Tomás Ó Flatharta

Looking at Things from the Left

Posts Tagged ‘Donald trump

With Vance, Trump is doubling down on Maga

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An article from the Financial Times journalist Edward Luce, which should be a wake-up call.

Donald Trump’s running mate opposes abortion and aid to Ukraine and says he would not have certified results of 2020 vote.

With Vance, Trump is doubling down on Maga

Ohio senator is an intelligent and forceful exponent of the Maga movement — and maybe also its future

If there were any doubts that Donald Trump would go full “America First” he banished them on Monday with his vice-presidential pick. JD Vance is the most high-profile Trumpian cheerleader among senior Republicans.

Trump could have held his nose and chosen Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, who gave him the biggest run for his money in the Republican primaries. Haley is a relative moderate on abortion. Selecting her, or a like-minded figure, would have signalled that he wanted to broaden his appeal to wavering suburban female Republicans.

Vance, by contrast, is an unapologetic Christian conservative. If Joe Biden can find a silver lining in the gathering storm clouds, Vance would be it. Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, is an effective campaigner on a woman’s right to choose. 

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The USA hurtles toward political crisis – Assassination attempt emboldens Trump, further immobilizes Democrats

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We start with an old joke on the Irish left : Which is the Evil of Two Lessers?

Ashley Smith reviews a political crisis in the USA :

Article sources :


USA hurtles towards political crisis – Assassination attempt emboldens Trump, further immobilizes Democrats – ESSF


The U.S. hurtles toward political crisis – Assassination attempt emboldens Trump, further immobilizes Democrats – Tempest

Double Evil : Donald Trump and Joe Biden

Ashley Smith analyzes the impact of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on the deepening political crisis in the U.S. and the ever growing weakness of the Joe Biden campaign.

The United States was already headed for one of the most acute political crises in recent memory. Then former president and convicted felon Donald Trump was nearly assassinated at a rally in Pennsylvania. Having survived, Trump has consolidated his base and cornered the Democrats by blaming them for the attack.

Trump will now position himself as a strong man and survivor over a debilitated Biden campaign. He has an inside track to victory in the election with a clear advantage despite being widely despised.

Even before the attempted assassination of Trump, President Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance had thrown his candidacy into doubt with the bourgeois press, the Democrat’s capitalist donors, and centrist politicians, all calling for him to pass the baton to another nominee.

 GOP Capitalizes on Assassination Attempt

The attempt against Trump has drowned out all other issues. The image of him bloodied, defiant with fist raised, and chanting “fight, fight, fight” has been plastered across the media and will no doubt end up on t-shirts at this week’s GOP Convention in Milwaukee.

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Biden in the Bardo – Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch

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Jeffrey St. Clair writes a fact-stuffed polemic in the online magazine Counterpunch, which is relentless – like witnessing the last hours of an exhausted punch-drunk emperor surrounded by grovelling flunkies.

Till now, I did not know the concept Bardo :

Bardo “is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between

death and rebirth. The concept arose soon after Gautama Buddha‘s death, with a number of

earlier Buddhist schools accepting the existence of such an intermediate state, while other schools rejected it”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo

Thanks to Joan McKiernan for the link.

While we can not be sure which mechanism will be used to remove Joe Biden from his White House job, we can be sure his days as a power-wielding President are over. Expect a shit show next week; Democrats praising new President Kamala Harris; Trump’s coronation at his republican party gets little media attention : and plenty of gruesome gaffes from old man Donald are likely to surface.

July 12 mass media reports showing the world Joe Biden’s mistakes are only the tip of the iceberg :
Biden makes ‘VP Trump’ gaffe amid calls to end campaign

Here is the Jeffrey St. Clair article :


Biden in the Bardo

by Jeffrey St. Clair

Seymour Hersh said Biden isn’t all there. Thomas Friedman and Jane Fonda were reduced to tears. Rob Reiner, who watched the debate with Fonda in LA in the company of Doug Emhoff, the husband of Biden’s VP Kamala Harris, screamed at the TV: “We’ve lost.” One of the party’s top money-bundlers told Politico: “Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention or he dies. Otherwise, we are fucking dead.” These were just some of the shock reactions to Joe Biden’s somnambulant performance in his debate against Trump last week in Atlanta. 

Biden’s decrepit appearance, death-rattle voice and baffling answers shouldn’t have been a surprise. He’s 81-years-old and he’s been descending into senescence for years. But most people, including many of his most ardent supporters, hadn’t seen this diminished version of Biden before on extended display. 

Biden doesn’t make many prolonged public appearances anymore. He hasn’t given a full-press conference in nearly a year. He’s been kept on a tight public leash by his staff, restricted to short interactions with the White House press gaggle or prepared remarks fed to him by a teleprompter. Even then he’s seemed halting, confused, and mentally frail.

