Commentariat Central: Part Two

This is how desperate the Democratic establishment is getting: One of Bernie Sanders's campaign officials recently circulated a clip of Joe Biden seeming to make nice with that notorious Ayn Rand fanboy, former House Speaker Paul Ryan.  The subject was Social Security. Since Biden used the coded language of  Social Security "reform," rather than calling for outright cuts, the clip is being widely - and wildly - construed as Bernie "smearing" Biden.

Granted, the clip was taken out of context. But compared to the buckets of mud they're slinging at Bernie, it was but the gentle flicking of a few grains of sand at a corrupt politician who isn't getting anywhere near the media criticism he so richly deserves. The kid glove treatment is largely due to Donald Trump's own smearing of Biden and the Biden-centric Articles of Impeachment now before the Senate.

Paul Krugman is among the righteously incensed about the latest manufactured scandal, and he demands in his latest column that Sanders apologize to Biden, "abjectly" and pronto (I believe Sanders might even have already caved to this demand by the time the column appeared, but I could be wrong.)

Krugman effectively says it's worse to be falsely accused of saying nice things about Paul Ryan than it is to have spent your entire political career, as Biden did, in making the lives of millions of people nasty, brutish and short. 

Biden did make a misstep in his counterattack, mislabeling the misrepresented video clip as “doctored,” but that doesn’t mean he’s not still due an abject apology. Instead, however, the Sanders campaign has doubled down. Rather than admitting that it smeared a rival, the campaign is going around claiming that Biden has a long record of trying to cut Social Security. There is, unfortunately, some truth in that claim — but it doesn’t excuse either the original lie or the refusal to admit error.

Unfortunate that Biden has tried to cut Social Security, or unfortunate that the Sanders team refuses to retreat from its fact-based claims? It seems to really hurt Krugman that although the tactics might have been wrong, the essential truth of the matter is not.

My response to Krugman's specious claim that poor goofy old Joe was simply "swept along" by the overpowering austerity craze afflicting the Washington establishment:

Joe Biden didn't simply go along with the "consensus." As a founding member of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, he was one of the architects of the consensus to cut Medicare, Social Security and other New Deal/Great Society programs. 

  The DLC Agenda would not be so crass as to openly pummel the poor and minorities while they were down, or call single Black mothers "Cadillac welfare queens." Instead they would distort the egalitarian rhetoric and policies of FDR's New Deal by conflating representative democracy with consumer capitalism. This new definition wholeheartedly adopted Reagan's "government is the problem" dog-whistled means to demonize the poor and minorities while downplaying the cruel agenda with their own meaningless platitudes about acceptance and inclusivity. 

As Goldwater-style movement conservatism was gaining traction during the 1970s, Democratic leaders looked at this new rising star, Biden, and realized how well he could co-opt his own working class background and put some of his down-home rhetoric into the service of the corporations. Biden was considered a natural to pander to the blue-collar white voters who had fled to the GOP in droves, thanks largely to Reagan's fear-mongering on race. That populist mystique still clings to him, despite the harsh reality of every reactionary thing he has accomplished politically in the last nearly half-century. 

And Bernie comes along and 'unfairly' links him to Paul Ryan?  
Come on, man.

***************

Krugman's previous column was even worse, because he used children as the weapon with which to attack Sanders. His twisted logic is that because Bernie's signature campaign issue is Medicare For All, he thereby is willfully ignoring the way America treats "our children."

Most readers didn't seem to get that particular Bernie smear, because he nonchalantly tacked it on at the very end of his piece after spending numerous paragraphs doing what he does best: shooting diseased Republican fish in a polluted barrel. Krugman actually sounds a bit like Paul Ryan himself, with his open sneering at desperate people (rainbow and unicorn-chasers) who can't afford basic health care. He writes:

So we should be talking a lot more about helping America's children. Why aren't we?
At least part of the blame rests with Bernie Sanders, who made Medicare For All both a progressive purity test and a bright shiny object chased by the news media at the expense of other policies that could greatly improve American lives, and are far more likely to become law. But it's not too late to refocus.

My published response, along with some follow-up comments in response to other readers:

Well, if you're going to accuse Sanders of sexism, you might as well accuse him of child neglect while you're at it.

 The whole premise of this column is fallacious. To wit: since Bernie is for Medicare For All, it naturally follows that he doesn't care about kids.

The fact is, M4A would help moms, dads and kids. If parents can't afford to see a doctor when they get sick, their kids suffer as well. If parents spend thousands of dollars on co-pays, premiums and deductibles, there's less money to feed, clothe and educate the kids. How can you say that calling for M4A is neglecting kids when it would provide them with a good start and quality of life for both them and their parents?

 Times are so hard and good paying jobs are so few that adults can no longer afford to have babies, let alone afford the rent on a two-bedroom apartment in most areas of the country.

Warren's plan is good, but the catch is that the states would administer the programs and disburse the funds. Bain Capital, for instance, already runs a billion dollar-plus chain of day care centers. With more federal money possibly on the horizon should Warren's plan pass. look for Goldman Sachs and Evercore and KKR Little Tots Schools to pop up all over this land, raking in the cash while parents slave away at precarious low wage jobs with no health insurance.

 This is not an "either/or" thing. If we spend a trillion bucks a year on war, we can afford to take care of our people.... cradle to grave.

My follow-up comment to a reader echoing the establishment talking point that Medicare For All unfairly takes attention away from women's issues and reproductive rights:

True, Sanders doesn't do pigeonholing of issues as wonkishly as some might prefer.

Despite all the media claims. he also doesn't harp on M4A to the exclusion of everything else. On the contrary, he has stated many times that climate change is the critical issue of our time, with myriad repercussions on the economy and health. This usually gets drowned out by the media concern trolls demanding "But how you gonna pay for Medicare For All?!"

 Poor and minority women are disproportionately adversely affected by both climate change and our highly restrictive health care marketplace, particularly in states which have barred the ACA's Medicaid expansion.

