The so-called “alternative right” is at least posing as holding its breath over the prospects of Bush-era Neo-Conservative John Bolton being appointed as US Secretary of State. However, with the appointment of Breitbart’s Steven Bannon as Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor of the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump, Bolton and his Neo-Conservative agenda already has a solid foot in the door.

Breitbart News exists today as a living success story of Cass Sunstein’s cognitive infiltration doctrine. It infiltrated the increasingly independent and influential alternative media, and reasserted establishment talking points under right cover. The actual alternative media focuses on issues with a perspective outside of the Western “left-right” paradigm. Organizations like Breitbart News, World Net Daily (WND), and others, have ceaselessly worked to repolarize audiences increasingly seeing through politics and identifying the bipartisan control corporate-financial special interests hold over Western society.

read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2016/11/19/32541/

No matter where Trump got the idea, it's a very dangerous one for any president to hold: That you (or anyone) is effectively above the law.

But before we get to all of the implications that spring from that idea, let's examine the notion of presidential conflicts of interest. According to PolitiFact, the relevant portion of the U.S. code covering it is Title 18 Section 208, which says that federal government employees can't deal with issues in their official capacity in which they or their families have a vested financial interest.

Except that the statute doesn't hold for all federal employees. It reads: "Except as otherwise provided in such sections, the terms 'officer' and 'employee' in sections 203, 205, 207 through 209, and 218 of this title shall not include the President, the Vice President, a Member of Congress, or a Federal judge."

Here's more from PolitiFact:

It’s been this way since at least 1974, when the Justice Department issued a letter saying Title 18 Section 208 did not apply to the president. Congress expressly codified the exemptions in 1989.

In the 1974 letter, the Justice Department said the legislative history of this conflict-of-interest provision indicated that it was never intended to apply to the president. Additionally, the Justice Department said placing conflict-of-interest laws on the president could constrain him in a potentially unconstitutional manner, though it did not give specific examples.

PolitiFact rated Giuliani's claim as "true."

So, legally speaking, Trump (and Giuliani and Judge Dredd) are on generally solid ground when it comes to conflict of interest laws. The primary ones put in place by the U.S. code simply don't apply to the president.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/22/this-is-the-si...

Now it appears likely that he’ll have a second act, as President-elect Trump’s secretary of defense.

If confirmed, General Mattis could bring a voice of reason to a White House that will be led by a dangerously ignorant president who has so far shown too little interest in opposing views. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/an-experienced-leader-for-the-pentagon.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-

Wow! Bold by Gus. The voice of reason? Or the voice of war? Is war reason? Despite appearing "balanced" the NYT has always been on the side of the hawks — especially the Democrat hawks because they are disguised as doves... See toon at top.

John Bolton, a former U.N. ambassador reportedly being considered for deputy secretary of state in the Trump administration, said Sunday that reports of Russian interference in the presidential election may be a “false flag” conjured up by the Obama administration.

In an interview with Eric Shawn of Fox News, Bolton claimed the Obama administration had “politicized” intelligence and suggested there may have been a hidden motive behind the CIA’s finding that Russians hacked computer networks belonging to the Democratic and Republican national committees. He questioned why the FBI did not uncover similar evidence of meddling by foreign intelligence services when it investigated Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

“It’s not at all clear to me just viewing this from the outside that this hacking into the DNC and the RNC computers was not a false flag operation,” Bolton said. “The question that has to be asked is, why did the Russians run their smart intelligence service against Hillary’s server but their dumb intelligence services against the election?”

[Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House] 

Bolton’s extraordinary suggestion came after The Washington Post reported Friday that U.S. intelligence agencies concluded Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential race to help Donald Trump win. The CIA shared a secret assessment with key senators during a recent closed-door briefing, telling lawmakers that individuals connected to the Russian government had provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the DNC and others to boost Trump and undermine Clinton, The Post reported. President Obama has ordered a “full review” of suspected Russian hacking during the campaign, and a bipartisan group of senators has called for a probe of the allegations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/12/12/bolton-sug...

see also: 

President-elect Trump’s State Department selections have managed to trigger opposition from two distinct and opposed camps. The neocons and anti-Russians oppose Exxon chief Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state designate, as too inclined to accommodate Putin. The disparate but occasionally united liberal, arms-control, and realist types are equally alarmed about John Bolton’s apparent selection for the number-two deputy secretary of state slot.

