#Resistance, Inc

Back in June, before Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Kamala Harris would run on an unappetizing campaign of canned joy and fear, the New York Times ran an article outlining plans for a new anti-Trump resistance movement. The Democratic Party was essentially admitting that lacking an agenda of its own for the greater public good, it fully expected that Donald Trumpwould prevail once again in November. To that end, it was already making plans to produce an epic multipart soap opera to play out in the courtrooms of America and, of c,ourse, the consolidated corporate media matrix that still poses as journalism in the public interest. 

They were not kidding. In a follow-up piece published on Thursday, the Times dished that a team of 800 lawyers, salaries paid by the party's myriad veal pens, had been working behind the scenes for the past two years readying a lawfare campaign for the ages. It will not be the weakened Democratic minorities in both houses of congress that will be Trump's foes. It will be teams of unelected lawyers for hire.

The consortium of nearly 300 liberal organizations has dubbed itself Democracy 2025, presumably as a dig at the right-wing Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's wish list of antisocial measures.

Ron Klain, Joe Biden's outgoing sidekick, has already scored a seat on the board of directors. That was so fast, you might even suspect that the current administration was not only planning for "defeat," but hoping for it. Because although ordinary people may have lost, there will always be paid political functionaries who win, no matter which "side" they are on.

As far as Democrats being chastened for abandoning the working class and poor in favor of sucking up to Wall Street and Hollywood, far from it. 

Thanks to Donald Trump's cooperative casting of cartoon villains to his cabinet, professional Democratic operatives will now get to play heroes straight out of the Justice League franchise. We will be asked to enjoy dystopian dark times by settling back into our seats to watch the next exciting episode of superheroes vanquishing the Joker. Until he rises again to create even more havoc.

Unlike in 2017, when Democratic lawyers were unprepared for the onslaught of conservative policies, the intent is to be ready to unleash a flurry of lawsuits immediately.

“We’re leveling up and lawyering up,” Skye Perryman, the chief executive of the organization, said. “This wasn’t something that just everybody woke up the day after the election and started to plan.”

Just think, too, if Kamala had defied their rosy expectations and beaten Trump. Perryman and her team of 800 legal warriors might be languishing in some low level government job or second tier law firm, destined to live out their careers in crushing anonymity. This way they get to don a crusading cape and eke out at least their requisite 15 minutes of fame. They will get invited on MSNBC and maybe even be able to parlay their performances to permanent gigs.

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Normalizing Trump

-Donald Trump won so decisively, across so many demographics, that the "opposition"has no other choice but to accept his regime graciously.Only a week after the New York Times and other liberal media were braying that the end of the world was nigh in the event of a Democratic Party defeat, those same outlets are reporting with grave respectful seriousness the various cabinet appointments and proposed executive orders.

 After four long years of harping on a mythical "battle for the soul of America", Joe Biden has amiably changed his tune. Looking downright ebullient during post election remarks in (where else?) the White House Rose Garden, Biden pivoted from calling Trump supporters "garbage" to chiding Americans to be nice to one another. The electoral apparatus put in place to honor the interests of the ruling class no matter which legacy party wins worked, and it worked well, Biden boasted. At long last, Uncle Joe can drop the pretense that Trump poses an existential threat to "democracy". Since, historically speaking, capitalism has always been a gracious host to fascism, Biden has invited his doppelganger to the White House for a Wednesday photo-op to display the continuity of oligarchic power.

 Former first lady Melania Trump will not, however, take up the dainty invitation for tea extended by Jill Biden.Melania  reportedly cannot forgive or forget Biden s Justice Department goons or rifling through her underwear drawer in search of those purloined documents. In the interests of aforesaid ligarchic continuity, that case and all the various indictments and the one criiminal conviction based on the Stormy Daniels payoff case, will all magically disappear. It's as if the January Sixth spectacular never even happened. For one thing, the complicit corporate media have their careers and their continued "access" to power to think about.

 Now, the controversy of whether Trump is or is not a fascist is actually moot, given that the United States was not only built on fascism, its history also served as inspiration for Hitler's own regime. From the enslavement of Africans to the extermination of the indigenous populations throughout the Americas, the Trump reelection was entirely predicable. As I outlined in my previous post, the Democratic Party, with its own hard right turn via the Kamala Harris candidacy, ensured it.

 Why else would the historically reliable Black voting bloc not come out for Kamala? At least Joe Biden did not directly prosecute minority people, even though, as a senator, he engineered the racist, ethnic cleansing piece of Jim Crow legislation known as the Crime Bill. Liberals love to point to Donald Trump's notorious full page New York Times ad demanding death to the (later exonerated) Central Park Five, while giving Biden a relative pass for his own racist actions and rhetoric in the creation of the permanent racial carceral state, aka the Prison-Industrial Complex.

 As George Jackson wrote in one of his prison letters collected in Blood In My Eye, 

 "When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us, his barely functional plastic tape recorder that cost him a week's labor. and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism as simply as an economic geopolitical affair where only one party is allowed to exist aboveground and no opposition political activity is allowed."

 So it will be that Biden and Trump, brothers under the botoxed skin, will canoodle in the White House this week. We would do well to ask why and call out the fraud of the Duopoly once and for all - what the late Christopher Hitchens memorably dubbed the two tightly fused cheeks of one corrupt buttock.

Trump 2.0....

... brought to you, once again, by the Democratic Party. which spent billions of dollars doing its damnedest to lose this intra-oligarchic contest. Let us count just a few of the ways:

--Setting up Kamala Harris to take the fall. Her failure to win even a single primary vote in the 2020 contest made her a shoo-in for defeat, which is what Democrats wanted all along. Their whole purpose is to fund-raise by blaming everyone but themselves. You almost have to feel sorry for Kamala at this point. I don't imagine that she'll follow in the footsteps of her predecessors, the Clintons and the Obamas, cashing in with Netflix deals, speaking tours and self-glorifying charitable foundations..

--Their implicit goal of achieving lifetime status as martyred elite losers was cemented in the final weeks of the campaign. To ensure that Harris would lose, Bill Clinton told Muslim voters that Israel had a right to commit genocide because the Bible essentially had declared the zionists to be the chosen people. That was meant to supplement Michelle Obama waving her blue-taloned finger at men - who apparently do not empathize sufficiently with their womenfolks' menstrual cramps and the horrors of menopause to cast a vote in solidarity for Kamala Harris. It was really quite a retro argument, when you think of it, because the patriarchy has always pointed to female biology as the excuse to not grant them pay raises, promotions or even basic respect. Barack, for his own part, reverted again to his habit of denigrating Black men. His audience was not so much Black men as it was the white liberal burbs who feel more comfortable when it's a Black former president who utters their race stereotypes for them. 

-- Ignoring the dire economic straits many if not most people are now facing. Ignoring homelessness, sickness and despair. Championing a genocide.

