Dec 6, 2016

Red-Baiting, Putin-Scaremongering Democrats Are Now Suddenly Worried About Offending China

by Caitlin Johnstone, via Newslogue

It’s weird to see Democrats suddenly freaking out about diplomacy when they’ve spent the last five months screaming that we need to attack the Russians at every turn.

The Democrats, who have spent the latter half of this year loudly blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for everything from the DNC leaks to Hillary Clinton’s defeat to Arrested Development’s mediocre fourth season, have all of a sudden transformed from a mob of screaming, frenzied Joseph McCarthys into a bunch of tender-hearted grandmotherly diplomats now that Donald Trump has broken with executive tradition and accepted a phone call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen.
Why is such a phone call so outrageous, you may ask? Why, because that might offend the Chinese, and we can’t just go around offending the leaders of large, powerful Asiatic nations now, can we? The very idea!
Type the word “Taiwan” into Google and then click News and you’ll see what I mean; article after article, editorial after editorial about “China’s wrath” and what a colossal “gaffe” and “blunder” it was for Trump to have a ten-minute phone call with the leader of a… well it wouldn’t be diplomatic to call them an ally, so let’s just call Taiwan a nation that the United States currently sells weapons to, trades prolifically with, and would definitely defend if it were attacked or invaded. Let’s call it a schmalliance, to avoid offending China. Yeah. Taiwan is a major longtime schmally that America would never dream of communicating with, until that crazy political neophyte Donald Trump picked up the phone instead of letting it go to voicemail.
My favorite bit about this was Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald’s series of indignant tweets at Trump, angrily explaining what an incompetent political oaf the president elect is for not honoring the “USA’s One-China policy dating back to Nixon.” The reason that particular Twitter rant delights me so much is because this is the same guy who recently stayed up all night making dozens of rambling, repetitive tweets accusing WikiLeaks of having published documents that were doctored by Russia, based on literally zero evidence whatsoever. Get this god of journalistic integrity into your State Department pronto, Donald!
And it’s not just the pundits and talking heads ranting about this, naturally. The validation given to them by the liberal echo chamber has given the rank-and-file Democrats the confidence and self-assuredness to make their own inane, hypocritical condemnations as well. My news feed is full of party loyalists feigning outrage about this policy Trump transgressed that I’m certain none of them knew about until five minutes ago. One of the top posts on Reddit’s front page yesterday was a simple caption “This child has no understanding of foreign policy. None.” with a link to one of Trump’s tweets defending the phone call. This from the anti-Trump subreddit that routinely has anti-Russia and anti-Putin posts on its front page.
Fun fact: Liberals are terminal know-it-alls. All you have to do to get them repeating something as fact is state it as if they should have already known it in the first place. Start a sentence with “Well of course anyone who knows anything about foreign policy would know that…” and then slip in whatever garbage you want them repeating. Works every time.
It’s not the fact that they’re calling Trump out that bothers me (although seriously, what’s China going to do? Attack the United States? Stop trading with them? That would be the dumbest and second-dumbest thing they could possibly do, respectively. No, they’re going to put on their big boy pants, suck it up, deal with the fact that a phone call happened, and keep raking in the dollars. They knew Trump was going to razz them a bit; he’s said so once or nine hundred times. What’s their response been so far? They called him “inexperienced”? Ooh, scary! Save us from “China’s wrath”! Gosh this is a long parenthetical aside. How are you doing, dear reader? How’s your mom? You should call her more often. She gave you birth. Raised you up from a helpless babe, and it was harder than she let on. Give her a call right now why don’t you?), it’s the hypocrisy. These are the people who just tried to drag us into a full-scale military confrontation with Russia by supporting a candidate who wanted to start shooting down Russian planes over Syria. Clinton was plainly gunning for a war with Russia, and her supporters and her goons in the mainstream media were repeatedly casting all her political opponents as agents of the Kremlin, from Trump to Julian Assange to reputable alternative media sites to Jill Stein. Jill Stein! Hippie Grandma! I encountered many Clinton supporters in the lead-up to the election who posted this cute photo of Jill’s visit to Russia as evidence that she’s a “Putin sympathizer” and therefore an inferior candidate to the one who wanted to start a world war with his nation and its allies. One of those allies being China.
This is crazy. You’re drunk, Democrats. Go home. You guys suck at diplomacy and you don’t know what you’re talking about. Start building a real party that’s run by real human beings instead of neoliberal T-800 Model 101 cyborgs, start building up candidates who actually know stuff about things, and until you’re done trying to start world wars with nuclear superpowers, shut up about diplomacy.