After Trump's Impeachment

Then What??
{Thursday, December 14th, 2017}

     While America's embattled President, Donald Trump, appears to be staring straight ahead to stay abreast of his powerful enemies in the Democratic Party and in the Mainstream U. S. Media, I believe he would be better advised to look behind him over his right shoulder. His prime and most fatal enemies are most likely the foxes he put in his own hen-house. I have thought from the beginning, and that belief is now exacerbated, that Trump's choice as the U. S. Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, guaranteed that he would not finish out his 4-year term as President. I also didn't think that Haley would tip her hand in his first year in the Oval Office nor in the second year, except in subtle behind-the-scenes activity...such as with constant meetings and/or contacts with Senator Marco Rubio, the other fox in Trump's hen-house.

    On Sunday, Dec. 10-2017, Ambassador Nikki Haley appeared on CBS's very high-profile Face the Nation program. Regarding her boss's decision on Jerusalem and his other controversies, Haley made sure to make the obligatory pro-Trump statements. But not-so-subtly, she purposely tightened the noose around Trump's neck when she suggested that women accusers against sexual predators should be heard, even if Trump is a target. Unlike the plethora of politicians as well as Hollywood and television sexual predators...alleged and admitted...who are currently biting the dust, Trump's denouement as President will only tangentially be related to sexual innuendos. His foreign entanglements...especially with Russia and even Israel...can be expected to end Trump's presidency in its third year. But Haley's comment on Face the Nation was intended, I truly believe, to grease the skids so even gentle pushes from behind his back by her and Rubio with send the President careening wickedly and swiftly down a precipitous and perilous slope.

  In the Republican presidential primary Nikki Haley wildly supported Marco Rubio and both of them assaulted rival Donald Trump cruelly and, true to form, he fired back.

     Apart from his ultra-vital billionaire donors, Nikki Haley, as the Governor of South Carolina, was Marco Rubio's most vociferous presidential backer because the most powerful Cuban-Americans in Miami supported Jeb Bush and the Bush dynasty.

    Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Marco Rubio and Nikki Haley were often side-by-side -- both in front of cameras as above and far out of public sight.

     By the time the above photo was taken, it is believed that the Nikki Haley-Marco Rubio alliance...uh, at least politically...was firm. She was willing to forsake her high-profile job as Governor of South Carolina if another job...specifically Secretary of State...would better further her own presidential ambitions. Rubio, the most ambitious presidential hopeful on the planet, reportedly gave her some early advice: She should first opt for less minefields than would befall an unprepared Secretary for State and instead aim for the UN spot on her White House pathway.

     For sure, the indelible Nikki Haley-Marco Rubio alliance was momentarily shattered but not ended when Rubio was unceremoniously wiped out in the presidential primary by Donald Trump. Haley still had her cozy job as South Carolina's governor but the bitter Rubio, after not being able to trounce Trump even in his home-state of Florida, belittled the United States Senate and indicated he would not seek a second term. But Haley and Rubio were both far more interested in the presidency than being a Governor or a Senator. So Rubio changed his mind and won a second term in the Senate, which he belittled as not being able to get anything done and he explained that was why he actually missed an alarming number of votes in the Senate. Meanwhile, the presidential primary had fueled Haley's taste for the White House. And Rubio, with second thoughts, realized a second 6-year term in the Senate was necessary to keep his presidential aspirations viable and his rich donors happy.

     And so, Nikki Haley soothed Marco Rubio's embarrassing presidential defeat and used her political astuteness to advise him that, yes, he needed the second stint in the Senate as his springboard for presidential runs in 2020 and 2024. Of course, his Vice Presidential partner would be Nikki Haley. Then by 2028 she would have her springboard to bounce right into the top White House spot after him.

      Agreeing with Marco Rubio that she wasn't ready to test the Secretary of State minefields, Nikki Haley surprised a lot of people by giving up her job as Governor of South Carolina to accept President Trump's offer to become the U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Of course, when Nikki Haley was sworn in, above, as UN Ambassador by Vice President Mike Pence, the person standing right beside her was Marco Rubio. By that time, they both believed that, if Trump didn't make it through his first four years as President, Rubio as Senator and Haley as UN Ambassador would have the positions and the money to be poised to test their still-festering presidential ambitions by taking over the reins of the Republican party.