Now, if you're imagining that the return of Trump will cause the Democrats to do a little introspection, think again. If the march of the scapegoats hasn't already begun, it will get underway with a vengeance very soon. The usual suspects will vie for supremacy: racism, sexism. Jill Stein, Russian interference, social media... you name it.

 There may one silver lining to this debacle. With the Senate now in Republican hands, a President Harris would have made all kinds of deals to keep the government open - cutting Social Security and other social benefit programs would have been at the top of the agenda. Such back-stabbing of regular people  can only succeed with bipartisan complicity and cooperation. No one party is accountable and therefore no one party need take the blame.. It is why Republicans failed to pass NAFTA until Clinton came long. And the only thing that prevented him and his GOP partners in triangulation from privatizing Social Security was the Lewinsky scandal. 

Make no mistake. If Trump is a fascist dictator, it was Democrats who opened the door for him and his movement. They are the ones who abandoned their disaffected constituents and chose instead to serve financialized capital.

 Cynics and cowards, they have delivered the population to corporations and oligarchs. They should fade away with pathetic whimpers that nobody will listen to.  

The way forward, if we are to survive this dark age, is to band together in acts of mutual aid, both large and small, both loud and quiet. Any resistance movement must be from the bottom up and remain as far as possible away from the Democratic Party and its various veal pen think tanks and its corporate media partners. 

Fright Fest '24

a Who needs Halloween when the politicians and the pundits are already force-feeding us so much doom and dread candy that we're apt to fall into a mass post-apocalyptic coma before the actual Apocalypse even gets a chance to happen on November5th? We may be so overdosed on manufactured terror that we won't even have the strength to shamble to the polls like the good patriotic zombies they want us to be.

There hasn't been this much  manufactured hysteria since the Y2K disaster turned out to be a big fat epic  bust. I will never forget how disappointed I was on waking up on Jan. 1, 2000 to discover that the clocks were still working.

I suspect many of us will feel the same way on Nov. 6, when a presidential winner will have been announced and the world has not come to an end. Even if there is no clear winner, we can at least count our blessings when the campaign ads and money-grubbing emails and robocalls suddenly stop and we can get back to the same old comforting consumer cons of yore.

Not that whatever the outcome, we are well and truly screwed. All this talk of the fate of  Democracy itself hanging in the balance  seems so quaint, given that democracy  has become just a code word for the neoliberal capitalism that's destroying the  planet and causing mass economic inequality, along with war and genocide. Why else would the corporate media be keeping such a breathless scorecard on which candidate is winning the billionaire sweepstakes?

The funniest-scariest headline I've read all week was the one that screamed "BIll Gates Has Privately Endorsed Kamala Harris," as though that pronouncement from the billionaire buddy of Jeffrey Epstein will send thousands of wavering voters to the polls in a burst of trans-class solidarity.

Meanwhile; Donald Trump has snagged the currently reigning world]s richest man, Elon Musk. It is now predicted that should Trump win, he will install Musk as his top White House adviser, if not his de facto co-monarch.

The media are also making a big deal over Kamala Harris finally daring to Go There and call Trump a fascist. She made the stunning accusation at yet another corporate-sponsored staged "town hall"  event. This was during the same week that her campaign had to clap back against the vile rumors that Harris is not a loyal and full-fledged supporter of the joint US/Israel genocide of Arab populations in the Middle East.. It is so unfair that Trump keeps  accusing her of being a radical Marxist and a hater of imperialism and mass death. That is rank disinformation, given that Kamala has worked tirelessly to advertise her neocon values, what with dragging Liz Cheney to so many staged events that you might even think she's secretly dumped Tim Walz from the ticket, leaving him to languish in the woods with his pheasant-shooting gun. The least the veep candidate could do is to emulate Liz's own creepy veepy daddy and shoot somebody in the face  with i tand then demand an apology from his victim.

Meanwhile, we must not let the manufactured doom and gloom get us down. We must look forward to Barack Obama pivoting from his current stand-up routine of guilt-tripping black male voters and making fun of Trump's McDonald's stunt, not to mention his faltering mental capacities.

It was Consoler-n-Chief  Obama, remember, who comforted the nation after Trump's 2016 victory, by insisting (correctly) that the Duopoly is really an intramural team, all playing within the same cosy 40-60 yard line.

Maybe he can tweak the platitude just a tad, assuring a divided nation that  the players are cosily scrimmaging within the 10-20 yard line  or whatever real estate is closest to the right-leaning goal post. They are all part of the same fascist team. Both are financed by billionaires, both are beholden to white supremacy.  Donald is the snarling fascist, and Kamala plays the "compassionate" fascist, each giving the wealthy exactly what they want, giving the lucrative "defense" industry exactly what it wants, all under the guise of a two-party system whose only internal differences are in  style and cultural tastes.

Meanwhile,  we will have to endure fantasy scenarios of what will happen under a second Trump term and even consider the possibility that Trump will still  take over the whole country even if Kamala wins.  He will  deport immigrants, ban Muslims and throw his political enemies in jail by fiat.  Thankfully, though, Congress has appropriated far more funds for the construction of shiny new prisons than it has for affordable housing. These elite enemies won't be out in the streets or living under bridges during the Trump dictatorship that they have so thrillingly forecast for our Halloween viewing pleasure.

Protesting the Brutes of Capitalism

More than 200 people were arrested Monday outside the New York Stock Exchange, where they were protesting the US-financed genocide in Gaza as well as the escalation of Israeli aggression against the citizens of Lebanon and any day now, of Iran. The demonstrators were charged with blocking the entrances to thefortress wherein the stocks of such war profiteers as Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin are bought and sold at record profits.

Given the escalating slaughter in the Middle East, it was wholly appropriate that the protest was staged on Indigenous People's Day, which is still officially called Columbus Day in the United States. 

It's  been a near- unbroken line of genocide by various imperial powers in various parts of the globe ever since Columbus first landed on Hispaniola in 1492 and began wiping out the Taino people.

Now it's Israel,  the proxy of the West in the latest campaign of murderous ethnic cleansing and land-grabbing. Joe Biden admitted as much years ago, when he kvelled that if Israel did not yet already exist, the US would have had to invent it, in order to protect American "interests" in that oil-rich portion of the world.

Populated as it is by descendants of European refugees from pogroms and by descendants of victims of the Nazi genocide, the Israel proxy/client state is the perfect actor to carry out mass extermination in Arab lands, in the interests of its Western investors, funders and zionist idealogues. The Holocaust, one of the most grotesque and well-documented acts of mass murder in modern history, is repurposed as  the perfect weapon of "self defense." wielded by a nation-state made up of a historically oppressed ethnic group. It enables the United States and its European allies to wallow in their own historic racism even as the liberals among them pretend to be staunchly ant-racist as they pander for political support in their home countries.

