The Cast-Iron Heart of Imperalism

Joe Biden's "ironclad support of Israel" has become so mindlessly repetitive, so unthinkingly reactionary, that it is rendered practically meaningless, if not a parody of itself.

Ditto for his hair-trigger response to the anti-genocide protests - that  they are "anti-semitic" to their core.

He might as well be saying that if you don't support Israel's ethnically-motivated right to mass-murder upwards of 30,000 Palestinians, you're simply the wrong kind of racist. It's kind of similar to to what he blurted out during his first campaign:

 "if you don't vote for Biden, you ain't black." The hidden meaning of that taunt, issued to a Black radio host, was that oppressed people will embrace their tormenters if they want to survive in the prison-industrial complex that he himself had been so instrumental in creating. 

All the racist tropes in the world can't keep up with Biden. He is getting so desperate he spun a yarn last week about his uncle possibly being killed by cannibals on Papua New Guinea during World War II.  He might have been thinking of cartoon characters with a human bone through their noses who kidnapped and devoured all those brave white settler-explorers in the jungle back in the day.

 If you can't have a heart of darkness to go along with your ironclad mania, then what good are you as an overlord?

And why did he settle for the retrograde "ironclad" loyalty to an apartheid regime? After pocketing millions of dollars from the Israel lobby over the course of his 50-year political career, iron is so stingy.  Why not upgrade to "tungsten steel-clad" or better yet, "diamond-clad" loyalty? Those are materials which unlike iron, can never rust.

 the Biden regime's use of the ironclad metaphor is not only cheap, it's getting downright flaky, not to mention riddled with holes. A lot like whatever passes for their ancient, rust-eaten brains. 

Meanwhile, although regular people have been massing in the streets for more than half a year in support of the Palestinian people, the New York Times and other mainstream outlets were not covering these events with any regularity. Not, that is, tuntil they converged on elite college campuses, especially the campus of Columbia University in New York City. The biggest media personalities are in town anyway, covering the Donald Trump trial. You will be relieved to know that this hush-money trial is the lead story, despite rumors of World War III already breaking out. Forget Joe Biden's pig-iron brain. Donald Trump is so old and decrepit and sociopathic, they'll have you now, that he keeps nodding off after lunch right in the middle of the trial of the century.

Trump is so guilty in fact, that the Los Angeles Times spotted him emerging from O.J. Simpson's prison cell during the writing of the their O.J. obituary last week.

 suffice it to say that we probably never would have learned about the self-immolation of Max Azzarello had it not happened right outside the Trump courthouse in full vew of the TV cameras. Of course, when it turned out that the victim was not a Trump supporter, they lost interest as soon as was indecently possible.

If you feel like you're trapped in a Theatre of the Absurd, you are not alone. Only in a world this topsy-turvy would the genocidal Israeli prime minister Netanyahu accuse the Biden White House of "the peak of absurdity and a moral low," for merely considering the sanctioning of a particularly brutal IDF battalion indulging in non-sanctioned genocide in the occupied West Bank. Bibi definitely got the absurd part right, given that the US just voted to give more unconditional aid to Israel.

"The horror! The horror!" -- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

The November Lottery: A Boycott, Divest, Sanction Scenario

When six white Western aid workers and their Palestinian driver were droned to death by Israel in Gaza last week, Joe Biden was so livid that he got right on the horn with Bibi. It turned out that the dead workers were employees of a wealthy personal friend of his. 

Joe has frequently dined at his high-end restaurants and had even appointed him to lead a White House nutrition council.

And just like that, Netanyahu withdrew his troops from the section of Gaza territory that his troops  were occupying and destroying. Biden had finally threatened to stop sending him the American weapons and ammunition that are so essential for the continued genocide of Palestinians. 

The deaths of six white Westerners with connections to a wealthy mover and shaker within Biden's own Beltway Bubble moved Biden like the deaths of more than 32,000 Gazans had not. After all, Palestinians all look alike to Biden.

He as much as admitted this fact to a Muslim doctor he'd invited ibto his inner sanctum to celebrate the end of the Ramadan fast. She had shown the president photos of injured  starving Gazan children in an attempt to move him. But all that he muttered in response was "I've seen those."

As the physician later told NBC News, however, this would have been impossible,  since they were private unpublished pictures she had taken herself. 

They all look alike to Biden because he is a racist, unable or unwilling to see the humanity of children with a darker skin color than his own. The Gaza genocide itself is the extreme manifestation of a global racialist capitalism, which grows and grows even to the point tof its own extinction, by extracting wealth and even life itself from various populations in the Global South. 

So how long will this de facto "truce" last? Some say Israel is only regrouping and preparing for a final assault in the south of Gaza, where more than a million refugees are trapped. 

Through  their favorite New York Times mouthpiece, Zionists say they fear that even Bibi's temporary acaquiescene to Biden's selective rage will lieave Israel vulnerable to attack by Hamas or even directly by Iran, in retaliation for its bombing of its embassy in Syria. Perhaps the embattled Netanyahu is even hoping for another  epic attack on his own people  thus giving him all the justification he thiks he needs to wipe out the entire Palestinian population with the help of those 2,000-pound American bombs.

Speaking of the New York Times, the paper of record devoted the prime upper left real estate of its digital front page Sunday to the plight of Biden and other Democrats who are finding no peace of their own, thanks to the thousands of protesters converging on their high-dollar  campaign events and even in front of their own luxurious homes. The way the Times frames it, you'd think that verbal attacks on these politicians and the inconvenience caused to their families are worse than the assault on Gaza itself. Protesters even poured buckets of fake blood on the heavily armed chauffeured car of the Secretary  of State himself!

The not-so-subliminal message in the Times piece is that if Biden loses to Trump n November, it will be the fault of the protest movement. The Times even grouses that the protesters are not also showing up at Trump campaign events- as if supposing that The Donald is also sending bombs to Israel despite not currently being in power. Maybe he stashed some ammo at Maga-Largo along with all those top-secret purloined papers.

Buried deep within the Times article is the chilling revelation that the Biden campaign and/or the FBI are screening the social media accounts of all the ticketholders to his campaign events. Several people were denied admission to his Radio City extravaganza because they were deemed to be anti-genocide threats. One elderly ticket holder, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, was escorted from the premises to that the Biden people called the "Solutions Tent" to get an explanation. All decisions to admit or not to admit, were of course Final.

But the suppression of protest by this division of the Censorship-Industrial Complex was not entirely foolproof:

One protester, Hannah Ryan, 33, a photographer from Brooklyn, said she had been flagged by the campaign, asked a battery of questions about people she knew and how she had acquired her ticket, and had then been allowed in. She shouted at Mr. Obama, who told her and other protesters, “You can’t just talk and not listen.”