The problem with Bolton is simple. If you liked George W. Bush’s foreign policy, especially the Iraq War and the idea of regime change carried out by the American military on a multi-country, pan-regional scale, and you want get that kind of policy going again, the search is over: he’s definitely the guy. Most of the upper-middle-level officials who plotted the Iraq War have retreated quietly into private life, but Bolton has kept their flame alive, claiming quite recently that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, writing incendiary op-ed pieces about the desirability of bombing Iran, and seemingly (before a pro-Israel student group at the University of Chicago) encouraging Israel to launch a nuclear strike on Iran. In every realm where Trump—for all his Jacksonian bluster—has consciously sought to reassure us that he understands the radically extreme danger of nuclear-weapons use, Bolton has done the opposite. Where Trump quite courageously—before a hawkish South Carolina audience—criticized the Iraq War as an unmitigated disaster fomented by officials who consciously twisted intelligence findings, Bolton was one of the twisters, actively propagating the falsehood that Saddam had an active nuclear-weapons program. There may be literally no issue where he doesn’t take an extreme position: in 2002, as a Bush under secretary of state, he made the charge, later debunked, that Castro was engaging in advanced biological-weapons activities.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/bolton-is-trouble-tiller...

John Bolton, the most hawkish of Washington’s hawks, strutted onto the stage Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference and presented what can only be described as a Boltonian view of the world: America’s influence around the world is declining; its exceptionalism is being neutered by a shadowy group of global elites. By the end of the ten-minute speech, you might have gotten a hint as to why the Trump administration passed on hiring the former ambassador to the United Nations for jobs in the White House and State Department.

Bolton’s lambasting of global aristocrats aside, there isn’t much in the man’s worldview that rings consonant with President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy. Throughout the campaign, Trump made a compelling argument that struck a chord with America’s blue-collar and middle classes: the U.S. has been spending the past 15 years on a wild-goose chase in the Middle East, spending trillions of taxpayer dollars in order to overthrow and undermine governments we don’t like and using hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to reconstruct broken societies. Where Barack Obama referred to Iraq as the “dumb war” that distracted the U.S. military from the “good war” in Afghanistan, Donald Trump went several big steps further, labeling the Iraq adventure a disaster that tore the region apart. The invasion “may have been the worst decision anybody has made, any president has made in the history of this country,” Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper at a February 2016 town hall.

You know who doesn’t think the invasion of Iraq was a terrible blunder? John Bolton. Indeed, a full ten years after U.S. troops drove Saddam Hussein into a spider-hole and disbanded the Iraqi army—a decade in which much of Washington admitted that the management and assumptions powering the invasion and occupation were beyond hubristic—Bolton told the Washington Examiner that the decision was the right one. “I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct,” Bolton said. “I think decisions made after that decision were wrong, although I think the worst decision made after that was the 2011 decision to withdraw U.S. and coalition forces.” With beliefs like that, is it any wonder why Bolton was passed over for three national-security jobs in the administration?

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-john-bolton-isnt-par...

See toon at top...

see also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11276

Former Ambassador John Bolton is again raising the battle cry for pre-emptive war on television and in the newspapers, this time with North Korea, though this is hardly new, considering he did his best to derail diplomatic talks between the U.S. and the Kim regime when he was a member of the Bush Administration in 2001. Like a bad broken record, Bolton offers the same reckless militarism that’s proven him wrong so many times before, though his reputation as a foreign policy “expert”—particularly in conservative media circles—didn’t seem to suffer much.

His latest call is for reunifying the Korean peninsula—with China leading the charge. If that fails, the U.S. should consider its own military attack on the regime. He admits that it would “undoubtedly be dangerous and somewhat chaotic,” but “whatever the risks, they pale before the risks of nuclear conflict emanating from the erratic Kim regime.”

On paper, Bolton’s got the credentials of an established Washington policy official and seasoned public servant. He’s an alumnus of three different Republican administrations—Reagan and Bush I—and worked in the State Department and served as Ambassador to the United Nations under Bush II. He advised Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign on foreign policy, and he’s a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

His public statements throughout the last 16 years of war, however, have been more in line with the radical warmongers of the extreme right of the Republican Party, and are as predictable as a daytime soap opera.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-are-we-still-listeni...

