Virtue-Signalers Gone Wild

The blue wave forecast to wash over Congress like the storm surge from a hurricane has just been downgraded to a torpid depression. Democrats, if they do take the lower House, will trickle in like a shallow babbling brook, while the Senate looks to be complete loss. Or so say the ever-unreliable polls.

Is this doom-saying simply a clever way to get voters, whether they be  disaffected or smug, to the polls next month? We'll soon find out, but in the meantime, those intrepid Democrats are doubling down on their phony moralizing as energetically as Donald Trump is doubling down on his mendacity about the Big Alien Invasion from Mexico. To hear him tell it, there are not only Hispanics in that caravan, but Muslims and rapists of all nations.

So you'd think, wouldn't you, that Democrats would react to opinion polls by offering to give people what they want, nice things like universal health care, decent jobs with good pay, and affordable housing and education.

Nah.

They'll keep doubling down on how patriotic and virtuous they are compared to Trump. The fact that they're haranguing voters about "values" to the exclusion of actual social programs shows just how reactionary they have become. It used to be only conservatives who were so hung up on values. Republicans are so obsessed with values, in fact, that they hold an annual confab in Washington called the Values Voters Summit. So when Democrats try to beat them at their own right-wing game, they have no choice but to go further right themselves. Witness Donald Trump's own escalating neofascist rhetoric and policy agendas.

It's not that the Democrats don't recognize the trap they've created for themselves. Many liberal pundits are latter-day lackadaisical John the Baptists, drawling that the end is nigh and therefore "we" should stop obsessing so much over Trump and instead, cling to our American Values.

John the Baptist - Hieronymus Bosch

Take Charles Blow of the New York Times as a case in point. He led off his latest jeremiad with

One thing that I find profoundly disappointing about modern liberalism, particularly as it now stands in opposition to Trumpism, is the degree to which it is reactive, governed by what is being done to it rather than its own positive vision.

And Blow proceeded to fill the rest of the column with the usual laundry list of all the awful things that Trump has done this week, not least of which was slandering the Democrats as a "mob." 

You can almost see the smoke coming out of his ears as he types out the revolutionary words in the comfort of his corner office:

Well, count me among the mob, if that means people who stand in opposition to Trump’s degradation of the country in all ways. If the mob stands up for women and stands up to the National Rifle Association, I want in. If the mob hates corruption and loves the increasing diversity of this country, then it is for me. If the mob finds it abhorrent that during the same week that it became clear that a Washington Post columnist had been killed in a Saudi Arabian consulate, Trump praised an American politician who assaulted a journalist, then yes, yes, yes to the mob.

My submitted comment, which was rejected by the Times: 

How about single payer health care? Polls show that it is wildly popular among whole mobs of Democratic, Republican and independent voters. The main problem, of course, is that it's very unpopular with the wealthy donors who've already forked over record-breaking billions to fund the midterms. The rich get what they pay for, and they don't want Medicare for All.

This makes no sense.  Because if you want the hoi polloi to get all fired up about "liberal values", then you must first ensure that the voters are healthy.  On top of an estimated 30 million uninsured Americans,  there are tens of millions more with such junky insurance that they can still go bankrupt if they get sick.

Some economists predict that in another 15 years, health care costs will suck up the entire average household budget and actually surpass today's unaffordable housing costs. Are not the lack of a federal guaranteed housing policy and universal health care deliberate, immoral, corrupt and longstanding political decisions? Is it a liberal value that increasing numbers of people have been dying deaths of despair since the 2008 financial collapse?

What about joining a mob demanding that we divert those trillions of dollars spent on the bloated military toward improving the lives of our own citizens?
There was nary a mention by Resistance, Inc. of the Women's March on the Pentagon held over the weekend. 

Perhaps that's because war is indeed an all-American value, if only for the oligarchic mobsters who profit so handsomely by it.

Liberal pundit Paul Krugman, meanwhile, is following the Democratic script of just now noticing that Saudi Arabia is a bad actor because it murdered an important Washington Post columnist, an event which provides some much needed glue for elite journalistic solidarity and a box of verbal dummy bullets for their Resistance, Inc. movement of social justice for the moneyed professional class and their mutual hatred for Donald Trump, and only Donald Trump.

The president not only personally profits from the Saudi Arabian autocracy, he is lying through his teeth about the sales of arms being necessary to protect American jobs! It is downright immoral and unheard of!

You can almost envision the Cotton Mather brimstone setting Krugman's grizzled beard on fire as he pecks out these righteous words:

O.K., it's not news that the religious right has prostrated itself at Donald Trump's feet. But Trump's attempt to head off retaliation for Saudi crimes by claiming that there are big economic rewards to staying friendly with killers -- and the willingness of his political allies to embrace his logic - nonetheless represents a new stage in the debasement of America.
It's not just that Trump's claims about the number of jobs at stake -- first it was 40,000, then 450,000, then 600,000, then a million -- are lies. Even if the claims were true, we're the United States; we're supposed to be a moral beacon for the world, not a mercenary nation willing to abandon its principles if the money is good.

I suppose it's not really fair to accuse Krugman of abandoning the journalistic principles of fair-mindedness and putting things into context, because he is not really a journalist. He's an economist hired to parrot and preach the talking points of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party.

I had better luck with Times censors accepting the following comment, although they did carefully hold it back from publication for seven hours, until the wee hours of this morning when all good and righteous people were safely asleep in their beds: 

Yes, Trump is a dishonest blowhard, but to present him as some sort of hypocritical outlier in the longstanding special relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia is a bit much.

Wikileaks revealed that although Sec. Clinton in 2009 had called Saudi Arabia the major backer of terrorist groups, including a Qaeda, this knowledge didn't prevent the Obama administration from selling these murderous autocrats $29.4 billion in weapons in 2016.

As Obama's Undersecretary of Defense, Jim Miller, bragged at the celebratory press briefing: "This will positively impact the U.S. economy and further advance the President's commitment to create jobs by increasing exports. According to industry experts, this agreement will support more than 50,000 American jobs. It will engage 600 suppliers in 44 states and provide $3.6 billion in annual economic impact on the U.S. economy. This will support jobs not only in the aerospace sector but also in our manufacturing base and support chain, which are all crucial for sustaining our national defense."

Wow. As the great I.F. Stone acerbically noted in 1968 during the mendacious U.S. war on Vietnam, "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."

There's been a whole lot of smoking going on for decades, if not centuries, so it's gratifying, in a bitter sort of way, to finally have a president who lies so often and so ineptly that catching him out is virtual child's play.