The Show Must Go On

 It's hard to believe that in just a few short weeks (if the polls are right)  Donald Trump will officially become a lame duck president. I'm already envisioning the ebullient crowds chanting, as they did outside the Bush White House when Barack Obama beat John McCain in 2008: "Na Na Hey Hey, Kiss Him Goodbye."

But I am also envisioning ultra-right militias showing up to do battle with the ephemeral Marxist/Antifa/Biden forces that supposedly are taking away all their freedoms.

The ugliness threatens to far outweigh the joy and relief that the long national nightmare of Trumpism is over. Because it won't be over. Even before he was elected thanks to the archaic Electoral College and the economic inequality of neoliberal capitalistic rule, Trumpism was always simmering just below the surface. Reversing the flood will be no easy task, and it will take a lot more than a corporate Democratic president's few token sandbags to do it.

Lame Duck Donald, if he wasn't joking at one of his recent Covid-spreading campaign rallies about fleeing the country to avoid prison, could start acting more like a high-flying reanimated Pterodactyl. He won't be going down without a fight, even if this fight doesn't include the highly prophesied legal challenges to the election result.

 Out of revenge, he would refuse to sign even a bare-bones stimulus bill that does not personally and directly benefit himself and his clan and grant him and them immunity from prosecution for all past, present and future crimes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no doubt correct when she claims that all he cares about, right this very minute, is his name on $1200 stimulus checks to help his re-election chances.

Post-defeat, President Duck a L'Orange will be so busy stuffing his own carcass with Treasury loot that he'll make the Clintons' alleged absconding with White House furniture and memorabilia as they left office in 2000 look even pettier than it did at the time.

The mischief that this man can still do and the violence that he will still be able to foment from his continuing position of power are incalculable. The boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it might even be put to the ultimate test. Would the Republicans, even assuming that they'd still barely control the Senate in January under a Biden presidency, finally help remove him from office in November or December in the interest of the survival of their own corrupt party? Because if he does lose, and loses badly, the country might not even be able to wait a few more months for his final departure.

Of course, with no pandemic relief in sight, a lame duck Congress could single-handily transform America into a virtual abattoir as Joe Biden bides his time till Inauguration Day. Who needs a sane, functional president with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel in virtual control of both the public purse and the Republican Party? Having distanced himself from the White House after the bipartisan CARES package for the plutocracy gave him and his class everything they wanted and more, McConnell has no incentive at all to cooperate with any president, whether Democrat or Republican.

Even if Trump is ultimately tried and convicted of a crime, he will get his own reality show. "Celebrity Apprentice" will morph into "Celebrity Ex-President" or maybe "Orange Is the New Orange" filmed in a luxe Club Fed, where Trump in a jumpsuit can promote QAnon conspiracy theories to his heart's content. Stay tuned for a cable bidding war to end all bidding wars to determine where Trump decides to take his talents after he leaves Washington.

Meanwhile, whoever said that divisiveness and partisan "gridlock" are preventing our elected representatives from doing anything for the public good should ponder this grisly image:

That's maskless ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein giving a "full body hug" last week to maskless Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham after the Duopoly, at the behest of polluting Dark Money, successfully rammed through Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court nomination for a full body vote. They were congratulating themselves on the awesome civility with which they stabbed the body politic right in the back. Or maybe it was the skill with which they attached the silencer to the assault rifle aimed at America, allowing one more right-wing jurist to avoid answering even the most basic and pressing existential questions, including whether she "believes" in the capitalism-engendered climate change destroying all forms of life on Earth.

 How do we explain this oligarchic merry-go-round, these endless variations on one grotesque theme?

 Let us at least try to count the ways: 

 

Covid and Capitalism On Steroids

 Leave it to Donald Trump to equate his truncated hospital stay with a post-doc residency in infectious diseases. His malignant narcissism, turbocharged with a euphoric regimen of the powerful steroid Dexamethasone, led him to boast he'd learned so much about Covid that he discharged himself from the hospital after only four days. Armed with that false sense of well-being supplied by the drug, he is using his disease as germ warfare, infecting all who come into his path with his toxic spittle and "don't worry be happy" cant. And that includes his own teenage son, assuming that he is not already sick.

Trump was in full S.O.B. (shortness of breath) mode as he went huffing and puffing up to the White House balcony on Monday night for his Mussolini photo op and campaign ad.

 

 He is getting back to work even if it kills him and everybody around him, not to mention the legions of his mask-averse fans who worship him like a god. And not to mention the untold numbers of people who will continue to sicken and die of disease and despair, thanks to his continuing reign of ignorance and terror. 

The White House has been literally transformed into a pest-house.

The heavy-duty steroid that he's on is commonly reserved for those with severe symptoms of Covid-19. I suspect that his compliant physicians dosed him with it not so much for therapeutic purposes, but because it does such a good job of masking symptoms. I have witnessed just what this drug can do when my husband, suffering in the last stages of Multiple Myeloma, was prescribed it.  With only weeks left to live,  this normally responsible and sane man felt so good he decided it would be a great idea to use our house as collateral to purchase a BMW, which he would then race professionally on the world circuit. To say that this drug instills a false and even psychotic sense of well-being is a vast understatement. 

Trump was already psychologically damaged. And he has the nuclear codes. And nobody seems capable of saying No to him. Forget about him not being out of the woods for another week to ten days. The whole world is in more danger than ever with this steroid-addled, ratings-addicted tyrant on the loose.

One commentator compared his balcony scene to Michael Jackson dangling his infant son out of a hotel window. I had also been thinking of Michael Jackson, but more in relation to his likewise being so rich and powerful that he was able to hire a compliant doctor to administer anesthesia to help him sleep. That turned out to be the ultimate in insomnia cures.

