Category: American Politics

You think Trump got it right in Syria?

by Peter Lowry

There were pictures in North American papers the other day of Trump and his key advisers in a small room at his Florida resort. The captions explained that they were being briefed on options in Syria. The question that has to be asked: Is a strike against one airfield any kind of solution?

Does the world really need tit-for-tat gamesmanship?

Is this a Trump era solution? Trump can bawl about babies being killed all he likes but babies have been routinely murdered in Syria for the past six years, to the despair of the world, and there is no permanent solution in sight.

Trump is an ass. He is being congratulated for 58 out of 59 Tomahawk missiles being able to find their general target area. And it only cost a little over a million (US dollars) for each missile. Based on the after pictures, Syrian Leader Bashar al-Assad could have the base operational again in about two weeks if he wants. Just one surgical nuclear weapon would have made the air base unusable for about 2000 years.

The difference is that between an admonition and a conviction.

Looking at all those rich white men (and one young and rich Trump relation) around that table makes you wonder who really made the decision? It was a bad decision in any event. It was made in retaliation and in anger and because they could.

Better people than Donald Trump and his Merry Men have addressed the Syrian situation and have been found wanting. When a dictator such as al-Assad spends his idle afternoons in Damascus thinking up new ways to kill his county’s people, there are no simple solutions. And having Vladimir Putin of Russia stick his oar into the desert sands of the Middle east is not exactly helping the problems.

But what is America doing on this Holy Crusade? If we heard Mr. Trump correctly last year, we thought he wanted nothing to do with the Middle East. And yet, he thinks he can bomb the ISIL brigands back to the Middle Ages. He just has no idea how to do that.

You would think that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with his background with ExxonMobil could explain the politics of oil and the Middle East to him. Maybe Mr. Trump is more of a coal guy.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Teaching Trump ‘The Art of the Deal.’

by Peter Lowry

The first thing Canadians should do is stop sweating over renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It has never been a really fair deal and it became overly complicated when Mexico joined. Given the opportunity to renegotiate, Canada could improve its position. The only problem is that we would never get to negotiate with Donald Trump. He has shown often enough that he has no understanding of the deal.

Where we erred in the first negotiation of NAFTA was when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney pulled our civil servant negotiators. Mulroney was frustrated by the delays and replaced the experienced negotiators with politicians who lacked the background and negotiating skills. Since then, we have spent enough time just arguing over soft-wood lumber to renegotiate the NAFTA deal three times over.

To suggest that Trump knows about negotiating because he has a book out over his name called ‘The Art of the Deal’ is a laugh in itself. Anyone who believes that should be forced to read the book. The reality is that Trump’s style of negotiating is nothing more than bullying, braggadocio and B.S.

What Trump and maybe Trudeau seem to fail to understand is that since the Auto Pact in the 1960s and the two versions of NAFTA, North America has become a single, tightly integrated economy. Nobody should be so stupid as to suggest closing any borders. Any precipitous action by any of the three countries could actually bankrupt one or several major automobile makers. They are hardly kidding when they say that many auto parts and assemblies cross borders multiple times in the manufacturing process.

Those states in America that are following Trump’s lead and proposing Buy America laws are in for a surprise when they find their laws in conflict with federal laws to the contrary. It would take Congress a long time to change the country into the bellicose backwater it will become if it does not take America’s world role more seriously.

We are constantly amazed by the utter ignorance of President Donald Trump. He might not be quite as stupid as former president George W. Bush and we do appreciate that sometimes ignorance can be cured. Stupid, as displayed in the 1994 movie, Forrest Gump, usually lasts a lifetime. And is rarely funny.

But we can assure you that in terms of NAFTA, it would take at least two lifetimes to disassemble.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Trump sure doesn’t know America.

by Peter Lowry

When driving back with the wife from a trip to Washington several years ago, we took a lazy route north through the Appalachians. It was early summer and it was a stunningly beautiful vista in those ancient mountains. It was a great trip until we crossed into New York State and found a state trooper greeting us at a local speed trap.

The trooper had checked our speed on radar in Pennsylvania where the speed limit was 65 mph. The radar reading was lower. When crossing the state line, there was a sign saying the state limit was 55 mph. There was another a few hundred metres ahead of where he stopped us saying the limit was 45 mph. Reality was that the head of the state police and the New York bar seemed to think it was funny and we should pay off the Town of Carrollton the few hundred dollars (US) they were demanding.

It is also why you will not see us picketing Trump Tower in New York. We do not drive in New York State anymore.

This is to say that Donald Trump really needs to drive south through the Appalachians. He really needs to see the beauty in northern Pennsylvania before he continues south and the picture changes.

The reason many of those Appalachian coal miners are out of work is because coal mining technology has changed. They used to send those poor men into the mines in the mountains to dig out the coal. They do not do that anymore. Too many of them got black lung disease or other problems. They were always suing the mine owners.

