Clump in the White House

(Clinton + Trump = Clump) 

I'm not hallucinating, and neither are you. The Donald Trump presidency is swiftly manifesting itself as almost the exact same presidency that Hillary Clinton envisioned for herself.  Same war-hungry neocon generals, same neoliberal Wall Street bankers, and of course, the same kind of palace intrigues and unforced errors for which the Clintons have been so rightly famous throughout their own political careers.

Politics is entertainment, in case you hadn't noticed. Unless, of course, you're one of those people on the receiving end of the Tomahawk missiles, the Predator drones and most recently, the Mother of All Bombs. Only in America could the biggest piece of weaponry ever dropped upon the earth be described in such grotesque maternal terms.

The populism of Trump is (surprise!) turning out to be just as fake as the populism of the Clintons. As the late Christopher Hitchens noted in his scathing book about the Clintons (Nobody Left to Lie To) these politicians achieved their initial success by co-opting regular people in the service of the ruling class elite. Hillary's problem during the past election cycle was that she was a stale, boring, wonkish liar, while Donald was the more colorful and amusing fibber.

And so far, Trump hasn't been forced to pay for his lies because he has utterly succeeded in normalizing the political flip-flop and making ignorance a virtue. Nobody expects him to tell the truth about anything, and so the constant fact-checking of his statements is getting more tedious and exhausting by the day. Stop the presses! Trump lied again! In relentlessly informing his fans about something they didn't already know, the fact-checkers only keep proving what stuck-up snobbish sticklers they are.

We exceptional bootstrapping Americans are far too enthralled by the dogma that the end always justifies the means, and that nothing succeeds like success, to really take Trump to task.  As Jeremy Peters writes in the New York Times:

No matter how many people try to tell them they have been played for fools, much to their annoyance, that is not a conclusion they seem likely to reach before Mr. Trump even marks his 100th day in office.

They knew all along that they were not voting for a man with concrete convictions. And they continue to see that lack of rigidity — his preference for the transactional over the dogmatic — as a quality they want in a chief executive.

So while much of the country sees the swerving on policy as another sign of White House dysfunction, many conservatives shrug it off as esoteric jockeying over foreign alliances, currency manipulation and economic policy. They are focused more, they say, on what they see as a litany of recent victories.

With Trump's unabashed love of international violence and sanctioned terrorism now on full display, the phony opposition party known as the Democrats hasn't even got a feeble leg to stand on. There's been nary a peep from the Clintonites on his ever more lethal rampages, including the dropping of "Mother" and a whole series of other utterly unintentional bombings of hundreds (if not thousands) of innocent bystanders in his first hundred days in power.

But if the Democratic leaders are having any second thoughts about their own recklessness, goading Trump into adopting a more bellicose policy in response to their accusations of Kremlin puppetry, they're keeping such thoughts to themselves. RussiaGate is still a thing, albeit a less discussed thing this week, now that Trump is going into full neocon overdrive.

Trump is Obama's third term, Bush's (both pere and fils) third term, Clinton's third term and Reagan's third term. He is continuity of government of, by and for the richest of the rich. He combines the very worst that the duopolistic enterprise has to offer to us, and he offers it with a vicious relish so lacking in his more circumspect predecessors. He doesn't lie and pander with their glibness and charm and folksiness. He wears his heart, clogged and shriveled as it probably is, right on his sleeve.

Nepotism? He's proud of it. As Jack Shafer points out in Politico, Hillary Clinton would have established Bill as co-president by now, with Ivanka's BFF Chelsea doing the honors as first lady. And without the ethical baggage and the grandstanding of permanent congressional investigations, where would our reality show of a democracy be?

Remember how Trump’s surrogates said during the campaign that a Clinton presidency would be too hobbled by the ongoing FBI investigation to govern effectively? Instead, we’ve gotten a Trump presidency tainted by an FBI investigation of several of his top campaign aides. During the campaign, Trump beat on Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen with the baseball-bat fury of Joey Ramone. “To a certain extent, I think she should be ashamed of herself,” he said. That statement is now inoperative, replaced with the “I like her, I respect her” statement he gave to the Wall Street Journal. Reappointing her to the Fed is not outside the realm of possibility.

Ivanka's and Jared's personal lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, who opined that there is nothing at all shady about the Kushners' use of public office for private gain, is an alumnus of the Clinton administration. In her capacity as Bill's deputy attorney general, she became embroiled in the Fannie Mae accounting scandal and also wrote the memo segregating intelligence agencies from one another. That decision, which disallowed the sharing of information among the agencies, led to the series of unfortunate miscommunication events which culminated in the 9/11 attacks. The War on Terror has continued raking in the cash for the plutocrats ever since.

 Gorelick later acted as chief counsel for BP in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill. And besides imparting lucrative legal advice to Jared and Ivanka, she also sits on the boards of Amazon and the giant weapons manufacturer and major polluter known as United Technologies.

  You obviously don't hear establishment Democrats lambasting Trump for stuffing the White House with the same Goldman Sachs people who paid the Clintons their hundreds of millions of dollars in speaking fees. That's because Wall Street is the living continuity of government so essential to the ruling class racketeers who run this country as they fund and control both political parties.

Gary Cohn, the Democratic Goldman Sachs COO in charge of Trump's National Economics Council, is another testament to the fact that despite what the entertainment media dubs The Wild West Wing, everything is running very smoothly, exactly as it is meant to run in a feudal society. Slate's Daniel Gross explains:

The National Economic Council was created during the first year of the Clinton administration. Its inaugural director was Robert Rubin, the co-head of Goldman Sachs who was an influential early Clinton adviser. After two years at NEC, Rubin was promoted to Treasury Secretary. Rubin’s partner in running Goldman in the 1990s was Stephen Friedman. Friedman left the firm in 1994 but in 2002 was named to succeed Larry Lindsey as—yup—director of President George W. Bush’s National Economic Council.

