Calling Doctor Freud

My biggest "takeaway" (I do hate that word) from James Comey's testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee is that Donald Trump equates being president with being the CEO of the biggest corporation in the world.  Either that, or his demand for "loyalty" from the FBI director shows that he equates being president with being the godfather of the global mafia.

And in a perverse sort of way, Trump would be absolutely right about both job descriptions. His problem is that he doesn't stay in his proper place. Presidents have heretofore acted as super-salesmen and propagandists for the plutocracy, dutifully using their private armies (the CIA and Special Ops) without bragging and Tweeting about them. Previous presidents have carefully kept their individual psychopathies away from public view, for the most part.

In some Freudian-slipped remarks at a pre-inauguration press conference on Jan. 11th, Trump bragged to the whole world:

"As president, I could run the Trump organization, great, great company, and I could run the company—the country. I’d do a very good job [at both], but I don’t want to do that."

He doesn't want to do a good job at both, because he views the country and his company as one and the same thing: a mega-merger for the ages, if not the greatest hostile takeover the world has ever seen.

Two months into his presidency, Trump was still persisting in his job description. He again called the United States a "company" during a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel before, again, belatedly correcting himself.

As far as James Comey is concerned, has there ever been a more slippery character in the canon of Washington political theater? Now seemingly forgiven for having helped destroy Hillary Clinton right before voters went to the polls, he has morphed from villain to All-American hero, a multimillionaire golly gee willikers Boy Scout in a six foot seven frame. He pulled off the awesome stunt of forcing the Democrats and Republicans to act in the lockstep bipartisan manner so beloved of the Washington neoliberal establishment. 

He openly admitted having head-faked Trump by waving the discredited "urinating prostitutes" dossier in front of his face during the transition period as a subtle way of telling the president-elect that the Intelligence Community (another loathsome phrase if there ever was one) has what Chuck Schumer called six ways from Sunday of getting him to behave. He openly admitted to carefully transcribing every Trump conversation - a practice he never bothered with under his previous bosses, Messrs. Bush II and Obama. He openly admitted leaking these transcripts to the New York Times and other outlets - even though they are now so "classified" that he simply could not in good conscience share all the salacious contents with the American public on national TV.

Even so, Comey humble-bragged about the exhilarating freedom he now enjoys as a private citizen to destroy Trump by calling him a liar on national TV. This career prosecutor, steeped in the intricacies of criminal law, lays out a prima facie case for obstruction of justice and then sanctimoniously demurs from calling Trump's behavior criminally offensive. He is not enough of an expert.

And speaking of the subconscious, Comey's dramatic bodice-ripper account of his fraught private dinner with the Groper-in-Chief - he later told colleagues he never wanted to be alone with Trump, ever again - gains new meaning with revelations that he was once accosted as a teenager in his own suburban home by the infamous Ramsey Rapist. So Comey is apparently very sensitive to the vibes put out by serial predators.

His narrative has garnered for him empathy, if not admiration, from every woman who has ever felt intimidated by her boss.  It has also deprived Hillary Clinton of one of the main scapegoats for her election loss.

And just one more speculation before I quit: would there even be a #RussiaGate had Hillary prevailed?

I think not. After all, James Comey also unhelpfully mentioned that Vladimir Putin is an ecumenical abuser. Vlad wasn't just gunning for Hillary; he can't stand either side of the American Uniparty. He's not out to destroy the Democrats, who are already doing a pretty good job of destroying themselves.

The appeal of a liberal 21st Century Inquisition does have its limits, especially in the wake of the punishing bipartisan Age of Austerity. Voters will be apt to stay home when their only choice is between Donald "Berlusconi" Trump and the neoliberal McCarthyites of the Surveillance State.

The Come(d)y Hour

FBI Director James Comey wasn't merely fired. He was "terminated" and then removed from office.

Just look at the wording of Donald Trump's announcement. It has all the despotic flair of an execution order for a previously coddled apparatchik who has deeply, deeply disappointed his Leader. It is also deeply, deeply cowardly, since the Leader himself takes no responsibility for his own decision.

"You are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately," Trump passively dictated in a scene reminiscent of Pontius Pilate washing his hands of the whole sordid mess.

In a further parody of the New Testament, the part that has Peter the Apostle denying any knowledge of Jesus Christ on three separate occasions, Trump perversely reminds Comey that he had denied knowledge of any Trumpian wrongdoing on three separate occasions.