M4A by definition IS reproductive health care. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has long included abortion rights and birth control in their definition of reproductive health care. They also don't pigeonhole women's medical issues into a separate category that becomes ripe for ideological and moral arguments and misogyny by the right wing.

 As a single mom facing my own share of child care issues and emergencies through the years, we absolutely do need relief. But it needs to be simple, guaranteed and universal relief, administered at the nonprofit, public, federal level and designed to be as repeal- proof as we can make it.

And my reply to another reader who really liked Krugman's column and was bemused by my reaction to it:

Krugman took a perfectly good column advocating for children and managed to turn it into a smear of Bernie. He comes right out and says that Sanders "bears part of the blame" for "us" not talking about our children.

 True, Krugman doesn't get together with his fellow pundits to plot strategy, but they do feed off one another's discourse. You can see the same talking points all across the A to B spectrum of centrist neoliberal narrative. One common trope is "you can't have this or that program because then Ivanka and her spawn would only take advantage of it."

We should have guaranteed universal programs for everybody, both rich and poor. Warren's child care plan is certainly better than nothing, but parents would have to jump through many bureaucratic hoops to get approved, the govt would not build new centers or train and pay providers -- and the biggest catch of all, as I mentioned before, is that it's voucherized. Red states, especially, would find ways to re-allocate the money for other programs or just use it to reward cronies and private equity vultures. We saw this with Clinton's welfare reform package. The job training money that went along with kicking people off the rolls went to subsidizing businesses. Moms got zilch and the poverty rate skyrocketed in the ensuing decades.

Warren's plan is capitalist to the bone, which is not so much of a good thing when the whole point of capitalism is to extract resources and dispossess people.

************

This week's adventure in commenting-land concludes with Maureen Dowd's observation that Trump's misogyny is infiltrating the Senate impeachment trial by way of his two attorneys, Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz -who themselves have been joined at the pervert hip by defending Jeffrey Epstein. Therefore, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar should stop "whingeing" and start acting as tough as Nancy Pelosi.

Why even bother joining in this kind of simplistic, identity-politics shallowness? 

So I tried tor a little more perspective in my published response:

The devolution may not even be televised. Whenever King Donald looks vulnerable, his courtiers have the power to kick the cameras and the reporters right out of the room. This archaic rule makes the Starr Chamber description all the more apt.

 It's gotten to the point where even the National Archives is censoring photos of Women's March anti-Trump signs,

Since Trump has been getting away with high crimes and misdemeanors his entire adult life, nobody's gonna stop him now. His rise to infamy coincided with the dawn of neoliberal austerity during the New York City debt crisis in the 70s, ushering in a second gilded age of obscene wealth inequality. The corrupt Empire State political machine allowed him to commit real estate and tax fraud with impunity, in the hopes that his flamboyance would attract even more speculators to the Big Apple.

  Trump always thrived at the direct expense of the poor and working class. He got his welfare, and the unions gave up their pensions to save NYC from bankruptcy. He helped turn it into the wealth disparity capital of the country.

The media rarely challenged Trump, and if they did, it was with a grudging admiration. He's always been a ratings bonanza.

 Dershowitz and Starr, both of whom should have been disbarred long ago, are more fiendish proof that this is a full fledged oligarchy.

In a subversive nod to Nathan Hale. Trump is essentially saying: "I only regret I had but one Roy Cohn to give to my country!"

Culture War Cats Edition

Just in case you still had any doubts, Donald Trump's official job description is our self-proclaimed culture warrior-in-chief. His latest act was to disinvite Super Bowl champions, the Philadelphia Eagles from a White House celebration. He instead used the occasion to outdo embattled Culture Warrior Princess Roseanne Barr in belting out one of our great national hymns. Donald didn't have to take a knee to disrespect the flag. He kneed the sensibilities of the entire nation with his botched lip-synced rendition of God Bless America. The god in question, of course, being himself.

Vying for attention with the latest rendering of Great American Culture Wars is the new game show sensation, "Where In the World is Melania Trump?" Except for a blurred glimpse at a different, closed military-themed White House affair this week, she hadn't been seen in public for nearly a month, ever since undergoing a minor kidney procedure in May. My own catty theory is that she had a little cosmetic surgery - a facelift, an eyelift, a whatever-lift - along with, or even instead of, the alleged kidney embolization. This is what extremely wealthy, famous women do after plastic surgery. They go on an extended vacation to a secret location, or they stayed holed up in their mega-mansions until the scars and bruising fade, a process which can take many weeks. So when I read a report that Melania had been spotted wearing dark glasses indoors as she strolled through the West Wing, my cat-sense went into high alert.

If my theory is true, then my recommendation to Melania would be to go the iconoclastic Betty Ford route and become a national spokesperson for the benefits of cosmetic surgery. Betty was the trailblazer, having had the first ever public First Lady Facelift, frankly admitting at the time that she had an eye job and neck tightening because "I wanted a fresh new face to go with my beautiful new life." 

Betty Ford was also forthcoming about her mastectomy during her husband Jerry's truncated White House tenure, an announcement that encouraged many women to seek out mammograms and detect early cancers. She was later famously honest with revelations about her drug addiction.

  Again, assuming that I'm right about Melania, she could even out-do Betty and become an advocate for making cosmetic surgery available under Medicare and Medicaid --  or, to make her hubby and his party really pissed off, Obamacare silver and bronze plans.

Of course,Donald (who decades ago underwent his own scalp reduction surgery) would probably nix the idea, given how he'd so cattily Twitter-mocked former friend Mika Brzesinki's "bleeding face" last year at Mar-a-Lago (she later staunchly denied having had had a facelift) as well as mean-spirited remarks from Trump supporters about Hillary Clinton's own rumored work and reputed Botox injections.