Friedman and Rubin were succeeded at the helm of Goldman by Jon Corzine, who went on to run successfully for U.S. Senate and then governor after he was ousted in 1998. Corzine was replaced by Henry Paulson, who had been the chief operating officer. And when Paulson’s time at chief executive at Goldman came to an end, he skipped the NEC and went directly to the Treasury Department.

The Clintons and the Trumps are both New York limousine liberal dynasties residing in the same physical core of the Plutonomy.  Therefore, the core accusation in RussiaGate -- that Trump is beholden to, and financially embroiled with, Putin's oligarchs -- is simply a partisan red herring. High-end New York real estate could not exist without the global oligarchy. Luxury buildings and apartments in Manhattan are just like unregulated banks: they're a place for obscenely rich and tax-averse tycoons to park their billions. The purchasers of these luxury digs rarely if ever even set foot in them, even as the homeless population in the Wealth Disparity Capital unconscionably increases.

Joel Kotkin writes in "The New Class Conflict", 

Fifty percent of buyers in some urban areas are foreigners seeking pied-a-terre in what is increasingly an exclusive global club. This concentration of wealth begins to change everything in the political realm as well. In New York (...) the finances of the country's largest municipality are now entirely at the mercy of a few thousand very rich taxpayers....

Increasingly, in this era of Oligarchs, certain cities are not so much centers for upward mobility as preferred locales for the successful, talented and wealthy.... The rich cluster in the center and the poor serve them from the dreary periphery.

It should come as no big shock, therefore, that Russian oligarchs have invested some of their ill-gotten gains in Trump properties and hidden their ownership beneath limited liability companies for the tax-evading purposes which our corporate-owned Congress have deemed perfectly normal and legal. Rare would be the real estate tycoon or associate who avoided interacting with them.

As I wrote during the Clump campaign last year, Hillary and Donald actually have more in common than either they, or the corporate media profiting so intensely from the electoral charade, were willing to publicly admit. They did not, for example, heed my suggestion to hold one of their debates at their mutual homestead, located at 1209 Orange Street in Wilmington, Delaware.  This is just one of the domestic havens where both Hillary and Donald hide their excess cash from the tax collector.

Something invaded our democracy, all right, and the invasion was born within our own national boundaries. These boundaries are, of course, perfectly porous. Capital flows freely, but human bodies do not.

There's never been a more apt bipartisan time for Congress to change the name of Washington, D.C. to Wall Street-Upon-Potomac.

The Trumps: Neoliberalism's Perfect Distraction

Stop the presses. Donald Trump had the unprecedented gall this week to hang up on the Australian prime minister, right after rudely reneging on Barack Obama's noble promise to accept a token number of people who fled U.S. invasions and bombings only to find themselves imprisoned in a privatized Down Under gulag.

To hear the ruling establishment whine about this Major Incident in the Oval Office, the refugee prisoners might as well not even exist. The big hang-up is all about a shocking breach of etiquette at the heretofore pristine pinnacle of world power. And so begins the daunting task of scapegoating a scapegoating old goat.

By concentrating on the disastrous manners of Donald Trump and his entire clan, the mainstream media deflects attention from the ravages of Disaster Capitalism itself. It's more convenient to instill hate and fear of the new president than it is to examine the forces that produced him and other right-wing populist demagogues like him.

Entirely lost in the conversation about Trump's serial breaches of protocol is the long-standing breach of the social contract. The media, far from being the champions of social and economic justice, are falling all over themselves to scoop each other in the etiquette sweepstakes.

Establishment mouthpiece The Washington Post leads the Miss Manners pack by informing us that Trump is not only rude, he is unnecessarily rude. After all, the new president should be joyfully reveling in his new power, if not metaphorically chain smoking the post-orgasmic cigarettes of the traditional media honeymoon period.

It should have been one of the most congenial calls for the new commander in chief — a conversation with the leader of Australia, one of America’s staunchest allies, at the end of a triumphant week.

 Instead, President Trump blasted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refu­gee agreement and boasted about the magnitude of his electoral college win, according to senior U.S. officials briefed on the Saturday exchange. Then, 25 minutes into what was expected to be an hour-long call, Trump abruptly ended it.

The Post doesn't bother to inform its readers why the refugee crisis has become such a hot-potato issue among staunch and congenial democratic countries. Better for the newspaper and its billionaire owner not to mention that it is the global banking cartel and multinational corporations which have caused so much unprecedented death and injury and disease and famine and infrastructure collapse and despair through endless wars and cruel austerity policies. Millions of people have literally nowhere to go and nowhere to hide because of just one thing: violent American imperialism.

The borderless military-industrial complex, when not letting migrants drown in the oceans or starve to death in flight from their war-torn homes, has been warehousing them in private prisons in such out-of-the-way places as islands off the Australian coast. And the Australian P.M. is in as much of a pickle as Donald Trump, because of all the bad publicity surrounding the subhuman treatment of refugee prisoners by some of the same multinational corporations profiting from wars and austerity and plunder. He wants to play Musical Refugees, offshore some of the human detritus so he won't look so bad to his electorate. His country's cruel private refugee prison system is actually run by Serco, the same multi-tentacled British conglomerate that was awarded $1.25 billion by the Obama administration for the disastrous roll-out of its health insurance marketplace. The company got the contract despite its long history of fraud and incompetence.

But never mind all that pre-Trumpian crony disaster capitalism. Step right up and gaze over here, all you Washington Post consumers - it's Trump, the Rude and Unready!