Trump, who can never resist covering his own tender ass, has essentially made a veiled threat, thanking the FBI in advance for keeping its hands off him. In consigning the FBI director to the proverbial gallows as the latest scapegoat, he is sending a mafia-style message to Comey's successor. 

Comey has finally outlived his usefulness. He'd made the mistake of trying to play both sides of the Uniparty off against each other instead of, say, prosecuting Wall Street criminals. He should have just resigned last summer, after the airport tarmac meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and President Bill Clinton made him the fall guy. He displeased the Republicans by not indicting Hillary Clinton and he displeased the Democrats by gratuitously lecturing Hillary about her reckless stupidity.

 Barack Obama, who himself had cravenly risen above the fray in order to avoid the pitfalls of actual leadership, conveniently flew out of the country on a private jet this week to lecture the rest of world about healthy eating and climate change.

"You get the politicians you deserve," Obama cynically schmoozed in Milan to an audience full of sated plutocrats who'd paid 850 euros apiece for the privilege of being reassured.

Meanwhile, to make the Comey saga a thriller in true Grand Guignol style for the folks back home, it was Trump's personal private bodyguard - not Secret Service personnel - who delivered the execution order to FBI Headquarters. Comey himself reportedly learned his fate from news bulletins just as he was giving a schmoozy speech of his own in Los Angeles. He wasn't talking to the wealthy political donor class, of course, but to the public-private law enforcement community tasked with protecting and absolving the wealthy donor class. It has long been Comey's job to foment fear of Terrorists in basements in order to deflect attention from the rampant white collar/corporate crime spree and deferred prosecution agreements with the Department of Justice.

To make the Comey story even more gruesomely delicious, Trump's publicity flack took media questions in the virtual shadows, cowering near or behind a bush on the White House lawn after he ordered all the camera lights turned off. "I know nothink," was his standard reply to a barrage of questions. "Spicey" deliberately gave the media something even more exciting to write about and to speculate about. Did Sean Spicer wet his pants? Is Sean Spicer on drugs? Does Saturday Night Live desperately need more funny material?

Are the Democrats and their veal pen offshoots in a renewed frenzy of email fundraising?  First they wanted Comey fired, now they say he was fired for the wrong reasons. Click here to prove you are a good citizen who demands the right reasons!

  Something has infiltrated what's still left of our democracy, all right, but it sure isn't Putin. This is all about two ruling class factions battling each other in a massive power struggle that has little or nothing to do with the needs and desires of ordinary people. It's the dregs of democracy and the spoils of the whole world which are still very much up for grabs.

Have you noticed how Obama and Hillary Clinton are now re-positioning themselves not just as national leaders, but as world leaders and elite influence-peddlers? As far as finance capital is concerned, there are no borders. Populism - which in their neoliberal world, means the looming threat of actual people demanding such nice things as survival - is Public Enemy Number One to the "centrist" global plutocracy. Why else would cool, calm, above-the-fray Obama be interfering in foreign politics and openly endorsing an investment banker in the French elections? Why else would Hillary be chronically "submitting" to interviews conducted by fellow members of the private ruling class club known as the Council on Foreign Relations? (Google the list, and look for Nicholas Kristof, Christiane Amampour and Andrea Mitchell.)

Meanwhile, the collapse of a crumbling tunnel on top of a huge toxic pile of nuclear waste in Washington State is going largely unnoticed and unreported. Ditto for the insane escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Ditto for the looming famine in Yemen.

Situation hopeless but not serious. The radiation is contained, because opioid addict and Energy Secretary Rick Perry said it is. The terror is contained, because the imminent deployment of 5,000 more American terrorists will "break the deadlock." The peasants are contained because the plutocrats are droning and starving and drugging poor people to death all over the world.

 Everybody move along, nothing to see or hear or get excited about except the latest sordid plot twist in Palace Intrigue Theater. If you didn't catch last night's episode, cleverly titled Tuesday Night Massacre, then you haven't been paying attention. Heaven forbid that you haven't picked your favorite character yet, or a side to root for in what amounts to a permanent political campaign.

Stay tuned while we pause for another commercial break brought to you by Big Oil and Big Pharma. Grab the popcorn before the mainstream media hauls out the next panel of fact-checkers and spell-checkers and virtue-signalers and knee-jerkers and paid lobbyists.  Because Donald Trump has just burped out another inane Tweet to save everybody from engaging in any actual thought.

By the Pricking of My Thumbs

Something Clicked This Way Comes

Just a few quick thoughts and speculations on the latest thrilling episode of Hillary's Life of Scandal.