***

Speaking of cattiness, Paul Krugman has been having a field day lambasting fellow Ivy League academic Niall Ferguson for urging his conservative Stanford students to do "oppo research" on the life of a liberal student activist on campus.  This act of unseemly cattiness, the New York Time's chief Bernie Bro-bashing intellectual writes, is emblematic of the "bad faith" of conservative intellectuals in general:

And yes, I do mean “conservative.” There are dishonest individuals of every political persuasion, but if you’re looking for systematic gaslighting, insistence that up is down and black is white, you’ll find it disproportionately on one side of the political spectrum. And the trouble many have in accepting that asymmetry is an important reason for the mess we’re in.

But how can I say that the media refuses to acknowledge conservative bad faith? While some journalists remain squeamish about actually using the word “lie,” and there’s still a tendency for headlines to repeat false talking points (which are only revealed to be false in the body of the article), readers do get a generally accurate picture of the extent to which dishonesty prevails within the Trump administration.

True, Trumpism is infectious -- but the anti-Trump oligarchic resistance antidote of more austerity and more corporate Democrats in Congress and more allegiance to the authorities of the "intelligence community" is an equally addicting and dangerous off-label regimen. Manufactured "divisiveness" sells, and both sides of the corporate Duopoly profit, whether they be electoral winners or losers.

My two-part published response focuses on the suppression of free speech and dissent:

 "Registered Republican professional historian" is an oxymoron.

Phony intellectuals like Ferguson are, in fact, really nothing more than the "snowflakes" they love to accuse liberals of being.

Meanwhile, a recent survey by the PEN press rights group shows that more journalists are actually self-censoring out of fear of government reprisals.

With no real ideology other than Greed is Good, the right wing's m.o. is the stifling of the very First Amendment rights they purport to champion.

Take the case of Cal State writing professor Randa Jarrar, who sent the phony moralizing hordes to the fainting couch this spring when she tweeted that the late Barbara Bush "was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal."

Although the college initially seemed to bow to demands from reactionary media for her firing, she kept her job.

These same reactionaries are now having conniption fits because Samantha Bee got away with calling Ivanka Trump a bad name for her insensitivity to Daddy's ripping tots way from their mothers' arms at the border, while complaining that Trump Show prima donna Roseanne Barr got unfairly fired for her louder, crasser racism.

Ferguson is simply a bully and a coward for "punching down" on a student from his position of power. He might as well declare himself Roseanne's replacement as best supporting actor in the Trump Show, which is what the GOP might actually rename itself.

If it were honest, that is. Which it most definitely is not.

(And following up with a reader pointing out that renowned war critic and historian Andrew Bacevich is a registered Republican) --

Notice that I used the term "reactionary" -- not conservative -- to describe the modern Republican Party.

Not all conservatives are alike, and of course they should not be painted with the same broad brush. Maybe Ferguson is a smart guy, but he was very stupid to buy into the divisive tactics perfected by Trump.

I hadn't realized that Andrew Bacevich, whose work I admire, was still a registered Republican. He writes for, besides outlets like TomDispatch, The American Conservative. While I strongly disagree with much of this site's sexist and even "colorblind" racist content (Pat Buchanan is a regular), it is also reliably critical of American imperialism, endless war and especially neoconservatism. They publish a variety of viewpoints.

Here, for example, is an article on the US drone war, which has gotten especially vicious and unaccountable under Trump:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/targeted-killing-donald-...

***
 To his great credit, centrist Times columnist Frank Bruni is not taking Bill Clinton's appearance on the Today show (see my Monday post) kindly. In a scathing piece aptly called "the Sultans of Self-Pity," he writes:

Move over, Alec Baldwin. Bill Clinton does a much better impersonation of Donald Trump.

The hair is wrong but the air is right — self-righteous, self-pitying and suffused with anger that anyone would peddle a version of events less heroic than the one that he prefers. We’re shaming him about ancient groping when we should be showering him with eternal gratitude. And what about his pain?

“I left the White House $16 million in debt,” Clinton said, in an interview that NBC’s “Today” aired on Monday, batting back questions about whether he had demonstrated sufficient contrition for converting a 22-year-old’s romantic idolization of him into sexual favors and setting off a sequence of events that savaged her. I don’t know what legal bills have to do with a moral ledger. But I can see that his fixations on money and martyrdom are intact.

The Clinton team is now in full damage control mode. The Times swiftly disappeared Bruni's column from the top right corner of the digital home page, and Stephen Colbert invited Bill on his Tuesday show not for a comb-over gag, but for a moral makeover - or as Colbert termed it, a "do-over." Now that Bill has summoned up enough moral courage to finally utter Monica's name right out loud, maybe he hopes he can get on with his book tour without further ado. Let us hope that he cannot. (Hiss, scratch.)

My published response to the Bruni column:

One common theme in the MeToo movement is that the perpetrators aren't getting called to account until relatively late in their lives,often decades after their predatory behavior was an "open secret" within the overlapping spheres of power they inhabit.

Better late than never, of course, but oh what damage these men have done, not only to their female victims, but to the country and society at large.

During the Lewinsky episode, leading feminists, most notably Gloria Steinem, came to Bill's defense. His abuse of power was cast as a purely partisan issue, with blame deflected from him onto the much nastier and hypocritical Republicans. At the same time he was castigating Bill, Newt Gingrich was cheating on his own wife.

Meanwhile, Bill had connived with Newt to "end welfare as we know it" with the ensuing cruel reform package condemning millions of women to whole lifetimes of poverty.

 It's not surprising that Trump and Clinton, who were both once considered "outsiders" in New York high society, golfed together at Trump's club. It's not surprising that the Clintons attended Trump's third wedding. Not because they liked Trump, of course, but because these "transactional" things are what rich and famous people have to do to maintain their lifestyles and images and status and power.

How ironic that Bill is now promoting pulp called "The President Is Missing."

In reality it's the presidency that's missing, since Trump's organized crime cartel has effectively hijacked it.

(photo credit: Bob's Blog)

Don't Call Tony Blair a Poodle

The New York Times axed my published comment on today's Maureen Dowd column, which portrayed Iraq War co-manufacturer and former British P.M. Tony Blair and xenophobic UKIP leader Nigel Farage as the two opposite, but apparently coequal, sides of the "Brexit debate".