Trump’s behavior suggests that he is capable of subjecting world leaders, including close allies, to a version of the vitriol he frequently employs against political adversaries and news organizations in speeches and on Twitter.

“This is the worst deal ever,” Trump fumed as Turnbull attempted to confirm that the United States would honor its pledge to take in 1,250 refugees from an Australian detention center.

Forget the substandard inhumane living conditions endured by Disaster Capitalism's millions of victims. Because the Neoliberal Thought Collective has made them so easy to forget as they concentrate our collective wrath on such a limited man in such an artificially limited fashion.

But just in case you can't forget, please now direct your attention to the Old Goat's wife. Because Melania Trump is committing her own unprecedented breach of etiquette by refusing to move to Washington and play her assigned role as The Good Wife. As New York Times White House correspondent Julie Hirschfeld Davis tells it, things have gotten so bad that thousands of requests for private tours of the People's House have gone ignored. And worst of all etiquette breaches, they haven't even begun planning for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll yet! Professional concern-trollers are extremely concerned. Those dreaded passive-voice "questions are being raised."

 “She is far behind the curve compared to where modern first ladies have been by the time their husbands are inaugurated, in a quite unprecedented way,” said Myra Gutin, a professor at Rider University who specializes in first ladies. “We are in uncharted territory here.”

No mention of the uncharted territory that so many millions of migrants and refugees and myriad other victims of neoliberal policies are finding themselves trapped in all around this burning, drowning planet. (And just as an aside, the whereabouts of Melania Trump immediately pale in comparison to the revelation that First Ladies Studies seems to be an actual academic discipline.)

If you're not sufficiently incensed at Mrs. Old Goat's ineptitude and selfishness, let's move on to First Daughter Ivanka Trump. She is taking a ton of liberal heat for advertising her brand last weekend at the exact same moment that hundreds of refugees were being detained at the nation's airports.

  USA Today sniffed,

Timing is everything in politics, as French Queen Marie Antoinette learned two centuries ago, and Ivanka Trump was reminded of over the weekend.
"Let them eat cake!" mocked the tweets and Instagram comments on Trump's accounts, after she posted pictures of herself and husband Jared Kushner dressed to the nines — she in a $5,000 silvery gown by Carolina Herrera — just as chaos and protests erupted at international airports over President Trump's just-signed order barring refugees and travelers from some Muslim countries.

It's gotten so bad that Nordstrom's was even forced to discontinue Ivanka's clothing line.

Frank Bruni of the New York Times was especially miffed because Ivanka let her husband Jared Kushner fondle her butt during the photo shoot. "He (adviser Steve Bannon) has a seat on the National Security Council. Kushner has his hand on Ivanka Trump’s seat," Bruni quipped while urging his readership to go ogle the picture.

Last month, feminist writer Jill Filopovic opined in a Times op-ed that Ivanka is practically alone among her wealthy peers and friends (including Chelsea Clinton) for not only being a totally fake feminist, but also a totally dangerous fake feminist. Filopovic, while decrying Ivanka's privilege and her ghost-written parenting advice book for career women, and her disturbing attachment to the Old Goat, also takes a gratuitous neoliberal dig at poorer women, who seem to be reproducing like rabbits without benefit of wedlock:

Unlike in past generations when educated women had a harder time finding partners, today, college-educated women like Ms. Trump are more likely than their working-class counterparts to wed, and also like Ms. Trump, usually delay childbirth until after the wedding. With the fewer financial stressors that come with dual incomes or a single extremely high one these educated couples divorce less often than those with fewer financial resources, despite other findings that both groups have comparable dedication to the marital ideal.

Filopovic of course has no problem with the trickle-down feminism of other neoliberal wives and spawn of wealthy men -- such as Hillary Clinton and Chelsea. So I left a published comment on her annoying and hypocritical screed:

This piece could just have easily been written about Ivanka's friend Chelsea Clinton, had her Mom won.

Chelsea wrote a book too, hers aimed at young people. She urges them to travel the world and and take some time out to get to know the poor. Like Ivanka advising women of her own class, or those aspiring to her heights, Chelsea was addressing versions of herself. She lives in as much of a mirror-bubble as Ivanka and other meritocrats with a conscience.

No wonder that even during the height of the nasty bickering between their parents, both women pledged undying friendship to one other. Class transcends the Duopoly.

There are plenty of highly educated young society matrons in New York and Washington and the West Coast, spewing the same neoliberal hucksterism (Be your own Mommy brand! Be your own entrepreneur! Lean In! Sleep Revolution!) as Ivanka Trump -- who, let's remember, couldn't even vote for Daddy in the New York primary because she'd forgotten to divest from her Democratic party affiliation by the deadline.

 So it's convenient that Ivanka suddenly becomes just the right hook upon which to hang this critique of "fake feminism." Since her father is such a big creep, she's fair game. If she were a real feminist, she would have disowned him years ago. Right?

Anyway, I guess it'll be fun in a gross kind of way watching her try to play Cordelia to Trump's King Lear. All the world's a political stage and we the audience are, as ever, merely being played.

Of course, the lifestyles and coutures and excesses of the Trumps are not that different from the lifestyles of the Clintons -- or the Obamas, who just moved into a mansion two blocks away from Ivanka and her family. The main difference is in the virtue-signalling.

If you must bomb many countries for many decades, and if you must reward yourself and your plutocratic friends and donors with record gains at the expense of the huddled masses who elected you, you also must maintain the proper decorum and use the proper platitudes. Instead of constantly boasting and consuming way too much way too conspicuously, you utter such phrases as "Women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights" and "When they go low, we go high" and "I am my brother's keeper.org."