Meanwhile, the same politicians badger their own citizens, claiming if they're against their leaders' campaign of genocide,  then they must be antisemitic.

Besides being a proxy, Israel has also been the West's insurance policy. Remember that it was only a few years after the 1948 Nakba (forced expulsion of Palestinians) that the CIA fomented the coup in Iran and installed its own puppet on behalf of British Petroleum. Now that Iran's counterrevolution is a done deal, it's been a imperative ever since to topple the Islamic regime in the interests of controlling the global  oil supply. The defense of Israel is their only excuse... and it is wearing mighty thin. The rest of the world is simply not buying it.

It is only because a presidential election is looming that the current Democratic administration is feebly demanding that Israel tone down the rampage just a bit. The Biden crew wrote a letter threatening to withhold "some" future arms shipments unless food and water relief is allowed in Gaza. This is tantamount to ensuring that the lambs are fattened up before the slaughter.  It would never do to have images of delib erately starved, emaciated children circulating over the Internet before they are rendered out of sight and out of mind under tons of rubble.

The main difference between the joint US-Israel extermination campaign and all the genocides of the past is that the people back at home are now all too aware of the atrocities being committed in their name. And the imperialist propaganda simply iis not working as well as it once did.

Back in the 19th century heyday of the British Empire, for example, there were few critics and no crowds of anti-genocide protesters storming the Chancellor of the Exchequer or Buckingham Palace. People had only the complicit news sheets to keep them informed. They were not about to  question the sources of the sugar they put into their imported tea or coffee. And if  they did consider themselves to be informed, they were taught that exterminating lesser people was humane, because their very backwardness and "savagery" were already condemning them to extinction anyway. Imperialsts were only too happy to pounce on Darwin]s new theory of evolution and use a specious "survival of the fittest" excuse for their mass murders.  

As Sven Lindqvist writes in his magisterial "Exterminate All the Brutes"  - 

"After Darwin ,it became accepted to shrug your shoulders at genocide. If you were upset, your were just showing your lack of education. Only some old codgers who had not been able to keep up with progress in natural history protested."

Now, of course, trhere many more codger-critics, both young and old. And since so many of them are Jewish themelves, they are more impervious to the antisemitism whose increasingly desperate ubiquity are rendering them ineffective if not totally meaningless. To the extent that antisemites do exist, they are becoming more emboldened, feeling free to verbalize their own racism against both Jews and Muslims. Antisemitisim and Islamaphobia are indeed two sides of the same coin.

"We do not want to remember," wrote Seven Lindqvist back in the 90s in his history of genocides which did, in part, inspire  and enable Hitler to conduct his campaign of human annihilation. :We want genocide to have ended with Nazism, That is what is most comforting.... The air he (Hitler) and all Western people in his childhood breathed was soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable  destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which had already cost millions of lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application."

Perhaps, at long last, the cycle of mass public acceptance of, or ignorance of, the long history of genocide has come to a long overdue and much-deserved end.

And for those who think that Donald Trump is the only source of fascism, just remember that the highest ranking members of the New York City police state apparatus are either under criminal indictment or have already resigned in disgrace. It is cause for optimism when the lords of genocidal capitalism are threatened with even a momentary loss of their publicly funded private security forces. At the very least, brute force capitalism is losing more face by the day when it arrests peaceful protesters for the offense of resisting the corporate education being foisted upon them.

Biden: Brain-Dead Is As Brain-Dead Does

You have to be "brain-dead" if you don't believe in climate change, remarked Joe Biden as he briefly peered at the catastrophic damage in North Carolina this week. This was just days before an even deadlier storm blew up in record time to a Category Five monster in the  overheated Gulf of Mexico.

Now, as much as we might be tempted to accuse Biden himself of being effectively brain-dead, he still has enough functioning  neurons left not to say the quiet part out loud: that there is a proven connection between the trillions of gallons of water unleashed by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and the trillions of dollars expended to wage the US Hegemon's endless genocidal wars around the globe.

The American military is the world's single largest greenhouse gas polluter, consuming and spewing more hurricane-spawning hydrocarbon than any other institution on earth.

And ironically enough, Biden has been forced to cancel a meeting in Germany to plot and finance another escalation in his Ukraine-Russia war. And then he was due to fly to Angola immediately thereafter to plot how best to plunder that poor African nation of its oil reserves and precious minerals with which to fuel "the greatest and most lethal fighting force the world has ever known." 

So as much as Biden often brags that "we're the United States of America for God's sake - there's nothing we can't do!" the president has been forced to stay in Washington so as to "oversee" preparations and response to the latest hurricane. This oversight, as the White House readily admits through its New York Times mouthpiece, is largely cosmetic, to avoid accusations by Republicans that Biden is ignoring a crisis in the Homeland. So he will don his special NOAA bomber jacket for the usual photo-op. He should probably continue wearing it as he phones Netanyahu to tell him on what refugee camp or apartment complex or humanitarian food aid convoy to drop his endless supply of those Made-in-the-USA 2,000-lb bombs.

And with FEMA grotesquely underfunded  only 10 percent staffed. what of the climate refugees back in the states? Even what remains of the middle class can't escape the devastation. Witness upscale Asheville, North Carolina and what's in store for Tampa, Florida, where gas stations have already run dry in the mad rush to escape.

Something tells me that Democrats sneering at the Trumpies who don't "believe," as they so piously do, in climate change, is not going to impress voters for much longer. They're already trying to sell us on "resilience" rather than such rectifying measures as stopping the wars and imposing huge fines and taxes on billionaires who fly on private jets, sail the seas on their mega-yachts and can't even remember where their multiple mansions are even located.

Of course, to paraphrase Frederic Jamison, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. So we have to struggle all that much harder, not  not to get sucked into their propaganda matrix, not to descend into their horrific maelstrom.

A Plague of Election Year Drought

As a consolation prize to make up for the orchestrated dearth of meaningful choices on the ballot, New York is letting us vote early this year.  For the first time in my voting career, all third party candidates have been erased from the official document that just arrived in the mail. No Green Party, no Libertarian party, not even a Rent Is Too Damned High Party. The document is a vast desert of wasted white paper. The tiny printed names of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are the mirages, cruelly mocking all of those vainly searching for an oasis of democracy.

 The parchment offers no respite to the parched.

Not that the pair of candidates vying for the 18th Congressional Distric seatt are any more promising. Far from it, in fact, given that each of them is a xenophobic reactionary.

