Monday, May 2, 2022

The Unbearable Brightness of Democratic Being

 Another week, another New York Times article about elite Democratic Party angst. The gaslighting theme, as ever, is that voters are ungrateful wretches who refuse to hear the message about all the great things that Joe Biden and his party have accomplished.

The electorate just doesn't get it. After all, writes the Paper of Record with an apparent straight face, "many Democratic candidates are raising vast sums of money, a sign of voter engagement."

Actually, it's an unmistakable sign of the record engagement of wealthy donors who, as that famous Princeton study proved way back when, usually get whatever they want in the way of tax breaks, antisocial policies and investment opportunities (private gains via socialized losses.)

But still, the Democrats will go through the requisite motions. They'll most of all have us reminisce over those long-expired, long-exhausted Rescue Plan benefits. And Joe Biden, to prove how much he cares about you, is carefully considering limited and mean-tested student debt forgiveness. He will begin hitting the road with a vengeance to spread the feel-good message in order to, as the Times headline puts it, "brighten his presidency and the national mood."

One of his very first stops to help lift our spirits will be on Tuesday at a Lockheed weapons plant in Alabama.  This facility manufactures the thousands of anti-tank Javelin missiles that his administration is sending to unknown hands in Ukraine. So if your mood is not instantaneously brightened by the sight of the Commander in Chief surrounded by all those shiny phallic symbols of death, then you probably need a mental health intervention to strengthen your libido. For as Theodore Roosevelt himself famously thundered over a century ago in the lead-up to the War To End All Wars: "By war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life!"



House Speaker Nancy Pelosi virtue-signaled the importance of gender parity in equating killing with caring. She cares so much about human struggles, in fact, that she did both T.R., and Joe Biden one better, all but unilaterally declaring war on Russia on Sunday. "America stands firmly with Ukraine. We are here until victory is won," she orgasmically gushed upon being gifted the Order of Princess Olga medal from heartthrob Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Not for nothing is this powerful feminist icon royally described by corporate media as "third in line to the presidential succession" in her own country.



The peasants just don't get it. The Dems have to fight "the Russians"  over there so that they don't have to fight for you over here. Over There, Say a Prayer, and Beware, for the Yanks are coming and they won't stop till it's Over, Over There. Or, as the New York Times a tad less jingoistically puts the party's existential exasperation with the lower orders not getting with the Neo World Order:

How much time should they spend trying to show voters they grasp the pain of inflation, compared with efforts to remind them of low unemployment? Should they pursue ambitious policies that show Democrats are fighters, or is it enough to hope for more modest victories while emphasizing all that the party has passed already?

My published comment on the article:

 It seems that every time a prominent Democrat appears on the corporate news shows, it's to agitate for war and billions of dollars in weaponized "humanitarian" aid for the people of Ukraine, the latest designated pawns in the endless US wars for oil, for profit, for global real estate. War is an investment opportunity for the wealthy donors who fund both our major political parties.

But student loan forgiveness, continuation of subsidized Covid treatment for poor uninsured people, renewal of modest cash aid to children? Where is the profit in that? Of course, since they can't say that directly because it would hurt their re-election chances, they turn to the usual cynical platitudes. Their go-to refrain is that helping people in their everyday lives would unfairly benefit the "undeserving". Take your pick of who the undeserving are: if they aren't residents of "crime ridden communities" who'd only use the benefits to score drugs, then they are those ubiquitous children of millionaires champing at the bit to avoid paying their alleged student loans. As far as his devotion to the working stiff is concerned, Joe Biden has yet to cancel the lucrative government contracts with Amazon, which is trying to squash labor unions. So far, he is ignoring his "good friend" Bernie Sanders's appeal to rectify this oversight. Voters are noticing the political cynicism as well as the money-soaked corruption which exists all across the designated A-to-B political spectrum.

3 comments:

VLT said...

Good comment. Glad they published it.

This is such a rerun of Iraq. Only everyone knows that Russia has WMDs.The Democratic party's only ploy to retain voters is fear of Trump Republicans and this war to distract from the status quo which is only working for the 1%. I am barely speaking to my Democratic friends in the States who are taking in the NYT and DNC messaging hook line and sinker. I don't understand it. There ARE alternative points of view on the Internet. But they treat the NYT as the word of God.

I heard a speaker Vladimir Pozner speaking very eloquently at Yale on Russia. I don't know very much about him but he certainly filled in some gaps for me in my understanding of the Russian perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X7Ng75e5gQ

Uncle Ho said...

Hey Valerie, check out Noam Chomsky on Ukraine,

Noam Chomsky shines his light on the Russia-Ukraine war
https://youtu.be/6YeRX6ZYXH0

Chomsky Calls Trump the ‘One Western Statesman’ With a ‘Sensible’ Plan for Resolving Russia-Ukraine Crisis

https://www.mediaite.com/donald-trump/chomsky-calls-trump-the-one-western-statesman-who-laid-out-sensible-plan-for-addressing-russia-ukraine-crisis/

Uncle Ho

VLT said...

Uncle Ho - There is a brilliant interview with Jeremy Scahill on the Intercept https://theintercept.com/2022/04/14/russia-ukraine-noam-chomsky-jeremy-scahill/

Most informative of all interviews I've heard on the Ukrainian Crisis.

I'm no fan of the lunatic Trump but I have to say, he handled Russia pretty well - something I have to acknowledge.