The Times omitted the  last part of Obama's retort,  when he scolded that people who rudely interrupt their betters and speak out against genoicde are behaving just like "the other side." He is still operating under the delusion that people primarily identify themselves as members of a corrupt duopoly. If the Times had completed the quote, it would not have been a good look for him, comparing lefty protesters to right-wing rudeniks  at Trump rallies. It would only have highlighted the thoughtless Manichean mindsets common to politicians whose whole reason for being is to serve the 'rules-based order" - their euphemism for the reign of voracious, predatory, unfettered global capitalism. It would have exposed Obama's insistence that bland civility is the very essence of democracy to be the fraud it always has been. His  attempted repression of public voices is rapidly losing its overhyped "rock-star" punch -  if it hasn't collapsed from the cloying weight of its own hot air already.

Thus are Democrats beginning to openly avoid the public sphere,  because they fear the public. If Trump wins in November, he too will fear the public. And this "public" will have nothing to do with the phony bourgeois pro-Hillary "pink pussyhat" crowds  hurling invective at him from their tony neighborhoods. Hillary Clinton herself was heckled by savvy students at her Wellesley alma matter over the weekend. They correctly pointed out that her neoliberal brand has aided and abetted the mass murder of women in Palestine.

Like Obama, Clinton is so arrogant that she she doesn't seem to realize that telling protesters to "get over yourselves" on the Jimmy Fallon talk show is not a winning strategy for getting Biden re-elected.

Since voting for either Biden or Trump this November is providing the neoliberal capitalist world order the fig leaf of consent for its continued oppressive rule, I won't be   partaking in this fraud at all, unless it is to vote for Jill Stein or Cornel West. A vote for Republicans or Democrats or even RFK Jr. is essentially a vote for the militarized world banking system and transnational corporations. These are the entities profiting from plunder and genocide in all their varieties. The politicians we elect are simply the middle-men and women acting as financialized capitalism's buffer zone.

So my vote is for the brave protesters making both the oligarchs and their political lackeys so uncomfortable and feeling more vulnerable than they're used to. That is why they are lashing out at us and attempting to censor us.

We are at a time of great crisis and a time of great change. Fighting for Palestinians is a fight for ourselves. Now that more and more people, especially the young, are realizing that capitalism  itself is the real monster behind the evils of the world, the many will find the wherewithal to defeat it and the  precious few corporations and billionaires currently at the increasingly uncontrollable controls.

Socialism is no longer a dirty word, especially for the young and the downtrodden. That is what gives me such hope.

Angels and Demons Come Out To Play

 Former President Barack Obama compared anti-genocide protesters to rude Trump supporters Thursday night as they repeatedly interrupted him and Joe Biden and Bill Clinton at their $26 million schmoze-fest as Radiio City Music Hall.

As one audience member shouted that they have blood on their hands, Obama - rather than addressing the accusation or defending himself and his two fellow war criminals - scolded: "You can't just talk and not listen. That's what the other side does."

 This was according to a press pool report of the paid-admission-only event, where the cheapest nosebleed seats went for $250 and where  even remotely accessing to the live-stream cost viewers $25. 

According to Obama, no matter how outrageous the behavior of their leadesrs may be, now matter how much death and destruction these powerful leaders spread throughout the world, the only permissible response of the citizenry is abject silence. Protest is not civil, and civility trumps everything else. If you want to be a loyal Democrat more than you want to be a free-thinking humanist, then you will pretend that Clinton, Obama and Biden are angels and that it is only the "other side" (Trump) who is the demon.

The Catholic Marxist critic Terry Eagleton had Obama and Company absolutely pegged when he wrote in "On Evil" that

"The United States, unusually among nations, is angelic and demonic at the same time. Few other nations combine such high flown public rhetoric with that meaningless flow of matter known as consumer capitalism. The role of the former is to provide some legitimation for the latter....

"Rather as Satan combines angel and demon in his own person, so evil itself unites these two conditions. One side of it - the engelic, ascetic side, wants to rise above the degraded sphere of fleshliness in pursuit of the infinite. But this withdrawal of the mind from reality has the effect of striking the world empty of value. It reduces it to so much meaningless stuff, in which the demonic side of evil can then wallowl"

This is another way of puttinng the specious "lesser evil" rationale for holding one's nose and voting for Democrats rather than Republicans, who more verbally and loudly  wallow in the dark side.

That Obama would attempt to silence a person speaking out against the US-financed mass murder and starvation of 30,000 Palestinians is just one more indication of his being, as the late Glen Ford posited, the more effective evil."

While Donald Trump wallows in his own assigned role of being the devil incarnate, sacrilegiously selling $60 Bibles to defray his legal expenses while his slimy son-in-law Jared Kushner openly scopes out Gaza oceanfront property to add to his real estate portfolio. the Democrats chide Israel in public even as they finance its genocide, thus making all of Jared's obscene dreams come true, sooner rather han later.

Not that Joe Biden is above self-deprecatingly embracing his demonic "Dark Brandon" persona. Last Saturday, to mark "National Puppy Day," his campaign was marketing blankets emblazoned with the cartoon image of Biden with glowing read orbs in place of eyes.  I guess the idea is to toughen up all those whimpering little doggies out there so they can grow up to be just like Biden's German Shepherds and get away with two dozen biting incidents before finally being banished from the White House.

And nothing screams "Get Off My Lawn!" to disrespectful protesters and annoying neighborhood kids like a yard sign featuring a smalevolently grinning Joe Biden decked out in red aviator sunglasses.

They're even selling a Joe Biden coffee mug whose eyes glow bright  crimson as soon as you pour hot liquid into it. Because, folks, Biden is red hot and Donald Trump is nothing but a limp white fleshly noodle with less of a campaign war chest than Biden.

For some mysterious reason,  I have been getting five or six spam emails every day from the Biden campaign. This is because, the Act Blue money laundering outfit explained, I had supposedly donated to Democrats in the past. But since they only have  my email address and call me "folks" or "friend"  - or when they come from Obama a derisive but very cool "Hey!" - instead of by my name, this is an obvious con. The last politician I gave money to was Bernie Sanders, back in 2016 when I still believed in him, so they could have gotten it from him. 

I have not unsubscribed because I was curious about the "messaging" to voters. These fund-raising appeals to "grassroots voters like me" have one main theme. Give $3 or $25 or buy some Biden bling. It is the only way to keep Trump out of the White House. The spam contains nothing about what Biden wil do for you to make your life better. A few of them did offer a chance to win a ticket to Radio City Music Hall, if I would fork over $25 first.

Other than that, it's all about the fear and fomentation of same just in case you haven't  developed it independently yet. Their records also show I have not yet contributed, although 239 people in my town did, today alone! I should be ashamed, not to mention feeling left out of the in-crowd.

They are asking people to hop on the money bandwagon in support of a cartoon character with a cynical grin and glowing red eyes. And if I don't, Trump will win, and it will be all my fault.

Fortunately for me and I suspect for many others,  these political marketeers are themselves the cartoon version of the nuns in my Catholic School, who were much more effective gaslighters.

And unlike the mass protests of Occupy Wall Street and the protests against the George Floyd murder, neither Democratic nor Republican politicians have yet found a way to co-opt the anti-genocide protests. They can't very well do photo-ops with their own victims. These mass killers and career warmongers are not about to co-opt either themselves or the predatory capitalists that they work for.

Saving Democracy By Killing It

The New York Times reports that the Biden administration is dispatching a whole "army of lawyers" on a special mission to aggressively seek and destroy any and all challengers to the unpopular incumbent's continued reign in the White House.