What makes Cotton’s warmongering all the more worrisome is that the military action he favors taking is always unnecessary. There is no U.S. security interest or commitment that requires intervention in Syria or the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and there is no legal justification for U.S. military action against the Syrian and Iranian governments. Like other hard-liners, Cotton has a vastly exaggerated definition of American interests, blows foreign threats out of proportion, and has no problem with starting illegal wars. Cotton is offering “Jacksonian America” a future filled with an unending series of unnecessary wars whose costs will be far higher than he claims, and if they are wise all Americans will reject him and the fanatical foreign policy he is trying to sell them.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/tom-cotton-perpetual-warm...

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John Bolton defends preventive war against North Korea, but he won’t call it by that name:

Pre-emption opponents argue that action is not justified because Pyongyang does not constitute an “imminent threat.” They are wrong. The threat is imminent, and the case against pre-emption rests on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from prenuclear, pre-ballistic-missile times.

The concepts of preemption and imminent threat have been so thoroughly warped by the Iraq war debate that their proper meanings have been all but lost. Preemption means striking before an impending attack occurs, but there is no such attack being prepared by North Korea. If the U.S. strikes North Korea first under these circumstances, our government would be committing an act of aggression pure and simple. There would be no preemption, because there would be no attack to preempt. 

Bolton declares that the threat from North Korea is imminent, but this requires us to redefine imminent to mean something entirely different from what it has always meant. Imminent means something that is about to happen, and that does not describe the threat from North Korea. North Korea is not about to attack the U.S. or its allies. It is not about to do it next month or next year. It is not about to do it at all. It has been deterred from doing so for decades, and continues to be deterred. In order to believe that there is an imminent threat from North Korea, namely one that is going to happen in the very near future, one also has to believe that its government is bent on self-destruction. Bolton writes about North Korean nuclear weapons and missiles as if their mere existence justifies a U.S. attack, but that is simply nonsense.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/bolton-wants-preventive-w...

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With the rumor mill abuzz, the next official said to be in White House limbo is US National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster and it appears John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, might be his replacement if the general gets the boot.

This notion, however, hasn't exactly sat well with many, including Gareth Porter, a historian, investigative journalist and analyst specializing in US national security policy.

​Speaking with Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear, Porter told show hosts Brian Becker and John Kiriakou that the idea of the US "sprinting" to war with Iran if Bolton replaced McMaster is "hyperbolic," but that he ultimately understood the logic of the fear.

"I think it's a bit hyperbolic, but I understand the logic of it and I can't complain about people fearing war because of the people involved and the history of real threats of war against Iran and, indeed, during the Bush administration there was a plan for war with Iran," Porter explained.

When asked about the significance of US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson being replaced by CIA director Mike Pompeo, Porter noted that it had a lot to do with Pompeo pushing the same agenda as Bolton when it comes to his thoughts on Iran.

"Pompeo is somebody who obviously appealed to the neoconservatives and to [US President Donald] Trump on the basis of his extremism on the question of policy toward Iran," Porter said. "And the reason that he is quite a scary figure is that he appears to be thinking along the same lines as John Bolton has for many years, which is along the lines of wanting to have a military confrontation."

"We don't know for sure, but that's a reasonable assumption that Pompeo thinks in those terms because he has pushed as hard as possible to push for Trump to do exactly what Bolton wanted him to do, which is to do what Netanyahu wants him to do — and that is to threaten the intention to pull out of the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] if the Iranians don't agree to major changes," he continued. The JCPOA, signed in 2015 by 6 world powers including Iran, is also commonly called "The Iran Nuclear Deal."

"The US will indeed pull out and give an ultimatum to the Europeans that they must do this or they will face sanctions against their businessmen."

But is the Land of the Free headed in the direction of a confrontation with Iran, Becker inquired.

"There are a couple of sides to this," Porter said. "If Bolton were to be chosen as national security adviser, this would be extremely bad news in terms of the danger of war because Bolton, when he was the George W Bush administration, he was the top policy maker on Iran."

Porter went on to explain that Bolton taking over McMaster's role wouldn't be the best thing since sliced bread because of his past links to former US Vice President Dick Cheney and his role in trying to previously execute a war with Iran during the Bush administration.