 The incumbent,, Pat Ryan, was one of only a couple dozen of "moderate" House Democrats who voted to censure their own Palestinian-American colleague, Rashida Tlaib. He gave a big thumbs-up to a resolutions that defined  opposition to Israel as anti-Semitism. He has enthusiastically voted for every war appropriations  and surveillance bill  put before him. As a former Army intelligence officer stationed in Iraq, Ryan is stll every inch the military man. His campaign ads and incessant robocalls boast that he is "not your usual Democrat".  One TV spot actually shows him wrestling with his young children rather than, say,  hugging them or reading to them. He suggests it was he, and he alone,  who dared to talk tough to Joe Biden about supporting Donald Trump's draconian border policies so as to convince Republicans to support Ukraine War funding. No matter that it was a moot point, because Trump himself nixed the cruel border legislation out of pure partisan spite... and the Ukraine War funding was approved anyway.

Ryan's Republican opponent, Alison Espositio, is a retired New York City police inspector who is laboring under the delusion that this bucolic upstate district is rife with violent crime perpetrated by - who else? - those alien hordes. So her platform is pretty much limited to restoring cash bail, thus ensuring once again that poor defendants will languish in jail pending trial - or to be completely accurate about it, a forced plea deal simply because they can't afford a private trial attorney.

The main difference between Ryan and Esposito is that he supports abortion rights and she does not. The Democrats didn't codify Roe v Wade when they had the chance for the very important reason that doing so would have robbed them of their best campaign wedge issue.

All is not lost, however. The incumbent Democrat in my State Senate district, Michelle Hinchey, is reliably progressive on most issues. And in the Assembly, incumbent Sarahana Shrestha is a self-described socialist who recently introduced a bill which would  take our privately-owned utility (Central Hudson) public after it bilked customers out of millions of dollars in a crooked billing scheme. (Pat Ryan's boast of fighting the utility involved his office forwarding constituents' complaints to the state's regulatory Public Service Commission and a floor speech demanding the resignation of its former CEO, who was promptly replaced by another market-based, investor-serving company apparatchik.)

So, since October is the storied month of surprises, and events are bouncing off each other with the speed of blight, I have placed my precious voting parchment into a drawer with no plans of sending it in until the very last possible minute. 

Any of the aforementioned candidates who renounce war and capitalism and, for good measure, kicks at least one of their billionaire donors in the rear end in full public view has a pretty good chance of earning my vote. I say "chance" because some or even most of them will say anything or pull any stunt to retain or gain power.

Meanwhile, how  ironic that in such an orchestrated electoral drought, we keep getting flooded with their calls, their ads, their fear-mongering appeals for the "grass roots" cash that for many of us, doesn't even begin to cover the food, the rent and the medical bills.

How the Times SugarcoatsTerrorism

 If its coverage of the explosions in Lebanon of  booby-tapped pagers and radios hasn't been implicitly admiring of Israel's technical "prowess" in causing at least two dozen deaths and thousands of gruesome injuries, the New York Times added insult to injury by proclaiming that Hezbollah militants are feeling mighty "embarrassed" for having been such unwitting dupes of Israel.

In framing the atrocity in in such a "was my face red!" manner, the Times has tried to deflect readers' attention from the actual blood streaming down all those faces and from the fact that many of the victims literally had their faces blown right off their skulls.

I thought I was beyond feeling shock and disgust at how the pro-Zionist New York Times regularly dehumanizes the targets of this settler-colonialist apartheid state. But its coldly clinical coverage Israel's latest sadistic mass murder went beyond the pale, even for the Times. The Gray Lady has exposed herself in all her ghoulish nakedness.

Nowhere in the rapidly dwindling  coverage does the paper describe the carnage as an act of terrorism On the contrary, it is an act of counterterrorism.  You see, It's only terrorism if Arabs and Muslims do it. Or maybe if a white guy like Putin does it. I can assure you that the coverage would be very different if Russia had sent explosive devices to Ukraine and thousands of innocent people had been torn apart.

So the Lebanon massacre must be downplayed at all costs. One article headlined "Waves of Small Explosions Cause Chaos Inside Hezbollah" served both to minimize the horrific injuries and to give the false impression that only militants were injured. Israel apparently possesses so much technical prowess that the throngs of passersby were magically erased right out of the picture. As is its wont, however, the Times did deign to mention the death and funeral of one child.

As "eye-catching" as  the carnage (Israeli prowess) certainly was,  writes reporter  Patrick Kingsley in another article published on Wednesday, the usual experts in the statecraft biz are very confused as to why Israel has not capitalized" on it. It was a tactical success but not the ultimate victory over the entire Middle East that warmongers of all nations crave.

Because if nothing else, Kingsley grotesquely writes, the mass slaughter in Lebanon "has restored some of the prestige and aura that Israel’s intelligence agencies lost on Oct. 7, when Hamas led a surprise attack on Israel that the Israeli military failed to predict or prepare for." (Sadly, the nearly year-long genocide in Gaza has failed to impress the more discerning among connoisseurs of cruelty as not being sufficiently prestigious.)

That Israel has foresworn bragging rights is just the Times being its cute disingenuous self again. Why would Israe boast and dish on all the details when it has as its partner  the United States do it for them? For the most powerful and lethal fighting and intelligence force the world has ever known and feared, the US sources dishing to the Times certainly seemed instantly aware of every detail of the planting of explosives in the hand-held devices, despite their claims of having no knowledge of the booby-trapped devices and terror attacks in advance.

The terror is, of course, the whole point. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. It can happen to us. It's just a short step from surveilling us and censoring us to physically mangling us. Look at  how easily, to give you just one example, that the FBI was able to  crack iPhone security without Apple's help.

I don't think  I was being overly paranoid when I fleetingly wondered why my iPad gave out a cheery little ding the other day.

***

Books don't explode, thank goodness, despite the reactionaries wanting to ban them. So I am reading a lot these days, fiction and nonfiction. This passage from a book by James Baldwin that I just finished really hit a nerve in me, so allow me to share it with you:

"The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct. they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply. Life is their only weapon against life, life is all they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may coerced) in hte population control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring on the fields which others own, with their transistor radios on their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one of the heads of the civilized world. forbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them. the wretched. quite coldly and deliberately. znd do not intend to change the satus quo; they are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement' rain down their bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced. and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life. or the 'conscience' of the civilized world There  is 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child's arrival, but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the 'vital interest'' of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child."

De Bait & Switch '24

It was Kamala Harris For the Oligarch People all the way on Tuesday night.  With taunt after taunt, platitude after platitude, she utterly destroyed Donald Trump's portrait of her as a Marxist Commie radical. Beyond any reasonable doubt, she established her right-wing cred as both a neoliberal and a neoconservative.

  It has taken gallons of the recombinant political DNA of Dick Cheney, Barack Obama and both Clintons to create the ultra-processed finished product known as Kamala Harris.

But even her skilled verbal waterboarding of Trump has left barely a dent in the admittedly unreliable national polls.

