Our Own Little Gazas

 Gaza has been aptly described as a high tech laboratory experiment for how to most efficiently oppress, surveil, starve, torture, and ultimately dispose of a population deemed to be nothing but excessive, superfluous human flesh taking up too much valuable land and resources.

At its essence, the US-financed genocide by the state of Israel of some two million Palestinians confined in their open-air prison is the ultimate expression of the global class war being waged by multinational oligarchs and militarized corporations against the rest of us.

So it's not just empathy and outrage that's spurring hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of us to take to the streets in protest. It is the shock of realizing that we could very well be next. Too many of us are there already, trapped in the gulags of crushing medical and education debt, low-paid work and unemployment, evictions leading to homelessness, and - especially if we have a darker skin color -  police brutality and mass incarceration.

Gaza is the paradigmatic example of what Achille Mbambe, in his 2019 book Necropolitcs, terms the "matrix of rule" by the ruling oligarchy. Gaza is both a supercharged reiteration of the settler-colonialist atrocities of the fairly recent past, and a warning of what they have in store for us the not-too-distant future.

While they're so busily killing Palestinians, a surplus population sitting on top of what is believed to be a wealth of oil deposits, they're also in a near-frantic crusade of trying to quash dissent in the parts of the world that are still relatively free. For, as Mbembe writes,

"Unmistakably, an ever increasing multitude of voices are making themselves heard... human chains of solidarity are forming. In the darkenss of fear and denunciation, and faced with unrelenting waves of repression, compassionate men and women seek to awaken the sleeping fireflies of hospitaliity and solidarity. In the midst of an otherwise troubling anesthesia, an active minority is taking a stance. With renewed vigor they seek to denounce acts carried out in their name against the Other - who, it is claimed, is not one of us."

In a rank display of their own panic at being caught out in their crimes and lies by the masses of people, our ruling oligarchs and their political lackeys have resorted to plastering the anti-Semite label on the dissenters in a vain attempt to shut us up. This gaslighting has largely failed. So fully two months after October 7th, they are regaling us with graphic propaganda about Hamas incels sexually assaulting Israeli women. When they had to walk back their wild claims of having personally witnessed the beheadings of Jewish babies, they are now whipping up visions of Israeli women being shot in their private parts and abused even in death. Needless to say, the usual suspects have produced no evidence to back up their lurid claims.

But let us, just for the sake of argument, concede that rapes and worse were committed by Hamas. This still does not justify obliterating tens of thousands of Palestinians with bombs and tanks. And let us, also just for the sake of argument, acknowledge that this "war" has emboldened closet anti-Semites to act out their fantasies in public, even on elite college campuses. This does not justify smearing antiwar and anti-genocide protesters with the anti-Semite label, or conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.. Such tactics are a classic case of Freudian projection.

It brings back nauseating memories of late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once publicly admitted that the deaths, by US sanctions, of half a million Iraqi children had been "worth it" in that war for oil, and whom Joe Biden so fondly evokes when he talks about the wars in Ukraine and against Gaza. Albright also had infamously remarked during the 2016 presidential campaign that "there is a special place in hell for women who don't support other women." She was talking, of course, about Hillary Clinton and the female supporters of Bernie Sanders. What she meant was that if you moved beyond the corporate version of feminism and supported policies for the greater public good, you were damned. 

It is indicative of their own consciousness of guilt that the Biden administration waited until 11 p.m. Friday to notify Congress that it was bypassing them and unilaterally giving Israel hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of tank ammunition in order to continue killing Palestinian civilians at the speed of light. Whenever the extermination of powerless trapped people is deemed to be an "emergency," then the niceties of democratic procedure do not apply. Plus, the end-run by the State Department conveniently absolves Congress of actually having to take a principled stand against sending money and bombs to Israel. It's such a clever way avoiding accountability to their dissenting constituents.

It's both ironic and even somewhat entertaining to watch the billionaires and their corrupt political lackeys so publicly accosting the same elite Ivy League presidents they put into office for the express purpose of laundering administering billions of dollars in tax-exempt oligarchic slush funds. 

Claudine Gay, Harvard's current president and one of the trio of female administrators hauled before Congress last week and damned for defending the free speech of students, was handpicked for her job by billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, the former Obama administration commerce secretary who now heads what is aptly called the "Harvard Corporation." Pritzger was also recently named by Joe Biden to lead the postwar multinational corporate  plunder of Ukraine. The corruption is all right out there in the open: elite universities are primarily for-profit corporations, where the education of young people is only the fig leaf. Students are there not to learn, but to be credentialed for elite careers.  They are definitely not to be heard. Too many of them, apparently, did not get the message that as the lucky golden ticket-holders in an overpriced Willy Wonka diploma mill, they're doomed to the hell of the careerist garbage chute when they become too loud and demanding and free-thinking.

Speaking of the mask being ripped right off the Ivy League, it turns out that at least some students have given the aforementioned Hillary Clinton a failing grade in the "Rate My Professor" online survey. Not only did Hillary castigate the pro-Palestinian student protesters on the Columbia University campus - she accused them of  being complicit i in alleged Hamas sex crimes against Israeli women by marching in support of Palestinian women.

she didn't have the guts to  confront the young people in person. In fact, she avoided her students like the plague. She refused to take most questions and left class early when she bothered to show up at all. 

This is according to one disgruntled former student writing in the Huff Post, perhaps Clinton's worst offense was her refusal to even glance at the written work submitted by her students, instead handing it over to low-paid adjuncts to read and grade. 

And these students were the lucky ones, because future attendees of   Hillary's class will have to make do with the video version of what she recently performed. The entire semester was filmed so that Clinton will never again have to return to academia in the actual flesh.

 However, hefty tuition will still be charged for the class, and her handsome residuals as a college performance celebrity will continue to be paid by the Columbia corporation.

Let the masks continue to fall, preferably all the way to hell where they can keep Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger company for all eternity.

Crouching Cuomo, Hidden Biden

Is the unified Biden-endorsing Democratic leadership already finessing plans to replace Uncle Joe with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo?

An email slugged "Official Democratic Poll" asking voters nationwide to share their feelings about Cuomo landed in my inbox yesterday:

"In these uncertain times where we're depending on our mayors and governors to save our lives, Andrew Cuomo has shown incredible leadership. He's doing what Trump isn't."