Trump, who has reportedly never slept much thanks to imbibing a dozen Diet Cokes a day, just got his own compliant doctors to feed his permanent sub-manic state with a psychosis-inducing stimulant.

Meanwhile, as The Washington Post reported this week, more than $2.3 trillion allocated through the grotesquely named CARES Act was injected into the big bloated coffers of corporations and individual oligarchs that were never required to prove either immediate need or future adverse impact from the pandemic. Nor were they required to promise they would keep their workers on their payrolls.

Contrast this with the bargain Band-Aid and the crumbling tablet of expiring aspirin of the cruelly temporary unemployment supplements and one-time-only $1200 "stimulus" checks tossed out by a bipartisan Congress to the tens of millions of people who are suffering the most.

 It was a massive dose of financial steroids for the rich and the ethically unhealthy, allowing the pandemic itself to rage on and on, and get even worse. 

The Trump presidency is emblematic of our entire terminally diseased capitalistic system, which needs euthanasia much more than it requires any more of the wasted therapy that ends up hurting the whole world.

Don't just take my word for it. Pope Francis has issued a perfectly-timed encyclical, inspired by his namesake saint of Assisi, with the anti-capitalist and anti-war theme of Fraternity and Social Friendship. This paragraph takes direct aim at Trumpism:

The best way to dominate and gain control over people is to spread despair and discouragement, even under the guise of defending certain values. Today, in many countries, hyperbole, extremism and polarization have become political tools. Employing a strategy of ridicule, suspicion and relentless criticism, in a variety of ways one denies the right of others to exist or to have an opinion. Their share of the truth and their values are rejected and, as a result, the life of society is impoverished and subjected to the hubris of the powerful. Political life no longer has to do with healthy debates about long-term plans to improve people’s lives and to advance the common good, but only with slick marketing techniques primarily aimed at discrediting others. In this craven exchange of charges and counter-charges, debate degenerates into a permanent state of disagreement and confrontation.

But the Pope doesn't let the neoliberal system of government and the discourse-controlling corporate media which produced Trump off the hook either:

 The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of "spillover" or "trickle"-- without using the name-- as the only solution to societal problems. There is little appreciation of the fact that the alleged "spillover" does not resolve the inequality that gives rise to new forms of violence threatening the fabric of society. It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at "promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity" and makes it possible for jobs to be created and not cut. Financial speculation fundamentally aimed at quick profit continues to wreak havoc. Indeed, "without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function. And today this trust has ceased to exist." The story did not end the way it was meant to, and the dogmatic formulae of prevailing economic theory proved not to be infallible. The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom. It has also shown that, in addition to recovering a sound political life that is not subject to the dictates of finance, "we must put human dignity back at the centre and on that pillar build the alternative social structures we need."

Trump Fears Bernie, Not Biden

With the coronavirus spreading and the economy crashing, Donald Trump is said to be desperate for Joe Biden to hurry up and win the nomination over Bernie Sanders. 

But he is damned if he does get his wish, and he's damned if he doesn't.

First of all, Biden is so far to the right that he might as well be a Republican himself. Trump, who has vowed to cut Social Security and Medicare, will be hard pressed either to pay grudging homage to Biden's own long crusade to cut Social Security and Medicare, or he will forced to publicly defend FDR's New Deal from Biden's depredations. Neither tactic is likely to make him feel comfortable. Then again, he's always bragged that he thinks the avoidance of hypocrisy is for chumps. And it certainly would not be the first time he attacked an opponent from the fake-left. 

A Trump/Biden general election would play out more like the GOP primary which Trump thought he'd avoided as the incumbent president. So unless the campaign devolves into two old reactionaries arm-wrestling or holding push-up contests or trading ornery senile insults on the debate stage, this match-up would be quite the yawn if its only theme is "Corruption V. Corruption."  Turnout also likely would be quite low; the youth vote in particular, which has thus far failed to materialize for Bernie in the vast numbers predicted, would effectively be nonexistent in the general. 

In Michigan, where some of Bernie's poll numbers lag behind Biden's by more than 20 points on the eve of the primary, Biden has already beaten Trump to the punch in 2016 by endorsing, in a $200,000 paid speech, Republican Fred Upton in his ultimately successful congressional run. The Democratic establishment has studiously avoided confronting this inconvenient fact in its own desperate attempt to construct a millimeter of space between the two right-wing reprobates.

  There is no possible way that Trump would ever be able to successfully accuse his fellow racist, sexist, corrupted corporate tool of being a socialist, as he is wont to do with Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the "Opposition."  His supporters are not as stupid as they're made out to be by the liberal press.  The awful, uncomfortable truth is that Trump and Biden are more alike than they're different.

 To achieve the continued enthusiasm and rally turnout of human bodies to which he is accustomed, Trump would much prefer to stick to the tried and true (but false) GOP narrative of the "radical" Democratic Party - to which he himself belonged in the not so distant past. 

It's really hard to accuse Joe Biden of being soft on immigration when activist Latinos heckle him at nearly every event for his own cruel deportation record in the Obama administration. Biden was Obama's xenophobic point man in Latin America, strong-arming leaders in Mexico and elsewhere to keep Central American refugees far, far away from the US border.

So unlike the liberal donor class and the liberal punditocracy, Trump appears not to have written off Bernie Sanders quite yet. Unlike Biden, Bernie has an actual moral leg to stand on when he's standing up to Trump. 

It could be that, unlike the Democratic establishment, Trump pays some actual serious attention to other polls revealing that Bernie has an even better chance of beating him that Biden does.