What - you still thought that democracy included giving voters an actual choice on Election Day? To the contrary. Anybody still operating under the delusion that our form of government is anything but a fascist oligarchy should be getting a cruel wake-up call with this latest news. Not only are they acting like the dictators that they accuse Donald Trump of wanting to be, they are flaunting their own authoritarianism right out in the open. No matter to them that they are also flaunting their abject fear of the voting public right out there in the open.

Not for nothing does the Times headline characterize such anti-genocide candidates as Cornel West and Jill Stein as "threats" - literal enemy combatants of the World Order.

These and other upstarts are, according to the article, "peeling away" votes that Joe Biden presumes that he, and he alone, rightfully owns. If this tired old flaying-alive nonsense doesn't plant an image in your head of a puckered rind being pulled off an old lemon whose pulp is revealed to be covered in toxic mold, then I guess you're not as much into horror as I am.

According to one of Biden's lawyers, the aim of the anti-peeling op is to police the usurpers and pretenders to ensure that they are playing by such rules as jumping through all the artificially narrowed ballot access hoops in the proper, normative order. If they should accidentally graze the top of the pole vault bar with a pinky finger, or trip over one of the many tripwires that the corporate Democrats have placed on the obstacle course, "we will hold them accountable."

Or as the Times more primly puts it, 

Gaining access to the presidential ballot is a complicated and expensive process for candidates, particularly for those not affiliated with a party, even a minor one. Laws vary from state to state, with some requiring merely a fee or a few thousand signatures, and others requiring tens of thousands of signatures gathered under tight deadline pressure, along with other administrative hurdles.

The lead legal warrior trying to purge the ballots of all challengers is former White House Counsel Dana Remus, currently a partner in the Covington and Burling white-shoe law firm. She is married to a State Department undersecretary for security who previously ran financial security for the Capitol One bank. Remus once clerked for right-wing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion that overturned Roe v Wade last year.

When, several years prior to that notorious ruling Alito was accused of misogyny by columnist Dana Milbank for allegedly making mean faces at the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg behind her back, Remus defended him against the charges of sexism, gushing in a letter to The Washington Post that her former boss "is a good man, who serves every day with humility, dedication, and incredible intelligence and insight."

It's really incredible how misused and overused the word "incredible" has become in polite, fawning discourse.  Whenever I hear it uttered by a famous or powerful person, my bullshit detector goes into full gear. An alternate interpretation of Remus's statement is that Alito's alleged respect for women and his integrity and brains are beyond belief. Her glib statement is simultaneously meaningless and non-credible. Ditto for the projectile belching of all the U.S. politicians and media stenographers who regularly proclaim themselves "unbelievably heartbroken" about the genocide in Gaza.

The State of the Union Is Deranged

 Joe Biden wasted no time setting the belligerent, paranoid tone in his State of the Union address to Congress on Thursday night.

"Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop in Ukraine, I assure you he will not," he thundered.

Whereupon his fellow belligerents erupted in cheers and thundering applause. You might have gotten the impression that they were cheering for Putin. They were definitely cheering for World War III, as Biden hearkened back to the good old days when Adolf Hitler brought the whole country together and the war economy boomed, putting the final nail in the coffin of the Great Depression.

Biden's theme of the night is that fascism is coming to America in the form of Donald Trump. So it was all the more grotesque when he strayed from his script in an attempt to out-Trump Trump on the border crackdown.  If he can't beat the Republicans at their own bigoted game, then he will join them. In fact, he will outdo them in his fear and hatred of the Other.

He certainly proved his tough-guy right-wing mettle Thursday when he engaged with Marjorie Taylor Greene. He certainly shocked a few liberals when he called the alleged Venezuelan killer of a young U.S. woman an "illegal." It was especially jarring when he promptly returned to his script and pronounced himself disgusted that Trump had accused migrants of "poisoning the blood of America." 

He, Joe Biden, respects the humanity of those dastardly illegals!

So that "gaffe" didn't prevent the media from praising his performance. He was totally on fire. He was feisty and he was folksy. He was Joe Being Joe! These are just the kind of qualities required when telling a litany of lies about how great America is, and how "heartbreaking" it is that Israel is using Biden's love-bombs to actually kill people.

Like the fairytale ogre who fattens up his victims before slaughtering them, Biden announced at his stand-up routine he is sending a military flotilla to the coast of Gaza in order to build piers for the offloading of food. Since he is simultaneously sending hundreds of bundles of ammunition and other deadly hardware to Israel - arriving at lightning speed compared to his food delivery stunt - it will be such a tragedy when the starving Palestinians who are still alive at that point will even have the strength to crawl through the rubble to get at the supplies. 

One even wonders if the Israeli armed thugs posing as an army will shoot at the ships and US troops to prevent the aid from being delivered. One also wonders whether Joe Biden will nevertheless still defend Israel's right to "defend" itself.

"History is watching" was the refrain Biden kept bellowing out during the speech. History was watching then, it's watching now, and it will watch in the future. This is not surprising when you consider that Historian-For-Hire Jon Meacham reportedly composed much of the speech.

Because of the Standardized History Bible, Biden was also able to preposterously declare that the Capitol riot of January 6th was the darkest American day ever. It has apparently supplanted Nine Eleven as the greatest holy day of paranoid apocalyptic obligation. 

But miracle of miracles! History has further decreed that even though Donald Trump (whom he did not name) is the greatest threat to America, America has enjoyed such a recovery that people don't even realize it, until Joe Biden, or Meacham, dubs his presidency " the Greatest Story Never Told." Historical Revisionist-in-Chief Joe Biden declared that despite the fascist threats both abroad and at home and existing in his own administration, America has never been better.

I won't bore you with his whole litany of lies, such as his boast that he cut child poverty in half. He did not mention that child poverty has actually increased since the expiration of Covid-era social spending legislation. To that end, he modestly vowed that every child in America will learn to read by the third grade.

The third grade? What a modest, all-American goal. Is History watching or even paying minimal attention to the gibberish flowing from Biden's lips?

What Biden could have meant was that he hopes every American will continue to read at a third grade level for the rest of their lives. That way, neither they nor History will notice all of the political gaslighting going on. They will also lack the skills to read any of Meacham's hagiographic history books. 

You Can't Reform Capitalism

Instead, if you're an unpopular neoliberal president running for re-election, you will at least want to be seen as trying . Therefore, in lieu of winning hearts and minds by changing his own mind about Medicare For All, Joe Biden cynically aims to make you forget all about his old campaign promise to at least include a public insurance option in his health care agenda, Who needs that sort of namby-pamby consolation prize when you can join him in privatizing Medicare and Medicaid by calling it an all-out war against greedy corporations?

Since Joe Biden prides himself on being an absolute killer of a genocidal wartime president, the least he can do for the folks back home is to get the eugenics craze up and running at full speed. The fact that his Centers for the Prevention of Disease Control just officially made the Covid  isolation protocols go away, Biden will make it opaquely plain at this Thursday's State of the Union speech that he aims to transform your health care into a full scale cutthroat competition You see, the problem with the American health care industry is not that it's even called an industry instead of a universal program for the public good. It's not that even insured citizens are going bankrupt at record numbers when they get sick. It's not the unaffordable premiums, co-pays and deductibles..