Coal mining has changed. Instead of tunneling into the mountain, now they just knock down the damn mountain and use machines to dig the coal. It is faster, cheaper and more profitable for the mine owners—Mr. Trump’s friends and relations. And in a hundred years or so, those lower mountains will have new forests on them to hide the scars.

And if you thought for one minute that Donald Trump gave a damn about all those sick and dying coal miners, you are as ignorant as he is.

Donald Trump signed all that B.S. at the Environmental Protection Agency the other day because he could sit there and say this was on behalf of clean coal. And there is nobody’s blood on this clean coal—it is untouched by human hands.

But it seems that between 65,000 and 75,000 people in the U.S. still consider themselves coal miners. Like cigarette smokers, they are a dying breed.

And yet, it is reported, that over 600,000 jobs in the U.S. are now in the rapidly growing clean energy business. These are jobs making wind turbines and other foolish stuff. Betcha Mr. Trump did not know that!

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Lies. And Trudeau-Trump lies.

by Peter Lowry

You have come to expect it in the daily reports from the American White House. You know that the man in the White House tells lies. You just do not expect it from the guy in charge in Ottawa.

And you already knew that the guy in charge at the White House does not give a damn about the environment. You are more conflicted by the guy in Ottawa. This guy says he wants to save the environment and makes a big show of it. And then he approves doubling the Kinder Morgan pipeline over the Rockies to pump diluted bitumen to an ocean port. And he is a cheerleader for President Trump approving TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline to the Texas Gulf.

Of course, there is nothing new about the guff that Trump spews for the American news media. He even believes there are American jobs to be had. He had Russ Sperling, president of TransCanada Corporation in his office for the announcement. Sperling would have tripled the number of jobs created by that pipeline to get more bitumen to that Texas port. Hell, he might consider putting Trump’s grandmother on the payroll if that would help.

But it is not going to pave the way past all those environmentalists in the American Midwest who are digging their own trenches for the coming Keystone Wars. This question is not resolved by a long shot. Trump can try to call out the Nebraska National Guard if he likes but Keystone is going to have to run over a lot of environmentalist barricades on its way to the sea.

Trump appears to be drinking his own bath water though when he uses the usual untruths about Keystone. The American jobs Trump was going on about will be fleeting and if the entire line from Alberta to Texas involves as many as 400 maintenance jobs, it will be generous.

But by no stretch of the imagination will Alberta tar sands bitumen make North America self sufficient in ersatz oil. Nor will bitumen-based synthetic oil be cheaper. The greedy bastards who want to pipe the bitumen down the line will hardly be happy until the price of crude oil again hits the US$80 mark. And if we really tried to use bitumen-based oil to supply North America, we would all be knee deep in bitumen slag from trying to refine so much bitumen into synthetic oil.

It seems to be common knowledge now that Donald Trump usually does not know what he is talking about. What is Justin Trudeau’s excuse?

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

You want Trump to go? And then what?

by Peter Lowry

There seems to be a growing consensus among mental health professionals that Donald Trump might be crazy. After all, he thinks he is President of the United States. How crazy can that be?

And the man does seem delusional. We all saw it early in his campaign. He would preen himself in front of his crowds of followers. He would rant outrageous lies about his opponents and the previous President. And he is still doing it. Even after being told he won, he wants to stay in the campaign mode. He keeps on having victory rallies just to hear the cheers of his fans.

So, what if the man really is paranoid? There are people who want to see him removed from office. They start with his Vice President and half the Trump staff. It must be a nightmare for the Secret Service protective staff.

But look at the nightmare he is putting the world leaders through. Angela Merkel must have gone home to Germany after meeting Trump and doubled her protective staff. Trump has Canada’s Justin Trudeau and his government so traumatized that they are afraid to do anything that Trump might dislike. They are acting like tensed up ball boys in the Trump one-man tennis match.

And then there is Kim Jong-un of North Korea—there is a match for Trump made in Hell. The world watches while these two crazies argue about who has the biggest missile. Even China is reluctant to get in between.

But if Congress impeaches Trump as a nut-case, what do you get? You get the Tea Party’s darling and Koch Brothers’ lap dog: Mike Pence. This guy was famous in Indiana when as governor he tried to restore 19th Century bigotry. He had to retract when industry leaders said the they would leave the state if he did not back off. Now he is busy running around assuring people that the situation in the White House is not as bad as it looks.

If Congress is able to impeach Trump, Congress would then own President Pence. It would be a situation where the President did everything Congress wanted. He would send them the bills they wanted and would sign them into law without question. The One Percent would be embarrassed by a plethora of tax cuts.  Congress would simply fire the remaining staff of the Environmental Protection Agency. The military would get anything they asked for. Nothing would be left of Obamacare or Obama’s legacy.