When you go on your luxury vacations, you never, but never, post pictures on Instagram. While cavorting on a private island, for example, you discreetly allow the rare casual capture of your cool dad image, complete with flip-flops and a backwards baseball cap. And voila, you will fill the Internet with some of that much-needed joy so seriously lacking in the Trump gene pool. 

You have to combine the fakery with folksiness and flattery and finesse. And the Trumps will never in a million years be able to do folksiness and flattery and finesse. 

Half the country despises them because they're such rich oafs. The other half loves them, because the Trumps prove that if even clueless oafs like them can be successful, then anybody can be successful. Even you. Better an honest huckster than a phony huckster.

Donald Trump: Candidate Y2K16

Remember the late 90s, when everybody was in a tizzy over the imminent end of the world because the geeks hadn't fixed the clocks in computers? And remember how we woke up on January 1, 2000 to an intense hangover of continuing life, our money still in the bank, electricity still thrumming through the grid.. and most important of all, intact and crystal clear cell phone and Internet connections?

This time around, the disaster hysteria revolves around the very slim chance that a different kind of virus known as Donald J. Trump will usher in Armageddon.  If Trump is elected, Putin will invade America, take over the Internet, and super-rich people will be fleeing the country in droves. It couldn't get any worse than that last part.  

And it would be all your fault because, even if you personally voted for Hillary Clinton, you obviously didn't work for her hard enough, guilt-tripping your friends and neighbors into voting for her too. This failure to work for free for a quarter-billionaire is the new original sin. Because only Hillary can save the planet. The Guardian said so right in a front page editorial over the weekend.

What really had the serious people freaking out over the weekend was revered odds-making guru Nate Silver giving Donald Trump about a 35 percent chance of beating Hillary. As a result, he is being declared a jerk and a traitor by the HillHuffPo. How dare he crunch numbers that are not, at minimum, one hundred percent favorable to Hillary Clinton? Nate Silver is causing unnecessary "waves of panic" all across the landscape. By putting his thumbs on the math scales, he is almost as dastardly as FBI Director James Comey himself.

The declaration of treachery in turn unleashed an F bomb-laced, 14-part Tweet-storm from Nate Silver, who in his own defense was even forced to partially plagiarize Michelle Obama.

"When you go low, I go high 80% of the time, and knee you in the balls the other 20% of the time," the math whiz fumed.

But Nate Silver's feelings getting hurt is nothing compared to the angst that The Market is experiencing in the End Times. They're in a downright shuddering frenzy. With Donald Trump's poll numbers improving, the S&P 500 was down for the ninth straight day on Friday, something that hasn't happened since 1980. The Donald Bug has led to the most prolonged selloff in stocks since the '08 financial crisis.  Even the manufactured Y2K Bug-Panic of '99 didn't have the power of Trump.

So it's only natural that media pundits would also be scared out of what passes for their wits.

Frank Bruni, who only last week vowed to quickly get over his Trump coverage addiction, isn't quite there yet. He admits to being "terrified" by Election Armageddon. Even if we all wake up Wednesday morning breathing a sigh of post-Trumpian relief, our fear will linger on like a really bad case of the measles:

There’s no end here, just a punctuation mark, a measly comma between the rancor that has built until this point and the fury to come. And there’s no way to un-see what all of us have seen over these last 18 months, to bottle up what has been un-bottled.

Election Day will redeem and settle nothing, not this time around. No matter who declares victory, tens of millions of Americans will be convinced — truly convinced — that the outcome isn’t legitimate because untoward forces intervened. Whether balloons fall on Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, there will be bolder divisions in America than there were at the start of it all and even less faith in the country’s most important institutions.

I know exactly what he means. The FBI, which has been in its own frenzy of fear-mongering through entrapment of marginalized people into fake terror plots while ignoring warnings of real terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers, is a prime example. It's been such a well-regarded public institution for well over a century. And just look at it now. James Comey's re-opening of the Clinton email investigation and meddling in our free and fair elections has seriously tarnished its stellar reputation. It has effectively neutered its recent noble accomplishment of secretly scanning millions of our Yahoo email accounts. If we can't all be considered terrorists until never proven otherwise, we might as well become atheists and refuse to recite the Pledge. If we're going to be divisive, we may as well go whole hog and be boldly divisive.

And the rest of the world respecting us? Forget about it. Donald Trump has been such an embarrassment. He is doing untold damage to the reputation of Barack Obama, so beloved throughout the globe for his humanitarian wars and drone assassinations. If Trump wins, the rich and famous people had better think of emigrating to Waziristan so they can huddle in the safety of the tribal regions. Better to hear drones constantly buzzing above your heads than to have to listen to Donald's potty mouth all the time.

In its recent survey of global attitudes,  Pew researchers discovered that the majority of residents of other countries strongly disapprove of both the Obama administration's drone attacks and its widespread surveillance upon ordinary citizens. Trump would seriously erode these ratings, because he would probably be prone to bragging about the atrocities. The United States might not get as many Likes in the global popularity sweepstakes under Trump. It would lose the favorability it still enjoys, against all odds. Even Nate Silver might be flummoxed.

And what a toll a Trump presidency would take on freedom of the press. His serial insults of news agencies and reporters might even cause the USA to drop from its current dismal 41st place in Reporters Without Borders' annual ranking list. What a dreadful blow to our national reputation it would be for Mauritania or Slovenia or Niger to beat us in the event of a Trump victory. It's already bad enough that the highly ranked Scandinavian countries are as transparent about informing the public as they are generous in their "people first" social welfare programs.

Of course, much of the fear-mongering about the Trump of Doom is for crass purposes of last minute fund-raising for the Democrapublican Party and its respective offshoots. So any email you're receiving slugged "Dead Heat!"  is bound to contain a panic-stricken appeal for cash.

