Your Other Left Video: Doing It Wrong, or If We Can Brexit They Can Fix It

A rant about brexit and the lack of dialectic in our current multitude of schismatic subjects.

Your Other Left: Up The Republic: Feel The Paine

Now that my party, The Democratic Party, has a presumptive nominee, I am bewildered at how few people understand our political process.  Having worked closely with the national party, worked for several state, county and town Democratic and Republican Party organizations/committees, I'd be happy to counsel any voters who are confused as to what the process is, what things mean and how it works.  To the same point, if anyone feels they are confused about civics and government in general, I am glad to explain the inner workings of the republic to you.....or you could watch the West Wing on Netflix.

Your Other Left: Caligulan Populism: Deep Tedium 2016

The Grand Old Party has allowed their message and indeed every ounce of their base's energy to be transformed by the most reactionary and noisome con artists. They eagerly acquiesced and surrendered to their previously exiled mutants in order to rile up the hordes with rage, victimhood and paranoia. William F. Buckley purged the Klan and Birchers from the conservative coalition and the Republican Party.Now Buckley is gone and the benighted brutes are back and they're pissed.

The cynical GOP leadership gleefully staffed out the entire conservative platform to the personalities who could take them where the energy was.This makes some sense from a strategic marketing perspective, and the Democrats have had their own fringe message coup in an effort to compete.However attractive this enterprise must have appeared with each passing panic, the GOP establishment wishes they could hop in a delorean and stop themselves from engineering their own destruction.Examine the candidacy of Donald Trump from the perspective of the ordinary American citizens who have been told by our politicians that they can do things they simply cannot do.Resist the urge to revel in political schadenfreude because we need those establishment Republicans who the Trumpkins are so angry with if Western society is to right itself.The Bernie Sanders supporters are a different story.We never needed them before.They should return to the right wing pseudo-liberal Occupy tent with their poppers and wait for the next asinine fascist rally against free trade.

As much sense as this chorus of mouthbreathers operation may have made to the Republican country club set and Democratic consultant class who set it in motion, there doesn't seem to have been any doubt as to the wisdom or responsibility of this strategy on their part. It must have been irresistible if you consider the free messaging and organizing muscle that came with anger radio, and all the disciplined recruitment performed by televangelists, assorted Christian right media, and tabloid cable news that could tap into emotions, define issues and develop mass acceptance of political narratives for an audience who tend to vote without having to be begged or persuaded, unlike their liberal counterparts who incessantly vomit trite syllables approximating the deeply tedious half thought "lesser of two evils" sonnet. The right has a natural constituency of frightened and angry people who are quite good at following a routine.These lowest hanging denominators and the millions of indoctrinated Evangelicals make up the right wing coalition along with the young libertarian dudes and credulous conspiracy theory cultists that exploded onto the scene of a once silent reactionary counterculture. These are the people who suddenly dominate much of the national political conversation with more power than they merit and there is nowhere near enough sedative on hand to dull their malignant rage.Where there was once an establishment party of patriotic deal makers there is now flash, blustery belligerence and magnificently unapologetic hatred.

The working class and middle class, weakened and deluded by constant demagoguery, are feeling alien to their culture.They feel as though they are taboo in their country and they've been told to blame it on multiculturalism.These people are not stupid.They just have few alternatives to the sensory overload of clickbait media culture.This tabloid Saturnalia of sensationalism seems to have produced a psychotic political movement of paranoiacs at whose pleasure we now live.They're mostly in Congress.

The grown-up party of conservative, responsible, middle of the road, Alex Keaton type young Republicans, the unabashedly stuffy exclusive country club party of Poppy Bush and the Cold Warrior party that sheltered spooky Roy Cohn or E. Howard Hunt types is long gone.Those very stalwarts torched their reasonably successful moderate conservative brand of the "grown up" or "daddy party" and auctioned off their message to unscrupulous fiends who prey on credulous hordes.They now more resemble the party of your creepy uncle who still insists Ike was a pinko.