It's that the government-subsidized insurance behemoths should be fighting more among themselves for every last denial of benefits and every last nickel that they steal from your pockets.  

As reported by Politico, Joe Biden will use part of his State of the Union speech this Thursday to announce the creation of a (drum-roll, please) brand new Task Force to study  and root out the roots of the corporate greed they apparently have only recently discovered exists in this country. 

This task force is the next best thing and the only alternative to single payer, government-run medical insurance. The idea is that once Biden's task force studies the problem, it will then have the chops to gently chide the insurance predators into  playing in a new Free Market Olympics for the fostering of capitalistic good will and understanding on the killing fields. Which team will have the best results in narrowing provider choice and cutting costs (and services) in the end? Citizens will root and cheer and vote for Team United Health Team, Blue Cross and all the others.  Which team can valiantly raise the bar on the pole vault and make it harder  to give fans the care they need? If life can't be a constant battle, then what good is it?  

From Politico's breathless preview:

The move comes as President Joe Biden seeks new ways to show voters he’s cracking down on the so-called corporate greed that he has increasingly blamed for high prices — a message he is expected to highlight during his State of the Union address on Thursday.

Biden’s approval ratings on the economy have been dragged down by voters’ concerns about the rising cost of living despite the otherwise robust post-pandemic recovery. And a recent KFF poll shows that 80 percent of voters say it is “very important” for candidates to talk about health care affordability.

Since the person whom Biden is tasking to lead the force also heads the HHS division orchestrating the stealth privatization of Medicare by insurers under the "advantage" rubric,  one wonders if this allegedly novel ask Force is simply another way of putting lipstick on a pig. When Biden calls them greedy, he means it as a Gordon Gekko-like compliment.

And don't look for Biden to issue a price control  or freeze order, either. The problem is not high prices at the grocery store, or rising rents, you see. The problem is a lack of transparency from grocery chains and landlords. If they were only more honest about the many ways that they cheat and bilk you, you would be satisfied, according to the Biden White House.

These are not only supremely stupid people, they think you are as supremely stupid as they are. But look over there: Biden is dropping a few surplus meals-ready-eat packages for bthe starving Palestinians to compete for. He is only trying to bring free market competition into an open-air prisonm after all.

R.I.P. Aaron Bushnell

 Maybe if U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell had set fire to the Israeli embassy instead of setting fire to himself, his act of protest against the genocide in Gaza would have gotten more attention  from the establishment media machine. As it was, the first instinct of a cop arriviing on the scene was to draw his gun instead of grabbing a fire extinguisher or a blanket with which to smother the flames. I guess the cop feared that without gunfire,  the fire might spread to some pretty valuable real estate in the vicinity.

The police reaction and the ensuing media silence on this tragedyare simply reflective of the fact that the the powers-that-be consider the destruction of property to be far worse than the destruction of human beings.  This also applies to the destruction of oneself in an act of political protest.

 And when it's a military service member who self-destructs so spectacularly to protest against a genocide in which he potentially would be ordered to participate ,it renders thr masters of war and their media lackeys completely speechless.  Their own cowardly acts of self-censorship speak for ithemselves; to the extent that outlets like the New York Times have covered the tragedy, they have done so in as perfunctory and repressed a style as they can indecently manage.

 "Man sets self on fire in front of embassy " is pretty much the gist of it. It's rendered as pathetically humdrum a stunt as the  latest disturbed White House fence-jumping or at least no more remarkable than a particularly gruesome traffic pile-up.

"Move along, folks," the media cops on the beat seem to chide those rubbernecker readers. "Nothing to see here."

It's especially awkward for them as Election '24 is in full gear. Genocide Joe would find it especially difficult to shamble up to eh podium and slur out his thanks to Airman Bushnell for his service and his sacrifice. And his standard closing line of "God protect our troops" would neither fit the occasion nor contribute to the kind of  for-profit patriotic fervor that he's always aiming for. 

And it also wouldn't do for Biden to bring up suicide of any kind during this election year, when deaths of despair in America are at their highest level in years -  despite his boasts of  an economy so booming that only MAGA Republicans are mired in the slough of American life,. They are so cynical when  a Democratic future obviously beckons to one and all.

To hear the politicians tell it, our military heroes and martyrs have all willingly and valiantly killed or died for us. Never do the masters of war tell us the real truth: that the vast majority of people join the military to escape poverty, either actual or threatened. That is because wages have been stagnating for decades. A military job means guaranteed food, lodging, job training and guaranteed, cost-free health care.  Recruiting efforts, largely done in high schools in poor districts, take great care sell the benefits and to downplay the physical and mental risks.

The first place I learned about Aaron Bushnell's death was in the right-wing, sensationalistic Daily Mail. The headline in its follow-up story today was. predictably enough, aimed at arousing outrage against lefties burning Israeli flags in a vigil outside the embassy, and glorifying the airman as a martyr. It is the same kind of stereotypical language the media uses when they cover Muslim jihadists fomenting mayhem in the Middle East just for the crazed fun of it.

But surprisingly enough, the body of the Daily Mail article contains interviews with Bushnell's neighbors and plenty of background and photographs.  Even though it's buried deep within the body of the story, it even quotes a psychologist warning that to the extent that the establishment media will cover the self-immolation in any depth, it will be a smear job, calling into question Bushnell's mental health. Absent any radical tidbits, The Times and its cohort  probably will continue to ignore the story.

Besides, they're too busy covering Joe Biden's campaign appearance on a late-night NBC talk show while studiously ignoring the scores of anti-genocide protesters gathering outside 30 Rock. They're too busy analyzing whether Joe's genocide will hurt his chances in today's Michigan primary - where, we're told, only his victory will prevent the Second Coming of Trump.

They figure if they just ignore Bushnell's death, it will go away. So let's make it impossible to ignore. Otherwise, his death will indeed have been in vain.  

Biden's Holy Wars

Christian fundamentalism is the unbroken thread winding its slinky way throughout the history of the United States.  It writhes on to this very day, above the surface among right-wing factions, and more or less below the surface among liberals who purport to be more rational. This more enlightened, more occult liberal version is either approved or ignored  by the mainstream media.

Joe Biden is a conservative Catholic, whose hardcore religious fundamentalism often escapes the traditional bounds of liberal discretion. He is certainly not immune to the hardcore religious dogma which has kept the colonialist, repressive, inquisitorial mindset alive in North America for upwards of 400 years.  He, like most leaders, has used his religion as a moral excuse for inhumane policies ranging from his longtime opposition to abortion,  via the Hyde Amendment, to his full- throated support of the antisocial austerity policies espoused by the Reagan inspired Democratic Leadership Council he helped to found in the 1980s.

But nowhere is Biden's religious fundamentalism more apparent than in the thick coats of pious gloss he applies to his proxy war on Russia and his fanatical support of the State of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians trapped in occupied Gaza.