But the Trump followers, the losers and the malcontents, the generations technology has left behind, are going to miss him. He cared about them. When they realize he is gone, they are going to riot in the streets. They will be looking for another saviour. We will likely feel that we should have left that Mr. Trump alone.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Is Trudeau fighting out of his weight class?

by Peter Lowry

The reason why boxing promoters will not allow a lightweight boxer to take on a heavyweight is that the lightweight might not last two minutes. The lightweight might be fast on his feet but the heavyweight only needs to land one punch. That is why Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau needs all the help he can get to take on U.S. President Trump.

The most urgent problem today is the proposed cuts in the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Trump hardly gives a damn about the environment. He has shown that with his decisions on pipelines and coal mines. Maybe he did not know that the EPA is responsible for U.S. federal support in keeping the Great Lakes clean and fit to provide water for millions of Americans. Those Americans include those in some states that were key in winning the presidency for Trump.

And it is not as though it is a matter of talking Trump out of some of his positions or getting him to like Justin Trudeau. He forgets. Even in his recent speech to Congress, he made several conflicting statements. He is erratic. He does not give a damn about Canadians. They are just like Americans to him. Only they seem to want to live where it can get cold.

One of the biggest mistakes Trudeau might have made is the Canadian ambassador in Washington. Of course, the choice of David MacNaughton as ambassador was made before the Trump disaster happened. No doubt with a Clinton presidency, MacNaughton would have been right at home. As it is now he is going to need constant hand-holding by the trained diplomats. He is no political problem solver. He proved that when he was Justin Trudeau’s point man for Ontario in the last election. The appointment was his reward for the Liberals winning, That was despite his being so obviously out of touch with what was really happening in Ontario.

To make matters worse Trump has Trudeau buffaloed as well. Trudeau thought he made the right impression when he and Trump met. Trump forgot the Canadian’s name as he went out the door. And how does he think he will handle Trump’s reopening of the mid-term emissions controls for new automobiles? It looks like an attempt to release all auto manufacturing controls in North America and is in direct conflict with Canada’s objectives.

Is Trump the Darth Vader who takes Trudeau over to the dark side.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Who’s sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom?

by Peter Lowry

It used to be that if you donated enough to the American President’s political party, you could get an invite to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House. There is a possibility that is where President Trump is trying to sleep when in Washington. And Honest Abe is now haunting him.

Why else would the poor man be awake so early in the morning creating wild twits for posting on Twitter? Not that Honest Abe would condone such conduct but twitting would be long after his time. And it would be possible for Lincoln to roll the roles of the three ghosts of the past, present and future into one spectre.

The spectre could take special delight in playing the role of events in the present. He could show the President how his cabinet selections denied his worse attributes at their hearings before Congress. It would be the ghost’s turn to be confused when Trump told him that he had told them to say that. He did not want them all turned down.

But even a ghost would have trouble figuring out what will possibly happen in the future. Trump already has his legacy built—Trump Towers in cities around the world. He built them for himself—his pyramids reaching for the heavens. They were built as the ideal resting places for the ugly Americans who want nothing foreign in their travels. These are Americans who want to say they are travelled but stay at American hotels with American food and American spoken there.

It is a legacy of shame. Most of these hotels are just franchised to use the Trump name. They will all be wanting to get rid of that name sooner than later. What started out as beacons to the rich and fastidious are now just focal points for protests against America and its xenophobic President.

But Trump will probably continue to be his own best customer at the Lincoln Bed and Breakfast. He bought himself that bed and now he can sleep in it.

What he has also bought himself the enmity of many millions of Americans as well as people around the world. He has lavished them with lies. And he has earned their distrust with his crudity, their displeasure with his misogyny and their derision for his bigotry.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

What would Dr. Goebbels say?

by Peter Lowry

Did you miss the new lie from Donald Trump? He dreamed up a complaint that President Obama had his phones at Trump Tower in New York tapped during the campaign last year. It seems a novel suggestion but nobody can come up with any idea why Obama would bother. If you really want to know what Donald Trump is thinking about, all you need is a Twitter account.

Thankfully today, we have news media to keep up to date with the twits on Twitter for us. Since there is no more colossal waste of time than Internet social media (other than writing a blog), we can turn our minds to the more important concerns of the day.

Like what has happened with President Trump’s latest twits? He wants Congress to waste its valuable time investigating President Obama. The Congressional leaders do not seem very interested. Mr. Trump’s good friend running the Federal Bureau of Investigation thinks it is pile of something best handled with a pitchfork. The reviled news media are laughing.

What is a guy to do? Has Mrs. Trump’s little boy shouted “Wolf” too often?

It is time to call in the experts. Which is not something that Mr. Trump does very often. The only problem is that the world’s leading expert in the big lie committed suicide in 1945.

