The Bad Idea Bears were characters invented for the Avenue Q puppet theatre troupe, and their day job is to come on stage and counsel the other characters to do really dumbass things, then pout and whine when they don’t get their way. They encourage others to drink heavily, call in sick to work to get days off, eat crap, and have unprotected sex. To one depressed fellow puppet they exclaim “You should HANG yourself!”, and when the guy demurs they cry a little, and exit crestfallen, one of them saying sadly over his shoulder “well, we’ll just leave you this rope in case you change your mind”.
Few in the audience are aware that these same bears, who are not at all the mere puppets they pretend to be, have been guiding Trump’s foreign policy since the 2016 election, and likely longer. The Avenue Q gig is just a cover. I suppose I don’t know this for sure, and it’s true they’ve never been photographed near the White House, but it just has to be them. I used to suspect Bolton, but then I remembered that some very, very bad ideas pre-dated his arrival, and that got me thinking. The pattern of decision making, I submit, is unmistakeable. It must be the Bears. They must come and go from the Situation Room through those underground tunnels that nobody admits are there, but everybody knows about. They probably lay low until the Joint Chiefs get exasperated and go back to the Pentagon.
I reckon that by the time Trump was yelping “no puppet, no puppet, you’re the puppet” at Hillary, the Bad Idea Bears we’re already pulling his strings. You can tell it’s them. It could only have been the Bears, for example, who were whispering in Trump’s ear during a security briefing from Andrew McCabe last year, when he blurted out “But why don’t we just invade Venezuela? They have lots of oil and they’re right next door!”. Similarly, only the Bears could have advised Trump to ask his strategic analysts why the hell it was that the US never dropped nuclear weapons on anybody, and what good the damned things were if you weren’t going to blow things up with them. And who else could have told Trump that it might be a good idea to kill the families of ISIS fighters, or seize Iraq’s oil, or nix the Iran nuclear treaty, or take US forces out of South Korea, or pull out of Syria, or let Kim Jong Un play him for a chump, or undermine NATO, or withdraw from the INF Treaty, or nix the Paris climate accord, or build a frigging border wall for that matter? Who else could be telling him to ignore and contradict his own multi-kabillion dollar intelligence apparatus? And who do you think really sends out those Tweets? Ever notice that the supposed author spells just like a bear?
It’s obvious! Irrefutable, I say! No simple human, not even Bolton, nor Pompeo either, could conceive such a broad and varied range of diabolical idiocies, and then announce them in garbled, typo-strewn form to a confused and often deeply frightened world via Twitter feed. To strive so assiduously and witlessly to work counter to US interests at every turn, you need to have no underlying philosophy, no native intelligence, no fear of consequences, no conscience, and no capacity to think more than a couple of steps ahead. You have to crave only mayhem. Like bears.
If you want more evidence, the preceding litany of calamitous foreign policy boners is nothing next to the latest revelation: Donald and Jared, like disgraced General Flynn back before he was shit-canned, are working hard to give Saudi Arabia nuclear technology so MbS can have the Bomb. The capital “B” Bomb. The Hydrogen Bomb. For the Saudis.
Here’s an excerpt from today’s edition of The War Zone, a military affairs website I favour:
Whistleblowers have warned Congress that current and former members of President Donald Trump’s Administration, including some with serious conflicts of interest, may have tried to rush the transfer of sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in ways that may violate U.S. law. There are now concerns that those efforts may still be ongoing, despite existing concerns that the Saudis, fearful of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, may be seeking a pathway to acquire their own nuclear weapons. Even more worrisome, Riyadh appears to already be working on developing indigenous ballistic missile capabilities that could eventually carry these warheads.
You can’t tell me that’s not the Bad Idea Bears hard at work. Listen, I know my bears. I’ve got a bunch around here. They’re always doing mischievous things, even though none of them makes any particular claim to innate badness. Look at this guy:
That’s Bixby Bear. This was when I caught him rooting around in the bathroom for Kathy’s hair brush, which is where he gets the stuff that he drops all over the house. This is a program he pursues with such tireless devotion that I think he must have shares in the Swiffer company or something. Just think what would happen if Bixby Bear was Trump’s de facto National Security Advisor, and consider that those Bad Idea Bears are way worse.
So how bad was this idea – what would happen if the Saudis actually got the Bomb? Something really unpleasant, I bet. For starters, I imagine Iran, which has continued to abide by the treaty that Trump abrogated, would perceive no choice but to restart its own nuclear program. Then the Israelis, who perhaps are comfortable with the Saudis going nuclear – though not too comfortable, probably – would undoubtedly be inclined to go full-bore apeshit. Maybe at that point Bolton gets on the phone and tells Netanyahu to hold his horses, and wait for the USAF to handle it, which is something the evil walrus deeply desires anyway – he doesn’t even need the Bears to nudge him that way. It could then start to get a little sporty, as I’ve described in this space before.
The cat’s out of the bag though, so the whole scheme should probably fall apart. That’s what I’m telling myself. I almost feel sad for the Bears, though, this was such an ambitious attempt to provoke utter disaster, it really would have been their masterpiece, plus it involved companies like Bechtel, and Siemens, and Westinghouse, and Brookfield (the latter an outfit with known financial ties to Jared), and there would have been scads and scads of money sloshing around. That MbS guy has all sorts of spare cash. Besides, a nuclear exchange in the Middle East might not even escalate to global thermonuclear war, so as bad as the idea was, it might have been survivable, over here anyway.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to follow most of their advice, like that given here, so the Bears are doing OK.
the needlefish 