Here's former Bernie Sanders supporter Robert Reich mongering on behalf of  MoveOn, one of the biggest Democratic veal pens in existence:

By now, we all know the stakes of this election—and the choice between a dangerous authoritarian demagogue or a woman of great experience and commitment, running on the most progressive major-party platform ever.

We all know the real threat that Donald Trump could win. The polls have tightened to a dead heat this week, with Trump ahead in many battleground states.

Even the normally cool President Obama is siding with Nate Silver and pretending to push the Trump panic button. “This should not be a close race, but it’s going to be a close race," he warned North Carolina voters last week.

Obama should just relax. 

I, for one, am feeling very relaxed. I just mailed in my ballot, and feminist that I am, voted for four fine women: Jill Stein of the Green Party for president; Robin Laverne Wilson of the Green Party for U.S. Senate; Zephyr Teachout of the Democratic Party for U.S. House of Representatives; and  Pramilla Malick of the Democratic Party for New York State Senate.

(Malick is really something of a miracle in these parts. Although the GOP incumbent has run unopposed for decades, more people have chosen "blank" on their ballots than have actually voted for him. Senator Blank has been the real victor for way too long. So it's nice to actually have a real human choice for change.)

I'll be back after Election Day... assuming that there is no shocking TrumPutin Armageddon and I still have an Internet connection.

Vote! And don't let anybody tell you you're throwing your vote away if you choose to diverge from the Duopoly. That line of bull got stale a long time ago.

As Corey Robin lays out in an excellent post, we mustn't let the inevitable gaslighting by Hillary supporters get to us:

 Liberals in the media, academia, political circles, and on social media who support Clinton act as if your one vote—out of the more than 100 million cast—determines the fate of the republic. If you vote for Stein (whether in a safe state or not), you are personally responsible for Trump’s inauguration.
These voices are often the very same people who, when challenged about Clinton’s voting record in the Senate or Obama’s policies, will say: Clinton was only one voice in a Senate, out of…a hundred voices. Obama was one lonely man arrayed against…three veto points.
Somewhere in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith has a passage about how we identify with the trials and travails of a king, giving him all of our sympathy and understanding, yet are so repelled by the tribulations of the lowly that we can scarce understand what they’re going through.

"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” ― Charles Dickens

 

Debate & Switch III: The Ultimate Clump

For those of you who wisely missed the big event, here's a condensed and creative but essentially accurate transcript of Wednesday's final "debate" between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Pitching the softballs at Team Clump was Chris Wallace of Fox News.

Chris: I want to drill right down.... like an oil rig in fragile, shallow Arctic waters. No audience participation will be tolerated. What -- you thought this was a participatory democracy and the debates weren't funded and controlled by the corporations that own the place? So shut up already, and let these two plutocrats spew their dreck at the enthralled TV audience.

First topic, Supreme Court. Will you let the Founders lead the country from their graves?

Hillary: You know, what kind of country is this going to be? We need a Supreme Court that will stand up for women's rights and do away with the kind of dark money that my campaign has had absolutely no qualms about accepting.

Chris: Trump, same question.

Donald: I love all the amendments but mostly the Second, which is under trauma.

Chris: Clinton, what's wrong with everybody having a gun?

Hillary: Nothing. I love guns and I love gun-owners. Arkansas and Upstate New York, which I represented, are chock-full of the yahoos with guns. But I sure wouldn't want someone to kill us with one. Especially a redneck toddler. We have to keep guns out of the chubby little hands of toddlers living in trailer parks in Arkansas and Upstate New York.

Chris: Trump?

Donald: Hillary is very strongly against the Second Amendment. She was very angry about the Heller decision. People were angry about her anger.

Hillary: I hate it when hordes of toddlers go around shooting each other. Their deplorable parents don't lock up their guns.

Chris: Trump, you support national open-carry.

Donald: Chicago has the toughest gun laws and the most violence. Just thought I'd get the obligatory racist dog whistle out of the way early. I will appoint only Second Amendment lovers to the Court.

 Chris: Now that you mentioned violence, let's naturally segue into the hot button issue that wasn't a hot button issue until I said it was. Abortion. Trump, will you overturn Roe v Wade?

Donald: Let the states decide. For purposes of this election, I am pro-life. I have no other choice as a Republican.

Hillary: I love Roe v Wade. Donald hates cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood. He wants to punish women who get abortions.

Chris: As a loyal Fox News employee, I will now gratuitously bring up the constitutional rights of Fetuses. Why, Clinton, are you against fetuses?

Hillary: I am for the health of mothers.

Donald: I think that is terrible! Hillary just wants to rip babies right out of wombs! In the final day of the ninth month!

Hillary: That's not what happens. You should meet with the women I've met over the course of my life. The government should stay out of wombs.

Chris: Since climate change is never an issue at Fox News, let's move on to immigration. Trump?

Donald: In the audience are four parents of kids killed by illegals. You have thousands of relatives all over the country. Drugs are pouring in. The border patrol endorsed me. Hillary and Obama cause heroin addiction. We have some Bad Hombres here and we have to get them out. 

Chris: Clinton, is he wrong?

Hillary: When he was talking I was getting my next talking point lined up. I met a girl in Vegas named Carla whose parents are going to be ripped away from her the way Donald's imaginary full-term fetuses are getting ripped out of wombs. I don't want to rip. I am not a ripper.

Donald: Hillary wanted that Wall!

Hillary: I only want appropriate walls.Trump exploits undocumented shadow-workers.

Donald: Obama deports record numbers of my undocumented shadow workers!

Hillary: I do so too want borders! Why can't Trump be more like Saint Ronald Reagan? And my other Republican icon, the great George W. Bush?

Chris: But in $260,000 WikiLeaks speeches, you said you wanted open borders!