Trump's America First Action Super PAC is certainly worried enough, or pretending to be worried enough, to have sent out the following S.O.S.  over the weekend:

I'm going to keep this email short and blunt.
We must move quickly before things take a turn for the worse.
Bernie Sanders is building a full-fledged army of socialist grassroots warriors to take down President Trump and Vice President Pence.
It's up to us to put an end to this.
STOP SANDERS - STAND WITH TRUMP!

In other words, despite tweets siding with progressives in accusing the Democrats and the media of slimingBernie, Trump is effectively campaigning for Joe Biden on the very eve of the all-important Michigan primary. Just as Hillary Clinton thought she was cleverly installing Trump in 2016 as the "pied piper" candidate who'd be as easy as pie to beat, so too is Trump going full Machiavellian with the bipartisan red-baiting of Sanders.

He wants Biden and he doesn't want Biden. He wants Bernie to be a foil to Biden and he wants to beat Bernie. In other words, he's trying to gaslight everybody into the desired state of confusion. He is the depraved human iteration of Doctor Doolittle's Pushmipullyu. He not only double-talks, he double-talks from every orifice.

I would also quibble a bit with the survival of the "grassroots socialist army" hinging upon Bernie's own electoral fortunes. The movement now has a life of its own and will notfold in the event that Sanders loses the nomination and fulfills his promise ( cringe-worthily reiterated on the Sunday talk shows) that he will campaign for his "good friend" Biden.

It turns out that the America First Action Super PAC might be even more of a head-fake than it it appears. They weren't asking for dollars - of which they have hundreds of millions aplenty from various corporations and oligarchs - but for a signature on a petition. AFA's founder, Randy Perkins. heads AshBritt Environmental, a disaster/defense contractor. Perkins has been accused by various public interest groups of skirting the law which forbids federal contractors from contributing to political parties. Other AFA contributors include mega-donor Sheldon Adelson as well as some of the shady characters associated with Rudy Giuliani and "Ukrainegate."

My conclusion? They want to beat Bernie to install Joe Biden to get Hunter Biden to get the ultimate Russiagate Revenge against the Democrats. And I also think Trump is afraid of Bernie and is mentally sending the Democratic bigwigs a dozen roses and a magnum of Dom Perignon by way of cheap secret thanks for orchestrating his victories.

Whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead is nuts. 

Correction: whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead forgot to notice that this is a Machiavellian Duopoly, whose oligarchic members must sometimes pretend to hate each other to maintain the increasingly fragile illusion that our elections are free, fair and democratic.

So many head-fakes, so little time. 

And this isn't even counting Hillary Clinton's not so stealthy comeback campaign.

The Smell of Astroturf in the Morning

I'm sure I'm not the only one getting carpet-bombed with impeachment emails from one Democratic Party offshoot after another, asking for money, phone calls to Congress, and my participation in a protest march demanding the ouster of Donald J. Trump from the White House.

MoveOn, the group originally formed in 1996 to corral voters for Democrats by urging them to "move on" from the impeachment of Bill Clinton, is now seeking "crisis" donations to pay for professional organizers to travel to battleground states to corral voters to demand the impeachment of Trump.

I got one email this morning from a Brent J. Cohen, executive director of "Generation Progress". It was addressed to "Joe," the same pseudonym I used when I signed up several years ago to handsy Joe Biden's "It's On Us" campaign to combat campus sexual assaults.

In case you're wondering why I didn't use my real name, it's because, suspicious person that I am, the use of multiple names to sign up for these various enterprises is how I keep track of who's sharing my email address with whom. So I immediately assumed that "Generation Progress" is simply one of the many names given to the Democratic Veal Pen network, names invented to make people believe that they're being bombarded by myriad independent groups instead of by one gigantic, corporate party-affiliated, mother of all bunker busting missiles.

Not that they try that hard to disguise themselves, mind you. For one thing, they use their real names. For another thing, the fonts and designs they use on their various websites are eerily similar to one another. 

(Hillary Clinton's PAC)

Let me quote from the Brent Cohen "Generation Progress" email that landed in my inbox this morning.

"We the people should be a reality, not just a quote," the pitch begins. "Tell Congress that Trump compromises our morals and values. It's past time to remove him from office." --

Joe-- Democracy is one of the most fundamental American values. Our democracy isn't, and never has been, perfect, but we aspire to reach a place where 'We the People' is a reality and not just a quote. Right now, Donald Trump is attacking our democracy. By pressuring the president of Ukraine to intervene in American elections and on his behalf, Trump has taken his attacks to a new level. This is an abuse of presidential power and an impeachable offense. It's vital that Congress hears from you on this: tell them it is time to take action." 

Cohen helpfully provides a link my congress-critter's email address and phone number. But I have to say, I find it really hard to get all fired up about democratic morals and values and UkraineGate when the congressional intelligence committee hearings on the scandal are all being undemocratically held behind closed doors.  All we're getting are third-hand dribs and drabs of whatever damning revelations the secret tribunal feeds to the cooperative establishment media to then regurgitate to us. We don't get to watch the testimony live and unfiltered on TV the way we did in the Watergate impeachment hearings back in the 70s.

Probably realizing the irony of his democratic pleading, Cohen proceeds to quickly gloss over the secondary reasons to demand Trump's impeachment: his racism and xenophobia, his incitements to violence, his scoffing at the climate crisis, his refusal to take action on gun violence.

No public impeachment hearings are scheduled for those particular crises and affronts to democracy, but if you want to, you can keep them in the back of your mind when you call Congress to demand that Trump be impeached and removed from office. Because it is only with your help and your complicity that the Democrats can sweep these annoying issues right under the rug as they carefully limit their inquiries to UkraineGate. In so doing, they advance the electoral fortunes of Joe Biden and other low-polling centrists who can bat clean-up in case his campaign collapses.

