#Resistance 2.0

Why waste your time fretting that Donald Trump is quite likely to beat Joe Biden in November? It is never too early to wax nostalgic for the halcyon days of #Resistance, Inc. when well-heeled elites giddily took to the streets and kvelled their despair over Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss from high atop penthouse rooftops.

On Sunday, mere hours before the aforesaid Clinton received a standing ovation at the Tony awards from the aforesaid elites, and mere hours after Joe Biden had raked in $30 million from other aforesaid elites at a Hollywood fundraiser. the New York  Times took the  extraordinary step of admitting that Joe Biden is toast.

The narrative goes something like this: it's better to preemptively turn ignominious defeat in November into a moral elite victory right now, by showing how proactive the Democrats can be, even as they continue to foment the fear day in and day out. Just going negative can get so tedious and exhausting. The Hitler comparisons got stale quite a while ago.

It took four of the Paper of Record's star reporters to spin this yarn:

Opponents of Donald J. Trump are drafting potential lawsuits in case he is elected in November and carries out mass deportations, as he has vowed. One group has hired a new auditor to withstand any attempt by a second Trump administration to unleash the Internal Revenue Service against them. Democratic-run state governments are even stockpiling abortion medication.

Never mind that even the right-wing Supreme Court has just upheld the right to obtain the abortion pill. Trump might send iin the troops to prevent their mmanufacture and distribution. Never mind that Joe Biden has granted Trump's cruel immigration wish by closing the border to Latin American refugees. It would be even worse under Trump, who would send the troops to Democratic cities to round up the migrants. The gist of the resistance" will be to protect aforesaid elites from Trumpian revenge where it would hurt them the most - in their pocketbooks. There is nothing in the 'resistance" that will protect ordinary people from the predatory capitalism and endless wars embraced by both wings of the Duopoly - or what the late Christopher Hitchens described as the two tightly fused cheeks of one  gigantic ass. Or what the Times hilariously calls "Democracy itself."

The Times article then goes through a laundry list of corporate-funded liberal think tanks and a roster of Obama-sera lawyers already hard at work writing their briefs and padding their resumes.

Among those approvingly quoted by The Times is the leader of an outfit called the "States United Democracy Center," which purports to fight looming Trump-style authoritarianism by authoratatively protecting/policing democracy with a partnership of former governors and law enforcement officials.

A group of former White House lawyers from the Obama administration have started a firm called "Protect Democracy." They've  moved on from helping former Atty Gen. Eric Holder legalize extrajudicial drone assassinations into making sure that Trump doesn't morph into becoming any more than "an aspiring autocrat."

"He is no normal candidate, this  is no normal election, and these are no normal preparations for merely coming out on the wrong side of a national referendum on policy choices," explained the firm's founder, Ian Bassin.

What policy choices are these Blue Team freedom fighters actually offering to make peeple's lives better? That is the question, entirely ignored by the New York Times.

I did submit a comment, which was rejected. I am guessing that the uncivil words "pussy" and "genocide" tripped up their  automatic ccensorship filter. It was certainly no more withering than the more than 2,000 other comments from shocked readers Here it is:

 So in lieu of Dems offering voters an agenda of their own for the greater social good, this article implies that because they lack an agenda, they might as well as well throw in the towel regarding Trump-fear to motivate voters.

We may as well start dusting off our pink pussy hats, getting all fired up and ready to go for the good old days of the "resistance." We go high when they go low! The D Team be "fighting for" you, proles. Stay tuned for all the exciting lawsuits, glitzy congressional hearings and bombshell scandals, because they certainly can't promise you universal health care, affordable housing or, heaven forfend, an end to war, mass surveillance and genocide. On the contrary, these professional resisters will once again give Trump even more billions of dollars than he even requested for his military/surveillance budget.

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In Search of His Lost World War

At one year old in 1944, Joe Biden was too young to be aware of D-Day in particular and World War II in general. At 81 years of age in 2024, Joe Biden  is so old and so out of it that he can't even keep  his own lies (what the New York Times calls "tall tales") straight any more.

Unlke the decline in his his actual cognitive functioning, however,  Biden's reptilian patriotic mindset shows no sign of faltering. In France last week to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion at Normandy that marked the beginning of the end of the war in Europe, Biden was in such a state of full-blown nostalgia that he expressed a yearning for a repeat. This time around, the designated Hitler is none other than Vladimir Putin.