Hillary: But not for people. That was only for capital. Read the whole WikiLeaks why don't you. Oops, on second thought, don't, Because it's a Russian plot to rig the election. Why can't Trump just admit that he is a secret Russian agent?

Donald: That was a great pivot from open borders.

Chris: Hold on a minute. This is getting out of my express control. Silence!

Trump: Putin has no respect for Hillary.

Hillary: He'd rather have a puppet president.

Donald:You're the puppet.

Hillary: No you're the puppet.

Donald: Am not!

Hillary: Are too! The Russian plot is deeply disturbing to the secret heads of a multitude of secret American agencies which collect all your emails and phone records without your knowledge or permission.

Chris: Hey, what about me? Trump - will you condemn Putin or won't you?

Donald: Sure. I have no idea.

Chris: Wait, this has nothing to do with immigration!

Hillary: He wants to put his short fingers on the nuclear button in a very casual fashion. I am terrified. It would take Donald Trump only four minutes to blow up the whole entire world.

Donald: I have 200 generals and admirals and Medal of Honor recipients. Am too!

Hillary: The United States has kept the peace! The only way to keep the peace is enlisting many other NATO countries to spread the war around.

Chris: Now the economy. I hope you handle this as well as you handled immigration. I'm gonna drill down in your icy cold shallow waters a little bit more now, and hope the blow-out preventer gizmo works better than it did in the Gulf. So, Clinton, what about jobs and growth?

Hillary: If I can believe in more middle class Ladders of Opportunity, so can you. Think lovely thoughts. Donald doesn't believe in Ladders. He only believes in Chutes. He's a sore loser.

Donald: Saudi Arabia must pay. Also too Germany and South Korea and Japan, not to single them out, but why aren't they paying for our free college tuition? We're going to cut business taxes on massively rich people very massively. We're dying at One Percent GDP.

Hillary: Let me translate that if I may, Chris.

Donald: No you can't.

Hillary: I will not raise taxes on poor struggling people who make only $249,000 a year. When my husband, on whose coattails I am riding, was in office, we had a surplus caused by the bubble economy that was pumped up and later blown apart by deregulation. So we know how to control hot air. Obama's austerity measures for the middle class and poor then cut the deficit by two-thirds. Hooray for the plutocracy! We have to invest in people to make money off of people. Free-market neoliberalism with a happy face works for the One Percent!

Chris: So more Obama stimulus? Since I work at Fox News, let me get the usual dig in and falsely assert what a total drag it was on the economy.

Hillary: I've never seen plutocrats so physically distraught from an economic catastrophe as they were in the  Bush administration. It was touch and go for the poor things for a couple of months. President Obama simply doesn't get the credit he deserves for ensuring that more than 90% of the gains have gone straight back to them. It was a terrible recession for them.

Donald: The economy is so bad I should be winning. Clinton can brag, but the results of NAFTA didn't kick in until they were out of office. Now she wants to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership. She lied, they fact-checked, and I was so honored.

Hillary: When I saw the final fine print of TPP when I announced my candidacy I decided to be against it. Unless it "creates jobs, increases national security and raises incomes" I'll be against it after I am president too. And that is being deliberately vague and pragmatic. As I said in my leaked speech to bankers, there is a public stance and a private stance. And Donald built his Tower with Chinese steel.

Donald: You had a chance to stop me for 30 years and you didn't. You're a mess.

Hillary: When I was working for the Children's Defense Fund for a minute, Donald was kicking children out of their homes. When I was going against teachers' unions in Arkansas, he was inheriting millions from his Daddy. When I wore a soft powder pink suit to China as the consort of a president, he was fat-shaming Miss Universe. When I was curled up in the Situation Room, watching the violent porn of the Osama bin Laden execution, Donald was taping Celebrity Apprentice. Oh the humanity. Oh the things I have endured for this country.

Donald: You're fired. Go directly to jail.

Chris: Clinton?

Hillary: He never says he's sorry for anything. At least I admit that mistakes were sometimes made and I might do things differently all over again if I possessed even a smidgen of insight. But Donald even went after my war-mongering Republican friend John McCain. Ugh. Very, very dark. That's not who America is.

Donald: I'd love to talk about ISIS and stuff.

Chris: Okey-dokey. What about the emails and the corrupt Clinton Foundation, Clinton?

Hillary: Everything I did, I did for America. I'm thrilled to talk about it. So let me dodge the question and say that the Trump Foundation is for the enrichment of Donald Trump.

Donald: We put up the American flag at Mar-a-Lago.

Hillary: Release your tax returns!

Donald: It's because of people like you that I can avoid taxes. You could have changed the laws when you were a senator. Your donors are just like me and even worse than me.

Hillary: Chinese steel.

Chris: Will you accept the result of this election, Trump?

Donald: I see dead people. Voting. Stay tuned. It's rigged because Hillary should be in jail and never have been allowed to run.

Chris: But tradition, tradition!

Hillary: Horrifying to only now pretend to discover that Trump is not a gracious person. The FBI investigated me for a whole year. What more can you ask of a candidate? What's more, he complained he was cheated when he didn't get an Emmy for Celebrity Apprentice.

Donald: I should have.

Hillary: His mindset is funny, yet troubling. He's a big fat loser. This is not how democracy works. Democracy is a game and, as Obama said, you should not start whining before the game is even finished. Donald is rudely denigrating and talking down to a sporting event.

Chris: Hold on, folks. This kind of straight talk is no good to anyone at the top of the heap. So on to Foreign Hot Spots. What's hot and what's not? Give it your best Michelin Guide ratings. How's about Mosul? 

Hillary: So glad there are boots on the ground and I will forever object to boots on the ground. And then on to Syria! We desperately need an intelligence surge. And a no-fly zone with lots of collateral damage and death in order to humanely protect Syrians.