Biden went  full fire and brimstone last week when that godless heretic Donald Trump committed  his shocking sacrilege against NATO, even going so far as to invite the great satan Putin to invade the member-states who don't plunk their fair share into the collection basket. It was one of many times recently that Biden has  referred to his NATO not as the European arm of the military-industrial complex, but as a "sacred" fraternity united against undemocratic (read: godless) Russia.

Biden's entire re-election campaign revolves around the enemies without and the Public Enemy Number One and "existential threat" to the soul of our nation within: Donald Trump.The liturgy known as Russiagate is the required catechism. 

Although the dictionary defines the word "sacred" as "dedicated or set apart for the worship of a deity," or "something or someone  "worthy of religious veneration," Biden certainly has a facile way of hurling it about.

"We have a "sacred obligation to our military families," he sermonized last spring, "because there is nothing more sacred or more American."

But on another occasion he argued that "there is nothing more sacred than the right to vote," a right which is enshrined in "the sacred Constitution."

Biden, as a Catholic school pupil during the Cold War, was always taught to say his rosary for the conversion of Russia. He learned all about the miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, who appeared to three Portuguese peasant children in 1917, around the time of the Russian revolution, to expressly warn them about a communist i menace so catastrophic that the children  were instructed by the mother of Jesus to only divulge the details to the Vatican, which was to keep the documents under lock and key almost a century. And Biden also learned that the anti-Muslim crusades were not a series of land-grabbing  atrocities carried out over a period of over 200 years, but rather virtuous pilgrimages for the saving of non-believing souls. How do I know this? Because I attended a Catholic elementary school, too, and this was the relentless propaganda that was drummed into me. It was a curriculum and catechism devised and decreed by the Vatican. Some pupils outgrew or disowned this dogmatism. Others, obviously, have not.

So it comes as no surprise, to me anyway, that the two enemies that Biden has chosen to fight are Russia and the Muslims that centuries ago reconquered the Middle East from all manner of European usurpers. It explains why Biden is a self-described Christian Zionist with an unwavering loyalty to the state of Israel, the formation of which officially expelled Palestinians fom the "holy land" in 1948. As a devout, fundamentalist Catholic, he believes that when the end of the world comes, he will be bodily resurrected into heaven directly from Zionist-controlled Jerusalem.

When it comes to war, Biden gets downright medieval in his rhetocic.  His crusade to expand and strengthen NATO to all of Europe and even beyond, his exhortation to the whole world to join forces against Russia is not only a throwback to the Cold War. It's a throwback to Pope Urban II's exhortation in 1095 to nobles, knights, clergy and peasants alike to join in a militant pilgrimage to Byzantium, ostensibly to defend a Greek monarch against the Turks -  but really while they were at it,  to reconquer Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Palestine from Islamic rule.

Pope Urban got around the Church's official aversion to war and murder by redefining what was to become more than two  hundred years' worth  of "crusades" against Muslims  - multigenerational long pilgrimage in which participating European  volunteer-combatants would be absolved of all their sins and guaranteed a place in heaven.

George W. Bush made liberals cringe when he cast his invasion of Iraq as a "crusade." Biden thus far has not verbally succumbed out that retrograde mindset by using the "C" word himself regarding his ideological wars. But he and his fellow hawks are always striving to overcome the Vietnam Syndrome described by neocons, in which our "sickly inhibitions" against war damage whatver war effort is currently underway.

For example, just as Tucker Carlson allowed Putin to tell his side of the story, the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny conveniently died in a Siberian prison - right before his wife was taking the stage at a NATO confab in Munich. Right as the House of Reps was balking at sending more money and weaponry to Ukraine. 

Right as the fate of political prisoner Julian Assange, exposer of Crusader Bush's war crimes, is being decided in a British court.

Just as "Genocide Joe" insisted that he witnessed the beheadings of Israeli babies by Hamas, Pope Urban II before him had urged genocide by atrocity propaganda. He  told his troops of pilgrims that Muslim "savages" were eviscerating their (non-existent) Christian slaves just to see how far their intestines could be  spread upon the ground. The pope also inspired his target audience with the specter of mass sexual assaults by Musliims upon on Christian women. Urban prissily did not go into specifics explaining that talking about the horror would actually be worse than the actual horror. . Of course, Pope Urban didn't have a New York Times to spread the graphic unproven  details for him.. Plus, most people were not that literate back then.

Enlightened liberal fanatics like Biden just can't seem to help embracing the same kind of mythical, mystical past they accuse the "deplorables" of clinging to.

The sacralizing of war and all kinds of ,cruelty is how they justify  their crimes to themselves.. It's what lets all of them  sleep at night.

 It also what makes Biden risk his own re-election for the sake of a religious fundamentalist idea, even it it means the second coming of Trump. Biden seems to be holding on for the second coming of Christ. Until then, his faith turns America iinto a pariah state in the eyes of the world.

We must face the likelihood thathe truly does believe that Israel's murder of 30,000 Palestinians and counting is simply a matter of righteous self-defense.

As Jeff Sharlet observes in his excellent history of American fundamentalism, "The Family.""

"Our attempts to shunt fundamentalists into the outer circle of kooks and haters and losers and left-behinds, undemocratic dimwits who do not understand the story the rest of us have agreed to live by. Our refusal to recognize the theocratic strand running throughout American history is as self-deceiving as fundamentalism's insistence that the United States was created a Christian nation."`

Sharlet writes in his book that the National Prayer Breakfast, begun as a yearly event during the Eisenhower administration, and at which every president siince has delivered a religion--themed speech  actually got its start as an anti-labor, anti-New Deal movement in the 1930s, as a nifty means to promote capitalistic greed and wealth inequality in the name of Jesus. The annual event also serves as a back-channel for foreign leaders - including foreign despots who are officially personae non grata with the State Department -and influential business people to wheel and deal in  safety and comfort, to be a part of the religious experience. The only requirement is a personal acceptance of Jesus.

For his own part, Biden did not disappoint the war profiteers in the audience. At oone point in his speech, he actually seemed to conflate the United States with the body of Jesus Christ:

"But we’re the beacon to the world.  The entire world looks to us.  That’s not hyperbole. 
"
This is an idea.  This idea was made real before the soul became flesh, before this dream became a fact.  It was prayed for, it was hoped for, it was believed in.  That’s the story of America."

Biden alluded to the famous passage from the New Testament's Gospel of St. John: "The word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory as it were the only begotten son of the Father, full of grace and truth."

I rest my case.

Unforgettable

Who cares if Joe Biden thinks that he took tea with Marie Antoinette at the Kremlin just the other day? Who cares if he forgets bombing countries with whom we are not actually at war? 

The president is, after all, nothing but a simulacrum or figurehead of power. The real power is invested in his representatives, who represent the corporations and billionaires who own the place.

To show that Biden as a personage doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of these malevolent schemers, loyal pundits like Paul Krugman are falling all over themselves bragging that despite their high intelligence, they forget the year that their own mother died.  So how dare the special prosecutor take the name of Biden's dead son in vain as an example of how senile the president is? I mean, who in their righteous mind hasn't forgotten when they were the vice president of a whole country, o even whether they still might even might still be the vice president of the United States?

