Has The American Establishment Opted for Thermo-Nuclear War?

Paul Craig Roberts

If you want to be an American TV talking head or a Western presstitute, you are required to be braindead and integrity-challenged like Bill O’Reilly, CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and all the rest.
In an interview with President Donald Trump, O’Reilly said: “Putin is a killer.”
O’Reilly is indifferent to the fact that thermo-nuclear war is a killer of planet Earth. For O’Reilly, President Trump’s desire to normalize relations with Russia is an indication that the President of the US is comfortable making deals with killers, as if America’s last three presidents have not been mass killers comfortable with their destruction in whole or part of many countries and millions of peoples.
President Trump’s response to O’Reilly’s was: “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think – our country’s so innocent?”



The only thing wrong with President Trump’s response is that it implicitly accepts that Putin is no different from Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Yet there is no evidence that Putin is a “killer.” This accusation is an assertion from those who prosper from having a “Russian threat” to keep the money and power flowing to themselves.
As Finian Cunningham shows, Trump should have reprimanded O’Reilly for his unsupported and undiplomatic accusation against the president of a country with which President Trump hopes to restore normal relations. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/02/06/trump-apology-for-killer-putin-wrongheaded.html
President Trump’s statement of an obvious fact was quickly branded “defense of a killer” by congressional Republicans, Hillary Democrats, the liberal, progressive, left-wing, and the Western presstitutes.
Even online sites, such as politico.com, jumped in to criticize “Donald Trump’s defense of Vladimir Putin’s homicidal history.” Allegations of “Putin’s homicidal history” are astonishing after 24 years of Washington’s genocide against Muslins in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria, and non-Muslims in Yugoslavia and the Russian regions of Ukraine. Washington ranks as one of the worst mass murderers in human history, but the Western presstitutes brand Putin as the one who is homicidal.
Listen to these members of Congress who represent Americans in Washington:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, Ky) said referring to the thrice elected President of Russia: “He’s a thug.” McConnell has gone along with Washington’s mass murder of peoples for 15 years, and this accomplice to mass murder said that Washington’s murder of countless millions, which have sent refugees all over the Western world, are not evidence against America. In his response to Trump’s statement, McConnell actually said: “We don’t operate in any way the way the Russians do. I think there’s a clear distinction here that all Americans understand, and I would not have characterized it that way.” http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/republicans-denounce-trumps-defense-of-killer-putin-234665
The Republican senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, said: “We are not the same as Putin.” Of course we aren’t. We are mass murderers.
The Republican senator from Nebraska, Ben Sasse, said, and this is a level of ignorance hard to believe even for Americans, that “Putin is an enemy of political dissent. The U.S. celebrates political dissent and the right for people to argue free from violence about places or ideas that are in conflict [as at Cal Berkeley]. There is no moral equivalency between the United States of America, the greatest freedom loving nation in the history of the world, and the murderous thugs that are in Putin’s defense of his cronyism.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens said: “Trump puts US on moral par with Putin’s Russia. Never in history has a President slandered his country like this.”
No Bret, you have it backwards. No US president has ever slandered Russia like this. There is no moral equivalency between Washington and Moscow. Washington is totally devoid of all morality. Russia is not. It is not Russia that has murdered, maimed, and displaced peoples in at least 9 countries in the last 15 years, sending refugees all over the Western world, some of whom no doubt bear legitimate grudges.
Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, rushed to tell NBC that Trump didn’t mean that Washington is not morally superior to Putin’s Russia. Of course the US is morally superior to everyone. The millions of peoples we kill and dislocate are proof of our unquestioned moral superiority. Every time we bomb a wedding, a funeral of the wedding guests, a children’s soccer game, innumerable hospitals and medical centers, schools, farms, public transportation, we exceptional and indispensable Americans are demonstrating our moral superiority over the Earth. Only the morally superior can commit vast crimes against humanity without being held accountable.
Normal relations with Russia do not seem to be in the cards. The demonization and lies will continue. The New Cold War is too important to the ruling establishment, and to the members of the House and Senate who are dependent on military/security campaign donations, for Trump to be allowed to normalize relations with Russia.
Everything that Reagan and Gorbachev achieved has been undone. The material interest of a few has again placed humanity at risk.
“The greatest freedom loving nation in the history of the world” can’t even have a debate about it, because a debate is Putin apologetics and moral equivalency.