Donald: So sad. MacArthur and Patton are rolling in their graves.

Hillary: Donald went on the Howard Stern show to support the invasion of Iraq.

Donald: Did not.

Hillary: Did too. I got audio. He thinks he's better than me just because I voted for a sham war. I watched bin Laden get brought to justice with a hundred bullets while he was doing stupid Celebrity Apprentice. Nonny nonny boo boo. He's unfit every time he talks.

Donald: No, you are. John Podesta said some horrible things about you, and he's right. Bernie said you have bad judgment.

Hillary: Bernie really likes me and he really hates you.

Chris: Let's go to Aleppo! Trump, you falsely said it had fallen.

Donald: No, I said it was a catastrophic mess. Heckuva job, Hillary.

Chris: A hotshot general said your no-fly zone would mean war with Russia, Clinton.

Hillary: War saves lives and makes wars end. But maybe we can strike a deal. Rome wasn't built in a day. And I am not letting any Syrian refugees in without being vetted. Even that little boy in the ambulance with the blood and dirt all over his face who we use as propaganda. We rely on Muslim Americans to spy on other Muslim Americans. And let me gratuitously add that the Muslim American who shot up the Orlando gay nightclub was born in the same New York borough as Donald! We have to up our war games and be smarter.

Donald: ISIS is in 32 countries. Don't make me spell them out.

Chris: OK. Now let's move on to the false claim that Social Security and Medicare are going broke.  Why are you both ignoring this totally non-existent crisis?

Donald: I am going to create tremendous jobs.

Hillary: Back when Saint Ronald Reagan was president, Donald took out a full page ad and said America was the laughingstock of the world. I don't add to the national debt, which is indeed a very serious problem of the very serious people. We are going to politely beg the wealthy to pay their fair share. I want to invest in people and make them grow just like commodities. Donald's father was a millionaire and my father was only comfortably bourgeois.

Donald: I'm going to stick with the lie that cutting taxes on rich greedy bastards will create more jobs.

Chris: But what about entitlements for greedy widows, orphans and retirees?

Donald: Repeal and replace Obamacare. I'm not saying with what.

Hillary: Replenish the Social Security trust fund by taxing Donald Trump more -- unless he can figure a way to get out of it.

Donald: Such a nasty woman.

Hillary: Means-test Social Security, which is a sneaky way of turning it into a welfare program ripe for future cuts, instead of the social insurance program it is at the present time. I am euphemizing this for debate purposes as "harder decisions."

Chris: On a lighter note, let's end with some funny unrehearsed closing statements on why people should elect either one of you president. Clinton, it's your turn first.

Hillary: It's my turn. Awesome, incredible, mission, life's work, children, families.

Donald: She's raising money to control people. Me, I want to Make America Great Again.We have to take care of the military better than we take care of immigrants. We need law and order in mainly black inner cities. I will do more for them than she can ever do in ten lifetimes.

Chris: That brings to an end this series of corporate-controlled sham debates to which third and fourth party candidates have been barred because of low poll numbers caused by deliberate lack of coverage by the mainstream media. Now, America, the decision is up to you.

(Cheers, applause, spin, mainstream media becomes uniformly aghast that Trump thinks the whole process is rigged at the very same time they keep spreading the fear that Russia is trying to rig the election.)

Now, to be totally fair to all concerned, and in case you suspect that my creative editing of the debate transcript is too over the top for belief, here's a supplementary video that truly captures The Banality of Clump. It's going viral under the alternate title of "Creepy Grandma Grin."

 

Debate & Switch... Ad Infinitum

Democracy is dead. Short live the oligarchy.

As our two favorite despised plutocrats met for Round Two of their Neoliberal Death Match Sunday, you didn't really expect the show to be about anyone else but themselves, did you?

 Oh, sure, Hillary for the millionth time delved into that time 30 years ago when she liked children well enough to actually have taken a short-lived job devoted only to them. She stressed over and over again that those who work hard with their "god-given potential" are not in her basket of deplorables. Nor are Muslim American citizens who patriotically spy on their fellow Muslim Americans in order to keep the domestic blowback arising directly from American military aggression against Muslims abroad in check.

  And between his own chronic sniffs and snuffles, Donald emitted scowling, sullen concern for "the African-Americans, the Latinos, the Hispanics" in a sort of amplified dog-whistle that he totally doesn't relate to anybody outside his own race and class. And that was about it for the empathy.

The debate results seemed to be a wash, despite many ominous predictions in the mass media that Trump would implode and die right on the stage, if not physically assault Hillary. He nearly had a Lloyd Bentsen moment, after Hillary delivered a creative history lesson equating backroom neoliberal sausage-making with Lincoln's prosecution of the Civil War. He cleverly observed that Clinton was certainly no honest Abe. (You might remember that famous debate moment when Bentsen told goofy Dan Quayle that he was no Jack Kennedy.) But the fact that Trump was still reeling from that damaging sexual assault fantasy tape kind of took the bite out of his riposte.

 I am very sad to report that Donald's worst lie of the night was when he shockingly accused Hillary of being for Single Payer health care. Neither she nor the moderators bothered to burst that balloon with a fact-check. They were probably too busy thinking about crotches and the sexual predations of rich and powerful and privileged men.

And when asked at the end of the debate to name one good thing about each other, Hillary allowed that despite the awful Trump gene pool in which they are immersed, his own kids have turned out almost miraculously well. They might be grifters like their Dad, but at least they don't go around snatching at people's crotches while they're raking in their millions and cheating investors. And Donald graciously admitted that Hillary was a fighter, which almost brought a hint of a smile to her pursed lips, if not a sparkle to her glazed eyes. She obviously can't wait to establish a no-fly zone in Syria and get that direct war with Russia started.