The old Republican establishment had such a reputation by the New century that Democrats were paralyzed and perpetually rattled by President Bush's popularity after September of 2001. They too fed their energy and enthusiasm deficit wherever they could.The progressive left, as it likes to be called, has an insatiable appetite for wish thinking and thought sanitation that is dwarfed by their compulsive cognitive dissonance and delusional dogmatism. The Democratic Party was infiltrated by naive pseudo-liberal progressives, 60's drop out nostalgists, failed spiritual seekers and social justice goose steppers who share the fundamentalist Chomskyite belief that motive can be discerned without evidence. When this crunchy lot of conspiracy theorists discovered that the mass media used populist white victimhood claiming hysterics to turn working men and homemaker women into diehard conservatives they saw diabolical sophistication where there was none. That mindset made for fertile ground for antisemitic mythology and it didn't take long to turn excessive white guilt and unfettered paranoia into mind reading.Did you know you're a racist? Now you know, and so does everybody else.

Welcome to 2016. After years of repetition, the phrase "lesser of two evils" is beginning to resonate, and the similarities, not between two parties as has been claimed for years, but between two mirrored edges of the ideological horseshoe are becoming rote, menacing and depressing.

The nation is divided between the two reactionary conservative factions of frightened and stubborn amnesiacs who are unaware of their similarities.The left and right are of one mind.They simply follow different politicians.Each day it becomes more and more difficult for liberals to align with the reactionary tattered edges of the horseshoe as they shout in unison what becomes a chant of "make free stuff great again."

"A republic, if you can keep it," Benjamin Franklin once said in the early days of the nation founded on Thomas Paine's radical liberalism and Thomas Jefferson's pen, but can we keep it away from ourselves? 

Your Other Left: United States & Turkey: an Exercise in Masochism

                   
The half billion dollar program to recruit and train a moderate Syrian rebel force to fight ISIS has been a failure. This is due largely to the fact that nearly everyone fighting in Syria is more interested in fighting Bashar Assad's government than fighting ISIS.  Its not like we in the west are fans of Assad (his biggest international fan is Vladimir Putin) but with the country in chaos and full of domestic and foreign warring factions, removal of Assad's government root and stalk would only perpetuate and worsen the chaos.  If some sense of order is restored then a new government would be a better prospect, especially if the civil servants, bureaucrats and military leadership can keep some semblance of continuity.  This is incredibly naive in light of everything we know about the Syrian civil war.  Assad is going to be removed and his government will be extirpated.  We cannot save him and we don't want to.  

Our alliance with regional players who are actively sabotaging our efforts makes the entire prospect of stabilizing Syria seem far fetched.  The United States relationship with Turkey is the most cringe-worthy example of this duplicitous trend. The willingness of Turkish officials to do business with ISIS and al Qaeda and refrain, until recently, to take any part in the fight against ISIS seems to have been forgotten.  The United States government seems to be ignoring the Turkish attacks on Kurdish fighters in Syria and Iraq and domestic police violence against Kurdish dissidents inside Turkey.  Turkish politics has descended into blatant authoritarianism.  The so called 'buffer zone' that Turkey wants between itself and Syria would be another in the series of new Berlin walls that are popping up all over the globe.  

This 'buffer zone' is least of all the distressing behavior of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.  Since his party, the AKP, lost it's majority in recent elections, his covert support for ISIS and his unhinged paranoia about the Kurds and Assad have become more transparent and more well known.   We in the west can't even acknowledge the seriousness of ISIS as an enemy or measure our successes and failures on the battlefield since the administration, congress and the Pentagon have no coherent voice on this war. The assessment of this foe and the threat they pose has been delusional from the outset. The effort to motivate the various regional interests to work together against the Islamic State is a halfhearted approach to a serious problem.  Almost no regional party of importance is interested in the western objective which is eliminating ISIS as top priority



.

Turkey has worked hand in hand with ISIS and al Qaeda to fight the Kurds and the Assad regime and these relationships have not ended.  Saudi Arabia has been working with al Qaeda in Yemen.  Iran has a clear desire to fight ISIS, but they are terrible to the Kurds, supportive of terror groups in Yemen and have genocidal aspirations for Israel.  Iraq is just trying not to fall apart, but the Iranian influence has filled the void left by the US.  We can hope the new leadership can free itself from Iranian influence to some degree and make progress bringing moderate Sunnis back to the government. Iraq is still no accepting all of the arms the US has offered, and since they're the middle man between the US and the Peshmerga, this is an embarrassment.

