It's that most wonderful time of the year, when the racketeers in Congress put aside their petty partisan differences just long enough to have their big party and pay their annual mob dues before they all head off to the beaches, the ski slopes and the high-dollar fundraisers.
It's an especially rewarding time for President Donald Trump, whom the House Democrats just honored for his cruel treatment of immigrants and his cruel cuts to the SNAP (food stamp) program by giving him his very own Space Force, a bona fide fourth branch of the military, along with enhanced killing powers by way of another nearly trillion-dollar stocking stuffer for his Pentagon. This was an especially generous gift in light of the publication of documents in the Washington Post which show that the past three administrations have deliberately lied about the "progress" of the multi-trillion dollar Afghanistan war and occupation. Adam Schiff, the Democrat who spent all last week lambasting the unpatriotic and corrupt Trump, grotesquely gushed that the Democrats' gift to the president is "the most progressive defense bill we have passed in decades."
The Democrats even gave Trump his very own worker-punishing NAFTA clone package with his name on it. In a grab-bag ripoff if there ever was one, the Democrats in return got a relatively paltry twelve weeks of paid family leave for federal workers only. They apparently didn't want to act too greedy by demanding that Bad Santa Trump also reverse his cruel pre-Christmas decision to cut nearly a million people from SNAP (food stamps) which also includes cuts to home heating assistance.
This hellish Saturnalia kind of makes the much ballyhooed and ridiculously limited articles of impeachment the House is debating in the same breath look like dessert for Donald Trump.. It's more of a six-course meal for him, because he'll get unprecedented nonstop TV time soon after the holidays. It won't matter if the corporate media strives mightily to cast this as negative publicity for him, because he'll cast his own self as a victim-hero for the ages.
He'll be able to make hay, and rightly so, over the shocking revelations that among its other crimes, the FBI actually tampered with the physical evidence it presented to the FISA court in its investigation of his campaign operative Carter Page. No matter that the otherwise scathing report by Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice Inspector General, feebly concluded that the actual investigation itself was begun legitimately, and that there was no evidence of political motivation for FBI malfeasance and no evidence of a Deep State plot against the president. That's simply because, he acknowledged in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the people at the FBI were vague when questioned about their motivations and he doesn't purport to be a mind reader.
The FBI, now joined at the hip with the Democratic Party in its utterly phony #Resistance, Inc. movement, has been revealed to be rotten to its very core, and the undemocratic Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has (not for the first time) been revealed as a rubber stamp for all manner of abuse. It is so rotten that even extremist Republicans like Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz came off as righteous civil liberties champions during Thursday's Senate hearing on the matter. For the first time since 9/11, the most diehard war hawks are questioning the wisdom of having a secret court where the targets of investigations aren't even informed that they're under investigation. No matter if, when Graham said "it can happen to anyone," he was mainly thinking about himself and his fellow right-wing politicians.
Sometimes mistakes get made, and justice trickles down by sheer luck. Until, that is, the political racketeers figure out that even a trickle of democracy threatens to erode capitalism, and in a reactionary panic they turn up their own fire hoses of freedom to full throttle and aim them at the huddled masses both at home and abroad. But they're running dry on their excuses, and the pathetic hot air left in the wake of their mendacious gushers hasn't got the power to terrorize us, let alone convince us of their kindly flag-wrapped motivations.
Why else would Speaker Nancy Pelosi allow for a minimalist impeachment of Trump, other than to ensure that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren remain trapped in a Senate trial while corporatists Biden, Bloomberg and Buttigieg pretend to fight Trump out there and she pretends to fight him over here, in the cynically-named People's House?
5 comments:
C'mon, can't we all just get long? We should be happy the Christmas spirit is flooding the halls of Congress.
The Book of Revelations according to St Barack, tells us Reds and Blues should be seen as the same, and they just about are in 2019. St Barack stressed that in his breakthrough speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. Oh, the radiance !
"Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there's the United States of America."