 Of course, the official tracking poll devised by the Stop Republicans.Org data team is essentially fund-raising spam  It's just another name for the Progressive Turnout Project, which is just another name for Progressive Takeover. It's a Chicago-based party veal pen run by a trio of former Obama and congressional campaign operatives. In order to participate in the "poll" attesting that you admire Cuomo and can't stand Donald Trump, you must first give them your money.

The phony poll could also serve double duty, though, to gauge Democratic voter support for a Cuomo run. Uncle Joe, the presumptive nominee, is carefully never even mentioned in the email.

The increasingly fragile-sounding and reclusive Biden certainly must be giving Team Obama some second thoughts. Under the guise of party unity, the manufactured positive Cuomo media coverage and name-dropping could also be the sound of them sharpening the same set of long knives they used to plunge into Bernie Sanders on that infamous South Carolina night only a few months ago.

Then again, they could simply be using Cuomo as a proxy or a magnet, drawing in more voters disenchanted with Biden, who now also faces credible sexual assault charges that he is probably too senile to even respond to personally. In contrast, we are supposed to be irresistibly drawn to a brand of authoritarian thuggery (Cuomo) that sounds a lot more erudite than Trump's ravings.

For the centrist wing of the party, Cuomo is actually too good to be true. He accomplished the single-handed feat of striking Bernie's name from the New York primary ballot before the June voting was ultimately canceled due to the coronavirus. This underhanded ploy served the dual purpose of avoiding the embarrassment of Bernie coming too close to Biden and also discouraging disappointed Sanders voters from showing up at all to cast their ballots for the progressive candidates also running for local and state offices.

Besides outright replacement of Biden, or simply using Cuomo as cover for their zombie candidate in the basement, the third possibility is that the Democrats are not so much interested in winning as they are in raising tons of money as they pretend to "resist Trump." In their cores, they love Trump. He makes their own corruption smell sweet by comparison as they give him most of what he wants. Both parties, after all, serve the same oligarchic masters.

This email push-poll spam is a new tactic for the PTP. It's set up exactly like the Republican email "polls" testing how much you love Trump and hate socialist Dems like Nancy Pelosi, who are so Marxist that they're in bed with Wall Street.

Alex Morgan, the "progressive" group's field director, told The Hill last year that his PAC's $46 million budget would be used to open 66 field offices and hire  1100 workers to knock on the doors of the 7.1 million people who did not come out to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“We don’t waste money on TV ads, direct mail, or anything else that’s just white noise to most voters," he bragged before sending out his own blast of white noise emails this week."We can't rely on the high energy we saw in 2018 to carry over to 2020 unless we start engaging with voters now.... if we wait until September to counter Trump with field efforts, we're toast."

“We focus our efforts on what works best — multiple in-depth conversations with voters who are disillusioned with politics as usual. Democrats haven't been doing a good job of speaking to them on an intrinsic level beyond broad party platitudes, and Progressive Turnout Project is aiming to change that.”

Then Covid-19 happened. Depth conversations between voters and political canvassers would morph right into conversational death traps. So brace yourselves for what will very likely be an unprecedented and relentless onslaught of political emails engaging you on such substantive topics as The Incredible Cuomo and Be Very Afraid of Trump. The hordes of operatives must have some way to spend their hundreds of millions of dollars to extract even more hundreds of millions of dollars from you in order to live the pre-pandemic lifestyles to which they have become accustomed. 

Since even former Bernie Sanders campaign operatives have to eat, they've started their own PAC to "rally progressives" around Hidin' Biden, who "has shown a willingness to move in a more progressive direction" by deigning to allow Sanders  a bit of input in the creation of a pandemic task force operating out of Joe's basement bunker.

As proof of the progressive direction that Joe is heading, his busy little fingers typed out their own mass email Tuesday:

Hey there, I'm Joe Biden and I'm writing to you about a truly special moment in our campaign.
This afternoon, Secretary Clinton announced she's endorsing  us.  I'm so proud to have her support.

The letter is nothing but a slavish testimonial to Hillary, and how they used to have breakfast together at his vice presidential mansion when they were both in town, and how he learned how powerful she was when he didn't run for president himself. Her candidacy was so wonderful and so historic that this email reads like a de facto endorsement of a Clinton restoration. So when I clicked on the source of the encomium, it shockingly turns out it was not sent from Biden Basement Central at all, but from Onward Together - Hillary's own super pac!

His probing fingers probably didn't even write the email themselves. If they had, Joe would've inserted at least one "Here's the deal" or "I'm the guy" or "C'mon, man!"

So in the spirit of Hillary, please join Joe in the Battle For the Soul of Our Nation. Liberals are urged to tune in to the suspense of which lady will win his vice presidential beauty contest even as they lambaste Trump over his treatment of women.  Each and every one of these liberal #MeToo champions is still in it to win it despite Tara Reade, and Anita Hill before her. In fact, like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, he is using and hiding behind powerful women to defend him. Stacey Abrams, high on the list of vice presidential picks, points to the New York Times's smear piece against Tara Reade as evidence of his innocence. It's the same thing as Dick Cheney pointing to the Times articles spoon-fed by the Bushies to reporter Judith Miller as "proof" that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons.

It's also all too sickeningly reminiscent of the Democratic Party's shoddy treatment of Monica Lewinsky during the Bill Clinton scandal. You might remember that Gloria Steinem acted the same part that Stacey Abrams is now playing for Biden.

"I'm not here to ask you for money," Biden's fingers meanwhile reassure recipients in his closing policy argument. "I know first I have to earn it. So I'm asking you to think about what is at stake, give me a chance, and join my campaign."

Whereupon he only asks for money once you press the link he has so thoughtfully provided as a way to keep his word and to immediately earn your trust.

Smart Plutocrats, Dumb Trumpocrats

Don't you hate it when the rich and powerful can't all just get along? 

The plutes have really been blowing it lately. Their standard operating procedure of pitting the hoi polloi against each other in a never-ending orgy of divide-and-conquer, while at the same time craftily plundering the same hoi polloi of every last dollar and drop of sweat-labor they possess, is showing signs of some serious wear and tear.

 Having been carefully trained to fear and respect - if not love - the plutocrats, and to strive, as a top-secret Citigroup manifesto once put it, to become "pluto-participants" in the enterprise, the hoi polloi are getting wise to the con. The propaganda center can no longer hold. Strikes and protests and riots are breaking out all over the place: in Los Angeles, in Mexico, in France, to name just three in the last week alone.

The plutocrats, in the process of losing their propaganda war if not their actual class war on anybody with no money, appear to be losing their minds at about the same rate that the hoi polloi are losing their patience.