And it won't be a minute too soon. She blamed Russia for everything from the Wikileaked emails showing she has never given up her neoliberal agenda (unfettered free trade, Bowles-Simpson safety net cuts, privatization of the public sphere), to messing with the election and secretly backing Donald Trump.

But America is great, she said several times, because America is good. See Spot Run. Run, Spot, Run. See Spot Run, Jane. I see Spot run, Dick. Hear Donald Sniff. See Hillary Cringe.

Nobody won. In fact, everybody lost, except for the corporate sponsors. And the media. The Hill emailed me the first breathtaking headline of the night: "Clinton, Trump Don't Shake Hands!" Cooties, not Crotches!

 According to the Times, it was "bitter" right up until the bitter end. There were "remarkably tawdry accusations of groping and abuse," enthusiastically sniffed the Gray Lady. The Paper of Record has been acting as though it just discovered the secret porn stash in Daddy's closet, and doesn't know whether to be disgusted or turned on. It's obviously a bit of both.

***

Before I forget, here are my published comments on three of Sunday's Times op-eds.

Maureen Dowd managed to write a whole column about Trump going to the dogs without mentioning Hillary even one time. I think that must be a record for this election season.

My response:

The feckless fleet of GOP ships is leaving the sinking rat.

That should fool nobody. Forget about telling Trump to resign, they should all hand in their resignations.

The reactionaries clutching their pearls because Trump wants to grab female crotches are the same perverts who want to force vaginal ultrasound wands into women seeking abortions. The GOPers now demanding that the female folk be treated with respect punish women every chance they get. They refuse to pass a law requiring equal pay for equal work. They refuse to take the epidemic of rape in the military seriously. They sadistically deny expanded Medicaid health coverage to women in red states. They force poor women off the welfare rolls into low-pay, no-benefit jobs at the same time that they refuse to subsidize universal preschool and child care and affordable housing and food assistance and higher education.

Trump is only the latest, most glaring example of the institutional pathology which passes for GOP governing strategy.

It takes a loathsome, painful, unavoidable symptom to alert benumbed voters to the disease that lurks beneath. Is it too late to excise one single Trumpian metastasis and declare America cured?

Probably. There are plenty more predators lurking, and plenty more media outlets and and lobbyists and corporations and SuperPacs to give them all the air and sustenance they need.

There are unabashed hogzillas like Trump, and then there's the whole passel of pigs posing as prigs.

***

Frank Bruni whines about Hillary's Poisoned Prize.  Even when she wins, she'll lose, because Washington is broken and the country is hopelessly divided and gridlock caused Donald Trump and if gridlock won't go away, neither will Trump. (And you thought the debate was remarkably tawdry? I mean, sniff!)

My response:

This is a very misleading column, steeped in the usual inside-the-Beltway corporate centrism. Mr. Bruni cannot actually believe that the rise of Trump has been caused by congressional partisan gridlock, a simple failure of two bickering sides to make nice and compromise.

Trump has been paradoxically and deliberately enabled by the same media-political complex that is now feigning outrage in a feeble pretense at reining him in. Just as he has personally profited from the pathocratic system that has replaced our democracy, so too are the ruling class racketeers profiting mightily off one of their own. They are co-dependent parasites, and we everyday Americans are their food.

Bernie Sanders might have lost the battle, but the war is yet to come. He and Elizabeth Warren and soon-to-be elected down-ticket progressives (such as, I hope, Zephyr Teachout of New York) will be leading the charge. It's not the gridlock, which mysteriously disappears whenever there's a war to be fought or a bankster to be rewarded or a secretive spy agency to be funded. Because nothing unites the political and media servants of the plutocracy like the almighty dollar.

Bruni is right, though, that the ugliness won't go away with the Clinton restoration. Trump will be a constant cable TV guest, maybe even start his own media empire. He'll laugh all the the way to the banks he leverages, thanks to the laws and tax codes his lawyers have dictated to that terrible, horrible, dysfunctional Congress.

***

Times Public Relations Flack Public Editor Liz Spayd answers reader complaints that the paper didn't go after Donald Trump soon enough and hard enough. She split the difference, asserting that the coverage was a tad late -- but tough, very tough... and powerful. Give the Gray Lady a little credit, readers, because at least the old gal finally broke down and wrote "fuck" and "pussy" and the presses didn't explode. Spayd forgets to acknowledge that David Cay Johnston did much of the legwork years ago. The Times really hates to be seen playing catch-up.

My comment:

Trump has been such an integral part of New York's tabloid gossip /entertainment/high society scene for so many decades that, as Ms. Spayd acknowledges, The Times simply gave him a pass when he first started what initially was a pseudo-campaign. This entertainer certainly saved the pundits from doing much investigatory work. Writers, most notoriously Maureen Dowd, spent valuable column space just letting him go on and on and on for months and months and months. We were immediately clued in that Donnie was, if not a friend of Maureen, at least a highly accessible source. At least one of the interviews took place in an intimate dinner setting at Trump Tower. Very insider-y, especially the part where she gushed about all the little people peering in at them with awe and wonder.

Now she's finally taking him to task, once he cinched the nomination. Too, too late.

David Cay Johnston is the reporter who truly wrote the book on this character. Trump never could have gotten where he is today without the complicity of the media-political complex. New Jersey state officials, for example, gave him the green light to turn Atlantic City into another Boardwalk Empire. Trump became his own bank: too big to fail and too big to jail.

And thanks to the serial Trumpian outrageousness taking almost permanent possession of the top of the digital home page, there simply wasn't enough space to cover Bernie Sanders in any but the most condescending of terms. What a shame. Couldn't be helped.