Here's my take on ForgetGate. Biden, drawing upon his past feat of graduating near the bottom of his law school class but at a press conference decades later advancing himself to summa cum laude status, was simply perpetrating another con on a different panel of inquisitors. Only this time, he thought he could score points by dminishing himself. Granted that he is diminished, he chose to exaggerate his brain fog as a criminal defense strategy.

 The trouble was, his testimony was a bit over the top, even for him, even a bit sarcastic. He  was acting very passive-aggressively toward his interrogators.

It sure saved hhim the trouble of invoking the fifth amendment against self-incrimination. He probably figured the special prosecutor would simply do a wink-and-nod and release a brief report stating that the theft of classified material did not rise to the level pf a prosecutable crime.

This is the Old Boys Club, of which Biden has been a proud member iin good standing for nearly half a century!

It backfired on him, of course. When you're running for re-election, it's much more preferable to be charged with a crime than to be labeled senile. Just ask Donald Trump, who is so busy with myriad court cases that he barely has time to hold a campaign rally. And if he is off the campaign trail, he has less opportunity to exhibit his own senility.  Dementia and crime are canceling each other right out, in Trump's case. It also helps him when the Supreme Court seems poised to to demolish the Democrats' "lawfare" shenanigans to keep him off the ballot.

I still think Biden will drop out right before or even during the Democratic convention this summer.  That way, the corporations and billionaires, either in  person or via their paid superdelegates, can nominate his successor by undemocratic acclaim. If they have an ounce of sense, this is what they will do. And that is a big "if." The task will be to keep their rusting windup toy well-oiled with medication and well-scripted to stay on message for several more months. First lady Jill will never be far away in a futile effort to swat away any elder abuse allegations along with those pesky "Genocide Joe" epithets hurled against her hubby.

Putting Joe into the retirement home for Aging War Criminals will be delicate undertaking not least because they will also have to find a way of retiring Kamala Harris from the ticket. So I assume they will nominate a woman for either their number one or number two. I am currently betting on Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. She could well salvage the state for the Dems if only she can convince the anti-Biden Palestinian bloc that she is not also in Israel's pocket. That is another big If.

 And Joe Biden will get an unforgettable sendoff for putting the country before his incredible career of championing genocide,  writing racist crime bills, putting more immigrants into solitary confinement and deporting them than even his xenophobic predecessor did.

Reading "1984" in 2024: A Rambling Rumination

It's long been a commmnplace to attach the Orwellian label to everything  from mass surveillance to censorship to the endless war machine. Centered in a post-capitalist post apocalyptic future, George Orwell's dystopian novel has something for everybody. 

I just finished rereading the book for the fourth or fifith time since I first picked it up as a teenager in the 60s. Back then, I viewed it as the perfect description of the regimented public education system. I saw in the novel a mirror image of my high school, an ugly, dimly lit concrete example of Brutalist architecture. Not for nothing did those of us who fancied ourselves rebels dub it The Brain Factory.

At the time, I didn't pay much attention to ihe name of my school - Indian Hills High, nestled in a white middle class enclave where virtually every street bore the name of an indigenous nation. There was (still is) an Osage Road, a Cherokee Court, a Lenape LLane and Ramapo Avenue. It makes me cringe every time I think about it.

Fast toward 50 years to old age, and now the novel is a whole lot scarier, morphing from what Might Be to what ot Actually Is. 

I'm a lot more class conscious than I was in my youth. I had not really  noticed in in my prior reading how closely Orwell's fictional class system hewed to our own. In just that one respect, "1984" was entirely, eerily prescient. 

The top One Percent was rendered by Orwell as the "Inner Party." Granted, his version of the ruling oligarchy lived much more materially modest lives than our own Billionaire Class. Even Orwell could not have envisioned Jeff Bezos and his ilk.

His "Outer Party," however, bears an uncanny resemblance to what the late Barbara Ehrenreich called the Professional-Managerial Class: the upper 10 or 15 percent of the population serving the top One Percent 

The novel's antihero, Winston Smith, is very much an integral part of the PCM. Toiling away in the Ministry of Truth, He's the very model of our own modern day corporate media, whose dual function is to destroy the inconvenient past and to mold an alternate reality for the mass consumption of even the lowest rung in the hierarchy known as the "proles." In so doing, these Outer Party members must carefully suppress their own dissenting viewpoints, if any, if they want to survive. Winston Smith, as a careerist member of the PCM media division, was very careful in the beginning to toe the Party line himself, hoping that the Proles would be the ones rise up and revolt. I  can envision dozens of Winston Smiths sitting in their New York Times cubbyholes,, stealthily editing  articles that are, say, not entirely friendly to the establishment. Down the Memory Hole go all narratives referring to Occupied Gaza and Israel's 75 year old history of ethnic cleansing of the native population. The Israeli army obliterating that hospital? Never ven happened. There is now "confidence" from anonymous sources in the Inner Party that Hamas destroyed it with a stray missile.

 Dissenters to Party orthodoxy in Orwell's novel are relegated to the Ministry of Love for deprogramming. In real life, they are similarly disappeared, either by censorship or being  fired from a media job. The thought police ensure that free-thinkers are simply never invited to the panel discussions of Inner Party elites which pose as reporting and journalism.

Orwell's novel describes regular Two-Minute Hate sessions as well as more elaborate Hate Weeks for the masses of proles. For our part, we have Cancel Culture and endless political campaign seasons. And don't forget Shark Week.

 We have tightly orchestrated and controlled elections to put even a faint gloss of democracy on our own de facto oligarchy We in the USA still have a uniparty system divided into two factions, Republicans and Democrats. These factions disagree only around the edges, and mainly in matters of popular culture. For example, if Taylor Swift endorses Joe Biden, Republicans say it spells the end of democracy.

 Proles are urged to blame one bickering party faction or the other, and then to pull the lever accordingly every two and four years to vote against something or someone  - before everything stays the same. The main function of  the Uniparty both in Orwell's fiction and in our own reality, is to divide and conquer the proles, imposing on them an austerity so rigid that it forces them to fight each other for the crumbs.

. The ruler of Orwell's Party is an entity called Big Brother. Nobody has ever actually seen this personage in the flesh, probably because he doesn't actually exist iin the flesh.  He is mainly an Idea. a personification of the permanent ruling Structure. In our "reality-based" version, we're treated to a revolving cast of paternalistic leaders - ReaganBushClintonBushObamaTrumpBiden to name just the most recent actors - who all meld into one blob if you stop to think about it. And the Inner Party is perfectly fine with it. They want you to think of presidents  as personifications of the ideal of the United States of America. Why else would Joe Biden kick off his re-election campaign by evoking George Washington? Continuity of propaganda narrative is all they have to offer.

Just speaking for myself, every time my mind tries to conjure up an image of Joe Biden, I I keep getting the face of Bush the Younger. Maybe it's their similar beady little eyes. Maybe it's the similar contrived folksy demeanors trying to cover up their brutal neoconservative thirst for permanent global hegemony. Maybe it's their low I.Q. fanaticism.

