Democrats, the Mass Media Industrial Complex and the Deep State Pentagon Intelligence Surveillance Industrial Apparatus seem to have missed these two memos in ninth grade world history from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Niccolo Machiavelli.
In September, 1843, Ralph Waldo Emerson said to Oliver Wendell Holmes:
“I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him.”1
Four hundred years before, in 1505, Machiavelli wrote in The Prince what has been translated as “Never do an enemy a small injury.” He also wrote that “the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”
Two years of the frothing-at-the-mouth Russia Collusion narrative shows the narrators have laboured mightily producing not even a mouse. Indeed it was all “fake news” and the Mueller investigation flop has probably insured Trump’s re-election.
Somehow Sean Hannity’s Fox News has become more credible than Rachel Maddow’s msDNC and cnn plus the big New York and Washington dailies and networks and what’s left of magazines have lost whatever shreds were left of their post-WMD Iraq War credibility.
Congratulations!
When Lord Cornwallis sent his second-in-command to surrender to George Washington and the French at Yorktown in 1781, the British band played a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.”
Indeed.
Welcome to the accelerating decline of the US Empire, the successor to the Roman Empire, but with drone bombs, iPhones, microwaves, LED TV screens, gluten-free groceries, rock’n roll, microfiber, fast food, lattes, regime change uber alles, thermonuclear bombs, Donald Trump, John Bolton, Monsanto, Elliot Abrams, the Boeing 737 MAX, Nancy Pelosi and Goldman-Sachs. Are We Not Already Great Again?
Perhaps room is now available to talk about
* New Improved Medicare for All,
* The Green New Deal going to a ZERO CARBON economy,
* canceling student loan debt, making college tuition free,
* increasing the minimum wage to not below $15 an hour,
* creating millions of jobs with a trillion dollar infrastructure project paid for by canceling Obama/Trump’s trillion dollar nuclear warhead “upgrade,”
* fiercely and ferociously regulating the banks and corporations,
* restoring national sovereignty from usurpation and negation by international finance cartels,
* giving both Israel and Saudi Arabia the heave-ho,
* paying for everything else by cutting the Deep State Pentagon Intelligence Surveillance Industrial Apparatus and weaponized police by, say, 34.334 percent,
* home-porting the fleet and shutting down overseas bases,
* embracing authentic democracy (mere elections do not a democracy make) plus embracing democratic socialism to replace totalitarian financialized catastrophic capitalism, and
* finally smashing the Central Intelligence Agency into the thousand pieces President Kennedy vowed to do but somehow never got around to.
And then there is the looming apocalypse – ongoing actually as we speak – of fossil-FUELED, global HEATING-causing climate EMERGENCY leading to species EXTINCTION (i.e. US and every other living thing.) Time to nationalize Exxon-Mobil et al and shut ‘em down. Along with the telecoms, Silicon Valley and the twitterverse.
Time to start talking about principles, not personalities.
- Said to a young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had written a piece critical of Plato in response to his earlier conversation with Emerson, as reported by Felix Frankfurter in Harlan Buddington Phillips, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960), p. 59.