth hold back exports, and higher interest rates make it more expensive to borrow to buy cars and homes.
WOMEN IN WORKFORCE
TRUMP, in prepared excerpts: “All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before.”
THE FACTS: Of course, there are more women working than ever before. But that’s due to population growth _ and not something that Trump can credit to any his policies.
The big question is whether a greater percentage of women is working or searching for a job than at any point in history. And on this count, women have enjoyed better times.
Women’s labor force participation rate right now is 57.5 percent, according to the Labor Department. The rate has ticked up recently, but it was higher in 2012 and peaked in 2000 at roughly 60 percent.
MAGA Misses the Eurasia Train
While China and Russia solidify their economic and political alliance, the U.S. is missing an historic chance to join a multilateral world, clinging instead to military empire,
February 4, 2019
by Pepe Escobar
Consortium News
We should know by now that the heart of the 21stCentury Great Game is the myriad layers of the battle between the United States and the partnership of Russia and China.
Even the U.S. National Defense Strategy says so: “The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by … revisionist powers.” The recently published assessment on U.S. defense implications of China’s global expansion says so too.
The clash will frame the emergence of a possibly new, post-ideological, strategic world order amidst an extremely volatile unpredictability in which peace is war and an accident may spark a nuclear confrontation.
The U.S. vs. Russia and China will keep challenging the West’s obsession in deriding “illiberalism,” a fearful, rhetorical exercise that equates Russian democracy with China’s one party rule, Iran’s demo-theocracy and Turkey’s neo-Ottoman revival.
It’s immaterial that Russia’s economy is one-tenth of China’s. From boosting trade that bypasses the U.S. dollar, to increasing joint military exercises, the Russia-China symbiosis is poised to advance beyond political and ideological affinities.
China badly needs Russian know-how in its military industry. Beijing will turn this knowledge into plenty of dual use, civilian-military innovations.
The long game indicates Russia and China will break down language and cultural barriers to lead Eurasian integration against American economic hegemony backed by military might.
One could say the Eurasian century is already upon us. The era of the West shaping the world at will (a mere blip of history) is already over. This is despite Western elite denials and fulminations against the so-called “morally reprehensible,” “forces of instability” and “existential threats.”
Standard Chartered, the British financial services company, using a mix of purchasing power exchange rates and GDP growth, has projected that the top five economies in 2030 will be China, the U.S., India, Japan and Russia. These will be followed by Germany, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey and the UK. Asia will extend its middle class as they are slowly killed off across the West.
Hop on the Trans-Eurasia Express
A case can be made that Beijing’s elites are fascinated at how Russia, in less than two decades, has returned to semi-superpower status after the devastation of the Yeltsin years.
That happened to a large extent due to science and technology. The most graphic example is the unmatched, state-of-the-art weaponry unveiled by President Vladimir Putin in his March 1, 2018 speech.
In practice, Russia and China will be advancing the alignment of China’s New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), with Russia’s Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).
There’s ample potential for a Trans-Eurasia Express network of land and maritime transport corridors to be up and running by the middle of next decade, including, for instance, road and railway bridges connecting China with Russia across the Heilongjiang River
Following serious trilateral talks involving Russia, India and Iran last November, closer attention is being paid to the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), a 7,200-km long lane mixing sea and rail routes essentially linking the Indian Ocean with the Persian Gulf through Iran and Russia and further on down the road, to Europe.
Imagine cargo transiting from all over India to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, then overland to Bandar Anzali, an Iranian port on the Caspian Sea, and then on to the Russian southern port of Astrakhan, and after that to Europe by rail. From New Delhi’s point of view, that means shipping costs reduced by up to 40 percent, and Mumbai-to-Moscow in only 20 days.
Down the line, INSTC will merge with BRI – as in Chinese-led corridors linked with the India-Iran-Russia route into a global transport network.
This is happening just as Japan is looking at the Trans-Siberian Railway – which will be upgraded throughout the next decade – to improve its connections with Russia, China and the Koreas. Japan is now a top investor in Russia and at the same time very much interested in a Korea peace deal. That would free Tokyo from massive defense spending conditioned by Washington’s rules. The EAEU free trade agreements with ASEAN can be added to that.