Although Blair has long been derided as "Bush's Poodle," it is apparently verboten for mere comment-writers to expand upon this apt metaphor as he strives to make some sort of political comeback, along with even more money. Or, maybe I was censored for mentioning the scary words "Jeremy Corbyn". Who really knows when it comes to the stqndards of the Times, which had no real qualms about quoting verbatim the foul-mouthed rant of that other Tony, name of Scaramucci.

Seeing as how Dowd's column was, for once, not devoted to either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, this piece doesn't seem to be gleaning the usual vast number of clicks or comments. As best as I can remember (didn't think to make a copy) this is what I wrote:

Nice scathing take-down of Tony Blair. Good to know that he remains properly paper-trained enough to adorn his office walls with his master's (this was a reference to George Bush, who remains a pal) bathroom kitsch. (many paintings were actually composed in the luxe Bush soaking tub or just outside the shower stall).

But why did Dowd make no attempt to contact the current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, before jetting off to Brussels to soak up the wit and wisdom of Nigel Farage?

Silly question, I know.  The corporate media views the leftist Corbyn much as it views Bernie Sanders: anathema, and a clear and present danger to the sensitive elites for whom "bipartisan" politics must always remain within an artificially narrow safe space. When Corbyn achieved his unexpected upset, Blair snarled to the desperate victims of decades of cruel austerity policies: "If your heart's with Corbyn, get a transplant!"

It could have been worse. Because despite the best efforts of neoliberal politicians spanning a 40-year straight line all the way from  Thatcher to May, the National Health Service still exists, and even the poorest heart patients are still able to avoid the debt collector should they ever require such drastic surgery.

 Blair insisting to Dowd that he abhors right-wing strongmen like Trump and Farage and Putin is really quite hilarious, given that he recently agreed with Donald Trump that the "left media" has criticized Trump unfairly.

 After all, it seems like only yesterday when Blair was partying hearty with Silvio Berlusconi, who on one memorable night lit up the Sardinian sky with fireworks spelling out "Viva Tony!"  

Bunga Bunga might be naught but a fond memory, but who's to say that there's not a Mar-a-Lago invite in Blair's future?  With any luck and groveling finesse, perhaps he can score a big hunk of amazing chocolate cake, or at least a Beggin Strip.

After all, a poodle's gotta eat.

If there's one thing that Donald Trump has accomplished, it has been making this dog-eat-dog world safe for a whole slew of lesser jerks.

What do you think - too harsh?

Anyway, I had much better luck with the Times censors with my riposte to Paul Krugman, who compared the political promises of Donald Trump with the political promises of Bernie "Medicare for All" Sanders - while smarmily and dishonestly insisting that he meant to do no such thing.  His column (Politicians, Promises, and Getting Real) is one more lazy rehash of his many pieces deriding single payer health insurance as ideal in a perfect world, but undo-able because its pie-in-the-sky unicorniness would create a "backlash," and also inconvenience the millions of lucky proles who simply adore the employment-based insurance which they now pay for in myriad ways, both hidden and unhidden.  Krugman doesn't even bother pretending any more. The fallacies in his logic are too myriad to address in just one 1500-character Times comment.

Nevertheless, I persisted.Here's my published comment as it (for now anyway) still appears online:

 I'm tired of hearing the same tired old tropes to explain to us non-wonks that we just can't have such nice things as a bankrupt-free healthy life because of some dreaded "backlash."

Let's get really real here. The richest country on earth doesn't have Single Payer because the corporations and oligarchs running the place don't want it. This has little to do with people now insured through work becoming too "inconvenienced" if they have to change plans and simplify things. Nearly two-thirds of us want Medicare for All. Does Krugman mean to imply that most people either don't work, or that their insurance has no stupid limits attached?

Ditto for the political "litmus test" so allegedly feared by politicians loath to quit taking bribes from the predatory insurance industry. Why protect these people? So that our health care system remains the most expensive on the planet, and our mortality and morbidity rates stay some of the worst?

Right now, there are millions of people suffering the mental and physical and financial trauma of two massive hurricanes. So what better time than right now to start incessantly demanding true universal coverage for them, and for all of us?

If Great Britain could establish its national health service after the Nazi blitz, surely we can do the same in the face of the even deadlier assault of man-made climate change.

"Pay-fors?" For starters, we can slash the Pentagon budget, and stop bombing people to death.

So, what do you think - not up to my usual standards of harshness?

Commentariat Central: Mewling Neocons Edition

Here's a quartet of recent New York Times comments by yours truly:

Maureen Dowd, Girl Talk At Trump Tower, Oct. 1.

Synopsis: Dowd casts Trump and his buddies as 13-year-old girls prematurely saddled with menopausal hormones, and thereby outdoes Trump himself in insulting females of all ages:

Every minute of every day, Trump debunks that old “science” when he shows that the gossipy, backbiting, scolding, mercurial, overly emotional, shrewish, menopausal one in this race is not the woman.

Trump is surrounded by a bitchy sewing circle of overweight men who are overwrought at the prospect of a distaff Clinton presidency.

Cool, but watch out for the usual Clintonoid non sequitur. Never mind the teeny-boppers and the withered old witch-hags. Because like a bad case of teen acne, here come those "bimbo eruptions" again:

As former Clinton consigliere George Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir: “She had to do what she had always done before: swallow her doubts, stand by her man and savage his enemies.”

Usually women candidates have the so-called virtue advantage, but Hillary does not because of her reputation for being shifty.

Cue the Meow Mix cat food commercial. My published response:

We come not to neuter Trump, but to spay him.

Forget the standard nip and tuck in the nether regions for this misogynist who spews his vitriol as freely as a tomcat sprays his whatever from his wherever. Trump needs the full invasive procedure, without the anesthesia. If he couldn't be bothered to do debate prep, then why should we bother with surgical prep? Let's take Trump at his word and show him that he can, indeed, be treated as unfairly as he currently only imagines he is.