But even if Herr Doktor Josef Goebbels, Adolph Hitler’s propaganda Minister was around to give advice, he might tell Trump he is a ‘dumbkopf.’ What needs to be remembered is that there has to be some grain of substance on which you hang the big lie. It does not have to be something that would pass muster with intelligent people but could be accepted by people with a grudge.

For example, last year there was a very large number of very gullible people who bought the Trump lie that Hillary Clinton should not have used her private server for e-mails while Secretary of State. It was obviously an error in judgement rather than illegal. It is just that people who did not think Mrs. Clinton had the right to a personal life and personal friends during her time as Secretary, who would see anything wrong in it.

For Trump to continue to promote that lie would be actionable in court for anyone but a politician. And chanting “Lock her up” is not part of the Nicene Creed. Clinton had no idea of how much that chant would cost her on November 8 and she never handled it properly.

But President Obama is not running for anything. The fact that Donald Trump is so single-mindedly involved today in tearing down Obama’s legacy just makes Trump look meaner, less intelligent, less gracious and less of a person than the job of President requires.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Trump’s Throne Speech.

by Peter Lowry

Americans would not necessarily recognize what President Trump was doing in his speech to Congress the other night. It was easily recognized by any Brit or Canuck as a typical Speech from the Throne. It is a speech read by the Queen or the Queen’s Representative telling the assembled legislators what direction government legislation will be taking during the term of the current parliamentary session.

It was certainly not your typical American State of the Union address. And British or Canadian members of parliament would have been more restrained in their reaction to it. One rarely comments on the quality of such a speech as it, by nature, has gone through many hands, adding this and that and rarely has flights of rhetoric such as President Trump’s “The time for small thinking is over. The time for trivial fights is behind us.”

Nor would a throne speech include obvious contradictions such as ensuring jobs in the coal mines while later in the speech talk about the wonderful clean environment. The seeming tempering of his immigration stance during the speech was a bone to critics but the answer will be in the bills his administration sends to Congress.

Like a throne speech, much can happen between the aspirations early in the term of office and the actual legislation that is sent to Congress or the parliament. Bills can be added to or appended during their journey through committees and legislative bodies. The similarity between what was considered a boon to voters in the speech and the final law to be signed is sometimes co-incidental.

What you would not see in a Speech from the Throne in Canada or the United Kingdom would be someone like Donald Trump acting like a pompous fool in delivering the speech over more than an hour. His reaction to the Democrats sitting on their hands through most of his speech was obvious. He made the mistake of playing to them.

Typical of Trump, there appeared to be little thought behind most of his promises. Many left you wondering about their cost. The only specifics were his promises to the General Staff who were seated in the chamber for the speech like the three monkeys. As have many right-wing politicians before him, Trump thinks the money can come from increased efficiencies in government.

The only aspect of the speech that we had never seen before was the use of people introduced from the audience who were there as examples. It was a most embarrassing part of President Trump’s speech. You felt deeply for those people being used in such a crass manner by such a vulgar person.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Trumping the News Media.

by Peter Lowry

The other day one of our American relatives asked: “Why are you writing so much about Trump?”

The simple answer is that President Donald Trump is an ongoing saga of the worst of things that can happen in politics. There are also the greatly increased readership statistics when writing about the political failures of Donald Trump. Canadians are equally fascinated by the subject. And if Trump were not so scary, he would be funny.

Take the ongoing battle with the news media. It is a battle we desperately want him to lose. In fact, he has to lose. In his vanity, he is attempting to destroy the very core of democracy in the United States of America: a free and independent news media.

Admittedly there are huge numbers of Americans who have deserted the traditional print and broadcast media but they are finding no solace in the Internet-based social media. Not everyone identifies with the chaos and confusion social media spreads. To perpetrate that chaos through the malicious condemning of respected news media has to be questioned and combatted by those who want to preserve democracy.

The best example of this disturbing approach during the 2016 election was the “Corrupt Hillary” line that Trump fed his followers. It took a destructive and the still unforgiven besmirching of the reputation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to keep that lie alive through the campaign. Thankfully, it is still harder to sell a lie than to stand by the truth.

Now Donald Trump has turned his attention to the news media. It is over what he calls, “Fake News.” He does not take kindly to criticism. He prefers adoration; it sooths his ego. At a recent White House news conference, Trump devoted time to telling Cable News Network (CNN, owned by Time Warner) why the reporter could not ask a question. As you can imagine, Time Warner can take that kind of criticism directly to the bank. It is worth a good deal in free publicity.

But the problem with that is Trump’s base of supporters want to believe him. They will go along with him that these news media are not telling them the truth about their hero.

But the key question for Trump supporters is why would CNN, the New York Times, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Guardian and the Daily Mail want to produce “Fake News” when what is going on in the White House is much worse?

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]