     And that brings up back around to Nikki Haley's appearance this past Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation. As she did Sunday, Ms. Haley will continue to make the politically astute and obligatory defenses of her boss, President Donald Trump. But increasingly, especially if she or Marco Rubio sense that the teetering Trump is on the very edge of that precipitous and precarious cliff, she will, I believe, put the White House goals of herself and Rubio far ahead of worrying if Trump ends up at the bottom of the cliff. Her Face the Nation reference tying Trump to a mounting array of sexual accusers was subtle but quite calculated and surely not a slip of the tongue.

      The lure of being the U. S. Ambassador to the UN was not what caused Nikki Haley to quit as the Governor of South Carolina. She has strong presidential ambitions but would actually prefer being Marco Rubio's Vice President prior to her becoming Leader of the Free World. The Haley-Rubio alliance is indelible.

       As a matter of fact, President Trump has a lot of Foxes in his hen-house...not excluding Mike Pence...but by far the two most dangerous Foxes are Rubio & Haley.

      In an increasingly frayed two-party political system, especially with the Democrats so discombobulated, the montage above might well dominate America's near future -- President Marco Rubio and Vice President Nikki Haley. So, you ask, what does that have to do with Cuba or Cubaninsider? A lot, actually. It seems rather obvious to me that Rubio has two ambitions: {1} To be President of the United States; and {2} to be Dictator of Cuba. As America's Commander-in-Chief, he could conceivably be both.

     From start to finish, the money-crazed 2016 U. S. presidential election revealed to the world that America's precious Democracy was in dire trouble. The two-party system, careening downhill precipitously, produced two final candidates -- Republican Trump vs. Democrat Clinton -- that left Americans choosing between what they considered the lesser of two evils. And that's precisely how Trump shocked the world by getting elected President of the United States, which supposedly and instantly made him "the leader of the Free World." But now, after one year of the Trump presidency, it appears likely that he will be impeached, perhaps in the 3rd year of his 4-year term. SO, what then? Well, it might mean a Republican Party led by Marco Rubio and a Democratic Party led by Kirsten Gillibrand. But it's still a two-party system with new Supreme Court-approved parameters that favor politicians willing to sell-out to the highest bidders -- meaning 15 or so multi-billionaires anxious to purchase the American democracy for their very own totally undemocratic fiefdom.  

     But whoever is America's President and Commander-in-Chief starkly affects the rest of the world...including big competitors like China or Vietnam who are too powerful to push around and little nations like Cuba that are small enough to be preyed on, decade after decade, by a cancerous-like minority backed by the largest treasury in the world and by the strongest military in the world. So, in his first few months as U. S. President, Trump flew Air Force One to Communist China and to the very unified Communist Vietnam...thanks to the U. S. defeat in the Vietnam War...to suck up to mighty China and mighty Vietnam as prime U. S. trade partners. But even before sucking up to China and Vietnam, on April 16th, 2017, Trump flew to Little Havana in Miami. It was there {above} in a plush Theater named for a losing 1961 Bay of Pigs leader that Trump insulted Democracy by signing proclamations designed to appease the choir, which...after all these decades...still pines for the U. S. to overthrow the 1959 Cuban Revolution. In the shameful photo above, the clapping bald-headed man standing directly behind Trump is Florida's Governor Scott who is flanked on his right and left by two viciously one-sided Little Havana/Counter Revolutionary/Cuban-Americans in the U. S. Congress -- Mario Diaz-Balart and Marco Rubio. Mario's dad was a key Minister in the overthrown Batista Dictatorship in Cuba who in 1959 quickly became one of the richest and most powerful militants in a reconfigured South Florida. Rubio followed the well-greased Miami trend of sending only Counter Revolutionary zealots to the U. S. Congress although most Cuban-Americans even in Miami favor normal relations with Cuba. Of course, Rubio, now in his second 6-year term in the U. S. Senate, after his failed presidential bid in 2016, made it all the way to the Senate claiming his parents escaped the tyranny of Castro's Cuba when, in fact, they escaped the Batista tyranny two years before Americans began to first learn about Fidel Castro. But people like Mario and Marco don't reach the U. S. Congress from Miami by claiming any ties to Batista. And, most shameful of all, the last two generations of Americans have meekly accepted such assaults, not only on Cuba but also on the basic tenets of their frayed Democracy that has been fraying badly since 1959 when the Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba reconstituted itself on U. S. soil.