Here's a highly condensed analytic version of the official courtroom transcript:

ABC's David Muir(DM): Welcome to the high stakes showdown in the presidential sweepstakes horserace. As they face each other for the first time, they 're neck-and-neck, which makes actually facing each other physically impossible. But never mind all that. It's the foaming and the snorting and the frothing that count in these political spectacles.

ABC's Linsey Davis : And I am the token female sidekick.

Muir: Vice President Harris, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?

KH: So to avoid answering your question, I was raised as a middle class kid. And I am the only one on this stage who has a plan to lift up middle class people such as myself, unlike Doonald Trump who never talks about anyone but himself. So my plan is to build an Opportunity Economy which is simply a rehash of neoliberal bootstraps and ladders and stuff. So I want to help families buy a crib and a car seat, which are pathways to access to a house and a car. I will give a $5,000 tax deduction to small business start-ups.  Unlike Trump, who will impose a 20 percent sales tax on cribs and car seats And don't forget Project 2025.

Muir: Trump, you get two minutes to take the bait.

DT: Nah, it's not a sales tax, i's tariffs and they've kept them in place. It's me and me against the world. I am going to make other countries pay us back. They are sending us millions of people from their prisons and stealing jobs from Blacks and Hispanics and unions. They are taking over towns and buildings and stealing people's cats and dogs and eating them. They are destroying the pet population of the whole country.

DM: The fact checking machine in my ear has instantly checked  and reports that not one single cat or dog has been eaten. Now, Kamala, would you care to respond on the economy?

KH: Trump left us the worst economy since the Great Depression. Even though the unemployment was nowhere near the 25  percent it was then, this lie will pass right over your selective fact checkers who are still stuck on dead cats being stolen from single women.  Not only that, Trump's capitol riot was the worst attack on the country since the Civil War. Worse than even than 9/11 which viewers might remember used to be a holy day of obligation Now, Jan. 6th is. We must not lett our jingoistic holidays separate us.

DT: I have nothing to do with Project 25, I never even read it because I am not a reader and she knows it, okay? I am not going to read it because everybody knows I am an open book. The only jobs they got back were bounce-back jobs. Those are jobs that bounce. I threw them my balls and they grabbed them and then they took all the credit. 

DM: Kamala?

KH: He doesn't have a plan. I have a plan to create an Opportunity Economy which is the same thing as Obama's Ladders of Opportunity. You climb the ladders and you get to my land of opportunity. Goldman Sachs. which I won't mention  wrecked the economy before Obama rewarded them, says that Donald Trump will wreck the economy.

DT: I wemt to the Wharton School of Business. They say my plan is a brilliant plan. I am going to create a lot of good solid money for our comp - er, our country.  At least I will make them want to create jobs if not make actual jobs

Muir: Trump, I want to drill down and go to bat for Kamala and make her argument that your tariffs are really taxes. Your plan will make things costlier for average Americans. Do you believe Americans can afford your tariffs?

DT: I had no inflation. They have inflation.

Muir: Kamala, let's keep this debate focused on scaring people about Trump's evil tariffs.

:KH: Let's be clear. Since Joe Biden and I kept Trump's tax breaks for the rich in place, I will change the subject and mention that he sold chips to China that they're using for their military which will attack us because of him. Trump actually thanked Xi in a Tweet. This puts a real damper on our war plans. Plus China not transparent about being the origin of COVID!

Muir: The fact checker is taking a nap in my ear. Trump, you may respond.

DT: She's a Marxist. She is letting millions and millions of illegals into our country. They are criminals. They are bad for our country.

Linsey: Let's talk about abortion .Trump, Kamala says you keep flip flopping

DT: The previous governor of West Virginia said we can execute babies after they're born. And I say that is not OK.

Muir: My fact checker just woke up and tells me there is no state where it is legal to kill a newborn. Kamala, please respond.

KH: I am not surprised that that is a fact. Donald Trump is telling a woman what to do with her body. He will sign a national abortion ban. He will monitor your pregnancies, your marriages.

DT: There will no national abortion ban. It would never pass Coongress. And abortion reminds me of student loans. 

Muir: We might as well get back to immigration. Kamala?

KH: We were ready to sign the cruelest border law in history. But Donald Trump killed the bill. You should go to his rallies. He talks about fictional characters, whereas I have prosecuted human traffickers and drug dealers who actually exist. You will not hear him talk about your desires. I, on the other hand, will pledge to put your first, before his windmills that cause cancer.

DT: Sure, I'll take your bait. People don't go to her rallies. And the ones that do go, she's busing them and paying them. I have the most incredible rallies in the history of rallies. We are a failing nation, people want their country back. Look at the towns. They're eating our cats.

Muir: There are no dead cats.

DT: But people on television say there are dead cats beiing used for food.

KH: Talk about extreme! So I will. More than 200 Republicans including Dick Cheney say that America will never survive a Trump term.

DT: I fire bad people. You never fire bad people. Let me add I got more votes than anybody in history by far.

Muir: Will you go door to door rounding up deportees? What does this look like?

DT: Yeah, millions of terrorists, drug dealers. They have destroyed our fabric. All over the world crime is down except for here. And if the FBI says crime is down they're not looking at the worst cities.

KH: Well, I think this is so rich, coming from a criminal prosecuted for national security interference and found liable for rape with his next big court appearance in November. So let us move forward and address the housing crisis and support start-ups. Let us address groceries. The American people are tired of the same old playbook.

DT: You're weaponizing the court system against me. I will win on appeal. This is called lawfare. RussiaRussia Russia.

KH: No, Trump is the one who threatens to arrest political enemies. We must stop him.

Linsey: What about your flip flops, Kamala - on fracking, border decriminalization, buybacks of assault weapons. We will not mention your reversal on Medicare For All because our corporate sponsors in the insurance cartel forbid it.

KH: If we pollute our air and water here, we don't have to rely on foreign polluters over there. I was raised by a hard working mother and I wasn't handed $400 million on a silver platter. Didja really think I can't play shallow defense and lob non sequiturs as well as my opponent? Plus I am a gun owner, so there!

DT: She wants to win Pennsylvania where I almost got my head blown off thanks to democrats. If she wins., fossil fuel will be dead.

Muir: Let's rehash January Sixth.

(They proceed to sling the hash with abandon)

Muir: Madam Veep, Trump says he did not lose the last election.

KH: Let us be perfectly Nixonically clear. Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. The whole world is laughing at Donald Trump;

Trump: I just cannot resist this delicious bait. Victor Orban doesn't laugh at me, so there! The whole world is afraid of me and they need me. We got 14 million votes. She got zero votes.

Muir: And now to Israel-Hamas

KH: Let me repeat my unwavering support for Israel. All those women who were so horribly raped, as opposed to being run of the mill raped. And even when I am here on this stage, I am there working around the clock for a two state solution knowing full well that the time for such a solution is long past.

Muir: Trump, would you negotiate with Hamas?

