ONE WEEK IN AMERICA (AND THEN TURKEY A BIT)

So since the last time I wrote about Donald Trump, the following has happened: the Oath Keepers, everybody's favorite far-right ex-military sort-of-a-cult thing, started tweeting about how the USA was on the "verge of hot civil war" because of impeachment (meaning an actual shooting war, which they implied they would start); three Congressional committees (Oversight, Intelligence, and Foreign Affairs) requested Rudy Giuliani attend for an official deposition, which he refused, so they then subpoenaed him; the Republican party officially inquired if the Department of Justice was investigating Hillary Clinton for her connections to Ukraine because it's always about Hillary somehow; the DoJ then confirmed that Trump had asked the Australian government to investigate his political enemies; the Attorney General, Bob Barr, made undisclosed trips abroad to ask at least two foreign governments (the UK and Italy) to investigate the USA's own intelligence services; the House Judiciary committee requested the Mueller Report's grand jury materials because they believe Trump lied under oath in his written depositions therein; a second whistleblower complaint appears to have emerged alleging that the White House leaned on the IRS with respect to Trump's taxes; VP Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both been revealed to have been involved in the effort to pressure Ukraine; after Pompeo told the House committees he wouldn't let State Department employees be "bullied" into testifying, numerous State employees said they would testify anyway; Rudy Giuliani said that he was going to sue "the Deep State" in a federal court "jawsuit"; Trump, in a televised rant, claimed that he had been on a phone call with Nancy Pelosi and she had told him they couldn't impeach him; he attempted to bully the President of Finland into helping him; he then asked Ukraine to investigate the Bidens again on national television during a press conference, and then he asked China to do the same thing; the former US special envoy to Ukraine provided text message evidence to Congress that the Trump administration had specifically withheld aid money from Ukraine in order to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens; we learned that Trump had raised the idea of investigating the Bidens (and Elizabeth Warren, as a bonus) with China back in June on a secure call, during which he promised to stay quiet about the Hong Kong protests; and finally claimed it was all Rick Perry's idea somehow.

One week.

Also I'm just gonna quote this bit from a New York Times article because, seriously, what the fucking fuck:

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

And although that is of course horrific, the most worrisome thing just happened earlier today when the White House released a statement of what can really only be characterized as support via non-interference for a Turkish invasion of northern Syria. It is important to understand that in this context, "northern Syria," while geographically accurate in terms of, like, a map, really means "where there are a lot of Kurds." If you don't know anything about the Turkeys opinion of Kurds generally, the short short version is "they do not like them at all," and the slightly longer version is that the Turkish government's official policy towards the Kurds - who live in northern Syria, northern Iraq, and eastern Turkey, because when Europe was drawing lines to figure out where countries should be in the Middle East (and Africa, for that matter) it turns out they were really awful at it - kind of runs on a scale between "quiet hostility" to "attempted mass murder" depending on who is in charge.

Right now, the person in charge is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose tenure has been marked by a lot of bad things generally, but with respect to the Kurds he has overseen increased hostility towards anti-ISIS Kurdish militias in Syria and general hostility to Kurdish rights in Turkey proper. In recent years American diplomats had actually convinced the Syrian Kurdish militias to abandon defensive positions which served as a deterrent against Turkish attack, and Trump has just given the Turks effective permission to take advantage of Kurdish co-operation with violent means.

This is the environment where Donald Trump has suddenly decided to allow fairly drastic regional change, and it smacks of nothing so much as the wild tantrums he's been throwing for the past few weeks but on a larger and much more dangerous scale.

SCHEER INANITY

The last week has been a lot of dumb political stuff in Canadian politics, wherein I define "dumb political stuff" as "the stuff that mostly doesn't matter in any realistic sense but always ends up mattering anyway because people think it says something revealing about character or whatever."

Andrew Scheer got caught in two fairly major lies of this sort this past week. The first probably establishes the low bar for "caught," wherein the media figured out that despite his claims otherwise, there is in fact no evidence that he was ever an insurance broker, which was fairly obvious from context because anybody familiar with his personal history knew that he was first elected to office at the age of 25 when he was still sort of bumming around earning credits towards his B.A. in dribs and drabs. (The Insurance Councils of Saskatchewan have confirmed that he took an accredited insurance course, but not that he was ever an actual broker.)

All of this is being played as a big gotcha in the Canadian politics scene, but - seriously, who cares? Nobody was voting for Andrew Scheer based on his precious insurance brokerage experience, and conservative politicians lying about How Important They Were In The Business World is not new nor has it ever been new. This is just standard politician resume-fluffing. Whether Scheer was ever an insurance broker or not does not change the fact that he has not worked in the private sector for fifteen years and has no really significant private sector experience, and while it is conceivable that someone might get really upset about this and decide to vote for somebody else - I don't think it's going to be a lot of somebodies.

The second lie is a little more politically significant, at least. The fact that Scheer has not yet revoked his dual American citizenship is honestly not that important in any realistic sense; I do not think Scheer has divided loyalties. He's a Canadian with an extra passport, and there is nothing wrong with that. If I qualified for a second citizenship somewhere else I would apply for it, because it might come in handy some day! (If you are reading this and somehow have the power to unilaterally grant me citizenship in another country, by the way, feel free to message me. No marriage proposals, I am taken and also they are less effective than most people think most of the time for citizenship purposes.) Realistically, the fact that he sort of failed to mention his own dual citizenship while he was loudly criticizing other Canadians for having dual citizenship should make people angry, but probably it'll only make the people who already disliked him angry.

But the fact that his dual citizenship is American is probably what makes it a little more politically relevant, and you can tell that his campaign is certainly concerned about it by their waffling response, first claiming that he wasn't registered for the American draft and then admitting, in what certainly seemed like embarrassment, that he was; Scheer himself claiming "oh, I totally started that whole process to revoke my citizenship already, like, months ago" in a dog-ate-my-homework sort of way. Because Team Scheer knows that Canada's weird relationship with the USA veers between smug condescension and stuff envy, and a whole lot of Proud Canadians treat the idea of American citizenship sort of like having cooties. (America: we like to shop there, but we don't want to participate!) And more than a few of those Proud Canadians are going to be just a bit iffier about voting for a Secret American, and in a close election like this one that could matter significantly.

Don't get me wrong: it would be great if Scheer and the Tories were disqualified on the basis of their idiotic climate change "plan" - the one where Scheer literally suggested that building tunnels to ease traffic congestion could reduce climate emissions - but that's not the country we live in most of the time.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched since last week:

Joker (2019, Todd Phillips, theatre) - 1.5/5

We're currently watching a lot of old episodes of Death In Paradise, the BBC dramedy murder-of-the-week procedural about policing on a Caribbean island, and it's nothing super-heavy but sometimes you just want the television equivalent of a decent cheeseburger, you know?

See you in seven.