Unable any longer to keep their bickering and their palace intrigues behind closed gilded doors, the ruling class is desperately trying to salvage dwindling hoi polloi compliance and good will by at least letting us gawk at their sordid end-of-empire show as it plays out in real time.

Entertain yourselves from the nosebleed seats as the royal battle between the stupid, crass plutocrats (Trumpocrats) and the smart, sensitive plutocrats plays out. Root for your favorite stars. Stay tuned for the coming attractions in Horse Race 2020 if you ever find yourself unaccountably losing enthusiasm for the thrilling main event.

The lead actors now playing the Stupids for our entertainment misery are President Donald Trump and his commerce secretary, Wilbur "Mr. Burns" Ross. They've far, far exceeded all expectations in their roles as gross cartoon villains in the first exciting installment of Shutdown USA. These two human malignancies had craftily advised the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors working without pay for the better part of a month to simply take out a loan - just in case those form letters the White House thoughtfully provided, begging for mercy from landlords, mortgage companies and other creditors, didn't do the trick.

Enter the lead actress, intrepid multimillionaire centrist Nancy Pelosi, to save the day for the Smart Plutocrat Team. In the latest episode's exciting climax, Madam Speaker boldly forces Trump to cave and to call a temporary truce, ending the shutdown. She is being widely praised by the fawning corporate media reviewers as a feminist bad-ass in heels. Not only does she deny Trump his Wall, but perhaps even more painful to him personally, she denies him his coveted prime time spot as star of the annual State of the Union gala.

  And she'll spend the next three weeks continuing to show the whole intimidated world what a primitive wimp he is by altruistically offering him billions of dollars for "a smart wall." This means that Democrats will push for more humane, high-tech ways to terrorize and punish migrants and refugees, while Pelosi further shows her chops by tamping down all those pesky rumblings of Medicare For All in her caucus. There are just no billions of extra dollars to spare for "smart" hoi polloi health, apparently. 

Because no way is Nancy Pelosi ever content to just clutch her pearls like the Democratic #Resistance Fighter of yore. She wears them like a studded collar, like the warrior queen and de facto first woman president that she truly is. Elevating her to such regal status allows the corporate media to ignore the fact that massive labor unrest and sick-ins at the nation's airports was a disruption that even the Trumpocrats couldn't ignore.

I know it's hard to surpass Pelosi's brilliant bravura performance, but it seems that there is another eager ruling class racketeer lurking in the wings. So getting second billing in this week's Smart Plutocrat lineup is multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who is pondering his own primary run as a Democrat, based primarily upon his claim that he's a smarter CEO than Trump.

Skillfully exposing Trump as the poor negotiator and klutzy psychopath that he is, Bloomberg did him one better and showed that not only is he, Bloomberg, a smarter overlord, he is a plutocrat who can also do noblesse oblige whenever the rare need arises. Not content to merely employ the royal "we" to show that he is not amused, he also employs pop culture references and humor to show that he's down with the hoi polloi.

"The longer we have a pretend CEO who is recklessly running this country, the worse it’s going to be for our economy and for our security. This is really dangerous.... It’s like the government version of a bad horror movie, but instead of Freddy Krueger and the ‘Nightmare on Elm Street,’ we’ve got Donald Trump and the ‘Nightmare at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.'"

Trump wonders as he wanders. Bloomberg panders as he ponders. Therefore, we can forgot all about the nightmare of his three-term New York City mayoralty, highlighted by his edict that all food stamp applicants be fingerprinted as though they were criminals. And speaking of bad dreams, his "Stop and Frisk" crusade of city cops terrorizing virtually every single black and brown male existing within his domain lasted for years before a judge finally declared it to be inhumane and unconstitutional. Unlike the oafish Trump, Bloomberg is a smart, competent sadist capable of keeping his cruelty carefully hidden beneath platitudes. He's more like smarmy circumspect innkeeper Norman Bates than boastful slasher Freddy Krueger.

Meanwhile, you will be happy to know that despite all their unprecedented smartness, Bloomberg and Pelosi already face some more stiff competition. Because otherwise it wouldn't be a true democracy, would it? 

As Hillary Clinton just informed her PAC subscribers in a missive slugged "Let's not be distracted," she, Bill, Chelsea, and 500 of their closest public-private partners will burn untold tens of thousands of gallons of climate-destroying private jet fuel to convene this week in San Juan to discuss all the neoliberal ways that they can make Puerto Rico an even better and smarter de facto colony than it was before Hurricane Maria destroyed it, and Trump insulted its residents by throwing paper towels at them.

Unlike Trump, Hillary doesn't crassly throw stuff. (She also doesn't crassly announce her third presidential candidacy, preferring instead to send out sensitive feelers to gauge the reaction.) She does, as is her wont, always put her own grievances first, even placing herself above suffering Puerto Ricans in making her email pitch. Never mind island mudslides. The Clinton Foundation, she altruistically announces in the very first paragraph of her email, has been the victim of much mud-slinging from the dumb Trumpocrats:

When I ran for president, this top-rated global charity was dragged into a political mud fight. In the two years since, people with an axe to grind have continued to try to undermine its work by attacking them (sic) and making false accusations.

 So combine your outraged solidarity-pity for Hillary and your hatred of Donald Trump with concern for Puerto Ricans  and try, ironical as it might sound, to "resist the vitriol" and stop being so distracted by Trump's dumb oafish antics. Instead, give generously to the Clintons so that they, rather than US government agencies funded by raising taxes on the rich, can help the entire "greater Caribbean" to "build back better" via "practical solutions."

Although she offered few details on exactly what this practicality will entail, and no information at all about the confab's 500 attendees, Hillary Clinton does allow that one of her biggest concerns is the alleged "rising youth crime rate" in Puerto Rico. Her idea of bringing these youths to heel is "access" to mental health care and entrepreneurship training... making Puerto Rico great again and safe again, especially for tourists. 

She made no mention of raising the minimum wage in Puerto Rico, which Congress in its infinitely smart wisdom had reduced to $4.25 an hour for workers below age 24 the year before Maria hit. It was a common-sense austerity measure designed to placate the indebted commonwealth's bond holders, a very smart bunch of plutocrats indeed. Maybe some of them are even smart enough to be among the Clinton Foundation's group of 500 carbon-belching island rescuers.