"[Bolton] was working directly under Dick Cheney, who we know for a fact wanted [and] planned a war with Iran once they had gotten control of Iraq. Of course that never happened… but Bolton was going to be the guy who actually carried out the strategy," Porter noted before offering details on Bolton's ties to Israel. "We know that Bolton had a plan and carried it out to set up situation where Iran was taken to the United Nations Security Council and accused of having a covert nuclear weapons program and thus setting up a situation where they would stand officially accused — that's why he's such a scary figure."

"He has, more than any other figure, continued every month to call for the bombing of Iran," Porter said. "The other side is that the US military doesn't want a war."

"There will be a clash [between the Pentagon and the Trump administration] if Bolton comes in, that's a sure thing. We don't know how it will turn out, but there will be a clash."

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201803171062621509-john-bolton-pursue-w...

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Of course, the problem for this clique of in-the-know wonks was not only that their opposition to Tillerson was undergirded by their doubts about Trump (some of them, like Boot, actually admitted to voting for Clinton), but that their calls for the head of T-Rex put them in league with the fire-breathing reactionaries of the primitive right. That gaggle includes Frank Gaffney, the shrill anti-Muslim head of the Center for Security Policy; John Bolton, who wants to rip up the Iran deal (and who’s been slipping in and out of the White House looking for a job); Steve Bannon, who admitted to the New Yorker that he had blocked some of Tillerson’s appointments while serving with Trump; and Bannon buddy Sebastian Gorka, who sniped at Tillerson in public. For them, Rex Tillerson’s chief sin wasn’t that he had a “low familiarity with the work of diplomacy,” but that he believed in it at all.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-political-forces-beh...

His career really went down the toilet.

Outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was reportedly sitting on the loo when the White House chief of staff called to deliver the bad news.

Tillerson, who was on a trip to Africa, was suffering from a stomach bug when Chief of Staff John Kelly informed him to return to DC and be on the lookout for a presidential tweet, according to the Daily Beast.

Kelly was speaking in an off-the-record meeting with reporters when he made the potty revelation. It was later leaked to the website.

During the call, the chief of staff told Tillerson to cut short his diplomatic trip and added, “You may get a tweet,” The New York Times reported.

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2018/03/16/tillerson-was-reportedly-on-the-toilet-whe...

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http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34390

In my reporting on U.S.-Israeli policy, I have tracked numerous episodes in which the United States and/or Israel made moves that seemed to indicate preparations for war against Iran. Each time—in 2007, in 2008, and again in 2011—those moves, presented in corporate media as presaging attacks on Tehran, were actually bluffs aimed at putting pressure on the Iranian government.

But the strong likelihood that Donald Trump will now choose John Bolton as his next national security advisor creates a prospect of war with Iran that is very real. Bolton is no ordinary neoconservative hawk. He has been obsessed for many years with going to war against the Islamic Republic, calling repeatedly for bombing Iran in his regular appearances on Fox News, without the slightest indication that he understands the consequences of such a policy. 

His is not merely a rhetorical stance: Bolton actively conspired during his tenure as the Bush administration’s policymaker on Iran from 2002 through 2004 to establish the political conditions necessary for the administration to carry out military action.

More than anyone else inside or outside the Trump administration, Bolton has already influenced Trump to tear up the Iran nuclear deal. Bolton parlayed his connection with the primary financier behind both Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump himself—the militantly Zionist casino magnate Sheldon Adelson—to get Trump’s ear last October, just as the president was preparing to announce his policy on the Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He spoke with Trump by phone from Las Vegas after meeting with Adelson.

It was Bolton who persuaded Trump to commit to specific language pledging to pull out of the JCPOA if Congress and America’s European allies did not go along with demands for major changes that were clearly calculated to ensure the deal would fall apart.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-a-john-bolton-appoin...

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The head of the IAEA is reduced to pleading on behalf of the nuclear deal:

Yukiya Amano said that if the deal “were to fail it would be a great loss for nuclear verification and multilateralism.”

Amano said U.N. inspectors had access to all required sites and between them now spend 3,000 calendar days a year working in Iran.

Amano is right to defend the deal, and everything he says about it is true. The trouble is that the opponents of the deal are not interested in nuclear verification or multilateralism. The fact that the head of the IAEA vouches for the deal is another reason for Bolton et al. to want to get rid of it. They hate the deal because it is successful. It settles a dispute peacefully, and it removes an excuse for unnecessary war. 

