Or maybe I was hearing the wrong tune when I went to listen to what the horse’s mouth had to say at the Council on Foreign Depredations. At the time, last January, I wrote “to my pleasant surprise, he was eminently sane.”
At one point, speaking of Putin, he said that unlike Bush, who claimed he looked into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul, “I looked into his eyes and saw a stone-cold killer.”
Now the horse’s mouth has not only strongly endorsed Putin’s longtime business associate Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State, he’s responsible for recommending Putin’s Russian Order of Friendship recipient to Twitter Fingers in the first place. According to the Washington Post, “by happenstance Trump welcomed into his office a man who has served presidents of both parties, Robert M. Gates” [aka the Horse’s Mouth].
Trump asked his guest, a former CIA director and former defense secretary, what he thought of the four candidates. After Gates ran through his thoughts, it seemed that Trump was “looking for a way out,” a person familiar with the session said.
Trump asked whether there was someone else to consider.
“I recommend Rex,” Gates told Trump, referring to Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of ExxonMobil. Gates said in an interview that he had not gone to the meeting intending to recommend Tillerson, and he did not recommend anyone else.
Actually, it doesn’t seem like happenstance at all. “Separately,” the article continues, “on the previous day, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had proposed Tillerson to Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Rice and Gates … run a consulting firm that counts ExxonMobil as a client …”
“Which,” as New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer says, “is surely coincidental.”
It’s also surely coincidental that, like all those great Republicans, Gates has changed his tune entirely. Having once declared Twitter Fingers to be “unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief” and on national security “beyond repair,” he now says — what the hell — he hopes he was wrong.
There’s a broader pattern at work. As reported by The Guardian, neoliberalism is at the root of our problems, and it has turned our world into a business.
First we had Chevron name a tanker after Condoleezza Rice, a “giant floating symbol of the Bush administration’s cozy ties to the oil industry” as one report put it. And of course, Bush himself was an oilman, even if incompetent. Now we have the CEO of Exxon as Secretary of State. And to further confirm our brand of imperial capitalism we have three generals in the cabinet as well.
This is the give-us-the-oil-or-we’ll-blow-the-shit-out- of- you brand of diplomacy America has always had.
For every dollar ($1) the oil industry spends on Congress, it gets $119 back in subsidies. They might as well just be the government. A corporatocracy.