Unfortunately, because Maureen is compelled to yet again drag Hillary Clinton into her Trump operating theater, we never quite see the end of the procedure. I suppose the rationale is, when writing a catty piece about male cattiness, a catty polemicist simply cannot resist.

To Maureen, Hillary is pure catnip. What starts out as kneading the keyboard quickly pivots into the unsheathing of the claws. Trump licks his wounds just like an embarrassed but unharmed gib caught falling off his luxury perch. Enter Hillary, once more portrayed as the coldest,cattiest creature of them all, what with her purrfect plotting against the "bimbo eruptions."

Maureen has effectively neutered her own anti-GOP, anti-sexist argument. It's one more example of false equivalency. Trump and his catty clowder of chowderheads are bad in their way, Hillary is bad in hers. Who's the lesser evil, and who's the evil lesser?

Enough of this cheap reality show supplanting democracy.

We are citizens. Hear us yowl!

***

 Paul Krugman, Trump's Fellow Travelers, Oct. 3.

Synopsis: No, Krugman isn't red-baiting Trump from the right again. But it's close. In this pro-Hillary go-round, the Conscience of a Liberal chides Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell for not joining a fickle fleet of Republican ships deserting the sinking rat. He again blames the mainstream media for the unbelievable closeness of the race. He again ignores the job-destroying and and wage suppressing globalization and the corporate coups known as free trade. He again ignores the class war and income disparity and a crappy Democratic candidate. He instead holds up war criminal Paul Wolfowitz as a model intellectual conservative profile in political courage for deserting the sinking rat. I knew that Krugman had sunk low, what with all his catty Bernie-bashing this year. But this was a brand new low. Even for him.

My published response:

Krugman writes that "you have to give people like, say, Paul Wolfowitz some credit for political courage."

No, you don't. As one of the architects of the Iraq invasion, he should actually be hauled into an international court to answer a whole litany of charges, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Endorsing the better presidential candidate should absolve him of nothing. It's actually scary that he is supporting Clinton, because it's a sign that he might wield influence. He has, after all, served both Democrats and Republicans since the 1970s.

As a founding member of the odious neocon think tank Center for a New American Security, he urged Bill Clinton to ignore the UN Security Council and get rid of Saddam Hussein. He authored a document called the "Defense Planning Guidance" while working for Dick Cheney. It says the US can take unilateral military action whenever it feels like it.

 He is neither a "conservative" nor an "intellectual." Hillary should reject his endorsement forthwith. He's as dangerous as Trump, if not more so. His tortured thinking has led to the deaths of thousands of American troops and the deaths and displacement of millions of innocent Iraqis.

Trump is only the latest, most glaring symptom of the American pathocracy.

So yes, let's defeat him. And once Clinton is elected, let her know in no uncertain terms that we won't tolerate neocons anywhere near the White House, ever again. End the wars.

 

***

Paul Krugman, The King of False Equivalence, Oct. 4 

Synopsis: PK again gives favored whipping boy Paul Ryan another (ugh!) 50 lashes with his wet neoliberal noodle:

Ugh. Ryan is not, repeat not, a serious, honest man of principle who has tainted his brand by supporting Donald Trump. He has been an obvious fraud all along, at least to anyone who can do budget arithmetic. His budget proposals invariably contain three elements:

1. Huge tax cuts for the wealthy.
2. Savage cuts in aid to the poor.
3. Mystery meat – claims that he will raise trillions by closing unspecified tax loopholes and save trillions cutting unspecified discretionary spending.

My comment:

 Paul Ryan couldn't survive in politics without Democratic complicity. The DCCC has never backed progressive challengers in his purple district, which Obama actually won in 2008. Why do you suppose that is?

Ryan might be a fraud, but he's a useful fraud. He's personable and he's young and he's telegenic. While he may devote his whole life to punishing poor families, he loves his own family so very, very much. Even the president has praised him for being a fine, upstanding family man.

When the GOP lost its "safe" NY-26 seat in a special 2011 election, Bill Clinton approached Ryan at the annual Pete Peterson Catfood Confab for Elite Greedsters to offer some friendly advice on "reforming" Medicare in a less extreme way than had originally proposed by Ryan. An open mic picked up their conversation:

Clinton: "I'm glad we won this race in New York. But I hope Democrats don't use it as an excuse to do nothing."

 Ryan: "My guess is it's gonna sink into paralysis, is what's gonna happen. And you know the math. I mean, It's just -- out there. But you gotta start this. You gotta get out there. You gotta get this thing moving."

Bill promised to give Paul a buzz.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/paul-ryan-and-bill-clinton-chat-backstag...

My guess is there's gonna be some friendly triangulation among Bill and Paul and the Dems in the not-too-distant future. After all, Hillary has promised to put Bill in charge of "fixing the economy."

Fasten your seat belts.

***

Nicholas Kristof, A Blot on Obama's Legacy, Oct. 6 

Synopsis: The title of this column has now been changed to "I Am Very Afraid I Will Die Tonight." - no doubt because the original doesn't fit with the concerted mainstream media Obama-burnishing campaign, now underway with a vengeance. 

Before you get all excited and think that Kristof's column is about Obama's abysmal domestic record, his coddling of Wall Street banksters, or his push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or is a broadside against the president's pathological drone policy, think again. Kristof is upset because Obama hasn't yet declared World War III by way of a "humanitarian" escalation of the war in Syria. He actually uses a child who Tweets to him in English to sell a new war to the American public.

As far as I'm concerned, the president's refusal to bomb Syria in 2013, once he'd determined that Assad did not, in fact, kill his own people with Sarin gas, was actually a rare profile in courage for him. And even though I am certainly no fan of Obama, I think that I will actually miss him once Hillary moves in and wastes no time displaying her Bush-like neocon qualities from behind the safety of her security detail and a fawning, war-hungry press corps.

My comment:

Kristof has got it exactly backwards. Obama's reticence to start a full-scale war in Syria is not a blot on his legacy, but rather a mark of rare statesmanship amidst all the war-mongering hysteria being fomented by the media-military complex.