Update 1/28: Just as I was finishing up this post last night, billionaire and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz officially announced on 60 Minutes that he is seriously thinking about an independent presidential candidacy, fomenting enough buzz in the media-political complex to preclude their cravings for his overpriced caffeine beverages. 

Schultz, while posing as a smart plutocratic centrist, actually betrays his inner dumb crass authoritarian Trump when he says that he wants "America to win."

This should be interesting if it lasts. If Schultz can buy his way into the corporate-sponsored debates as an independent candidate, then it will be harder for the Duopoly to deny other third, fourth and fifth parties the same privilege. I don't think the police would dare chain Schultz to a chair in a warehouse as they did to the Green Party's Jill Stein when she showed up to debate Obama and Romney in 2012.

Struggles of the Rich and Famous

It's no longer enough for the superstars of the media-political-entertainment complex to flaunt their hedonistic lifestyles on TV. Even the queen of conspicuous consumption herself, Kim Kardashian, has flaunted her political capital by recently orchestrating the release from prison of a woman sentenced to a draconian term under harsh American drug laws, before pot-smoking became P.C.

Turn on the cable or click on any number of cool liberal news sites, and you'll learn all about how the rich and powerful are "fighting back" against Trump via the #Resistance, Inc. franchise. Either that, or they're fighting one another, usually via Tweet, for attention, ownership, and power. This often involves actors and actresses firing off nasty tweets to/about Susan Sarandon, who has made a few politically incorrect comments in her day, such as opining that the election of Trump possibly - potentially - is waking up a true Left.

"Debra Messing Lashes Out At Susan Sarandon" made the headlines in The Washington Post today. Messing, who is also plugging a reboot of her TV sitcom, groused that the awakening of young people to socialism unfairly takes away from the plight of the kidnapped migrant children, and therefore Sarandon should "shut the f up."

See what I mean? No matter how hard you try to avoid this stuff, the corporate media just won't let you. 

If anyone besides "our poor children" are being victimized, the consolidated media conglomerate wants you to know, it's those career people in the top 10% of income ownership rather than in the bottom 10%. You don't hear anything about Harvey Weinstein or Les Moonves and other media moguls groping and abusing and raping the office cleaning woman or the hotel housekeeper. You only hear about them victimizing relatively well-off and privileged women.

The outlier in the Predatory Boys' Club is, of course, Donald Trump, who goes after porn actresses and centerfold models, the better for the liberal class to sniff at how vulgar he is even in his choice of women to prey upon.

It's the job of The Star Collective to resist Trump so that we ordinary slobs don't get too carried away and start resisting the whole neoliberal financialized consumer culture that produced Trump in the first place.

As Guy Debord wrote in The Society of the Spectacle, the rich, famous and powerful maintain the status quo even while putting on a show of rebelliousness. Before Trump came along to upset this status quo through his vulgarity and self-parodying performances, the job of stars was merely to sell products and entertainment while flaunting their lifestyles, cars, bodies, mansions and vacations. At the most, a few outliers like Jane Fonda would generate a lot of pseudo-outrage by protesting the Vietnam War before it was cool to do so; and others, like brother Peter, would help the youth of America feel rebellious by smoking a lot of dope and making fun of redneck yahoos in the cult blockbuster Easy Rider.  

This conspicuous rebelliousness, co-existing as it does with the status quo of conspicuous consumption, is both banal and fake.

From Debord:

Stars -- spectacular representations of living human beings -- project this general banality into images of permitted roles.  As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner.

This is why Madonna could yell through a bullhorn at an orchestrated, cop-free Women's March protest that she planned to burn down the White House and not get arrested for it. This is why George Clooney can get himself arrested outside the White House and be treated with deference and gentleness by the Capitol Police for the brief duration his career-boosting handcuffed photo-op. 

Comedienne Kathy Griffin, you might remember, was not treated so kindly by The Complex after she posted a picture of herself holding a fake bloody Trump head. But that was only because her stunt was considered by liberal virtue-signalers too vulgar and psychologically damaging to the Trump children. Even so, she's making her comeback on Twitter.

The anti-Trump hysteria is also the proximate cause of the mass media suddenly getting over its crush on Angelina Jolie and making her the bad guy in a child custody battle. Global humanitarianism is so out of style now, unless it's stickily glued to partisan politics and the fake Resistance.

As Debord further explains about celebrities posing as social justice warriors: 

They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations -- the decision-making and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a government power may personalize itself as a pseudostar -- on the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudopower over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices.

It's a reflection of the false choices offered in our rigged election system, isn't it?

Moreover, the replacement by the spectacle of "representative" democracy extends to the further blurring of the line between entertainment and politics, and politicians becoming stars in their own right. Barack and Michelle Obama were full-fledged stars long before they left the White House and went on a long series of luxury vacations. And even though lacking in personal charisma herself, Hillary Clinton has also been elevated to star status. Most recently she was "spotted" (media-speak for a pre-arranged photo shoot) canoodling with Oprah at a celebrity bash honoring Ralph Lauren's 50 years of dressing the rich and famous.

 

Of course, everything is prearranged -- not that the phony Resistance Fighters are even trying to hide how phony their high-fashion, high-dollar protests are.

As reported last spring in Politico, the Democrats are so upset about having lost to "an insane person," they're openly turning to Hollywood for help!

Top actors and producers - as well as famous politicians too cowardly to be named in the article - meet in a Hollywood "writers' room" to discuss scripts for how to get disaffected and marginalized people not in the top 10 percent of wealth owners to the polls to cast their ballots to serve the interests of the top 10 percent, which is so much more inclusive than the GOP's service only to the top 1 Percent.  

“One of the first things we were at least talking about in the beginning meetings was how to improve upon the message as to what does the Democratic Party stand for, what does that represent,” said Andrew Marcus, who owns the television and film company Apiary Entertainment. “When the Republican Party or [President Donald] Trump is able to say ‘Make America great again’ and nobody that I know can tell you what the DNC or any of the leading candidates’ slogans [are], I think that’s a marketing problem.”

 It's not about making people's lives better. It's about conning the mark and closing the deal. By talking to Politico about their true agenda, they reveal themselves to be every bit as crass as Donald Trump. And in a way, that makes them even worse than Trump, because at least he proudly wears his own greed and dishonesty like a badge of honor.