DT: She hates Israel. And if I were president, the Ukraine war would never have started.

KH: He talks to Putin! He talks to Kim Jong-un. He has no regard for our military, the most lethal greatest fighting force the world has ever known. The world must fear us, not laugh at us.

DT: We shouldn't be playing with World War III. But thanks to ABC for not asking me why I ripped up the nuclear weapons treaty back when I was such a global laughingstock.

(De Bait and Switch meanders along in much the same redundant way. I think you get the exhausting drift.)

To make it even sadder than it already was, Taylor Swift did not endorse Kamala until the show was over. She deprived the Veep of bragging about it the same way she keeps bragging about the Dick and Liz Cheney endorsements, as though they were worthy of bragging about.

The good news is that this supposedly will be the only "debate" between these two scary clowns.

The Return of Russiagate

Despite the best efforts of her Joyful Vibe Machine, Kamala Harris remains in a statistical dead heat with Donald Trump.

So with only two months to go before Election Day, the Uniparty has had to augment the joy with some good old-fashioned fear-mongering. Just when you thought the debunked Russiagate vampire narrative was resting safely in its grave, the stake of sanity thrust firmly in its heart, its producers have come back to haunt us with yet another cheesy sequel.

It's even more gruesomely  gory messaging than usual in this election cycle, because the US is actually at physical war with Russia via its client state, Ukraine. And a Trump victory, we are told, might slow or even stop the flow of billions of dollars in weaponry, the profits of which continue to  enrich investors and corporations beyond their wildest dreams. 

So the Paper of Record and the Uniparty have no other choice but to spread the word that if you are opoosed to this war or  or even worse, openly express your negative opinions about this war,  you just might be a Trump supporter and/or or a Putin puppet. You are at least the"unwitting" victim of another Russian disinformation and election-interference campaign.

If you're not careful, you may even end up in a a criminal courtroom!

 The New York Times, perhaps the premier self-professed media guardian against the alleged plague of "disinformation" sweeping the globe, wasn't taking any chances in its Tuesday edition.  It  was even forced to fight Bad Disinformation with Less-bad Disinformation! 

"Activists Charged With Pushing Russian Propaganda Go on Trial in Florida" was the false and misleading home page headline,  strategically placed right below its coverage of the Ukraine war, which is not going particularly well these days. 

Since the spreading of propaganda - Russian or otherwise - is not a criminal offense in the United States thanks to the First Amendment, the Times headline is deliberately and patently false.

It is not until deep into the article that the Times bothers to correctly report that the actual charge is not the spreading of propaganda at all. The crime alleged is simply the activists' failure to register as agents of a foreign government.  Their acceptance of relatively small donations or payments from a Russian national to help finance a run for local office is apparently the gist of their perfidy.

 But the damage was done in the headline. Many readers of news don't read beyond the headline or lead of any given news story.

The subhead of the Times article continues the subterfuge, citing "experts" who have been warning us that Russia has "tried for decades to secretly influence American politics."

However, the only expert that the article quotes by name is one Bret Schafer, a "senior fellow" at the German Marshall Fund,  weapons industry-funded NATO think tank located in Washington.

In the Florida case, which did not result in any pro-Russia candidate elected to public office, the payoff for Russia may seem exceedingly small. But on a broader level, Mr. Schafer said, Russia wants more “authentic” American groups to adopt Russia’s perspective.

“Even if they are not in a real position of power,” he said, “if you can infiltrate and influence enough of these groups and have them at some level adopting positions that are beneficial to you — and that doesn’t necessarily mean pro-Russian positions, but just to further radicalize them and create further divisions — we know that’s obviously a win for Russia."

The subterfuge still continues.  The Times has failed to inform readers that Schafer's expertise is limited to his creation of the notorious Hamilton 68 Dashboard, which purported to list hundreds of Twitter users as Russian bots or trolls trying to  mess with our free, fair and democratic elections. Journalist Matt Taibbi exposed the dashboard last year as a complete fraud, and verified that many if not most of the accounts belonged to innocent citizens who were unaware of their placement on the phony blacklist.

The fake dashboard has risen from the grave under the new name of Hamilton 2.0 and Schafer continues his role as go-to source for any corporate media outlet invested in the lucrative Russiagate franchise. Don't they say that love is better the second time around?

In case you're wondering how Schafer got to be such an expert , look no further than his website bio. Before embarking on a career in professional Russophobia,he worked as a writer at the Cartoon Network.

The Russiagate franchise is just starting to get its second (or third or fourth or fifth) wind. 

Of course, since no one fraudster or clown can  sell the Russiagate product all byhis lonesome, the Times followed up the next day with an announcement that the entire "United States Announces Plan to Counter Russian Influence Ahead of 3024 Election."

Just in case you aren't taking the cautionary tale of those Florida defendants seriously enough, or  scoffing at AOC's vicious attack on Jill Stein, the Times is here to inform you that as either witting or unwitting tools of the Kremlin, you may be subject to searches and seizures of your computers, your websites with resulting criminal indictments and even economic sanctions! You may be under FBI investigation right this very minute:

"The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have also been investigating a handful of Americans accused of knowingly spreading false Kremlin narratives. But officials have emphasized that they are not aiming to curb free speech. Americans who merely repeat or spread stories they see on Russian state media are not being investigated as part of the efforts, officials said."

I love the way they claim that their McCarthyism does not infringe upon the First Amendment. You can think or write or say anything you want. Just know that they are watching you.

Ray McGovern over at Consortium News quotes the article at greater length, suggesting  that the latest version of Russiagate is designed to make American citizens amenable to a direct war on Russia. And that means getting Kamala Harris elected.

The latest indication that the U.S. is already under rule by one state party is Liz Cheney's endorsement of Harris. She is already being floated for a cabinet position in a next Democratic administration. And that makes it more pressing for the media-political complex to overcome what's known as the Vietnam Syndrome: the distaste of US citizens for war and imperialsm. If they were able to cure this syndrome temporarily with Daddy Dick Cheney's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, they think they can overcome it again, by making war and mass death so damned bipartisan and downright joyful.

Send in the clowns, indeed.

"If You Have Nothing to Hide, You Have Nothing to Fear!"

Curtains For Democracy

Did anybody else notice that about the same time mass media started spreading online rumors that Beyonce would perform at the last night of the Democratic convention, various military types started strutting on the stage to tout Kamala Harris as the ideal commander in chief to the troops stationed all over the world?

The last night of the convention was a freaking recruiting drive, people! It was also pretty shady bait and switch. The ruling elites are absolutely desperate for more young bodies to enlist to fight their endless wars for fun and profit.