 Cohen signs off his email "in solidarity" to give you the further false impression that not only is he on your side, he's every bit as progressive and community-minded as the striking teachers of Chicago or the Yellow Vests of France.

It is, of course, a scam.

Not only is Cohen, a former Obama White House fellow and adviser, the "executive director" of Generation Progress,  but Generation Progress itself is just a division of the powerful, corporation-funded Clintonian think tank known as the Center For American Progress. Cohen's specific job is to corral young people into the centrist wing of the Democratic Party.

Between his White House gig, where he helped start Obama's "My Brother's Keeper" privatized initiative to get young black men off the streets and out of jail (while ignoring young black women) and close the "opportunity gap," Cohen has been a fellow at the D.C. Policy Center, a "non-partisan think tank working for a strong and vibrant District of Columbia." Its advisory staff includes a senior partner of the ethically challenged McKinsey consulting firm and the chief financial officer of the Emerson Collective, a secretive venture capital organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the former Goldman Sachs trader and the billionaire widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs.

The Board of Directors actually running the D.C. Policy Center mainly come from the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector, along with sports and entertainment venture capital, the Sun Trust oil company foundation, and the Exelon energy company.

I'm telling you all this just to give you a general idea of where these professional impeachment advocates are coming from, who is financing them, and who will ultimately benefit from your unpaid phone-banking and marching efforts and other volunteer activities to remove Trump from office. 

Hint: it won't primarily be you.

Notice that Cohen and all the others importuning and gaslighting you under a pretense of "democracy restoration" are all employed by a tight little network of oligarchs, with the same names and world-destroying corporations popping up over and over again on the Boards of Directors of supposedly liberal philanthropic organizations.

Notice that these people don't ever offer you anything tangible, such as affordable housing or a debt-free education, in return for your controlled activism. They merely offer a return to what they call a moralistic, normative way of keeping you down and out. They simply want the status quo ante, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. They want to keep the lethal, neoliberal, market-based project that spawned Trump alive and kicking.

The propaganda that they're promulgating in the establishment media conglomerate is also quite shameless, with pundits cheer-leading astroturfed impeachment marches and protests as though they were coming up with the ideas all on their own, rather than rewriting press releases from the Democratic Party machine, or desultorily riffling through their Rolodex of reliable think tank sources to get the scoop.

"Want Trump to go? Take to the streets" urged "woke" centrist New York Times columnist David Leonhardt last week, pretending that there is no such thing as astroturfed movements where Democratic corporatists are concerned: 

The impeachment inquiry has reached the stage when it needs an outside game. We all know where the inside game is likely to lead: House Democrats will impeach Trump; Senate Republicans will acquit him; and he will claim vindication. But Trump’s presidency has become too dire for Americans to accept that outcome without trying to change it.... 

As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote last week, public protest “serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.” If anything, protest may be more important than in the past, because the elite institutions that helped bring down Richard Nixon, like political parties and the national media, are weaker today.

Leonhardt pretends that there is no organized oligarchy bankrolling this protest movement. He insanely casts the billionaire-run duopoly as too weak and therefore in great need of our warm bodies to give it legitimacy. He approvingly writes that the plutocrat-driven "Indivisible" group that I wrote about last week is some sort of legitimate grassroots undertaking.

The comment that I submitted on his column, in which I exposed the financial power behind the impeachment drive, was rejected. Maybe it was my alternative suggestion calling for a nationwide strike against the whole rotten capitalistic system that doomed it to the ether.

His Times colleague, columnist Michelle Goldberg, then ever so coincidentally came up with own utterly independent idea for "taking to the streets" to impeach Trump.

"1, 2, 3, 4 Trump Can't Rule Us Any More" is the clever slogan that she and her sources dreamed up for the plebs to shout as they march in sedate, civil, plutocracy-sanctioned mobs, sublimely safe from any police tear gas or mass arrests.

She professes herself baffled that Americans aren't rising up against Trump the same way, for example, that Chileans are rising up against high subway fares and austerity. She carefully doesn't suggest that Americans also rise up against the 40 years of neoliberal austerity that led enough desperate people to vote for a phony populist in the first place. That is not part of the plutocracy-sanctioned impeachment narrative.

Instead, Goldberg gaslights American couch potatoes:

So as Donald Trump’s sneering lawlessness and stupefying corruption continue to escalate, it’s confounding, at least to me, that Americans aren’t taking to the streets en masse. This presidency began with the biggest protest in American history, and its first two years were marked by a series of high-profile demonstrations. But three years in, even as the conviction that Trump threatens the Republic unites stolid military heroes and socialist feminists, demonstrations against the administration have faded. Lyndon Johnson was famously tormented by protest chants that could be heard through the walls of the White House. Why isn’t Trump?

Um... I consider myself a socialist feminist, but there is no way in hell that I will ever unite with such "stolid military heroes" as Trump critic James "Mad Dog" Mattis, who has gleefully gloated about the sadistic pleasure he got killing Iraqi civilians. Goldberg, of course, is simply trying to legitimize the right-wing reactionary partnership of the Democratic Party with the Pentagon/CIA de facto fourth branch of government.

Goldberg also conveniently doesn't mention that LBJ-era antiwar protests erupted when we still had the draft. Now that only non-elites sign up for the military, often out of economic desperation, our forever wars are out of sight and out of mind for most of the US population.

The military-industrial complex which Goldberg so hideously valorizes and humanizes has been striving to help Americans overcome their "sickly inhibitions" against war for decades by creating one imaginary outside enemy after another. After the debacle of Vietnam and the fall of the USSR, it became "Muslim terrorists." And with the Mideast now in shambles courtesy of American Exceptionalism, it's right back to Russophobia again and the smearing of antiwar dissidents as "Kremlin assets."