Of the group’s long-term goals, the producer Cindy Cowan said, “We’re looking at November. But our bigger end game, like most people’s end game, is the presidential.”
Though Hollywood professionals and celebrities have long maintained ties to the Democratic Party, their significance has largely been limited to their ability to raise money for candidates and causes. The group meeting is unusual for the lack of a direct fundraising tie.
“I was looking for something to do that didn’t involve giving money,” ( writer-producer Alex) Gregory said. “What I like about this thing is it’s not transactional.”

Whew, that's a relief. Nobody is getting directly bribed with dirty donor money.  That odious chore is being saved for the Obamas and the Clintons, who are very busy these days "headlining" fundraising spectaculars by and for the rich and famous. 

To be fair, though, Hillary has not totally forgotten the nondeplorable little people. I got this email from her just the other day:

Friend --

 One of the most incredible things to come out of the 2016 election has been how many members of this big-hearted team have turned frustration into action.

You're leading local campaigns and organizing protests. Youre showing up at town halls, rallies, and phone banks. Youre using your voices to support candidates who are breaking barriers and to speak out against policies that do harm instead of good.

Id like to send you an Onward Together sticker to thank you for your commitment -- just make a donation of $5 or more today, and Onward Together will get your sticker in the mail.

 

Get my sticker

Because of your dedication and generosity, weve been able to provide 12 groups with mentorship, resources, and more than $1 million in financial support -- and thats only in our first year. As the midterms draw closer, well be backing even more hard-working, groundbreaking organizations and candidates.

If youre with us, then donate to support this work and let us send you a sticker to say thank you.

Onward!

Hillary

The money raised supposedly will be used by Hillary and her party to "mentor" the lesser people about being good protectors of the ruling class and keeping the sloganeering "narrative" firmly glued, like a cheap sticker, to the needs and internecine battles of various factions of the ruling class (cynically described by Obama as two teams playing nicely together within the 40-yard line of professional elitist sport.)

As Guy Debord wrote, this concentration on sport and spectacle is meant to divert the attention of the Cheap Sticker Class from the real class war of the rich against the rest of us:

The false choices offered by spectacular abundance -- choices based on the juxtaposition of competing yet mutually reinforcing spectacles and of distinct yet interconnected roles... develop into struggles between illusory qualities designed to generate fervent allegiance to quantitative trivialities.

Such as gaudy cheap $5 stickers that probably cost two cents to make in a sweatshop along with the price of third class bulk postage to mirror the third class/third world status of their precarious recipients.  

I feel sticky. I feel like I need to take another shower.

A President Pardons Himself

I'm not talking about Donald Trump's latest tweet.

I'm talking about Bill Clinton's latest interview, which aired on NBC Monday morning.

He was on TV to plug his new book, a "thriller" co-written with James Patterson, when the questions veered off into the Me Too movement and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Needless to say, Clinton was not too thrilled when past episodes of his sexual predations came back to haunt him.

Borrowing a page from the playbook of long-suffering wife Hillary, who once complained that she and Bill were "dead broke" from legal bills by the time they left the White House, necessitating a new career of extreme money-grubbing just to make ends meet, the former president portrayed himself as the real victim of his tryst with a White House intern.

As such, he's never felt the need to apologize to Lewinsky, whose own public profile and "wokeness" to the lopsided power dynamics of the affair has risen as much as Clinton's has fallen in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein crime spree and other revelations of bad behavior in the highest places. His relationship with Monica Lewinsky, plus the accusations of outright sexual assault have, as Hillary parsed it during her latest political campaign, already been "litigated" and are therefore not open to further serious discussion -- MeToo movement, or no MeToo movement.

Even if he were president today, Clinton insisted, the movement would do nothing to change how he viewed the Lewinsky episode.

“I don’t think it would be an issue because people would be using the facts instead of the imagined facts,” he whined in his best legal parsing fashion, bringing back memories of "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is" and "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." (So much for his jab at Trump and the previously unheard-of phenomenon of "fake news" emanating from the mouths of government officials.)

He said he has never spoken to her let alone apologized to her in the decades following. Why should he? He already took the initiative, made his generic proxy apology once to the whole globe, for crying out loud. This unforced apology apparently inspired him so much that he then went on to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars from the Clinton Global Initiative branch of his family foundation. 

In exonerating himself yet again on Monday, Clinton gave the feeblest possible compliment to the MeToo movement, parsing his approval with the disclaimer that he "disagree(s) with some of the decisions that have been made." He didn't say if he was referring to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's belated decision to charge Democratic mega-donor Harvey Weinstein even after Vance had accepted campaign donations from him, albeit carefully and legally funneled through the disgraced mogul's lawyer.

Vance said he has since returned Weinstein's cash. The Clintons, though, carefully parsing to the end, dodged the issue by claiming all Weinstein's donations to their Initiative and Foundation had already been given away to charity anyway, so they cannot possibly return the money. As far as her political campaign chest goes, since Weinstein was largely a "bundler" of millions of dollars from his fellow oligarchs, she won't be returning that money, either. Her running mate, Tim Kaine, has falsely claimed that since the campaign was over anyway, they couldn't possibly even return Weinstein's own personal donation. (The campaign is over, of course, but as FactCheck.org notes, the excess cash was deftly funneled right into her super-pac, Onward Together.)


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Meanwhile, Barack Obama has apparently pardoned himself for his own role in giving us Donald Trump by promoting Hillary Clinton, not to mention rewarding Wall Street over Main Street during his eight-year tenure, ensuring that the richest  Americans clawed back 94% of all the trillions of household wealth "lost" in the wake of the 2007-08 financial meltdown.

 The D.C. Bubble is full to bursting about of the latest blame-game book, this one from one of his former flacks, one-time aspirational novelist and national security adviser Benjamin Rhodes. Since I don't have my barf bucket close to hand at the moment, I'll just refer you to one nauseating positive review from the New York Times's resident palace stenographer, and to another much more palatable one from the New York Times's resident style maven.

Long story short: Obama was shaken, if not stirred, by Trump's victory. He confided to his flacks that the ingrates of America were just not ready for his awesomeness. The legend in his own time turns out to have been about ten or twenty years ahead of his time. So it's our bad, Bottom 90% of America.

But just in case you're concerned that Obama is wallowing in a dysfunctional depression like tens of millions of bad and unready Americans, you'll be happy to learn that fresh off inking his reputed $50 million production deal with Netflix, he'll be the headline act at a major Hollywood bash later this month. He will sell intimate access to his cool self for a cool $100,000 a pop. (the flashbulb kind, not the unwanted and odious Clinton/Weinstein kind.)

