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.