May they someday be one, Lord. No wonder St Barack,during his tenure as President, kept reaching out to the other side with generous compromises of our rights. Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell––they were early converts to Obamism. It's now up to the rest of us to see the light and join in.
Faith in Obamism doesn't always come easy. There are exercises to bring you around, like saying "Some of my best friends are fascists / war criminals / thieves." Repeat ten times every day before lifting the newspaper from your doorstep.
Jay,
May I offer another mind-numbing mantra for Obamabots, including those whose doorstep is beyond newspaper delivery:
“We tortured some folks,” Obama said,
“… we crossed a line. And that needs to be understood and accepted.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/john-brennan-torture-cia-109654
I have coined a term in my NYT comments today, that I think fits the analysis here in these pages. I offer it here for discussion and further refinement.
I call it "Narcissistic Political Disorder."
I define it as an arrogant inability to consider actual voters, and a certainty that one knows what they ought to think, and that one is the very embodiment of what they should support.
It so departs from reality that they go past being sure they will win, to think they won despite losing office, and that anything other than victory is a conspiracy of evildoers against their virtue.
Narcissism is all too common among our privileged elite, and now it defines their very politics. DSM-V has an extensive discussion, which I think fits the political behavior we see, as much as it does other non-political interpersonal behavior more commonly assigned to this disorder. Politics is just a larger stage for interpersonal behavior.
@Erik
“… we crossed a line. And that needs to be understood and accepted.”
With that quote we can rest our case at The Hague––that'll be the day––by using the war criminal's own words.
In keeping with the Obamist style of no drama, we are initially presented in the quote with the smooth and brief syntax that quietly sneaks the cart before the horse. Without knowing what comes next in the president's soft chest beating, we are first told to close down our lying eyes and human emotions. Not much noise created with the abstraction of putting a line down on paper, then drawing a second line that crosses the first line. Not a cell of flesh or a drop of blood in sight.
That "line" he's talking about crossing is torture. Lie, taking a person to the edge of choking to death dozens of times. Suddenly,that's only a line. Which by medical miscalculation sometimes ends in death. A mistake, sorry. And torturing not just one but many over a period of years, usually in black sites, "black sites" being non-US soil where presumably there is no God, no Constitution, no human rights, no right to justice of any kind that applies. Black sites are free-zones where there are no consequences for crimes against humanity.
Besides water-boarding there are other varieties of torture the elite OK'd, like stripping them of clothes, soaking them with a hose, then forgetting them for a few days in a freezing cell.
Put that out of mind. Stay deaf, dumb and blind to the screams of men going mad because of what our agents are doing to them. Think rather of "a line was crossed." See, the president has reduced the charge to nothing more than jaywalking or bad draftsmanship.
Now that your humanity has been lulled by his sonorous baritone, Obama slips in the operative word, like a knife after the mob double kiss, at the very end of his calming exercise: "accepted." And you "need" to accept it, it being the mere line crossing. So many Americans were neatly carried all the way to that point of acceptance. Because St Barack, not Bush or Trump, phrased it so delicately.
@ Mark
You make a good point. The current elite do project their warped character onto the state they manage. Hence, "Narcissistic Political Disorder." What's good for me is good for America (apologies to Charlie Wilson c. 1953).
Might we adjust the first word depending on the particulars of a case to come up with subcategories of the empowered narcissistic impulse? Thus, "Sadistic Political Disorder,' or "Avaricious Political Disorder" or––and here I'm levelling a charge at a supine society, not the elite––"Zombie-Sanctioned Political Disorder."
In light of the first 20 years of this century, I'm sure the next edition of the DSM will have enough to add one more volume.
Jay–Ottawa -- For Republican thinking I'm exploring ideas from the DSM-V sections on sociopaths. This draws on antisocial personality disorders.
Narcissists vs sociopaths? Is that where we've come? It is a long ways down from FDR and Ike as Democratic and Republican models.
Post a Comment