As nauseating as Trump is, the toxicity of liberal McCarthyism and the corporatized jingoistic anti-Trump resistance movement is downright stifling.

  

"Race-Woke" New York Times Asleep At the Switch

It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for the New York Times. 

Their nearly three-year-long Russiagate-centric "resistance" to Donald Trump in tatters. all they have left are the two Pulitzers for the bold, fear-mongering propaganda provided to them by national security think tanks, former CIA officials and Democratic Party operatives, a body of stenography deemed eminently prize-worthy by a panel of judges comprised of their fellow Russophobes. 

Bereft of their overarching Narrative, they needed to plot their next Big Theme. and this is what they've come up with: they will deign to spread the word that the president of the United State is a lifelong racist and xenophobe who appeals to lifelong racists and xenophobes, which is even worse than being either a witting or unwitting Russian stooge. This shocking realization apparently dawned on Times management only a few weeks ago. And therefore, the Times will be on it, from here till Election Day 2020 and maybe even beyond.

Still smarting from the liberal backlash against their recent banner headline announcing that "Trump Urges Unity Against Racism"  and its subsequent replacement with the still wishy-washy "Assailing Hate But Not Guns," top brass at the paper convened an emergency meeting with reporters and editors to figure out what, exactly, their journalistic function should be for the duration of the Trump reign.

Slate, the online magazine, obtained a cringe-worthy recorded transcript of the meeting, in which Executive Editor Dean Baquet educated the troops about the narrative strategy for the coming years.

Here are the remarks by Baquet that had Trump gleefully shrilling "Witch Hunt by the Failing NYT!" The bolds are mine:

The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, “Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.” And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?

I think that we’ve got to change. I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of [racist] remarks? How do we cover the world’s reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump? How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.

Translation: stories about Donald Trump henceforth will be carefully framed through the lens of his personal racism in particular and the endemic racism in the United States in general. Be sure to read the whole transcript of the meeting. It's a valuable behind-the-scenes primer about how the actual Manufacture of Consent gets done. Now, if only we could get the transcript of a meeting plotting how to negatively cover Bernie Sanders, either in 2016 or in the current campaign. There probably isn't one, because the careerist reporters assigned to cover Bernie, both at the Times and at other corporate outlets, know without having to be told what their subtle, teensy flat-footed marching orders are: stomp, kick, repeat as necessary whenever his rising poll numbers and crowd sizes so indicate.

The newspaper's worthy "1619 Project," Baquet actually acknowledges during the meeting, would never have seen the light of day were it not for Donald Trump. This crash course in American history relies very heavily on previous scholarship on slavery, reconstruction and Jim Crow, much of the research emphasizing the true capitalistic roots of slavery and its aftermath of institutionalized oppression of minorities and the continued power of the white patriarchy. The Times, though, is subtly and unsurprisingly emphasizing the white supremacy part over the capitalism which actually spawned it and nourishes it to this very day. Self-examination can only go so far, especially with a popular, oligarchy-threatening Democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders running for president. 

The admission by Dean Baquet - that the Times examination of the roots of racism and American conservatism is inspired by the Trump presidency - is what has the Trumpists howling with their own overblown outrage.

Showing how hard it is to parody right-wing extremism in the Age of Trump, The Onion was not really exaggerating when it had Newt Gingrich lambasting the 1619 Project as "shameless abolitionist propaganda."

The real shamelessness is that Times is selectively speaking truth to power only about a century too late. That's because the newspaper did not exist in its current form until the 19th century, post-Emancipation, and thus cannot be blamed for the "peculiar institution."  It is speaking truth to power for the express purpose of making Trump's Democratic presidential opponents and the Vichy Democratic collaborators in Congress look good, by comparison, in the run-up to 2020. It's history presented in the interests of party politics and virtue-signaling.

So, no,  I don't feel sorry for the New York Times and its embattled leadership. Despite the smattering of canceled subscriptions due to its shockingly bland, Trump-friendly headline in the wake of the recent gun massacres, its profits have skyrocketed by a whopping 66 percent since Trump's election. This is the same paper that went broke after the 2008 financial collapse and had to take out an emergency loan from oligarch (and big Clinton telecom deregulation beneficiary) Carlos Slim, just to stay in business.

Of course, criticizing the Times at this fraught moment in end-stage capitalistic history makes me, by binary-dictated default, a closet Trump supporter, if not still a persistent Russian stooge, in the eyes of many of my liberal friends. Yes, of course, America has its roots in racism and slavery and land-grabbing and genocide. But were it not for Trump, wouldn't the Times (under a Clinton Restoration) have gone right on ignoring history and propping up capitalism-fed white supremacy? It was Hillary, after all, who during a debate with Trump, sternly announced: "I want to send the message that America is already great. And we are great because we are good."

Perhaps in subtle collusion with his employer's new Narrative for the coming year or two, columnist Paul Krugman now blames Germany (wink, nod) for the global Neoliberal Project's damaging fixation on austerity, without so much as a wink or nod to the Mighty Moderate Obama Technocracy's influence in perpetuating both domestic and European austerity regimens in service to the global rich. At least Krugman offers a minimal smidgen of even-handedness to balance out the flat-footedness, correctly pointing out that Trump is blaming Europe for the totally wrong reason, that they are injuring America while supposedly enriching themselves at everyone else's expense, especially Trump's base of Real Americans.