Biden and his gerontocratic war cult long with a vengeance for the good old days of World War II, the "good" war, when people waved the flag and planted victory gardens  and hardly anybody protested in the streets. The Americans wrenched themselves right out of their isolationism, saving the entire globe from Hitler. They later absolved themselves from their own official anti-Semitism, for the shame of having closed the immigration door to Hitler's Jewish victims, by supporting the creation of the state of Israel. 

Most importantly, World War II made the USA a superpower and paved the way for the permanent military-industrial complex that D-Day architect Dwight Eisenhower warned us about at the end of his own presidency.

Biden, in denouncing Vladimir Putin as the reincarnation of Hitler via his invasion of Ukraine, conveniently glosses over the actual history of the second world war, and how even before its end, FDR and Churchill  and Stalin had already divvied up the spoils and carved up the planet in a new imperialist world order. Germany was cut in half, as was Korea. American troops  still occupy Okinawa. There are at least 800 American military bases operating throughout the world.

 When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in the 90s, the United States assumed it would now own the whole world into perpetuity. vIt was, as as Francis Fukuyama arrogantly dubbed it, "the end of history."  But far from being inspired to cut back on the military industrial complex,  they created a new enemy in the form of "Islamic extremism."  It morphed conveniently into the permanent war on terror once former CIA asset Osama bin Laden and his Saudi financial backers attacked the World Trade Center. (Once Osama had outlived his usefulness in what amounted to one of several US proxy wars on Russia when it occupied Afghanistan) he did the expected blowback.

America's ownership of the world, and its status as sole remaining Superpower, is now coming to a close with the rise of China and the BRICs economy. This decline and fall of US power is only being hastened by its depraved financial and ideological support of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.

Meanwhile,  Biden  topped off his sales pitch for World War III with a gala four-course state dinner in Paris. In a scene straight out of Proust's Belle Epoque, he gnawed  his way through chicken on "a base of artichoke hearts, slivers of carrots of various colors had been curled into the likeness of a rose. A cheese course led to a finale of chocolate, strawberries and raspberries, again shaped like a rose, enlivened by a coulis of “carnal thorns,” whatever that may be. In any event, it was very good."

The fawning Times culinary review gives off a distinct vibe of Nero fiddling while Rome burns... right down to each individual table bearing the name of a celebrity or a politician. I imagine that guests were fihgting over who got to sit at tables labeled "Nancy Pelosi" and "Antony Blinken."

War and genocide and starvation can rage all they want outside of the palace walls, but for the elite dignitaries running the show,  everything is literally coming up roses. Even as they wined and dined in a sickening display of  war nostalgia,, in grisly remembrance of slaughters past, slaughters present, and slaughters yet to come,, thousands of protesters were surrounding the White House, draping its entire perimeter with a red banner bearing the names of Palestinian victims of US-financed genocide.

Biden and his Cold Warrior clan, now variously known as Neocons, Liberal Interventionists and Nato Partners, simply were not counting on the masses of people being disgusted by their violent antics around the world. Biden's repulsive boasting that the war in Ukraine and the slaughter of Gazans being good for the economy as they protect weapons manufacturing jobs, has fallen flat on its face and rightly so. He is still counting on the military Keynesism that finally lifted the US out of the Great Depression during World War II to do the trick once again.

He is looking at what Marcel Proust called "the monstrous past" through rose colored glasses. Biden's own search for lost time replaces the horror of past wars with "a miraculous golden age, a paradise in which all mankind shall be reconciled."

Of course he is running, or actually shambling, for re-election. And he is boasting of US-supplied missiles flyng iinto Russia.

This patriotic fervor in combination with senile dementia (and I include Donald Trump and his own twisted MAGA version of wpatriotism in that category) is particularly frightening.

This patriotic fervor is what keeps Biden on his feet even as he breaks off one of his "tall tales" of being arrested in a civil rights protest or graduating first in his law school class with a sudden blank, lost, slack-jawed stare. The mere sight of a flag-draped stage could be the miracle stimulant that snaps him right out of his senility for whole minutes at a time.

Meanwhile, even "progressives" like Bernie Sanders are urging people to re-elect Biden jthosust to avoid a second term of Trump.

He and other liberal apologists would be wise to heed the words of Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee from the real Hitler.

"Those who choose the lesser evil, " she wrote, "forget very quickly that they chose evil."