--While a hypothetical President-elect Clinton would not have the immediate power to fire FBI Director James Comey for trying to spoil her coronation, she theoretically could grant herself the additional power to abolish the entire agency once she took office. Since dissension within the ranks of the Bureau was reportedly the impetus for Comey's letter to Congress about some newly-discovered emails, Hillary would remain highly vulnerable, with or without the current director's resignation.

 -- Look at the whole murky history of the FBI. Teddy Roosevelt did a sneaky summer end-run around an adjourned Congress in 1908 by unilaterally creating his own executive police force. Congress had refused to go along with the formal creation of such a federal agency, rightly fearing that it would operate in too much secrecy. Ominously, the plutocratic Attorney General directly tasked by Teddy with manning the Bureau just happened to be the grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. What one aristocratic Trust-buster and an Emperor's spawn giveth, a once and future mistrusted Empress can (hypothetically of course) easily taketh away.

--When Congress refused to give AG Charles Bonaparte any money for his spy agency, he ignored them, and simply appropriated personnel from the Secret Service. The FBI has been an illegal agency from the outset. But as has been its wont, Congress is loath to overturn an executive order or a secret legal opinion or stealth bombings and invasions once they are "done deals."

--Since the first official task of Roosevelt's quasi-public cop shop was to enforce the Mann Act, and crack down on female sex workers by infiltrating houses of prostitution, wouldn't it be a hoot if one of its very last recorded acts was the attempted destruction of a political campaign by way of cracking down on a male sex addict?

--Of course, the main impetus for the creation of the FBI was the growing popularity of socialism, which spawned widespread paranoia within the ruling class. Roosevelt, remember, only became president when his predecessor was assassinated by an "anarchist." The scary Other back then were not Muslims and Mexicans, but Germans and Italians and other European immigrants. Domestic espionage upon all manner of civil and labor rights activists and pacifists and other critics of the military-industrial complex has long been at the core of the agency's mission. See, for example, COINTELPRO and most recently, the outrageous FBI scanning of Yahoo email under the direction of the talented Mr. Comey. 

 In sum, Hillary, intelligence aficianado that she is, could and likely would simply replace the current FBI with a carefully purged new agency all her own, called the New Improved FBI. 

-- According to its own auto-hagiography, the current Bureau has prided itself from its very inception for selectively rooting out political corruption. In the First Gilded Age, as in our ongoing Second era of inequality, "corruption was rampant nationwide... with crooked political machines like Tammany Hall in full power." So, who knows, Comey might actually think he's a rare and bold adherent of the noble historic spirit of his spy agency.

-- For those willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, James Comey is simply doing his unpleasant job, creating an unavoidable smallish mess out of the pre-existing humongous mess created by Clinton herself. As noted above, he is probably bowing to pressure from the rank and file, said to be disgruntled by the government's prior kid-glove treatment of Hillary. As a group, law enforcement unions are almost uniformly supporting Law and Order candidate Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. This doesn't make a lot of sense, given Hillary's own established hawkishness and pro-police history. Then again, Hell tends to be murky.

-- Democrats who are strutting and fretting at Comey (see, for example, Paul Krugman's Twitter meltdown) for politicizing Clinton's mess should direct some of their wrath at President Obama, who in a fit of pathological bipartisanship nominated the shadow banking/surveillance-friendly Republican FBI Director in the first place. Comey's reputation for honesty was a huge selling point at the time. Fair is foul and foul is fair.

--Just when we thought the duopoly, rampant as it has been with promises of war, and threats and actual outbreaks of violence, and revelations of sexism and fraud in the highest echelons, couldn't go any lower, it just got lower. The direct intervention of an unconstitutional police state into the electoral process is something out of a Banana Republic. The attempted hijacking of the "Neoliberal Death Match" between a publicly loathed multimillionaire and a publicly loathed billionaire is just one end-product of the deeply ingrained corruption which has been integral to the American ruling establishment for a very long time. 

--But the extinction of American representative democracy is nothing compared to the ongoing extinction of two-thirds of the earth's animal species. Since that scenario of dusty death is too frightening to contemplate, you are all hereby urged to turn on CNN in order to get fully briefed on DikiLeaks, as well as to get fully hoodwinked by those insipidly incessant and multicultural "I'm An Energy Voter!" commercials sponsored by the planet-destroying petroleum industry.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

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Nought's had, all's spent/ Where our desire is got without content;/ 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy/ Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy. -- Lady Macbeth.