Trump was labeled senile when he confused Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. But aren't they too similar for comfort, each acid-tongued  lady adopting a phony feminist persona with which to scold the Patriarchy in service to the Patriarchy? .

So they want us to think that Election12024 is a consequential death match for democracy or dictatorship, or whatever turns you on. But all it really is,  is an intra-oligarchic brawl between Trump and Biden as persons and party  leaders. It is really about the Inner Party making one of its periodic efforts to win the consent of the governed to give themselves a facade of legitimacy. They don't even much care that those of us in the prole category are increasingly onto their con, particularly those proles born after the brutal final stage of Neoliberal Capitalism. Young people never bought into the quaint and very cruel promise of the American Dream - a concept which had kept their elders more or less asleep these past 40 or 50 years. Now even more elders are beginning to wake up.

It's refreshing that every time Joe Biden gives a campaign speech trying to gin up hate for his opponent, people are showing up to call him out for the genocide in Gaza. His feeble efforts at Orwellian "doublethink" - as, for example,  he claims to champion the reproductive rights of American women at the same time he destroys the reproductive rights of Palestinian women by killing them. This gross display of gross contradictory messaging is not being lost on those dismissed as proles by the Inner Party and their Outer Party sycophants. They are finding it increasingly hard, as Orwell wrote, to be  "competent, industrious and even intelligent within narrow limits" but at the same time to be "credulous and ignorant fanatic(s) whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph."

"All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.... It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest... No Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real."

It reminds me of how often Biden and Antony Blinken and Nancy Pelosi and their mutual Partiers get so emotional whenever they boast about their "unwavering" and "unshakeable" support for a genocide they pretend is a war between two equal combatants. 

It's a wonder their heads don't explode with all that double-thinking effort. Maybe it's because their brains have already collapsed in upon themselves without anybody even noticing.

 Whenever I try to imagine what they could possibly be thinking all I can come up with is is a vast, yawning morass devoid ,of all life and all intellect. 

Blinken: Toward a More Humane Genocide

Secretary of State Antony Blinken doesn't so much want the genocide to end as he wants to put a more humanitarian gloss on the ongoing slaughter and starvation of Palestinians by the State of Israel.  Why call for a ceasefire and an end to the occupation of Gaza or the freeze in US military aid - when all that the world really needs is love, sweet love. Not to mention great big globs of self-serving propaganda from American Empire.

Blinken, despite what he called his "relentless" cajoling of Israel to cut back on the genocide,  somehow found enough "me-time"  time to jet off to Davos and schmooze with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman at the World Economic Forum. Friedman, appropriately enough, donned a literal puffy vest to signal what a puff-piece of a column would be ensuing from the conversation. 

If you could even call it a conversation as opposed to what might be termed a word salad had not Blinken served up such a gloppy soundbite stew. Here's just one example of what passes for deep thought in the Biden State Department:

So this is – this is actually clear when you look at it and see it.  The problem is getting from here to there.  And of course, it requires very difficult and challenging decisions.  It requires a mindset that’s open to that perspective.  But the choice is there, and ultimately this is about choices.  What kind of society do we want to live in?  What kind of world do we want to live in?  What kind of region do we want to live in?

What kind of plagiarism from a typically turgid Tom Friedman column is this? If we only take the time to look, we can clearly see all the myriad choices that are there for the savoring on the elite tasting menu.

And of course all the elites and war profiteers in the audience tittered appreciatively when Friedman asked Blinken: "Has there ever been a worse time to be secretary of state?"

Not until the end of the fawning interview did Friedman finally Go There snd confront Blinken about the genocide of Palestinians. Or as he put it, what about the naysayers who suspect that the Biden administration believes "Jewish lives matter more than Palestinian lives, Muslim lives," etc.

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  No, period.  For me, I think for so many of us, what we’re seeing every single day in Gaza is gut-wrenching.  And the suffering we’re seeing among innocent men, women, and children breaks my heart.  The question is:  What is to be done?  We’ve made judgments about how we thought we could be most effective in trying to shape this in ways to get more humanitarian assistance to people, to get better protections, and minimize civilian casualties. 

And at every step along the way, not only have we impressed upon Israel its responsibilities to do that, we’ve seen some progress in areas where absent our engagement I don’t believe it would have happened.  So there are a lot of – there are dogs that didn’t bark.  But that in no way, shape – way, shape, or form takes away from the tragedy that we’ve seen and continue to see.  It’s why we’re at it relentlessly every single day.  And all I can tell you, Tom, is just on a purely human level it’s devastating, but it reinforces the conviction and the commitment to do two things:  to do everything we can in this moment using our best judgment – and of course, we could be wrong about the judgments we’re making – but to try to make a difference in the day-in/day-out.

But it also reinforces my conviction that there has to be – and there is – another way that answers Israel’s most profound concerns and questions.  Israelis have to live with security.  They can’t have a repeat of October 7th.  No country would accept a repeat of October 7th.

Blinken then erects the straw man known as October 7th Denialism. People whom he does not name are out there spreading the word that October 7th is a hoax, It's Holocaust denialism all over again. There are "huge swaths" of it all over the world, he insisted. Apparently if you only take the time to look, you shall see... what you want to see. He stumbled on:

So one of our challenges is to fight that dehumanization, to find ways to defuse it, to take that poison out.  And that’s also a function of leadership.  We need leaders around the world who see that, understand that, and are prepared to act on that.

Technological disinformation is, another go-to straw man argument used by elites to explain all manner of their own antisocial policies, is what is  responsible for people "dehumanizing" one other. He skirts mighty close to blaming the Internet and not 75 years of ethnic cleansing by Israel, to be the crux of the problem.

If you're a sociopath like Blinken and do not possess a conscience, you must be very adept at pretending you have a conscience. You actually try to convince your audience that you have a moral compass - claim that as long as you think lovely thoughts while supplying bombs and money for genocide, you're all good. And it certainly helps when a fawning Times columnist calls your propaganda "heartfelt and impassioned" as if you even had a heart in the first place.

With Valentines Day less than a month away, maybe Blinken can attach candy hearts to those thousand-pound bombs used to kill people. If Israeli officials can only tone down the genocidal rhetoric a tad, maybe the case against them in The Hague wouldn't seem so airtight.

Joe Biden's Funhouse Mirror

 The most telling moment in Joe Biden's official rollout of his re-election campaign was when he blurted out: "As America was attacked from within, Donald Trump watched on TV in the private small dining room off my Oval — off the Oval Office."

It was a particularly awkward gaffe, since the whole theme of his speech was protecting our alleged democracy - and the whole world - from authoritarians and despots who think they own the place. "My Oval Office" is a Freudian slip for the ages in the context of a speech purporting to criticize the toxic narcissism of his predecessor.

 And then there was the inconvenient truth, unmentioned by Biden., that his administration is financing and green- lighting a genocide against the Palestinian people.

The sole theme of the event- and what looks to be the main if not the only theme of the entire re-election bid  was the January Sixth Capitol riot.