Carl Bernstein – the Watergate Journalist – describes Biden’s “horror shows”

During an interview with CNN, Carl Bernstein said multiple sources told him there have been at least 15 occasions in the last year and a half “where the president has appeared like he did at that horror show (his debate performance).”

Bernstein said that in the last six months, sources have told him there has been a marked rate in Biden’s cognitive decline.  He says that some of his sources have taken their concerns to Ron Klain in the last year, worried that the President is losing his train of thought and didn’t have the capacity to pick up where he left off.  Bernstein described a fundraiser at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York in June of 2023, where the President became “Very stiff…almost like a kind of rigor mortis.” 

Biden’s staff and family are charged with protecting him. The media isn’t. Most other courtier reporters surely knew what Bernstein had heard. Yet, they’ve largely been complicit in covering up Biden’s accelerating cognitive decline, presumably because of their deep hatred of Trump, whose faculties, such as they are, also seem to be in an advanced state of decay.

As Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times, wrote in Semafor: “It’s clear the best news reporters in Washington have failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power accountable. It is our duty to poke through White House smoke screens and find out the truth. The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline, which may be simply the result of old age. Shame on the White House press corps for not to have pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the President.”

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Birds of a Feather Flock Together – Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Sammy Wilson MP (DUP, East Antrim)

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There is more to this story than initially meets the eye. Much capitalist development is based on Ethnic Cleansing of original populations and the plantation of new non-indigenous populations – it happened in the United States of America (USA) and Australia – naming just two. It did not happen so brutally in Ireland – but British imperialism made a significant effort.

Links :
Plantation of Ulster
Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland – Wikipedia

The Northern province of Ulster was “planted” in the 1600’s, but the native Irish were not completely exterminated. Waves of native Irish emigrated – especially in the 19th century after a misnamed Famine (in reality a “Great Hunger” caused by British Imperialist Policy) drove millions of the native Irish to the four corners of the globe. These emigrants kept alive the idea of Irish freedom, and played a significant role in every attempt to rid Ireland of British rule.

The stubborn Irish “national question” remains on today’s agenda because of the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty which divided Ireland into 2 sectarian states. A key feature of extreme Irish Unionism is identification with plantation/ethnic cleansing forms of capitalism – and that goes a long way towards explaining Irish far-right Unionist sympathy for the present day attempted ethnic cleansing of Palestine and Ukraine. We should situate recent pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine statements by the British far-right politician Nigel Farage and Sammy Wilson within this framework :

Nigel Farage Endorses DUP Antrim MP’s Wilson and Paisley, Dumping a different extreme unionist, Jim Allister

Link :


The Russian imperialist occupation of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk is ethnic cleansing capitalism in action – accompanied by child stealing and abuse similar to the behaviour of the Catholic Church in the 26 county bit of Ireland from the 1930’s to the 1990’s.

An excellent Ukrainian blog, Ukr-Taz, covers the story of Putin’s ethnic cleansing dreams in Ukraine, and Donald Trump’s enthusiastic support :

Trump on Putin’s “dream”

29 06 2024

For all that can be said about Thursday’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump — including about the former’s dismal performance and about the boundless creativity of Trump’s fabrications on almost every topic under the sun — Trump’s curious note about Putin’s “dream” stood out to me:

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“Clare Daly needs to withdraw claim that media ghosted her” – Justine McCarthy criticises ex Dublin MEP who gave ammo to the “shoot the messenger brigades”

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This Justine McCarthy article is a damning critique of the “shoot the messenger” technique regularly used by the former Dublin Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Clare Daly, and the ex Ireland South MEP Mick Wallace.

Justine McCarthy, Irish Times, January 21 2024

Link :
Clare Daly’s Dog-Whistle to haters of the media wasn’t just hypocritical – it was reckless

It wasn’t just the ungraciousness of Clare Daly’s departure from the election count centre after losing her European Parliament seat that left the air disturbed in her wake. It wasn’t even the falsehood in her valediction as she flounced out of the RDS, telling an RTÉ reporter who had requested a comment from her: “Ye’d no interest in talking to me for five years, so I’ve no interest in talking to ye.” What shattered the air was her dog whistle to haters of the so-called “mainstream media”. The salivating in the trenches of the dark web was almost audible.

First, the truth – Daly and her Independents 4 Change colleague Mick Wallace have a usual practice of not responding to attempts by professional journalists to contact them. They prefer to appear live on air where their words cannot be edited. I know this because they told me so when they were both still TDs. Their confession tumbled out when, innocently, I had asked if I could check their contact details as I had repeatedly failed to get any response from either of them. Since that day, I have tried in vain to contact Daly and Wallace numerous times in attempts to obtain comments for news stories, as required by professional ethics and by the Press Council’s code of conduct. Many other journalists have had the same experience.

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