Just when the TV audience were expecting Beyonce to light up the stage, out walked Kamala in a severe navy pantsuit. She is the designated rock star. She is her own Beyonce. And that is how she aims to sell herself to disaffected young voters

That militarism was the overriding theme at the culmination of the four-day show also explains why Kamala Harris refused to allow an uncommitted Palestinian-American delegate to appear on the stage. This was a guy who'd already endorsed Kamala, mind you.

 But she was not about to let even a mealy-mouthed plea for a ceasefire ruin the happy vibe the jingoism, the  mindless chants of USA! US! USA as the curtain came down on this grotesque Ode to Joy. The final act actually gave off more an 1812 Overture stench, what with Kamala summoning up her inner Napoleon Biden to bray that the United States is "the greatest, most lethal fighting force the world ever known!"

She wasn't about to ruin her big moment by letting even the most fleeting thought of dead babies buried under tons of Gazan rubble or even slightly harsh the mellow of the uni-brain of the assembled K-Hive.

She also wasn't about to step on the toes of her investors, many of whom were watching from their million-dollar skyboxes high above her in the arena.

As a matter of fact, the democrats actually invited billionaires to speak. Illinois Gov. Jay Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune,  even boasted that he was a smarter billionaire than Trump who had only inherited  slum rental properties in the outer boroughs.

Bernie Sanders, who was allowed a speaking gig on the stage earlier in the week, didn't dare repeat his famous line that billionaires should not even exist. He didn't even renew his pitch for Medicare For All. He merely suggested that the program be expanded for seniors. And of course, he made no mention at all of the Gaza genocide. It would have spoiled the joyful vibe.

They really mean it when they scream "we can't go back." It's "Forward, march" all the way, baby! "Onward then, ye people, join our happy throng/Blend with ours your voices in the triumph song."

Occupational Therapy For Democrats: Weaving a Basket of Persuadables

aHow can we be sure that those microplastics recently discovered in human brains aren't also caused by toxic overdoses of political propaganda, supplementing  a steady diet ultra-processed food and breathing air polluted by petroleum byproducts?

Studies show that plastic brain pollution is worse now, in the recently dead, than it was in 2016 cadavers. 

But you may remember 2016 as the year when the ultra-processed Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Her loss was blamed on, among other things,  her notorious Basket of Deplorables  remarks to a group of wealthy donors at Club Cipriani in the Wall Street district of Manhattan.

And that brings me to Bill Clinton's speech on Night Three of the Democratic National Convention. The words oozed like petroleum jelly on electroshock paddles for a real jolt to the Trump-deranged throngs in the convention center.

Clinton sold a placatory mind-bend to the liberally confused. He sagely counseled the hyperactive audience with their signs and their cazy hats  that vocal liberal disdain for the hinterlands is a recipe for another disaster.  He lectured them to "meet your neighbors where they live" and to not equate Donald Trump supporters with Donald Trump himself.

You can still, of course, insult Donald Trump all you want. Bill Clinton doesn't seem to realize that if you trash Trump, you also trash his supporters, if only by proxy. They know when they're being tolerated, condescended to, and obliquely insulted. People have been indoctrinated by competing corporate media siloes to  internalize their cult leaders, making them and their trials and tribulations  a virtual part of themselves..

Clinton set the cautionary tone the whole night. After all, with Robert Kennedy dropping out and fixing to endorse Trump, the manic joy must now be tempered by caution. Even Oprah Winfrey made a surprise appearance to magnanimously urge Democrats to be nice to their Trump-supporting neighbors. You can so folksily agree without being disagreeable. 

Please, people, try to pretend to be nice to the erstwhile Deplorables at least until after November election!

Of course, no soul-searching is  ever attempted by the liberal elites, who still haven't figured out that it was the Clinton and Obama administrations, and their wealth gap-enhancing neoliberal policies and job-destroying trade deals which paved the way for Trump in the first place. It still paves the way for Trump in the second place.

This is despite the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Kamala Harris's running mate. He embodies the tweaked Democratic narrative that despite being funded and controlled by corporations and billionaires, they have suddenly developed a soft spot for Flyover Country.

Bill Clinton himself bragged about spending time in "rural areas" of New York. He evidently considers  pricey Westchester County, where he lives, to be a rural area. Or maybe he's ventured even further north. His wife Hillary actually spent a week in my own town of New Paltz n late fall of 2016 , to help herself heal after she lost to Trump. She stayed at the exclusive Mohonk Mountain house, whose employees can't afford to rent a small apartment in a town where the majority of residents are in fact, renters and not owners. 

But I digress. Suffice it to say, though, that Kamala's solution to the housing crisis doesn't involve the construction of more public housing stock. Rather, she has merely called for cutting bureaucratic red tape and pesky regulations so that real estate speculators and developers will be more incentivized to build more "affordable" housing.

Compared to Bill Clinton's hour-long schmooze, the aforementioned Tim Walz confined his own remarks to an affordable 15 minutes. He fully embraced his assigned role as Coach. We're all supposed to take the field and win one for the Gipper - actually for the right-of-center Reagan Democrats descended from the Gipper. Walz did mangle his metaphor slightly by intimating that football fields also apparently have developed trenches that we must fight within to beat Trump. Or maybe even in World War III, which the still-sitting President Biden took to another level this week with his enhanced nuclear weapons deployment package.

This is truly a made for TV stuff, nostalgically evoking memories of the 90s TV sitcom "Coach." Although filmed in Hollywood, it was set right in Walz's own hometown of Mankato, where the leading character, played by Craig T. Nelson, was the sometimes hapless mentor to his small college football team and long-suffering family and friends.

It was truly another made for TV moment as the camera repeatedly panned to  Walz's real-life family weeping openly and copiously in the audience. It was almost good enough to melt brain-plastic.

The Marketing of "Mamala"

She's a tough prosecutor who will eat Donald Trump for lunch!

No, wait. She's also the fairy godmother who will swoop into our lives to rescue us, the same way she swooped into her now-husband Doug Emhoff's lfe to rescue him, his kids, and even his ex-wife. That is exactly what he told us Tuesday night, anyway.

In other words, she is the authoritaran "strong Black woman" stereotype who balances strict discipline with loving-kindness.  These are just the qualities that the consumers/spectators making up the US electorate apparently crave in a leader. Someone who can bomb Palestinian mothers and babies to death while at the same time projecting an empathetic maternal persona.

 Barack Obama gave a speech Tuesday night with that same implicit theme. He made a big gallant show of allowing himself to be upstaged by wife Michelle, who totally eviscerated Donald Trump in her own barnstorming performance. Obama even pretended to cower behind the ghost of his late mother-in-law, in a cartoonish effort to show that only the strong matriarch of the family could protect him from being regularly hen-pecked by her daughter and his wife.

Taking the emasculation trope  a step farther, Obama mocked Trump's obsession with the size of his crowds, making a hand gesture to hint that Trump's manhood will absolutely shrink once he is faced by the candidate whom  Mrs. Obama called "my girl  Kamala." 

