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.