The only people who are only interested in fighting ISIS happen to be the people who value pluralistic democracy, humanitarianism and equal rights above theocracy and tribalism.  The Kurds are eager to trade resources and ideas with any people that wish for such peaceful engagement.  Shouldn't the US policy be to double down on our support for the Kurds, who have been most effective at defeating and scattering ISIS from towns in Syria and Iraq, rather than this masochistic organizing strategy?

The creepy crawl of the Turkish state towards fascism and their known terror sponsorship should negate the longstanding relationship with the west, at least until democracy is restored and the police violence is stopped.  The various parties in the  region are more worried about Assad returning to power, greater Iranian or Saudi influence over Iraq and Syria, and Kurdish territorial expansion or establishment of a Kurdish state than about ISIS. Our efforts in Syria, Yemen, Iran and the region at large have put us on both sides of many confrontations.  Our support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen has helped al Qaeda. Our dealings with Turkey have hurt our Kurdish allies and helped ISIS and al Qaeda.  We don't need to cater to these regimes and double agent diplomacy serves only to drag this war

This absurd strategy is steeped in our geopolitical identity crisis.  Do we in the west care about preserving our principles and confronting undemocratic ideas? Might we forge new alliances with people because they share our values instead of the double agent diplomacy we've been mired in with burdensome friends like Saudi Arabia and Turkey? The fear of a Kurdish state is inspiring the Turkish collusion with ISIS and al Qaeda as much as the fear of Syrian Baathists returning to power.  The Kurds in Syria and Turkey, to their credit have said they do not want a state of their own but rather self determination and autonomy within existing states. 

While the Kurds have taken territory from ISIS, they've been hospitable to inhabitants and refugees and tried to deliver basic services.  Maybe what we ought to be doing is promoting the Kurds as an example of democratic ideals and altruism. A Kurdish state would be a strategic victory against the theocratic fascists and corrupt regimes in the middle east.

I think we ought to arm, support and equip the Kurds to completely secure Kurdish territory first.  From there we have several options and nine are certain to be available.  One possible outcome is that the Kurds defeating ISIS savagely and decisively will decimate the morale of ISIS fighters, dry up their recruitment and encourage others to fight ISIS in other territory.  Ultimately this whole fight requires unwavering leadership from the US and allies.  Part of that leadership may be to encourage Kurdish and international volunteer fighters to go beyond Kurdish territory simply to remove ISIS, free slaves and confiscate weapons and resources.  If the coalition is more committed to defeating these monsters, then the Kurds and other allies may be encouraged to take ISIS controlled territory for humanitarian purposes, not to hold the territory or annex it.  This means the forces fighting ISIS beyond Kurdish territory cannot fight under a Kurdish flag or Kurdish militia emblem.  A new regional force like NATO, if not NATO itself, including Kurdish, Iraqi, Syrian and international volunteers could take the remaining ISIS territory and hand it back to locals once peace is restored.  This is not too likely a scenario, but at the moment no good ideas seem likely.  Leadership is needed to defeat ISIS.  We need to forget this exercise in futility of begging others in the region to fight this enemy.  The US and UK have been in the middle east for so long that it's silly to pretend we can extricate ourselves while conducting air strikes and diplomacy.  We have alienated Arabs just by being there.  Lets go all in with the Kurds to defeat ISIS quickly, surge style, rather than continue a strategy that accepts ISIS as a long term reality.

Counter insurgency expert and pillow talk media source David Petraeus has been suggesting that the coalition work with the Syrian al Qaeda affiliate, al Nusra Front against ISIS since they are indeed more moderate than ISIS and he has successfully recruited al Qaeda militants in Iraq to assist US forces briefly in the past.  First of all, it isn't necessary to work with al Qaeda against ISIS since we are already working with both al Qaeda and ISIS through our masochistic relationship with Turkey. There is only one available option that would not indirectly aid at least one jihadist group, and that is to go all in with the Kurds to take and secure the Kurdish areas and remove ISIS from Iraqi cities. If we have military success and effectively diminish ISIS territory, the humiliation will start to dry up their recruitment and it will only be a matter of time before ISIS is isolated in Raqqa. At that point, everyone who was reluctant to help before will smell blood in the water and begin fighting over who will take Raqqa. In the meantime we will have killed a good amount of barbaric thugs and freed some slaves. Every minute we are not freeing slaves is a minute we are complicit in the slavery, rape and torture we have the means to stop. And nobody is going to tell me we have to work with al Qaeda to get this done.