But when Krugman says, correctly, that American deficit hawks as they existed during the Obama administration were also nothing but a bunch of hypocrites, he carefully absolves Barack Obama from having anything at all to do with it. The last regime is never even mentioned in his column, either by name or by party:

 Some background: Around 2010, politicians and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic caught a bad case of austerity fever. Somehow they lost interest in fighting unemployment, even though it remained catastrophically high, and demanded spending cuts instead. And these spending cuts, unprecedented in a weak economy, slowed the recovery and delayed the return to full employment.While debt alarmism ruled both here and in Europe, however, it eventually became clear that there was a crucial difference in underlying motivation. Our deficit hawks were, in fact, hypocrites, who suddenly lost all interest in debt as soon as a Republican was in the White House. The Germans, on the other hand, really meant it.

Oops. They took the last Leader of the Free World at his literal word. Their bad. An examination of even the recent past can get so damned selective sometimes. Memories are short, and memory holes are deep. Krugman did not hesitate to criticize Obama's austerity policies and tepid stimulus package once upon a time, particularly during his first term. But now that centrist Democrats are running on the nostalgic fumes of Obama's myth-based rosy legacy, facts and truth be damned.

One of these truths is that the austerity measures imposed under his administration disproportionately affected Blacks and Latinos. The extension of the Bush tax cuts for the benefit of the wealthy white patriarchy in 2010 dealt a particularly harsh blow to already-oppressed, dark-hued people.

My early-submitted response to Krugman was once again delayed for many hours and buried in an avalanche of hundreds of reader comments, due to some mystery algorithm that, we are assured, has absolutely nothing to do with human censorship:

Phony populist that he is, Trump has seized upon the global misery caused by austerity, and has made it into a lethal weapon in his self-serving arsenal. Far be it for Trump to even pretend to "feel your pain" - because in order to control his fan-base and keep it riled up and resentful, he has skillfully taken their hardships and made them his very own.

 What could possibly be worse than losing your home, your health, your job, your savings? Why, for the elites and the immigrants and the media to deny the Triumph of the Will of The (real) People, in trying to deny him his re-election! They're ruining "our" economy out of pure spite! (Never mind that his own policies, such as they are, are based mainly upon spitefulness.)

Of course, his anti-elitist rhetoric masks his fealty and service to the very same "enemy" elites and corporate media conglomerate that he purports to despise.

He bypasses the media by tweets, and then the media dutifully reports on all his tweets the minute they appear. It's all Trump, all the time.

Unfair Advantage: Trump.

 Meanwhile, the EU technocrats and their banker pals have managed to crush the once truly populist Left ruling party in Greece so thoroughly that Syriza has now formed coalitions with newly rising Trump-like parties.

Trump is what happens when "centrist" rulers block emancipatory democratic politics, putting profits for the entitled few above prosperity and justice for the many.

 He is the quintessential scavenger.

Maureen Dowd Versus The Mob

In the third installment of her summer series "Confessions of the Designated Nancy Pelosi Whisperer," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd abandons channeling Madam Speaker's now-backfired attacks on the Squad of four progressive congresswomen of color, and unsheathes her worthy literary claws on the Vast Twittering Left.

The hook for this week's attack was a tweet by NBC News personality Howard Fineman, who boasted about his attendance at one of Dowd's apparently famous Georgetown parties. He affixed a photo of Dowd greeting honored guest Nancy Pelosi and her date for the evening, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Outrage then ensued from all across the political spectrum. Poor Howard Fineman was forced to delete his tweet, in utter shock that his "benign big shot brag" had elicited such "vicious" reactions from the hoi polloi. In the olden days, he implied, people would have been more duly awed by the doings of the high and mighty. The twitter taunts thus only gained in intensity. He and his hostess Maureen Dowd both interpret these negative reactions as pure class envy rather than as legitimate criticism of the cozy, incestuous relationship between government officials and the journalists who are supposed to be holding them to account.

As I mentioned above, it is no longer feasible for Dowd to directly attack the Squad, given that the first two installments of the Pelosi Whisperer franchise had only served to raise their public profiles and elevate their progressive agendas - and worst of all, had provided the perfect opening for Donald Trump to launch his own vicious triangulated racist attacks on them. Poor Maureen was temporarily reduced to dishing out sloppy seconds, such as a statement she retweeted from media mogul David Israel calling the four women "the Squad of Vuvuzelas."

Vuvuzelas are the extremely loud, even deafening, monotonal horns invented and used by the Zulus of southern Africa to summon distant community members, and are now widely used at soccer games and other sporting events. Given the ethnicities of the Squad and the fact that one of them, Ilhan Omar, is a refugee from Somalia, it's an interesting choice of metaphor. 

But back to Maureen Dowd's latest column, in which she expresses wonder that her vivid description of Speaker of the People's House Pelosi wearing $995 pumps, munching on bonbons, and relaxing at her Napa Valley vineyard evoked such sour grapes of wrath from people:

After I interviewed Nancy Pelosi a few weeks ago, The HuffPost huffed that we were Dreaded Elites because we were eating chocolates and — horror of horrors — the speaker had on some good pumps.

 Then this week, lefty Twitter erected a digital guillotine because I had a book party for my friend Carl Hulse, The Times’s authority on Capitol Hill for decades, attended by family, journalists, Hill denizens and a smattering of lawmakers, including Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Susan Collins.

I, the daughter of a D.C. cop, and Carl, the son of an Illinois plumber, were hilariously painted as decadent aristocrats reveling like Marie Antoinette when we should have been knitting like Madame Defarge.
Yo, proletariat: If the Democratic Party is going to be against chocolate, high heels, parties and fun, you’ve lost me. And I’ve got some bad news for you about 2020.

The actual bad news is that Dowd has erected a straw man. This version is comprised of the latest group-think narrative trope that progressives are a monolithic bloc whose constant harping on impeachment rather than on Party Unity will only serve to give us another term of Trump. 

They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough while placing all their hopes in a color-inside-the-lines lifelong Republican prosecutor appointed by Ronald Reagan.
The politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty.