Opponents of the deal didn’t want the nuclear issue to be resolved through diplomacy, and they are doing their utmost to sabotage the agreement that managed to do this. The debate over the nuclear deal, such as it is, has been a useful reminder that fanatics and hard-liners won’t ever accept a compromise and will do everything they can to destroy the compromise that others have created. They have found their willing pawn in Trump, who rejects the deal in no small part because it lets him distinguish himself from his predecessor. One of the most important diplomatic triumphs of the twenty-first century is most likely going to go up in smoke because a vain narcissist can’t stand the idea that Obama was right about anything.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/iran-hawks-hate-the-nucle...

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Brushing aside the anguished pleas of our NATO allies, President Trump Tuesday contemptuously trashed the Iranian nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions.

Prime Minister Theresa May of Great Britain, President Emmanuel Macron of France, and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany were put on notice that their ties to Iran are to be severed or secondary sanctions will be imposed on them.

Driving the point home, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin ordered Airbus to cancel its $19 billion contract to sell 100 commercial planes to Iran.

Who is cheering Trump’s trashing of the treaty?

The neocons who sought his political extinction in 2016, the royals of the Gulf, Bibi Netanyahu, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC had warned Iranians that the Americans were duplicitous.

After Trump had finished speaking, Bibi launched strikes on Iran’s bases in Syria, and flew to Moscow to persuade Vladimir Putin not to give the Iranians any air defense against Israeli attacks.

Iranian forces responded with 20 missiles fired at the Golan, which ignited a massive Israeli counterstrike Thursday night, a 70-missile attack on Iranian bases in Syria.

We appear to be at the beginning of a new war, and how it ends we know not. But for Bibi and National Security Advisor John Bolton, the end has always been clear—the smashing of Iran and regime change.

Tuesday, Trump warned that Iran is on “a quest for nuclear weapons,” and “if we do nothing…in just a short period of time, the world’s worst sponsor of state terror will be on the cusp of acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapon.”

And where is the evidence for this Bush-like assertion?

If Iran is on a “quest” for nukes, why did 17 U.S. intel agencies, “with high confidence,” in 2007 and 2011, say Iran did not even have a nuclear weapons program?

Saddam Hussein could not convince us he had no WMD, because that was just the pretext, the casus belli, for doing what the War Party had already decided to do: invade Iraq.

We were lied into that war. And how did it turn out?

Why has the Foreign Relations committee not called the heads of the U.S. intelligence agencies and asked them flat out: does Iran have an active nuclear bomb program, or is this a pack of lies to stampede us into another war?

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/its-boltons-and-bibis-ag...

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 The reality here is that Trump ALWAYS wanted Bolton as the whatever. But Bolton was too "unpalatable", even to the ultra-right wing boffins. Thus Trump went through a few personnels until he managed to get Bolton to do the job Trump always wanted him to do (kick arses), as well as Pompeo now having replaced the "mild" crew of whatisname on the world scene. And to crank up this hardening of the arteries, the proposed head of the CIA is a really nasty woman who was in charge of torture during the heydays of the Bush administration... Is this evolution towards complete loony nastiness or what?

Giving Jerusalem to Bibi was another step in this demolishing of delicate world diplomacy. Woof. And now with an armada the size of ten world war firepower in the Med and in the Gulf, the mad men of America, led by Trump the DumbDumb are about to obliterate Iran and blame the Russians for it... Piss of piss when your mates are Murdoch and Soros... Both wanting the same thing — even if Soros isn't a full fledged mate and seem to bat for the "other" (same) side...

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In a sit-down Meet the Press interview broadcast Sunday, host Chuck Todd asked Trump if he was “being pushed into military action against Iran” by his advisers – presumably pointing to the aggressive pronouncements from National Security Advisor John Bolton.

“I have two groups of people. I have doves and I have hawks,” replied Trump. “John Bolton is absolutely a hawk. If it was up to him he'd take on the whole world at one time, okay?”

Trump then brushed away concerns about the influence of Bolton, who also served in the White House during the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.

“That doesn't matter because I want both sides,” said Trump.

Trump went on to defend his record of preserving peace – including speaking out against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the decision to call off a strike against Iran in response to a drone downing this week, because it would not have been “proportionate” and would have resulted in “150 dead people.”

This was the second time in 24 hours that Trump was forced to back Bolton, after saying on Saturday that the official is “doing a very good job” but adding that he “disagrees very much” with him on the Middle East.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/462521-trump-bolton-fight-world-iran/

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