Transactional?

Nobody can claim to be surprised by the way Our President responded to CIA assurances that Prince MbS did, indeed, order the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.  Tr*mp did stop short of claiming that Khashoggi was an Iranian agent, but only by a hair's breadth.

News analysts, once again, had to come up with a term to describe Tr*mp's approach to foreign policy.  Seizing on his emphasis of $110 billion dollars in imaginary arms contracts, once again they settled on transactional.

Other terms come to mind — "morally bankrupt" is a strong contender — but rule books at major media outlets demand the appearance of neutrality, and transactional is such a neutral sounding word!  It started me thinking, though.  Rather than transactional, they could have used corporate.

The Supreme Court long has recognized corporate personhood.  (The recent Hobby Lobby decision maintains that a corporation is enough of a person to have religious beliefs!)  Unlike your average person, though, corporations have but a single objective: to increase the wealth of shareholders.  Pretty much any corporate "person" would have made exactly the same decision as Tr*mp: their values appear to be identical.  Tr*mp just might be the embodiment of corporate personhood.

If a corporation really were a person, driven by a single goal to the exclusion of all others, that person would be diagnosed as psychotic.  Presumably, Our President has a variety of goals; but, as we've seen, his approach to all of them is the same — transactional.

Well, duh!

I haven't posted lately because I try to avoid belaboring the obvious. but I'll make an exception this time to reassure my readers that I'm still alive:

• Voter suppression works, as demonstrated by Brian Kemp, the new governor of Georgia.  
• "Florida Man" can be a woman, as demonstrated by Brenda C. Snipes, election commissioner of Broward County.   
• Nancy Pelosi will be Speaker again, if only because nobody else is willing to take all that grief; but she's also the only one capable of doing the job at this time.   
• MbS personally ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, but the Tr*mp Administration will find a way to ignore that fact.   
• Fox News and Russia's TASS news agency are locked in a bitter struggle to determine which can be more slanted and misleading.   
• Nobody has any clear idea of how to cope with the ecological catastrophe that is California.   
• Matt Whitaker is an affront to the rule of law, but then so is the rest of the Tr*mp Administration.   
• You can't fight a trade war with China and expect them to maintain sanctions against North Korea at the same time.

Khashoggi, part two

I suppose this is conjecture, but it really feels right: Erdogan went public with lurid details of Jamal Khashoggi's murder because the Saudis didn't respond to his first blackmail attempt.  MbS couldn't imagine that anybody — especially the President of the United States of America — would be all that upset by the loss of a troublesome journalist.  After all, nobody paid much attention to the Kingdom's numerous other egregious abuses; how much difference could one more dead body make?

MbS was right about Tr*mp, of course, but others were less sanguine, and/or more opportunistic.  Under pressure, all MbS could do was "blame the help;" but given that the Turks almost certainly do have audiotapes, and possibly video as well, we can expect the negotiation of some very inexpensive "loans" to Turkey by the Kingdom in the near future.

Nobody actually believes the latest Saudi narrative, and even some Republicans will resist looking like complete idiots by pretending to swallow it — but it's the best anyone can do right now.  Will the whole thing blow over before Congress can curtail US participation in war crimes in Yemen?  As the Magic 8-Ball might say, "Ask again later."

The Real Khashoggi Question

A journalist is missing, probably dead, and whatever happened to him can be attributed to the government of Saudi Arabia.  That certainly is upsetting, but one wonders why it has drawn more media and Congressional censure than ongoing war crimes in Yemen; the imprisonment of women's rights advocates, including one sentenced to death; the imprisonment and near-fatal flogging of a mildly dissident blogger; the kidnapping and mistreatment of the Prime Minister of Lebanon; the Qatar blockade; and an host of other abuses.

Oh, yeah, there was that little matter of the Saudi royal family's involvement with al Qaeda prior to 9/11.

Jamal Khashoggi's reputation for "liberalism" dates from when he lost his job as editor of the Saudi journal Al Watan for failure to censor an article suggesting that Ibn Taymiyya, the 14th century founder of Wahabbism, may have been less than infallible.  It was just a minor glitch, though — more significant, since the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, were close ties to ousted defense minister Turki al-Faisal.  One suspects that most of Khashoggi's royal friends were among those rounded up by MbS for the great Ritz Carleton shakedown.

Clearly, criticism of MbS is enough to get a person murdered these days, but there seems to be one question nobody is asking: why did Turkey go so public so soon, and what's in it for Recip Tayyip Erdogan?  It would have been easy enough for the Turks to pretend ignorance: instead, they leapt at the chance to spread grisly tales of torture and dismemberment, thereby revealing a practice of bugging foreign embassies and consulates.  (Nobody actually will believe the "Apple watch" story.)

My guess is that Turkey is tired of being pushed aside as America's favored partner in the Middle East, especially now that Erdogan has tanked the Turkish economy.  How can Americans complain about a little Turkish authoritarianism when the Saudis are so much worse?  The release of Evangelical agitator Andrew Brunson signals renewed Turkish interest in close partnership with the United States — not just an end to sanctions, but some sort of financial rescue.

Crown Ponce Jared won't like the idea, and neither will his "uncle" Bibi: a falling out with MbS will throw their alleged "peace plan" into disarray.  It won't go over too well with American corporations heavily financed by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund either.  Stay tuned for the next exciting episode!