The crowd in the arena was already "all fired up and ready to go" before the Obamas took the stage.

No matter that Kamala Harris already had clinched the nomination withou ever winning a single primary. They staged a ceremonial roll call vote anyway, just for the spectacular fun of it. 

Lacking, as it did, the suspense of an actually democratic and competitive roll call in an open convention, it was staged as a glitzy game show, complete with strobe lights and even a professional D.J. to provide musical entertainment as a substitute for democracy. This forced the reps of the states and the occupied territories to scream their support for Kamala into the microphones. Sure, there was a handful of "present" votes in the mix to mar the joyful forced unanimity, but those results were uttered in comparative cowed whispers.

The fake roll call culminated with the arena going completely dark. And then came a  mystical cascade of thousands of tiny floating lights. It was fairy dust, the all-encompassing presence of the Fairy Godmother herself, whose actual corporal body was off campaigning in Wisconsin. Even so, her image magically appeared on the screen, even better than Glinda in Oz in her floating bubble.

This spectacle carried a  vibe creepily similar to what the Marxist critic Ernst Bloch observed in an essay titled "Dust," about pre-Hitler Germany in the 1920s:

"Even those who are not listening take notice of the bourgeois  conversations of the conformist; so propping up the table remains the gossip, the visitors, the false laughter and the real poison they strew amongst each other. The close, stale air greets even those who are not breathing it. It seeps down to the young man, and up to the beautiful people. Keeps him good and quiet, them good and deaf."

Thankfully, though, the propaganda fairy dust has not infiltrated every brain. Goodness and quietude are not universal. Anti-genocide protesters have mostly be barred from the DNC arena,  but they did succeed in interrupting a live televised interview between Stephen Colbert and Nancy Pelosi at a different venue a few miles away.

The 84-year-old Democratic matriarch was there to pump sales of her new book on "The Art of Power" - despite the mosty artless power she wielded in the ouster of Joe Biden. All she could lamely tell Colbert was that Israel has a right to defend itself... presumably against all those dangerous mothers and infants. 

Her party's definition of reproductive rights for Palestinian women is to keep the American weapons flowing. Bombs are  such a foolproof method of birth control that even Republicans can accept their use as population control of those they deem undesirable and less than human.

Despite all the angst about Trumpian hatred for women, misogyny is absolutely and disgustingly bipartisan.

Opening Night at the DNC: Passing the Cudgel

In the same speech in which he once again decried Donald Trump's infamous remark "there are good people on both sides" in the wake of a far-right rally that ended with the death of an innocent bystander, Joe Biden proceeded to both-side the genocide by Israel of Palestinians in Gaza:

"Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides."

A small subset of those tens of thousands of protesters, converging on the Democrats' nominating convention in Chicago, had just managed to break through the barricades guarding Biden and assorted dignitaries, factotums and celebrities all gathered to witness "the passing of the torch" to Kamala Harris. Although the protesters were stopped by police before they could enter the building, a group of delegates from Minnesota pointedly turned their backs on the president as he spoke.

Actually, Biden yelled his whole speech. Highly touted by the mainstream press as a "bittersweet moment" for him, he sounded a lot more bitter than sweet. For one thing, the producers of the event had delayed his appearance until close to midnight e.d.t. rather than the prime time slot usually given to the designated "keynote speaker."

Biden had to wait for a whole slew of party functionaries had their moment in the limelight before he was allowed to shuffle onstage. He delivered his remarks in his usual style: belligerent, boastful and slurry.

He sucked the carefully manufactured joy right out of the arena. Thousands of blue-and-white "We love you, Joe!" signs began to visibly wilt. The frequent camera pans to Kamala caught her in a visible wince. Maybe she was still smarting from the kiss that Jill Biden blew to her from the stage just moments before.

All the happy vibes that her marketing team and media sycophants had worked so hard to create seemed in collapse into one last atonal mess that was Biden's unfinished symphony before he blew the joint for a California vacation.

There's a good reason why they delayed his closing act until near midnight. I can't imagine that many people at home stayed up to hear the end of a five and a half hour-long slog. 

The theme of the evening (and the whole convention and campaign) was happiness and light and hope and no change .If I'd taken a drink every time some pundit uttered the word "joy" I would still be drunk now, the morning after. The convention actually evoked in my brain the scene of the Nuremberg rally from the Leni Riefenstahl film "Triumph of the Will," that's how joyful it was. I wouldn't be surprised if the Harris campaign dredged up the Nazi motto "Strength Through Joy" to replace the banal "When we fight (insert heavy pregnant pause here) we win! 

Or maybe it was all those "force the enthusiasm"  high school pep rallies that we had to attend prior to our football classmates getting permanent brain damage out on the field. Or maybe it was the satiric old Ren and Stimpy song "Happy Happy Joy Joy."

USA! USA! USA!

I get the creepy vibe that this presidential campaign is at its core the drama of two dueling fascisms. (or cartoons). The corporate sponsorships, the heavy reliance on emotions to replace thought, the demonization of others, and celebration of militarism are the hallmarks.

 When Biden bellowed out that "there is no place for political violence in America," he was talking about desperate freelance violence - not about his endless wars and occupations abroad. Not about the heavily armed police guarding him from the anti-violence peaceful protesters.

When he bragged about trying to enact gun control at home, he didn't mention that his administration has just quietly loosened controls on the international arms trade, via new trilateral agreement with Great Britain and Australia. America simply cannot manufacture bombs and ammo fast enough to meet the demand for mass death worldwide!

As reported by the New York Times last week,

"While some details are still in flux, equipment removed from the licensing requirements would likely include traditional munitions, like the artillery shells Australia is already producing to help replenish stockpiles that have been depleted by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Some technologies that have both military and civilian uses, such as sensors and propulsion systems, will also get exemptions across all three partner countries."  

Lest folks be worried that this accelerated global free flow of deadly weapons for endless wars might end up "in the wrong hands" the agreement states that abusers will be punished, even for sending a "stray email" that is susceptible to interception by bad actors. Also, any concerns about migrants crossing borders as easily as guns and bombs do will be allayed by treating the transfer of weapons and technology to any foreign worker as the same thing as transfer to that worker's country of origin. So it's all good. Not to mention joyful. 

They are letting their smiles be their umbrellas, shielding them (or so they think) from all those pesky storms of mass public protest.

+++++++

The raucous ovation for Hillary Clinton went on so long that it messed up ABC-Disney's whole primetime schedule. They shockingly cut to commercial break right in the middle of her cracked ceiling speech. But no worries. When they resumed the broadcast in five minutes, she was still at it. The ceiling had developed even more cracks. And when the crowd later erupted into  Trumpian calls of "Lock him up!" during Biden's stentorian diatribe, the camera panned right to Hillary, chuckling with all the grim joy at her disposal.