When will we ever learn, Kristof ironically asks from behind the safety of his computer screen, as he disingenuously fails to remark upon lessons apparently unlearned from the debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. How will little Bana, whom Kristof shamelessly uses as a prop in his liberal interventionist propaganda piece, benefit if Obama does his bidding to bomb bomb bomb Syria as an act of aggression toward Russia? Perhaps the columnist missed the Senate testimony of Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford last month, in which he warned that a no-fly zone would be tantamount to declaring war on both Syria and Russia.

Hillary Clinton is all for a no-fly zone. So be patient, Mr. Kristof - the real blot on the landscape may be yet to come.

 Too bad Obama can't get a third term like the Clintons.

Coming Soon: A Hybrid Neocon Third Term

Everything's Coming Up Stinkweed

 (optional soundtrack, but you probably should skip it: it's fingernails across blackboard annoying)

And they wonder why millions of desperate people are flocking to the neo-fascism of Donald Trump?

Here was Barack Obama doing his best Mama Rose impression last week in Elkhart, Indiana:

By almost every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here at the beginning of my presidency.  That’s the truth.  That’s true.  (Applause.)  It’s true.  (Applause.)  Over the past six years, our businesses have created more than 14 million new jobs -- that’s the longest stretch of consecutive private sector job growth in our history.  We’ve seen the first sustained manufacturing growth since the 1990s.  We cut unemployment in half, years before a lot of economists thought we would.  We’ve cut the oil that we buy from foreign countries by more than half, doubled the clean energy that we produce.  For the first time ever, more than 90 percent of the country has health insurance.  (Applause.)

Obama can plead truth-telling three times in one stinking paragraph, but it doesn't change the facts. 

The day after his legacy-burnishing speech, an Elkhart electronic components factory announced it will cease production, laying off more than 200 workers. Then came the worst jobs report in five years. For every new job created last month, 12 more people simply gave up looking for work. People who give up are not counted among the unemployed. Thus, a jobless rate of four percent is worse than meaningless. It's misleading.

But Obama thinks it's all swell, it's all great, that you'll have the whole world on your plate:

Now, here’s the truth -- you can look it up.  These journalists here, they can do some fact-checking.  As a share of the economy, we spend less on domestic priorities outside of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- we spend less than we did when Ronald Reagan was President.  (Applause.)  When President Reagan or George W. Bush held this job, our deficits got bigger.  When Bill Clinton and I have held this job, deficits have gotten smaller.  (Applause.)  Our deficits have not grown these past seven and a half years; we’ve actually cut the deficit by almost 75 percent.  (Applause.) 

Even though it has been thoroughly debunked as a growth booster, austerity absolutely kicks ass. (Yours.) The president bragging about how New Democrats have colluded to cut social programs like food stamps and long-term unemployment insurance is a real winner in an election year. Obama spent less on people than Ronald Reagan did, and those silly Republicans still complain that he's not mean enough? Come on.

But Obama's spinning is only just beginning. Hillary and Bill cutting millions of people off welfare 20 years ago and doubling the extreme poverty rate in the process was just so totally awesome:

 Moreover, there are fewer families on welfare than in the 1990s.  Funding has been frozen for two decades.  There's not a whole bunch of giveaways going on right now.  Aside from our obligation to care for the elderly and Americans with disabilities, the vast majority of people who get help from the federal government are families of all backgrounds who are working, striving to get back on their feet, striving to get back into the middle class.  And sometimes, yes, their kids need temporary help from food stamps when mom and dad are between jobs.  But look, these kids didn’t cause the financial crisis.  These kids aren’t spending us into bankruptcy.  They're not what's holding back the middle class.  And, by the way, neither is Obamacare.  (Applause.) 

Making mothers with very small children leave their children to go to work at minimum wage jobs was just what the oligarchy doctor ordered. The Clintonoid welfare reform succeeded in suppressing wages and weakening labor unions. It made desperation the new normal. And if you can't be a desperate striver, struggling to get into the nonexistent middle class, they'll cut you off at the knees. Oh, and Obama even falsely equates hungry innocent children with market-based junk insurance while he's at it. (And they say that Donald Trump is a sociopath.)

Still, if you insist on feeling miserable and hungry, rest assured that Obama wants to make Third World workers even more miserable than you are. Thanks to Chinese slave labor, for example, even poor Americans can numb their sorrows by staring at a cheap imported flat screen TV.

 Now, it is true that a lot of supporters of trade deals in the past sometimes oversold all the good that it was going to do for the economy.  The truth is, the benefits of trade are usually widely spread -- it’s one of the reasons why you can buy that big, flat-screen TV for a couple hundred bucks, and why the cost of a lot of basic necessities have gone down.  Some parts of the economy, like the agricultural sector or the tech sector have really done well with trade.  Some sectors and communities have been hurt by foreign competition. 

So pay no attention to Donald Trump's claim that China is killing us and immigrants are taking all our jobs. Even as we speak, Homeland Security is rounding up and deporting thousands of innocent refugees fleeing the violence and strife in Central America.

But since it's an election year, and Hillary Clinton is winning only by virtue of an orchestrated party machine funded by millionaires and billionaires, and she still needs those Sanders voters, Barack Obama will nobly co-opt Bernie Sanders. Belatedly admitting that most people are just too flat broke to save, he is pivoting from cutting Social Security to strengthening Social Security. Curtain up, light the lights, you've got nothing to hit but the heights!

 But look, let’s face it -- a lot of Americans don’t have retirement savings.  Even if they’ve got an account set up, they just don’t have enough money at the end of the month to save as much as they’d like because they’re just barely paying the bills.  Fewer and fewer people have pensions they can really count on, which is why Social Security is more important than ever.  (Applause.)  We can’t afford to weaken Social Security.  We should be strengthening Social Security.  And not only do we need to strengthen its long-term health, it’s time we finally made Social Security more generous, and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned.  (Applause.)  And we could start paying for it by asking the wealthiest Americans to contribute a little bit more.  They can afford it.  I can afford it.  (Applause.)