 “I am very excited to announce that President Barack Obama will be joining DNC Chair Tom Perez in Los Angeles on Thursday, June 28 to headline his first fundraising event for the DNC on the West Coast this year,” said the invite to the $2,700 to $100,000 priced event. “This will be a rare opportunity to spend an evening with President Obama,” the pitch added. “While at the event, President Obama and Chair Perez will discuss the strategy of the Democratic Party for winning elections in 2018 and beyond.”

And the Democratic functionaries still wonder why the party lost a thousand seats during the Obama years, not to mention a huge hunk of the working class vote to Donald Trump's paranoid-style populism. 

Meanwhile, former President Jimmy Carter took a much-needed break from building Habitat for Humanity houses last week, and visited a North Carolina McDonald's restaurant for an egg biscuit and a "senior" cup of coffee with his wife Rosalynn. And he isn't even running for anything.

He also isn't getting invited to headline Hollywood fundraisers or to appear on the Today show.

Darkly Dreaming Hillary

Losing the election to Donald Trump was her "dark midnight time of the soul," Hillary Clinton confided to rehab specialist Stephen Colbert on his CBS infotainment show. Fresh off his stint of normalizing and endearing professional liar Sean Spicer at the Emmy awards, Colbert was happy to do likewise for Clinton, whose marathon book tour is vying for attention with earthquakes, hurricanes and other disasters which always seem to unfairly threaten her campaigns.

She joked that she'll be sticking around unless people take up a huge collection to send her someplace really nice. She demurred from mentioning an actual price for her departure. And since she already is someplace really nice, "I'm not going anywhere."

Asked about her book, she said it was "horrible." (I am pretty sure that she meant that the grueling experience of writing the book was horrible, which just goes to show that Trump's own constant use of the words horrible - horrible! - is catching.)

Hillary called Trump's U.N. speech, which ridiculed the North Korean dictator as Rocket Man, "very dark and very dangerous," threatening as it did to eclipse her own dark night of the soul, not to mention causing an endless loop of the Elton John hit to play inside people's heads.

Trump's words, Hillary complained, were very crass and not befitting the designated purveyor of "respectful" American aggression and exceptionalism.  It's always best to use words which are diplomatic and nuanced and democracy-spreading, she said. Maybe something more in line with how the then-Secretary of State respectfully described to a worldwide TV audience (via another CBS interview) the death-by-sodomy of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, after the US bombing campaign and right before another mass US-inspired immigration crisis:

Perhaps that's what prompted her to dish to Colbert about Putin -  whom, she has absolutely no doubt, infiltrated the hive-mind of the American electorate and turned them into millions of zombie Trump-voters. Not only is Putin a giant pod creature from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, he is an evil manspreader whose sexism only added to the free-floating scourge of misogyny which helped propel Trump to his Dark Victory. Hillary also bragged that she got Putin so agitated one time in his dacha, he went into a manspreading frenzy. "He takes me down the stairs... into his inner sanctum... and then asked if my husband would like to come." (on a polar bear-tagging junket, not the other kind of threesome) Oh, the Hillmanity.

With that, Colbert uncorked a bottle of the Chardonnay which Hillary - once again - jokingly admitted is her drug of choice for the dark days of her lives. It's what got her through the agony of blamespreading, and then demanding gobs of money for it.  

Meanwhile, Darkly Dangerous Donald just got insanely handed, with no strings attached, more than ten times the money he'd asked for to help him pursue his dream-quest to redundantly "totally destroy" tiny North Korea: a whopping three quarters of a trillion dollars. Also in Trump's beady little sights: Venezuela and Iran or wherever his pre-adolescent brain takes him next.

As the New York Times approvingly noted, 

 In a rare act of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, the Senate passed a $700 billion defense policy bill on Monday that sets forth a muscular vision of America as a global power, with a Pentagon budget that far exceeds what President Trump has asked for.

Senators voted 89-9 to approve the measure, known as the National Defense Authorization Act; the House has already adopted a similar version.

I love the way the mainstream media is always in awe of this allegedly "rare" bipartisanship. The two right wings of the war party always act in lockstep when it comes to funding unlimited state-sponsored death. It seems like only yesterday when they near-unanimously funded Johnson's war in Vietnam after the phony Gulf of Tonkin attack (which was glossed over in the current PBS series, incidentally.)

After calling ever-spreading war fever a refreshing anomaly, the Times steps in its own doo-doo by casually mentioning that, well, yeah, this is the 56th consecutive year that Congress has passed the defense bill with much eagerness and very little debate.

But this year was also something heartwarming and special, because the vote was also a "tribute" to Senate Hawk John McCain, who is bravely battling cancer, and who muscularly boasted on CNN last week that his treatment isn't costing him a dime, and who is once again the deciding vote on whether millions of other people will lost their own skimpy health insurance.

Giving a blank weapons check to a president whom establishment politicians and their media partners  purport to fear and loathe so much should call them out as hypocrites. But they are not about to expose themselves as such, especially since their message and "the narrative" is congealed within a handful of corporate-owned and controlled conglomerates. 

So, just in case you need a good laugh, or a good cry, or simply a rapidly-spreading distraction from other realities, here's the full clip of the Clinton/Colbert Russophobic schmooze-fest (naturally, when Colbert bloviates that "we" have to stop the horrible things going on in government under Trump, he doesn't mean that we have to stop the permanent state of war. The topic never even comes up, because militarism helps pay Colbert's salary, and it enriches the CBS stockholders way too much. As CBS honcho Les Moonves famously said, "Trump might not be good for America, but he's damned good for CBS!")

All the News That's Fit To Suppress

You might think that a Washington protest rally with only about two dozen participants wouldn't get much media attention. But since Saturday's event was organized by an anti-Trump, anti-Russian astroturf operation called March for Truth, funded by a group of plutocrats, "intelligence community" alumni, neocon war hawks, and centrist Democratic Party operatives, you would be thinking very incorrectly indeed.

Because of the importance of the big-money backers of Resistance, Inc., the New York Times plugged the "march" on its Facebook page before giving the small-ball event some truly big league coverage in the A-section pages of its Sunday edition. For without relentless publicity, how are we, the rag-tag citizens of America, supposed to remember that Russian Meddling in Our Democracy™ is the crisis of the century?

And with the Times' cooperative failure to reveal the names of the big players behind the scenes, the Powers That Be can cling to the illusion that they still actually have the power to mold public opinion, redirecting our angst from quotidian economic concerns to ginning up a patriotic fever for war against Russia. It's not for nothing that the newspaper also unceremoniously dumped both the public editor and the whole public editor desk last week. Accountability is so yesterday.