Dowd carefully names no names within her horde of stupid puritans. Nor does she mention that the loudest voices for impeachment have not been those of ordinary people, more of whom are leaning toward some form of socialism to solve our problems, but rather the corporate class of journalists on MSNBC and CNN and her own colleagues at the Times. But since the much-ballyhooed testimony of Robert Mueller turned out to be such a dud, scapegoats must be devised by these discredited corporate journalists so fixated on #Russiagate, and they must be devised in a hurry. The corporatists of the incestuous media-political complex are not our natural allies. In fact, they're the exact opposite. 

Hippie-punching and voter shaming are the standard tactics of last resort for these amoral establishment fools, and Dowd is only too happy to join the fray and deflect the blame. When Trump wins another term due to the lack of a populist agenda from the centrist Democrat whom they hope to undemocratically nominate, they will then refrain from blaming themselves and as usual, blame people with no power and no money.

My published comment on Dowd's column: 

The tweet by pundit Howard Fineman bragging about canoodling at Dowd's digs with the very same officials that journalists are supposed to afflict was what roused the ire of both left and right. It had nothing to do with "progressives'" disappointment over Mueller's overhyped (by corporate journalists like Fineman) performance.

This may come as a shock to the Beltway Bubble, but opinions on impeachment vary among progressives. Some are for, some against. But I suppose it's easier for Maureen to call them nasty purists than it is for her to address such core progressive policy proposals as single payer health care or to write about epidemic student debt, the growing climate catastrophe, the unaffordability of housing, the caging of refugees, and the fact that Flint, Michigan still has no clean water.

Nobody out here in Lower Slobovia cares about your Georgetown shindigs or your angst about peevish purists who do not show proper deference to the Knowledge Class and its insulated meritocrats.. Most of us are too worried about paying the bills and what kind of future our children and grandchildren face in a country where representative democracy has devolved into winner take all predatory capitalism.

But keep writing columns like this one, because the more you scold the have-nothings the less they will heed your infinite wisdom, and the more they will spare themselves the tedium of reading the next self-pitying installment.

He's a Yankee Doodle Donald

In case you hadn't heard, President Trump will be the star of his own Fourth of July show in Washington this year.

Righteous people are all upset about the plans, because they deviate so recklessly from The Norm of presidents just sitting sedately on the White House balcony and watching the fireworks explode above our nation's great phallic symbol, a/k/a the Washington Monument. This monument might have presaged Trump when it sustained serious cracks a few years back due to a renegade earthquake believed to be caused by some very serious fracking in the area.

USA! USA! USA!

One typical headline bemoaning the sacrilege to be perpetrated upon our Great National Birthday is "Donald Trump Is Not America." 

 Oh, yeah?

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni says he hates to waste his valuable column real estate on Trump, but sometimes patriotism and decency demand that he take a stand, that he set people and Trump himself straight on the fact that this holiday cannot, just cannot, be all about Him:

Most of his predecessors did nothing of the kind. They understood that the day belonged to the country, not its leader, and they didn’t conflate the two.
Trump does, all the time, and it’s alternately annoying, confounding and galling. If you’re not thrilling to his vision and submitting to him, you’re possibly guilty of treason — remember that rant? If you’re asking legitimate questions about unholy alliances that he may have forged or conflicts of interest he may possess, you’re orchestrating a coup.

Most Black people and native Americans also understand that this holiday was never about them, given that the great white Fathers and Constitution-writers decreed that the enslaved would be only counted as three-fifths of a person -- and that was only so that plantation owners could be as well-represented in Congress as their northern Brethren. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, certainly did not include the people he purported to own in his assertion that "all men are created equal." And as for the Indians, they had already been personae-non-grata and extermination fodder for hundreds of years prior to the signing of the national birth certificate - or, in the contiguous future USA, at least since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock settlers began infecting them with their European diseases before expelling them and killing them.

So, again, Trump is simply ripping the mask right off all the historical and hysterical hypocrisy that is the very heart of the Fourth of July. He is exposing and encapsulating and symbolizing American Exceptionalism into one symbolic little blob of corpulent flesh.

My comment on the Bruni column:

Trump's bizarre-spangled Fourth would lose its luster if only the cable TV networks will set aside their greed for one magical night and patriotically refuse to broadcast this grotesque event.

Will they, though? His Nuremberg-style rallies are always reliably lucrative for the networks and their corporate sponsors. Think of the audience share and the ratings, the blow-by-blow coverage starting at the crack of dawn's early light, the talking heads acting out all the shock, awe and outrage they can muster.

Who in their right consumer mind has ever stayed home on the Fourth to watch military brass bands playing on PBS, or a rerun of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" with James Cagney as George M. Cohan? Trump could literally change the whole tradition and meaning of this day for at least some people.

 Not that he'd use the occasion for the public good, of course, such as lecturing young people not to blow their fingers or their MAGA-hat wearing heads off with illegal fireworks. In fact, he might do the exact opposite, and load up his cheesy online store with Trump-branded sparklers or rocket grenade launchers for the kiddies. It would certainly help get people all hyped up for all the new global wars he seems so anxious to start with his pals Bolton and Pompeo.

 Boycott Trump this Fourth of July. As George M. Cohan might say as he rolls in his grave: "My mother will thank you, my father will thank you, my sister will thank you, and I will thank you!"

Season Three, Episode 97: "Bill the Barr-barian"

Attorney General Bill Barr appeared before Congress, got lashed with a wet noodle by Democrats, and then shockingly refused to return for another lashing. It is so utterly contemptible, they're taking firm action by calling him a criminal liar and threatening to hold him in contempt of Congress, for which there is no penalty whatsoever.