Especially over these past four years, Russia has also learned how to attract Chinese investment and wealth, aware that Beijing’s system mass-produces virtually everything and knows how to market it globally, while Moscow needs to fight every block in the book dreamed up by Washington.
The Huawei-Venezuela “Axis of Evil”
While Washington remains a bipartisan prisoner to the Russophobic Platonic cave – where Cold War shadows on the wall are taken as reality – MAGA is missing the train to Eurasia.
A many-headed hydra, MAGA, stripped to the bone, could be read as a non-ideological antidote to the Empire’s global adventurism. Trump, in his non-strategic, shambolic way, proposed at least in theory the return to a social contract in the U.S. MAGA in theory would translate into jobs, opportunities for small businesses, low taxes and no more foreign wars.
It’s nostalgia for the 1950s and 60s before the Vietnam quagmire and before “Made in the USA” was slowly and deliberately dismantled. What’s left are tens of trillions of national debt; a quadrillion in derivatives; the Deep State running amok; and a lot of pumped up fear of evil Russians, devious Chinese, Persian mullahs, the troika of tyranny, the Belt and Road, Huawei, and illegal aliens.
More than a Hobbesian “war of all against all” or carping about the “Western rules-based system” being under attack, the fear is actually of the strategic challenge posed by Russia and China, which seeks a return to rule by international law.
MAGA would thrive if hitched to a ride on the Eurasia integration train: more jobs and more business opportunities instead of more foreign wars. Yet MAGA won’t happen – to a large extent because what really makes Trump tick is his policy of energy dominance to decisively interfere with Russia and China’s development.
The Pentagon and the “intel community” pushed the Trump administration to go after Huawei, branded as a nest of spies, while pressuring key allies Germany, Japan and Italy to follow. Germany and Japan permit the U.S. to control the key nodes in the extremities of Eurasia. Italy is essentially a large NATO base.
The U.S. Department of Justice requested the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou from Canada last Tuesday, adding a notch to the Trump administration’s geopolitical tactic of “blunt force trauma.”
Add to it that Huawei – based in Shenzhen and owned by its workers as shareholders – is killing Apple across Asia and in most latitudes across the Global South. The real the battle is over 5G, in which China aims to upstage the U.S., while upgrading capacity and production quality.
The digital economy in China is already larger than the GDP of France or the UK. It’s based on the BATX companies (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi), Didi (the Chinese Uber), e-commerce giant JD.com and Huawei. These Big Seven are a state within a civilization – an ecosystem they’ve constructed themselves, investing fortunes in big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet. American giants – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google – are absent from this enormous market.
Moreover, Huawei’s sophisticated encryption system in telecom equipment prevents interception by the NSA. That helps account for its extreme popularity all across the Global South, in contrast to the Five Eyes (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) electronic espionage network.
The economic war on Huawei is also directly connected to the expansion of BRI across 70 Asian, European and African nations, constituting a Eurasia-wide network of commerce, investment and infrastructure able to turn geopolitical and geo-economic relations, as we know them, upside down.
Greater Eurasia Beckons
Whatever China does won’t alter the Deep State’s obsession about “an aggression against our vital interests,” as stated by the National Defense Strategy. The dominant Pentagon narrative in years to come will be about China “intending to impose, in the short term, its hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region, and catch the United States off-guard in order to achieve future global pre-eminence.” This is mixed with a belief that Russia wants to “crush NATO” and “sabotage the democratic process in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.”
During my recent travels along the northern part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), I saw once again how China is upgrading highways, building dams, railways and bridges that are useful not only for its own economic expansion but also for its neighbors’ development. Compare it to U.S. wars – as in Iraq and Libya – where dams, railways and bridges are destroyed.
Russian diplomacy is all but winning the New Cold War — as diagnosed by Prof. Stephen Cohen in his latest book, War with Russia: From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate.
Moscow mixes serious warnings with diverse strategies, such as resurrecting the South Stream gas pipeline to supply Europe as an extension of Turk Stream after the Trump administration also furiously opposed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline with sanctions on Russia. Meanwhile, Moscow ramps up energy exports to China.
The advance of the Belt and Road Initiative is linked to Russian security and energy exports, including the Northern Sea Route, as an alternative future transportation corridor to Central Asia. Russia emerges then as the top security guarantee for Eurasian trade and economic integration.