        AND SO, in the closing days of 2017, which will mark the end of the first year of the Trump presidency, things are heating up with serious threats of impeachment. That salient fact means we are left with this question regarding America's two-party Democracy: Can the money-crazed system in the next presidential cycle in 2020 elect a decent President like, say, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand? The answer is: NO.

     Surely, America's democracy needs a female President but not a money-crazed dynastic one like Hillary Clinton, who merely helped the unqualified Donald Trump attain the White House. My pick would be Kirsten Gillibrand although Amy Klobuchar has long been one of the most powerful advocates for normalizing relations with Cuba. As you can see above, 9 bills proposed by Klobuchar have become laws and she currently has a decent Cuban bill under consideration. Kelly Ayotte would also be far better than any male contender from either the Democrat or Republican parties. But I believe when the U. S. Supreme Court legalized virtually unlimited money from multi-billionaires to buy-up the U. S. democracy, getting a Gillibrand or a Klobuchar or a Ayotte elected President of the United States is virtually impossible in today's money-crazed, lobbyist-mad political environs.

But:

  Now it seems that politicians like Marco Rubio, who allegedly feast on money-burgers provided by a handful of multi-billionaires, have by far the best and easiest paths to the White House whether or not they are ready or worthy. Sadly, the United States and the rest of the world long depended on America's NON-MONEY CRAZED democracy, one that didn't spawn Marco Rubios but instead stressed public servants. 

      Unquestionably, the U. S. democracy from 1776 till at least 1952 was by far the greatest form of government ever devised on this fragile planet. But in 1952...a few rogues in the Eisenhower administration got away with teaming the U. S. democracy with the Mafia to support the wicked Batista dictatorship in Cuba. Then in 1953 the same rogues began using America's might to mount coups and install U.S.-friendly dictatorships in the Caribbean and Latin America. This persisted into the 1970s when Nixon-Kissinger decided the democratically elected Salvador Allende government in Chile wanted to keep most of its resources for its own people. So a bloody U.S.-backed coup killed Allende and replaced him for the next 17 years with the murderous but U.S.-friendly Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. But even more telling of democracy's decline was January of 1959. After the Cuban Revolution rid the island of the Batista-Mafia rule, the leaders merely fled to U. S. soil. The self-serving sycophancy of the Bush dynasty, and others, helped meld the Batistiano-Mafiosi remnants into the fabric of the American democracy, and that proud democracy, as depicted above, has gradually descended into such depths as: {1} A Rubio has a better chance than a Gillibrand to be the next President of the United States, and {2} the once-proud U. S. democracy gets condemned for its ongoing Cuban policy by a 191-to-ZERO vote in the United Nations. And so, the little Uncle Sam character depicted above is now merely a faint caricature of what the Founding Fathers built.

       AND So, in the closing days of 2017, does it appear that this generation of Americans have the wherewithal, courage, and patriotism to resurrect the democracy bequeathed to them by the Founding Fathers way back in 1776? NO, I DON'T THINK SO.

     Even the Voice of America yesterday -- Dec. 11, 2017 -- hinted to its worldwide audience that the next century will likely belong to...Communist China. The VOA reported that China only recently developed a taste for wine and yet it has quickly become the world's #2 wine consumer on the way to being #1. The young Chinese lady above, working as she enjoys her wine, was probably educated at a top U. S. university...Yale, Harvard, Stanford?...but returned to a China that now is #2 in wine consumption while fast becoming #1 in the realms of the two M's -- money and military -- that the United States has long dominated internationally.