Stop the presses - and turn up the volume to high in the media echo chamber, because Barr called Bob Mueller "snippy" for criticizing Barr's misleading spin of the Mueller report. Barr must resign, immediately! And that is so crazy, because Billybob used to be Besties and Trump has totally come between them and maybe even broken them up forever.

How are Democratic leaders cynical? Count the ways, if you have the patience and the disposable time.
Me? I take the Clintonoid wing of the party's sage advice and do my own counting in very tiny, pragmatic, progressive, incremental baby steps.
One week it's blasting Nancy Pelosi's stupid "Pay-Go" rule as a device to punish people and make them feel grateful about going poor and dying prematurely as long as they can believe they'll be able live longer once they're reincarnated and the nasty old Republicans have been tamed.
Another week, it's reminiscing about Barack Obama's serial scolding of these same sick and indebted people during his eight-year term, a function which he continues to perform today from any number of safe, neutral international locations when he's not raking in $400,000 speaking fees and inking $50 million Netflix deals to produce content so inspiring that it tames 140 million paying subscribers into believing in a better life tomorrow.
And then it's on to Joe Biden, whose son Hunter recently quit his gig on the board of a corrupt Ukraine gas company for appearance's sake. And ad infinitum. The work is never done, because these horrible people are always doing something horrible and giving us something to kvetch about.

Today, for a huge change, let's talk about the latest Trump drama. Because keeping our minds off the fact that the Democrats are wholly complicit in the attempted coup in Venezuela even as they hypocritically wail that "Russia is invading us" is of the utmost pragmatic importance to them and to their electoral prospects.

The essential truth of the matter is that the corporate Dems love the Trump drama. Hating Trump certainly trumps loving the people who voted for them, and it helps them pretend that their "Love. Not Hate!" campaign theme actually means something They pragmatically pretend to be plodding through the bestselling Mueller report to figure out how best to investigate the conclusions of a two-year investigation conducted by some of the allegedly finest prosecutorial minds in the country. You can never investigate investigations enough. It's the best stalling method ever devised by the ruling class in order to maintain the Status Quo.
Nancy Pelosi says impeachment is off the table because "Trump is not worth it." It almost makes you think that impeachment is an awards show and Trump already has enough TV time. He's already the center of attention. Why spoil him even more by making him the center of the center of the attention? Nobody manipulates Madam Speaker, not even Donald Trump!

To be fair to Pelosi, at long last she is serendipitously honoring the wishes of the electorate, for whom punishing Trump's high crimes and misdemeanors is the least of their quotidian worries. Polls show that two-thirds of voters are not in favor of impeachment - about the same percentage as those who are in favor of Medicare For All.

Meanwhile, stenographers in the corporate media cover for Democrats by keeping the liberal consumer hatred churning at a constant furious boil during Perpetual Presidential Campaign season and spinning Hunter Biden's corruption as a product of the nasty Republican opposition. Their most commonly used technique is to pretend that everything was, if not as perfect as we might like, at least more tasteful and palatable before Trump and his minions appeared out of nowhere to spoil everything and overturn every beloved norm in the book.
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie even preposterously claims in the sub-head of his latest column that "In America, no one is above the law - except the president and everyone who does wrong in his name."

Say what? Just making a quick mental list in the recommended pragmatic, incremental baby steps, I don't seem to remember any BP executive going to jail over the criminal negligence and cover-up of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Maybe I forgot that Wall Street bankers lost their jobs and pensions and bonuses, if not their physical freedom, for bilking their customers and fraudulently foreclosing on millions of mortgagors. Did George W. Bush and Dick Cheney answer for their war crimes and torture at The Hague, and I was napping the whole time?

Bouie writes:

On Wednesday, when Attorney General William Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Mueller report, he addressed lawmakers more as if he were a member of President Trump’s legal team than as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Barr framed Trump’s actions as fully justifiable, even arguing that if the president feels an investigation is unfounded, he “does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course.”
Whether out of sycophantic loyalty or a deep-seated belief in executive impunity, Barr has used his position to insulate the president from legal scrutiny. He has done everything in his power to downplay the impact of the special counsel’s investigation.
He did not hesitate, for example, to frame Robert Mueller’s findings as an exoneration of the president, despite a report that said otherwise. By itself, this gave Trump the appearance of vindication, as major media outlets declared him innocent of “collusion.”

My published response:

When Trump bragged that he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and get away with it, he wasn't kidding. Barr is only paying it forward. He's protecting not only Trump, but the entire teflon-coated ruling class racket.

Toadying to power is the norm. The standard slime that we've come to expect gets new coatings of toxic sludge practically every single day. Those with the power to clean it all up don't have the will. They seem to have left their soap and scrub-brushes at home.

Republicans are in full aggrieved paranoid mode, with Trump sending email blasts to his fans, urging them to show their $olidarity against those "radical socialist witch-hunting Democrats."

Democratic leaders, for their part, continue to rail against his regime's crimes while waffling on impeachment, preferring to limit their agenda to "We're Not Trump" and thereby downplaying policies that would actually make regular people's lives better. They seem to fear that the "socialist" label will scare their donors away.

  Plus, if they did their Constitutional duty and impeached Trump in campaign season, all the fun and profit of the #Resistance would disappear in the wink of an eye. It's better for ratings to keep Trump around for awhile. Think of the billions of dollars in revenue for the media and the corporations, which are truly running this spectacular show.

Meanwhile it's the poor who get fined or thrown in jail, just for existing ("loitering" or "vagrancy").

And let's not forget the draconian imprisonments of the two brave whistle-blowers and muckrakers, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who are locked up for exposing the high crimes of the Bushies and other teflon-coated minions of the exceptional United States Imperium.