Last month in Moscow, I discussed Greater Eurasia– by now established as the overarching concept of Russian foreign policy – with top Russian analysts. They told me Putin is on board. He referred to Eurasia recently as “not a chessboard or a geopolitical playground, but our peaceful and prosperous h
Needless to say, U.S. think tanks dismiss the idea as “abortive”. They ignore Prof. Sergey Karaganov, who as early as mid-2017 was arguing that Greater Eurasia could serve as a platform for “a trilateral dialogue on global problems and international strategic stability between Russia, the United States and China.
As much as the Beltway may refuse it, “The center of gravity of global trade is now shifting from the high seas toward the vast continental interior of Eurasia.”
Beijing Skirts the Dollar
Beijing is realizing it can’t meet its geo-economic goals on energy, security, and trade without bypassing the U.S. dollar.
According to the IMF, 62 percent of global central bank reserves were still held in U.S. dollars by the second quarter of 2018. Around 43 per cent of international transactions on SWIFT are still in U.S. dollars. Even as China, in 2018, was the single largest contributor to global GDP growth, at 27.2 percent, the yuan still only accounts for 1 percent of international payments, and 1.8 per cent of all reserve assets held by central banks.
It takes time, but change is on the way. China’s cross-border payment network for yuan transactions was launched less than four years ago. Integration between the Russian Mir payment system and Chinese Union Pay appears inevitable.
Bye Bye Drs. K and Zbig
Russia and China are developing the ultimate nightmare for those former shamans of U.S. foreign policy, Henry Kissinger and the late Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski.
Back in 1972 Kissinger was the mastermind – with logistical help from Pakistan – of the Nixon moment in China. That was classic Divide and Rule, separating China from the USSR. Two years ago, before Trump’s inauguration, Dr. K’s advice dispensed at Trump Tower meetings consisted of a modified Divide and Rule: the seduction of Russia to contain China.
The Kissinger doctrine rules that, geopolitically, the U.S. is just “an island off the shores of the large landmass of Eurasia.” Domination “by a single power of either of Eurasia’s two principal spheres – Europe or Asia – remains a good definition of strategic danger for America, Cold War or no Cold War,” as Kissinger said. “For such a grouping would have the capacity to outstrip America economically and, in the end, militarily.”
The Zbig doctrine ran along similar lines. The objectives were to prevent collusion and maintain security among the EU-NATO vassals; keep tributaries pliant; keep the barbarians (a.k.a. Russians and allies) from coming together; most of all prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition (as in today’s Russia-China alliance) capable of challenging U.S. hegemony; and submit Germany, Russia, Japan, Iran, and China to permanent Divide and Rule.
Thus the despair of the current National Security Strategy, forecasting China displacing the United States “to achieve global preeminence in the future,” through BRI’s supra-continental reach.
The “policy” to counteract such “threats” is sanctions, sanctions, and more unilateral sanctions, coupled with an inflation of absurd notions peddled across the Beltway – such as that Russia is aiding and abetting the re-conquest of the Arab world by Persia. Also that Beijing will ditch the “paper tiger” “Made in China 2025” plan for its major upgrade in global, high-tech manufacturing just because Trump hates it.
Once in a blue moon a U.S. report actually gets it right, such as in Beijing speeding up an array of BRI projects; as a modified Sun Tzu tactic deployed by President Xi Jinping.
At the June 2016 Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Professor Xiang Lanxin, director of the Centre of One Belt and One Road Studies at the China National Institute for SCO International Exchange and Judicial Cooperation, defined BRI as an avenue to a “post-Westphalian world.” The journey is just beginning; a new geopolitical and economic era is at hand. And the U.S. is being left behind at the station
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
February 6, 2019
by Dr. Peter Janney
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.
Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.
After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.
The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.
When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..
A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.
The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.
Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.
Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.
Conversation No. 56
Date: Thursday, January 2, 1997
Commenced: 1:35 PM CST
Concluded: 2:10 PM CST
RTC: A New Year, Gregory. Will we see it out, do you think?
GD: Probably. Unless, of course, we have the Rapture and you and I are left behind. Are you particularly religious, Robert? If you are, I will refrain from comment so soon after the celestial birthday.
RTC: Nominal, just nominal. Say what you like.