      Also this week -- the second week of December, 2017 -- Anthony Bourdain's popular CNN program "Parts Unknown" featured a decisive visit to Shanghai, the incomparable city-state on the central China coast. It has over 24 million people with the world's busiest container port. It is becoming the global financial hub. After absorbing Shanghai's incredible and burgeoning wealth, Anthony Bourdain mused wryly, "Should I become a Communist?" Hopefully not, but...?

      As he gazed across the waters at Shanghai's skyline, Anthony Bourdain asked some Chinese experts how China, as epitomized by Shanghai, has crept up so ominously on the U. S. democracy. Its startling market economy, including its tremendous trade surplus with the very cooperative United States, was one answer. Another was...unlike the United States...China has not spent decades financing or participating in foreign proxy wars. Thus China can well afford to send hundreds of thousands of students to top, eagerly awaiting universities in the U.S. and UK, universities direly seeking and reaching for all that upfront Chinese money...as U. S. college students now face a debilitating $1.3 trillion Student Loan debt designed to make the students suffer but rich bankers much richer. And the health system in Shanghai, like the education system, had learned from the U. S. emphasis on creating extreme wealth for the health industry instead of stressing healthcare for its non-rich citizens. Only the U. S. democracy, China keeps reminding its people, has educational and health policies primarily designed to enrich its already richest people. This was pointed out to Anthony Bourdain even as he marveled at how Shanghai was now "over run" with millionaires and billionaires thanks to its reconstructions of what it perceives as "democracy's weaknesses in creating but not distributing wealth."

      Also, while the U. S. infrastructure -- roads, rails, airports, etc. -- need vast infusions of cash while the U. S. is fighting trillion-dollar wars, Anthony Bourdain noted that Shanghai has ultra-modern airports and four world-class railroad stations...with trains that travel 268 miles-per-hour. Meanwhile, China -- while vastly increasing its military -- is currently spending billions of dollars building modern railroads across much of Asia and now Africa, spreading its influence even further.

    This historic photo, courtesy of Wikipedia, is used by Chinese historians today to equate China's rise to Super-stardom with America's ascendancy -- both courtesy of imperial Japan's quest in the 1930s and 1940s to dominate the world. Japan's Dec. 7-1941 attack at Pearl Harbor famously awakened America, the "Sleeping Giant" as referenced by Japan's top general, into becoming a full-bore World War II participant, just as England's Winston Churchill was praying it would become. The image above was China's Pearl Harbor. The scorched Chinese baby was one of the few survivors after Japanese war planes had bombed Shanghai on August 28th, 1937. Such atrocities turned China into a major U.S.-British ally in World War II and, of course, spawned Mao, China's most legendary Communist leader. The Shanghai that Anthony Bourdain marveled at this week on CNN is reflective of the Communist China that, unless the U. S. has another Pearl Harbor-like awakening, is ascending into what will soon become China's, not America's, century. The photo above still provides a vivid education for 1.3 billion Chinese while the education learned on Dec. 7-1941 at Pearl Harbor seems to have been forgotten by this generation of Americans. I believe that is what Anthony Bourdain learned when he featured Shanghai on his CNN Parts Unknown program this month. Shanghai today rose from the ashes that scorched the Chinese baby depicted in the historic 1937 photo. As the VOA and CNN indicated, the Chinese today are trying REAL HARD to perfect their form of Communism while Americans today are NOT EVEN TRYING to re-discover their form of Democracy.

      Thus, in December of 2017 America's President Trump is battling loud impeachment cries in the very first year of his 4-year democratically elected term while China's Dictator Zi is being hailed worldwide as "the strongest Chinese leader since Mao" and "easily the most powerful leader in the entire world."

So, what in the hell happened?

Well, lately:

Donald Trump happened...

and Marco Rubio happened...

and Nikki Haley happened...

and the American people can't seem to fix it.

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