Earlier today the US Senate voted by a nearly two-to-one margin to kill Senator Rand Paul’s amendment to sunset the 16 year-old Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) which has been used to justify disastrous US military interventionism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. It can in theory be used to justify continued military expansionism in any nation purported to have a terrorist presence that could pose a threat to the United States, without further authorization by congress.

The Senate voted to continue violating the US Constitution by leaving that immense power in the hands of the executive branch today, which is of course headed by one Donald J Trump. And how much objection do you think has been raised to this by the coalition of establishment Democrats who call themselves “the resistance” to Trump’s administration? How much “resistance” do you think people like Neera Tanden, Joy Reid, Peter Daou, Keith Olbermann and the rest of the anti-Trump establishment loyalists are putting up to this vote ensuring that Trump maintains unrestricted war authority?

Go ahead and check right now; I’ve hyperlinked the aforementioned names to their respective Twitter accounts in the preceding paragraph for you. You’ll see them babbling about Russia, DACA, “Teflon Don” whatever the fuck that is, but you won’t see anything about the Senate’s vote to leave unbridled military force authorization in the hands of a president they assure us is a traitor, a madman, and a barely-closeted Nazi.

Anyone else seeing a bit of a plot hole here?

This is of course because the Democratic establishment is, as I never tire of pointing out, a grossly neoconservative one. The American supremacist ideology of neoconservatism has made a deliberate, calculated metastasis into the Democratic party in recent years, as described here in Glenn Greenwald’s important essay “With New D.C. Policy Group, Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons”. Any attempt to curb the US war machine necessarily conflicts with the neoconservative agenda of using American military might to suppress the emergence of a rival superpower and maintain US world dominance at all costs, and Rand Paul’s push to restore the legislative branch’s constitutional authority to declare war would have thrown in an undesired roadblock to that agenda had it passed.

In a recent interview with New York magazine’s The Vulture, MSNBC’s Joy Reid said the following, which we should all take very seriously:

One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with. I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together. [Laughs.]

Establishment loyalists frequently accuse me of being a Kremlin agent paid by Putin to “divide the left”, but I’m not a Kremlin agent, and I’m not dividing the left. Establishment Democrats are no more “the left” than Dick Cheney is. By pointing out these people’s blatant neoconservatism, which has no moral qualms about ripping apart children with Reaper drones in order to disrupt the interests of potential rival nations, I am simply pointing out where the left is and where it is not.

If you oppose the expansionism of the US war machine (and I insist that you’ve got no right to call yourself part of the left unless you do), then establishment Democrats are not your friends. Their whole McResistance is a farce designed to herd Democrats back into the stables of the neoliberal neoconservative one-party system, not to oppose Trump. For these amoral manipulators, Trump is not a force to be opposed, he’s a face to demonize and then pin on every anti-establishment movement that emerges. That’s why we’re seeing Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein and alternative media being deliberately associated with Trump’s election at every opportunity by these oligarchic propagandists; the goal isn’t to oppose Trump, the goal is to quash anti-establishment thinking.

Donald Trump is not your friend, but neither are these backdoor neocons who are trying to herd you into supporting US bloodbaths on the other side of the planet while they deprive you of the same social safety nets accorded to everyone else in every major country at home. If people sincerely want to oppose Trump they’ll oppose his continuation and expansion of all of Bush and Obama’s warmongering policies; if they don’t, they’re actually on the side of everything they claim to be “resisting”.

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