As ever, Obama will not demand that the wealthy pay even a paltry 50 percent tax rate or that the cap on Social Security contributions be entirely scrapped.  He is merely asking them to contribute "a little more" out of the goodness of their hearts. As ever, Obama reminds us that he, too, is a very rich, beneficent guy. He is not one of you.

And as ever, don't actually count on eating and making a living or keeping your house or retiring right this very minute. You see, existential purists are not allowed in the Glass Half Full Club. When politicians like Obama and Hillary talk about reaching the heights of defeating the Trump monster, they are by no means talking about an alternative of roses and daffodils, sunshine and Santa Claus:

So that’s the choice you face, Elkhart.  The ideas I’ve laid out today, I want to be clear:  They’re not going to solve every problem.  They’re not going to make everybody financially secure overnight.  We’re still going to be facing global competition.  Trying to make sure that all our kids are prepared for the 21st century workforce, that’s a 20-year project, that’s not a two-year project.  We’re still going to have to make sure that we’re paying for Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare as our populations get older.  There are still going to be a bunch of issues out there.

By the time your kids are prepared for Brave New World, they'll be 50 years old if they should live so long. Serious issues will remain, down there in the Bottom 90 Percent basement apartments. But the Neoliberal Thought Collective will leave a rickety invisible ladder of hope propped up for you anyway. You can do it, all you need is a hand. Mister Market gonna see right to it.

 We’ve got to come together around our common values -- our faith in hard work.  Our faith in responsibility.  Our belief in opportunity for everybody.  We’ve got to assume the best in each other, not the worst.  We’ve got to remember that sometimes, we all fall on hard times, and it’s part of our jobs as a community of Americans to help folks up when they fall.  (Applause.)  Because whatever our differences, we all love this country.  We all care about our children’s futures.  That’s what makes us great.  That’s what makes us progress and become better versions of ourselves -- because we believe in each other.  (Applause.)  

There are the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. We must act out of nationalistic impulses. Patriotism is the religious glue that binds and gags us. The truth is out there. You gotta believe. And starting here, starting now, nothing's gonna stop us till we're through (with you.) 
 

 ***

What would a platitudinous presidential speech be without a Paul Krugman column to reanimate it, giving it a tepid jolt of Frankensteinish electricity?

Krugman actually does give a feeble swipe to Obama's Mama Rose-colored glasses by deigning to mention last week's terrible jobs report. It doesn't quite spell a recession, but it is still a disappointing "pause in the economy's progress," with the pundit's main concern being how the nasty Republicans will use it to blame the Democrats. Not once does Krugman even pay even lip service to the millions of out-of-work or underpaid Americans stuck in temporary and dead-end jobs. Things are still better under Obama than they were under Bush!

Even with a Clinton restoration, nothing can be done anyway, because of Republicans.  Krugman always avoids mentioning the political donor class of plutocrats which actually sets bipartisan policy. Ever the reliable Democratic factotum, he echoes the Beltway group-think: failure to act for the public good is caused by "Washington gridlock."  It's funny how this gridlock always magically melts away whenever the war and surveillance industries need trillions of dollars to upgrade their weapons and spy systems or otherwise democratically intervene in other people's backyards!

But given that any sudden economic crisis during election season might hurt Hillary Clinton's chances, Krugman is feeling a bit nervous:  "So the evidence of a U.S. slowdown should worry you," he ponderously intones. "I don’t see anything like the 2008 crisis on the horizon (he says with fingers crossed behind his back), but even a smaller negative shock could turn into very bad news, given our political gridlock."

It must be so nice living in an elite bubble, where your only worry is a slowdown in the effervescence.

My published response (actually a synopsis of and prelude to today's blog-post):

If Democrats have any hope of winning across the board in November, they'd better move beyond their defensive "be afraid of Trump" posture and admit that life sucks big-time for the vast majority of Americans. It's time to stop painting a rosy picture about the make-believe economic recovery for mere crass political purposes. It's time to start campaigning for a new New Deal.

To his credit, President Obama has finally come on board with Bernie Sanders's proposal for an expansion of Social Security: increase the monthly benefits and raise the FICA cap.

Yet only a day before the dismal jobs report came out, he speechified that "by almost every economic measure, America is better off" and that Trump's constant claim that the economy is doing poorly is a "myth."

It's happy talk like this that sends disgusted voters right into the arms of the Trumpmonster. It's a jingoistic Hillary speech that saved all its scathing rhetoric for Trump's personality disorder and all its rousing rhetoric for American exceptionalism and military might. Enough already.

Now's the time to take advantage of the GOP's disarray and come out swinging like the late, great -- and left -- Muhammad Ali. Now's the time to move beyond what's "possible" and fight for what is right.

Twelve times more people gave up looking for work than got a job last month. And our death rate is increasing.

We're not merely worried, Mr. Krugman. We're running the gamut from despair, to disgust, to outrage.

The Green Shoots of Stinkweed

Warrior Empress of Austeria

Before she became a progressive for purposes of collecting votes, Secretary Hillary Clinton traveled the globe for the purposes of collecting a record number of frequent flyer miles in the service of banks and multinationals.

Reading a blog-post by her staunch surrogate Paul Krugman the other day, about how those crazy Republicans try to sell such bogus products as "expansionary austerity" for the masses in order to jump-start economic growth, I was reminded of the time in 2011 when Hillary Clinton went to Greece and compared austerity to life-saving chemotherapy.

As if that rhetoric was not slimy enough, she also praised the failing, cash-strapped, indebted Greek government for devoting its scarce resources to helping her bomb the hell of Libya, and also for militarily preventing a humanitarian aid flotilla from leaving port to deliver lifesaving supplies to the blockaded Gaza Strip.

Even then, the Empress-in-Waiting wore three crowns: neoliberal scold and protector of Big Global Finance; staunch friend of the right-wing Israeli government and punisher of starving Palestinians; and hawk extraordinaire who never met a regime she didn't want to change or a war she didn't want to fight.