So we never learn from reading the fawning Times piece by Nathalie Nieves that one of the main organizers of #March For Truth is a writer and "activist" named Andrea Chalupa, who recently Tweeted, with no proof, that "WikiLeaks is a proven front for the Russian government."  Her sister, Alexandra, has been exposed as the probable developer of the discredited McCarthyite website PropOrNot, which published a blacklist of some 200 independent news organizations scurrilously accused of being "unwitting" agents for Vladimir Putin and stooges for Donald J. Trump.

Indeed, the Times has engaged in a virtual coverup of the #March for Truth astroturf group's provenance. Nieves' article mostly consists of interviews with a handful of "just plain folks" who were ostensibly demanding the truth about TrumPutin complicity. (Nieves has to grudgingly admit, however, that most of the couple-dozen participants had really shown to protest against other things, like Trump's war on the environment) Still, she valiantly offers that such cool celebrities as Debra Messing have given money to "the cause" - thereby tacitly legitimizing the effort with that all-important Hollywood gloss.

We must look to the#March For Truth website for supplemental facts. (To give Nieves credit, she provided a link) All you really need is a Google and a dream to figure out what the Times doesn't bother telling you.

Perhaps what is most revealing about this astroturf movement is the involvement of so many Hillary Clinton donors and operatives, including the Chalupa sisters just mentioned. This involvement gives further credence to the largely ignored tidbit in the book "Shattered" that #RussiaGate was, in fact, the brainchild of the failed Clinton campaign itself. 

Some of the "partners" listed on the #March for Truth website:

Town Hall Project: founded by former Iowa Clinton campaign field organizer Jimmy Dahman. To its credit, this site and its app have enabled people to easily find the congressional town hall nearest them to agitate for all manner of progressive things, including single payer health insurance. To his own discredit, though, Dahman is choosing to emphasize Russophobia rather than the fact-based fear of getting sick while uninsured or underinsured. 

 "Across the country, constituents have flooded town halls to let their representatives know that they want impartial investigations into Russian interference in our elections," Dahman rather falsely brags on the March For Truth website.

Pantsuit Nation: a Hillary Clinton Facebook-originated fan group, whose founder, Libby Chamberlain, is now being harshly criticized for personally cashing in on the first person hard-luck stories of poor and minority women she collated. Therefore, Pantsuit Nation has expanded its tarnished brand into some lucrative Russia-blaming to help keep the dream alive.

Swing Left: founded by Ethan Todras-Whitehall (writer/teacher), Joshua Krafchin (marketer and entrepreneur) and Miriam Stone (brand strategist) They appear to be an honest trio of citizens just looking for congressional redistricting who now find themselves "veal-penned" into the RussiaGate franchise. This is ironic, given that the DNC had studiously ignored them, and the pro-Clinton Daily Kos had even once accused them of being Russian agents. The name Krafchin had apparently made the Russophobic hairs on the back of Democratic Party necks stand up. But now that Swing Left has been patriotically vetted, it's all good.

The Opposition - this is just another news aggregation site for anti-Trump stories. Since no actual names are listed on this blog, inquiring minds want to know: is it Hillary prop, or not?

  Stand Up America -  Founded and bankrolled by failed multimillionaire centrist carpetbagger Sean Eldridge and directed by Jessica Adair, who most recently served as Hillary Clinton's Women's Vote director in Nevada. DJ Koessler, head of Clinton's digital ops in Brooklyn HQ, is the digital director. Sean Quinn, digital strategist, formerly worked for Anne Lewis Strategies, a Democratic Party fundraising firm, whose own director previously worked in the Bill Clinton White House. This #March sponsor is so incestuous that it deserves its own diagram on Muckety.

Rise To Run:  this is one of several mystery sponsors of March of Truthiness that are so dark and so shadowy that they don't even have anonymous websites, let alone listing any human beings on them. Somebody had better check to make sure this isn't a KGB plant.

Stand Up Republic - Founded by Evan McMullin, former clandestine ops officer at the CIA and later a Goldman Sachs banker before he ran for president as an independent conservative. Co-director is Mindy Kaling (nee Finn), who worked on the Bush and Romney campaigns. Their fervid, jingoistic statement on joining the Russophobic Resistance Fighters is a real keeper:

"Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn founded Stand Up Republic to help Americans stand up in defense of the fundamental principles that have made this country the true home of liberty and a source of hope for many around the world. Stand Up Republic will build and organize a grassroots movement in defense of liberty, equality, and truth in America. Our priorities will be to uphold the Constitution and defend the democratic norms and institutions upon which the protection of our basic rights depend.

We invite all Americans committed to these timeless truths to join us today in this hallowed cause."

Party Majority - This sponsor of #March for Truth is definitely not interested in campaign finance reform. We must, they say, take full advantage of campaign finance law as it exists, not as "we" might hope it to be. Grassroots SuperPac ia not an oxymoron! But even so, this sponsor of Truthiness lies by omission in refusing to list even one single name of a person or an address on its website. Dark is Light. Ignorance is Strength. Money is money.

Rock the Vote -- "We're smart. We're passionate. We're badass. We get the job done."

 This group says its duty to democracy is to line up "cultural leaders," celebrity endorsements and fundraising concerts. Look how well that worked out for Clinton in Cleveland at the Beyoncé gala.

Rock the Vote is run by former Chicago Democratic ward heeler Carolyn DeWitt, who has previously arranged DNC convention entertainment, groomed Democratic surrogates for media appearances, and coordinated messaging between the Democratic Party and Barack Obama's Organizing for America staffers. It was founded and bankrolled by Virgin Records mogul Jeff Ayeroff.

Oppstn.Org: Cool, edgy cyperspeak for "The Opposition," this is just another mainstream media aggregation site which "curates" anti-Trump articles and then rather dishonestly bylines them all with "By The Opposition." It thus turns out that linked corporate monstrosities like NBC-Comcast magically morph into The Opposition. 

Although he doesn't list his own name on his Oppstn site, Executive Director Jason Uhl does out himself on the #March for Truth sponsor page. A search reveals 16 different Jason Uhls on LinkedIn, none of whom appear to have a journalism background, nor even minimal stenographic credentials.