Although lauded by the mainstream media with the usual stock raves as "impassioned" and "searing," the fact that Biden raised his decibel level did  not disguise the insipidity and hollow boastfulness of his ode to American aggression and imperialism. Perhaps it was the wall-to-wall American flag drapery that so bedazzled the  media into their state of manufactured awe.

And what about that live enthusiastic auudience in the closed setting? The CNN feed I watched showed only the backs of a multitude of  balding or grizzled heads. And since the exact location (a town near Valley Forge., PA) was a closely guarded secret until right before the performance, it is fairly obvious that these were not regular townsfolk. The Biden team was not about to risk any anti-genocide types disrupting the show. So my guess would be they were comprised of campaign operatives, Democratic Party officials and assorted hirelings.

In lieu of making shallow promises to make voters' lives better, Biden invoked the solemn and very scary occasion of the third anniversary of the January Sixth capitol riot as the rationale for picking him and not Donald Trump. He modestly cast his own re-election n as a "moral choice and a sacred cause" to, it would seem, differentiate himself from Trump's ungodly behavior. As a self-proclaimed Zionist, Biden is certainly taking the whole "shining city on a hill" Puritan settler ethic to a whole new level.

But it was slave-owner and white supremacist George Washington whom Biden evoked in his speech. In doing so, he revised US history by completely erasing Washington's campaign of  ethnic cleansing of native populations, claiming that the first president's aim was "liberty, not conquest.""
"Freedom not conquest!" Biden croaked on, to the cheers and applause of he carefully vetted audience, before going on to boast at length about American conquests in more modern times. 

"But just hink of it, folks.We almost lost America" Biden searingly saId, when the MAGA crowd staged an insurrection at the behest of Donald Trump -  Mad King George III to Biden's  George Washington.

Fulminating at length about how Trump stayed silent during the riot, Biden failed to mention that he, too, had stayed silent during the wild rumpus - even though he was President-Elect at the time. He had, after several hours, only meekly imlored Tump to send his minions home. He saved all the searing bits for his re-election campaign.

Three long years have gone by, and despite his fretting about the "sacred cause" Biden offered no explanation for why such a delay in criminally charging Trump for sedition.  He offered no explanation for why law enforcement was complicit in the "insurrection," or why elected Republican officials at the highest levels of power colluded with Trump and yet  remain unindicted themselves.

If the wheels of justice had sped on, of course, Biden would be lacking both a campaign platform and the ability to collude with his "mainstream" Republicans in creating and enforcing right-wing policies that punish the poor and reward the rich under the "sacred" mantle of democracy and bipartisanship.

"Trump’s not concerned about your future, I promise you," was Biden's fear-mongering substitute for a promise of his own.
" Trump is now promising a full-scale campaign of'revenge” and “retribution' — his words — for some years to come.  They were his words, not mine.  He went on to say he would be a dictator on day one."

So apparently, Biden's unshakeable devotion to Bibi Netanyahu's crusade of revenge and retribution against Palestinians does not translate into supporting Trump getting even with his fellow oligarchs and their paid political and media lackeys. That would definitely include revenge on the Biden clan itself.

"So, hear me clearly.  I’ll say what Donald Trump won’t.  Political violence is never, ever acceptable in the United States political system — never, never, never.  It has no place in a democracy.  None.  (Applause.)
But it certainly does have a place in state-sanctioned agression, both domestically and internationally. It simply doesn't look good to the rest of the world when American politicians talk violently about one another and inspire their followers to act out violently... against such important political figures as Nancy Pelosi's husband in particular. That, and not millions of people killed in America's never-ending wars, is the a slap in the face of all that Biden considers sacred.

"Great nations," Biden tendentiously garbled "never pretend they're something they're not. That's just what great nations do.. They look in the mirror. And we're a great nation. And we're a great nation. We' really are. We're the greatest nation on the face of the earth."

And before the mirror ever had a chance to "crack from side to side", Jill Biden rushed to Joe's side to escort him off the stage.

Out With the Old Year, In With the Flu

I've never been much for New Years resolutions, let alone even celebrating the New Year. I did watch the ball drop on CNN in the faint hope it would shatter into a million harmless pieces before ever reaching the ground.

But I did plan on blogging this week, until whatever bug is going around hit me. Before taking sick, I'd actually broken my longstanding resolution to boycott the New York Times comment section.  

Paul Krugman has essentially been writing the same column for months. . Over and over and over again he wonders why people are so damned pessimistic about the economy when everything is so great. You can't even call it gaslighting at this point. It's more like  he's belching out massive overdoses of recycled laughing gas to his audience, since the bulk of the responses include such stock phrases  as "Thank you, President Biden" or "You nailed it, Professor! " along with blaming the Republicans and only the Republicans for so nastily spreading false bad tidings and convincing happy people to be miserable.

Adding to the unintentional humor was the graphic photo appended to his "Is America on the Mend?" column:

Now, I think this is supposed to represent scaffolding. But to me it looks like Lady Liberty is trapped behind a maze of barbed wire, yearning to be free but not wanting to be impaled on material every bit as razor-sharp as the shattered Times Square disco ball of my imagination.

So I started out my published response with throwing one of Krugman's own lines right back at him. 

"For if America’s resilience in the face of the pandemic shock has been remarkable, so has the pessimism of the public." Substitute "ruling class" for American resilience, and tens of millions of struggling, stressed-otd US residents for his "pessimistic public" and you've got yourself the class war in a nutshell. It's the entrenched, structural economic inequality wrought by a half-century of neoliberal capitalism. It's survival of the richest, or at least of the top 10 percent of what the late, great Barbara Ehrenreich dubbed the professional-managerial class. The well-off have never been better off. They're also living longer even as US life expectancy has plummeted to the lowest level in decades. The richest Americans added trillions to their composite wealth during the pandemic. Meanwhile, all the Covid-generated public assistance programs, which had actually cut the child poverty rate in half, have all ended. Tens of millions of people have been kicked off Medicaid, leading to record new rates of the uninsured. Emergency SNAP benefits, often to the tune of hundreds of extra dollars a month were suddenly yanked away from families even before Joe Biden prematurely declared an end to the public health emergency. Homelessness (surprise!) is way up. It is truly baffling to me why pundits are so baffled that people are not out there cheering in the streets for this wonderful economic recovery that's benefiting the precious few at the expense of the exploited many.

Surprisingly enough, the replies were highly positive, except for one guy lecutring me that Krugman's column was not about the class war. I was really expecting the reactions to be of the "Are you a Russian plant?" ripostes I was accustomed to, back when I was a more regular commenter./ So that's ecnouraging.

Meanwhile, my next resolution is to both watch and analyze Genocide Joe's campaign speech later today, in which he will unfavorably compare Donald Trump with George Washington. It was supposed to be given on January Sixth, the anniversary of the Capitol riot, which has supplanted September 11th as our most holy day of obligation.  But since a snowstorm is forecast to interfere with the planned snowjob, he moved it up by one day/ This solemn anniversary is meant, I suppose, to take our minds off a genocide being perfromed right before our eyes.

I have a feeling I'm not the only one who believes that our so-called leaders and their apologists are completely, malevolently insane. 

Keep all your excellent comments coming!