What was kind of unusual is that she would tout all three sadistic credentials in  just one short speech. In light of her and Bill's past domestic record now coming under some much-deserved scrutiny, I think it's worth taking another look at this episode in her international antics as well.

When the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and Goldman Sachs load corrupt governments up with debts that they can never repay, the result is always the same. The creditors, back up by the governments who serve them, impose draconian cuts in social programs for the citizens of said country, and then allow the predators to swoop in and seize everything from water to electricity to ports to real estate to oil to precious historical artifacts and monuments.

Hillary Clinton, in a sort of job interview/debut for all those post-State lucrative, boosteristic speeches she gave at Goldman Sachs and other companies, performed perfectly to all their specifications in July 2011:

The steps ahead will not, they cannot, be pain-free, but there is a path forward to resolve Greece’s economic stability and to restore Greece’s economic strength. I have faith in the resilience of the Greek people and I applaud the Greek Government on its willingness to take these difficult steps. Greece has inspired the world before, and I have every confidence that you are doing so again. And as you (addressing her Greek foreign minister counterpart) do what you must to bring your economy back to health, you will have the full support of the United States.....

 We believe that the recent legislation (another bailout for Eurozone banks and the global investor class predicated on austerity for working people) that was passed will make Greece more competitive, will make Greece more business-friendly. We think that is essential for the kind of growth and recovery that is expected in the 21st century when businesses can go anywhere in the world and capital can follow. We think that will provide a firm financial footing on which Greece will be able increasingly to attract businesses and create the jobs that Stavros said are absolutely important for the Greek people. Because businesses seek consistent, predictable regulatory and taxation regimes. Investors seek a level playing field. They expect transparency, streamlined procedures, protection of commercial and intellectual property rights, effective contract enforcement, all of which was part of your reform package.

 Therefore, I am not here to in any way downplay the immediate challenges, because they are real, but I am here to say that we believe strongly that this will give Greece a very strong economy going forward. There are lots of analogies – having to take the strong medicine that tastes terrible when it goes down and you wish you didn’t have to, or the chemotherapy to get rid of the cancer. There are all kinds of analogies. But the bottom line is this is the best approach and we strongly support it.

If this speech sounds familiar to readers of this blog, it's because I also wrote about it last summer. But in light of her current populist message, I think her pro-business message bears repeating. Once an austerian and friend of the banks, always an austerian and friend of the banks. As much as Krugman loves to rail against Paul Ryan and the scamming Republicans as the causes of all that ails us, the GOP could never survive without Democratic complicity. The Duopoly serves identical plutocratic masters.

Unfortunately for some private investors in Clinton World, however, the betting on Greece didn't pay off particularly well. A hedge fund owned by son-in-law Marc Meszvinsky, a Goldman Sachs alum, lost a ton of dough betting on Greek debt and beaten-down bank stock. Oh well... maybe there was a hedge fund betting against the hedge fund for all we know.

  Although Krugman's main thrust in yesterday's post was how wrong it is to criticize Donald Trump solely about his protectionism, I seized upon Krugman's parochial blaming of horrible austerity policies on just the GOP: (and got plenty of pushback for my efforts; read the replies from the usual suspects if you have any time to kill.) My published New York Times response:

The Democrats might boast of being a big tent for a coalition of liberal policy wonks, but let's not forget that they, too, got caught up in the "expansionary austerity" craze not too many years ago.

Before Hillary Clinton became a born-again populist, she, too, dictated pain as a cure. And I'm not just talking about the domestic welfare "reform" of the 90s which plummeted millions of women and children into permanent poverty, or her foisting of partial blame for the housing collapse on subprime mortgagors/evictees.

As Secretary of State, Clinton also assigned blame to the victims -- not the plutocratic perpetrators -- of the entire global financial meltdown. In Greece, in 2011, she grotesquely likened austerity to "chemotherapy" which not only kills unhealthy cells but is a magical elixir which will help the body economic to grow.

 When she started running for president, she quickly changed her tune and said oh dear, what a Greek tragedy, as though it were never orchestrated by the IMF, the oligarchs, the big banks and the wonks of the rentier class.

Yes, Republicans are scary dudes, especially Cruz. But let's not limit the critique to them. There's plenty of pathology to go around. All around the world, where 80 billionaires own as much wealth as the bottom half combined.

(When the Syriza Party was elected on its anti-austerity platform, Clinton wasted no time pivoting from her gushing support of the deposed Papandreou government to pretending to lecture the Troika on its responsibilities to suffering Greeks. It was all part of the co-optation of that particular populist uprising while waiting for even more austerity measures to be imposed. The power players always must be perceived as having "tried." That is their passive-aggressive modus operandi. And as State Department emails reveal, their concern was geared more toward geopolitical war strategy than toward the suffering of Greek citizens. They were worried about a possible Grexit and potential collapse of the Eurozone and exodus of their fig-leaf NATO allies --  for purely profit and power-driven reasons, of course.)

Meanwhile, back in 2011, Clinton was commending Prime Minister Papandreou for helping her help the Libyan people to "secure a better future" by way of NATO-bombing the country into an anarchic band of extremist factions. This was before she uttered her bone-chilling words on the gruesome death of Qaddafi: "We came, we saw, he died."

And she'd concern-trolled the Papandreou's blocking of the aid flotilla (including one ship called The Audacity of Hope!) bound for Gaza by saying: "We commend the Greek Government for seeking a constructive approach in consultation with the United Nations to addressing the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza and working to avoid the risks that come with attempts to sail directly to Gaza."

Apparently those risks included about a million Palestinian families getting some desperately needed food and medicine. Too audacious for words. 

When I refer to Hillary Clinton as the Empress-in-Waiting, I am not kidding. 

When our rigged, super-delegated, brokered convention political system "elects" a president, the multinationals are indeed anointing the leader of their free world. 

Since the world is their oyster, no wonder they're clutching their pearls over an upstart named Bernie Sanders.