GD: I don’t know if you want that, Robert. I have very strong views on some aspects of religion.
RTC: A Christmas indulgence from me, Gregory.
GD: Every society needs a moral core. Mostly, Robert, religion supplies this. For the Nazis and the Communists, Hitler and Stalin supplied the religious themes, but not here. Why is America the compost heap that produces, not flies from maggots, but the Christian Jesus freaks out of absolutely nothing but pulp fiction? The Gospels are all forgeries, written a long time after the events depicted in them and they have been constantly changed over the centuries to reflect various political and economic needs. I mean, Robert, that there is not one bloody word in the New Testament depictions of Jesus that could be considered to have even a gram of historical accuracy. I could go on for hours about this subject, but the whole fabric of the Christian conservatives or the rampant Jesus freaks is that their dogma is based on total and very clear fraud. The so-called Battle of Armageddon, for example, is nowhere in the Bible…
RTC: Are you serious?
GD: Look it up, Robert. Revelations 16:16 is the sole mention of it. Just a geographical name, that’s all. No blitzkrieg of Jesus versus the Evil Ones. Nothing at all. It was all pure invention.
RTC: Well, if not in the Bible, who made it up?
GD: One Charles Fox Parham, that’s who made it up. He was a very nasty type who ran a bi-racial church in Los Angeles around the turn of the century, before he was chased out. And, of course, he did time in jail for defrauding his flock of money and, more entertainingly, buggering little boys in the fundament. Oh my yes, he made up the whole Rapture story and ranted on endlessly about a fictional Battle of Armageddon. It’s like having the Church of the Celestial Easter Bunny or the Divine Santa Claus. At least there really was a Saint Nicholas, but the Easter Bunny is as fictitious as Jesus the Water Walker.
RTC: I don’t recall learning about that as a child at all.
GD: Of course not, you belong to the original Christian church, Robert, not one of the later cults. Neither the Catholics or the Eastern Orthodox people have this silly Rapture business anywhere in their early literature. This was a fiction started up at the beginning of this century by some nut named Blackstone who claimed that Jesus was coming. I think the word ‘rapture’ didn’t come I into use until about 1910. It’s just more nut fringe fiction, nothing more.
RTC: Well, I haven’t had much in the way of contact with these people except to chase off the Jehovah’s Witnesses who bang on my door and try to shove all kinds of pamphlets on me. In the long run, Gregory, you should learn to avoid the lunatics and concentrate on more important issues. There are always nuts. Didn’t they burn witches in Salem?
GD: The same types, only then they were in power. Now they lust after power so they can shove their fictional crap onto the sane part of society.
RTC: Well, then, what about the ones who don’t believe in evolution?
GD: The same types. We have them across the street. Told me yesterday the world was only 6,000 years old and dinosaurs and men commingled in Kansas somewhere. You can’t tell these people anything. They just keep repeating that whatever fiction you go after is in the Bible. When you ask them to show you, they get angry. Nuts always get angry when you puncture their fantasy balloons.
RTC: And Armageddon? I vaguely recall something about a battle between the Antichrist somewhere.
GD: But not in the Bible. The only reference to Armageddon is Revelations 16:16 and it just mentions the name of the place, nothing about a battle, Jesus, Satan, the Antichrist or my cousin Marvin. Nothing. But when you tell the nuts this, they almost froth at the mouth. They’ll tell you the battle is there and when you make them open their chrome-plated Bible and look, they flip back and forth and get more and more upset. Of course it isn’t there so they make faces and later they tell me, with great triumph, that they asked Pastor Tim and he said it was all there. Of course when I ask them for chapter and verse, they don’t have it.
RTC: Gregory, a word of fatherly advice here. Why bother with these idiots? Who cares what they believe? Are they of use to you in some project? If they are, be patient and go along with them. If they aren’t, drop them.
GD: But they are annoying. Robert, if I told you the Japanese attacked Spain in 1941, wouldn’t such stupidity annoy you?