Meanwhile, Truth March fans are urged to Tweet and Facebook all their friends with quotes from such paragons of democracy as Obama Kill List creator and Bush torture-defender John Brennan:

The Burdened Sourpusses of the Ruling Class

Irreverence is the champion of liberty, and its only sure defense -- Mark Twain.

It was the guffaw heard round the world. Code Pink protester Desiree Fairooz snorted in disbelief when she heard Attorney General Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III lauded as a champion of racial justice at his Senate confirmation hearing on January 10th. She and her group were duly escorted out of the building for daring to poke fun at Sessions and his whole crowd of withered old racist reprobates.

Since the Department of Jiffy Jeffy Justice then insanely insisted on prosecuting Fairooz and two other protesters on disorderly conduct charges, and actually found a jury intimidated enough to convict them, it's the guffaw that will go right on echoing, ad infinitum. Sessions and his cronies will go down in history as one of the prickliest bunch of thin-skinned misanthropes who ever couldn't take a joke.

And this particular joke is totally on them. The video clip of Code Pink protesters mocking both him and his policies would have been lost in cyberspace were it not for the Trump government's paranoid overreaction to it.

The prosecuting attorney helpfully rebroadcast Code Pink's trenchant message, railing to the jury that “Her disruptive behavior included yelling that Senator Sessions’ ‘voting record was evil’ and waving a sign that read: ‘Support civil rights, stop [S]essions’.”

Stop Stop Stop Sessions Sessions Sessions Evil Evil Evil. Support civil rights! plead the enemies of civil rights, over and over and over again. 

Jocular Jeff To America: Don't Laugh At Me, Or Else!

Like any bully, Sessions can dish it out, but he can't take it. His own many stale attempts at humor, such as denying voting rights to black people, have had a history of falling flat whenever presented to the Supreme Court for its amusement. And then there was his recent crack about Hawaii being nothing but an "island in the Pacific" after a federal judge there ruled against Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban. Sessions apparently was unaware that not only is the state of Hawaii a whole series of islands, it was admitted to the union more than half a century ago. When you're an old racist reprobate like Jiffy Jeff, it must be very hard to escape from your imperialist, colonialist state of mind. Or should I say mindlessness.

The racism is hanging around his withered old neck like a rotting Confederate tombstone. Because in Jeff Sessions' America, they're still partying like it's 1860, or its twin, 1899. In Jeff Sessions' America, Rudyard Kipling still reigns at the top of the charts:

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Just as American imperialists have always cracked down on their fluttered subjects like little boys ripping the wings from butterflies, so too do the Trumpist authoritarians want to teach a lesson to anyone not kowtowing to them with all the requisite sullenness. These officials intimidate and flail so mindlessly, because they are so deathly afraid of being mocked.

"Authoritarianism and a sense of humor rarely go together," writes Amnesty International's Steve Crawshaw in the new book Street Spirit.  "That's where protesters can gain the upper hand - or at least find an excuse to laugh at their rulers or other powerful players (who, in turn, have little clue how to react.)"

"Laughtivists"  adds Crawhaw, "can help destroy the sense of invulnerability that unwanted rulers need in order to sustain themselves. The more they are persecuted by these rulers, the more afraid and vulnerable the rulers themselves are made to appear."

I never would have heard late night comic Stephen Colbert's tasteless joke about Donald Trump were it not for the news that Trump's Federal Communications Commission is investigating him for possible violations of obscenity laws. Thanks to the thin-skinned authoritarians currently in charge,  Colbert's previously moribund ratings are nearly high enough to even surpass Trump's in his reality show heyday.

Now, because of government overreaction, we'll never be able to get that hideous image of Trump in the act of pleasuring Putin out of our minds. If there's one thing that might keep the boring RussiaGate scandal alive in the minds of American consumers, it's making a dirty joke out of it.

Hillary Clinton must be grimly cackling all the way to her new SuperPac as she hilariously tries to refashion herself as the elite face of the Trump Resistance. Therefore, it is all the more vital that we resist her brand of Resistance -- Elitivism -- with all the persistence we can muster. Our continuing existence as the free laughtivists of the Counter-Resistance depends upon it.

In case you're feeling depleted and powerless in the face of all this daunting resistant elitism, take a break from mocking the withered racist corpus of Jeff Sessions, and remember another monumentally tasteless joke. It was back in 2011, at the beginning of the Arab Spring, that then-Madame Secretary Hillary quipped: "Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable. I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family."

As Crawshaw writes in his book, millions of ordinary Egyptians then began to laugh so heartily that they took to Tahrir Square in a fit of peaceful protest, and Mubarek soon shuffled his dour way out the door to several years in the slammer. But that was a dictatorship, and we Americans still enjoy a modicum of constitutional rights. If only Mubarek had installed a private server and pretended to be holding a free and fair electoral primary. If only he'd cracked a scripted joke or two. If only WikiLeaks had not become the face of public interest journalism, then the fortunes of the Mubareks and the Clintons might be very different today.

The joke was on the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party when WikiLeaks emails revealed that Citigroup had literally appointed Barack Obama's cabinet for him. The treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, was able to deadpan his way through his own Senate confirmation hearing, insisting that his failure to pay his personal income taxes was just an oversight. He later cracked the sick joke that foreclosing on victimized homeowners would be stretched out so as to "foam the runway" for unprosecuted banksters. He and his cronies laughed all the way to the bank in one big fat big circle of fun.

In case you're still not getting the neoliberal, insiderish brand of dry elitivist counter-humor, try this, because Hillary Clinton had her audience absolutely shaking. How could any one political standup routine be so creatively zany?

So you see, laughtivists, it really is possible to both loathe Trump and to rejoice that Hillary Clinton lost the election.

The selective enforcement of the obscenity laws, meanwhile, is rendered all the more ironic given that Obama's FCC had given a cynical free pass to last fall's permanent feedback loop broadcasts of Donald Trump's infamous "pussy-grabbing" remarks. Who even knew that there were still obscenity laws on the books? The Democratic Party must have mistakenly believed that Americans are still shocked by obscenity. But rather than protecting people's ears, they preferred that people get shocked into voting for Hillary by the drumming up of maximum disgust at the more disgusting Donald Trump.

They preferred in vain.

The hypocrisy is just so damned funny, it's hard to even breathe sometimes.

Even so, the possibilities for hoi polloi mischief and guffaws get more endless with every passing day. Who gets the last laugh is yet to be determined.

 Sessions, Geithner, Clinton, & Unidentified Prankster Enjoy Moment of Mirth At Your Expense

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