RTC: No, it wouldn’t. When I was in harness, I heard worse than the babbling of the Jesus nuts, believe me. Senior Company people acting like spoiled children because no one listened to their pet theories about this country, that economy, that head of state, that foreign political party and on and on. Sometime…. no, more often than I liked, some rabid lunatic did us all kinds of damage, as witness the Gottleib mind control stupidity. People like that, Gregory, should be taken out for a trip on your boat or a walk in the Pine Barrens and simply shot. What did Joe Stalin say? ‘No man…no problem.” I often had to listen to these boring nuts, but you don’t. I had to make excuses to get away from them, but you don’t have to deal with them in the first place. Most small-minded people fixate on something utterly unimportant and think they have discovered the wheel. Yes, I agree that religious loonies are probably the worst, but, believe me, the political experts are almost as bad. They hop up and down shouting, ‘Listen to me! Listen to me!’ And who gives a damn what they think? No, I agree with you about the Jesus freaks but there are legions, I say, legions of others that are just as fixated, just as crazy, just as annoying, so you would be far better served if you just shut them out of your mind and turned your talents to other matters more important. Take some comfort in the thought that just as their lights go out and the darkness swallows them that they realize in the last second that there is no heaven, no Jesus and nothing but the embalmer’s needle and the worms. Nothing. But then their brains have turned to Jello and they don’t care anymore because they have returned to the dirt that they came from.
GD: I agree, Robert, I agree with you, but I still get annoyed. But these nuts, and you can add the Jewish Holocaust nuts to the pile, demand you do not say this or read that or watch that movie. They aren’t content to live in their basements and talk to themselves or tyrannize over their poor children and wives, so they rush out into the street and issue orders as if anyone cared or worse, as if they really mattered. That I object to strongly. I have waded through tens of thousands of pages of official German papers and I can tell you, without any doubt, that the Germans did not gas millions of Jews. What do these creeps do? They tell the archives to seal the papers that make them out professional liars and attack anyone who dares to question them. The holocausters and the Jesus freaks are cut from the same piece of God’s underwear. I think the dirty parts to be sure.
RTC: (Laughter) Oh, Gregory, such passion for so little. They both think they are really important and that people actually listen to them, and even care about their unimportant obsessions. Ignore the Jews, too, Gregory, like you should ignore the Jesus freaks.
GD: Ah, but the Jews control the media and most of the publishing houses. If you write, you don’t get published. Now if I made up some fantasy that said the Germans burned two hundred million Jewish babies, I would be a best seller, number one on The New York Times book reviews and a great one on the lecture and TV interview circuit. Of course about ten people would read my fictions, but no one would be rude enough to talk about that. Christ, most of the Holocaust books are pure fiction and the rantings about the Rapture are right in with them.
RTC: Well, I can see some sense here and I admit it is difficult to get away from obnoxious Hebrews, but why not try? I find that if you ignore people like this, eventually they will go away and annoy people in public lavatories. Just another step to oblivion.
GD: I really shouldn’t bore you with you with my own obsessions but I do not suffer fools gladly.
RTC: God, there are so many of them.
GD: I remember my grandfather and one of his pet comments to bombastic idiots he encountered at social functions. He would smile and say, ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but are you anybody in particular?’
RTC: (Laughter) I don’t suppose any of the gas bags got that.
GD: No, but grandfather did, and so did I. I remember once my mother started yelling at me non-stop because I had come in late from a night with the ladies and the bottle. I listened to her rantings for about an hour and finally, after she ran out of steam, she asked me if I had anything to say and I told her, very politely, that I had been trying to tell her for the longest time that she had some hairpins coming loose just over her right ear.
RTC:(Laughter) My Lord, Gregory, what a put-down. Whatever did she do?
GD: She was so worn out shouting that she just stared at me with her mouth open and before she could get her wind back, I went in my room and locked the door. She stood in front of it yelling that I was disrespectful, until my father came out and made her go back into the house because the lights were going on in the neighbor’s homes. I had a warm and caring family life, Robert, believe it. But I didn’t have to listen to the braying of human donkeys all the time. Just the occasional parental psychotic episode. Now they come up with glazed eye and threads of drool dripping from their mouths while they clutch at you and screech, ‘Jesus, Jesus,’ or ‘six million, six million.’ Oh how I would love to give them lobotomies with a chain saw.
RTC: I don’t think you would have much luck with a lobotomy, Gregory. Most creatures like that don’t have brains.
GD: No, Robert, they don’t. What they do have are knots on the top of their spine to keep their asses from plopping down onto the sidewalk.
(Concluded: 2:10 PM CST)