An Auspicious Start To the New Year

As I write this, Kevin McCarthy just lost the fifth vote in his quest for the speakership of the House of Representatives. Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was spotted strategizing with the very same jerk (Paul Gosar, R-AZ) who was censured last year for posting a cartoon of himself slashing her. Always a quick study, AOC apparently has let bygones be bygones, and is heeding the maxim of Rahm Emanuel, uttered in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown: "You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste."

Or as she laughingly put it, “I think in chaos anything is possible, especially in this era.” 

 All of this chaos and intrigue is unfairly taking the spotlight off the fabulous fabulist who is being shunned by the cool kids in both establishment cliques. Not only is incoming freshman George Santos too stupid to lie and commit fraud skillfully, he has actually admitted to being a fraudster and a liar. This kind of ex post facto honesty simply will not do at Hallowed Halls High School.

Congressional Chaos also makes it easier for the mainstream media to continue ignoring the revelations in the so-called Twitter Files, which essentially prove that the FBI and CIA are engaged up to their eyeballs in the censorship of political speech. The latest scoop from Matt Taibbi is that BMOC (Big Man on Campus) Adam Schiff  personally called for banning a journalist skeptical of his beloved, discredited #RussiaGate franchise.

If you want to learn about this scandal, and other recent revelations of government/corporate censorship and attempted censorship, your only choice is to peruse such right-wing media outlets as Fox News and the New York Post. That is because liberal establishment outlets aren't touching these stories, thereby practicing censorship by omission.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden's own main concern is that the speakership voting chaos is a terrible cosmetic problem for the entire political class hierarchy. And he should know, because despite his own lies about his mediocre academic record, he'd managed to skip the Lower House altogether, matriculating straight to the Senate a whole half-century ago.  

Biden did manage to let some truth escape by admitting that the  keeping up of appearances is the only glue holding the ruling establishment together. The ongoing intramural junior varsity squabble would normally be beneath his notice, were it not for the gawking spectators in the global stands. The lack of decorum and cohesion is terribly embarrassing to him, personally, even as he strives to rise above it all by taking his former frat buddy Mitch McConnell on a joyride aboard Air Force One as a way to brag about doing bipartisan things. This would be the same Mitch McConnell who hazed the whole country by almost single-handedly packing the Supreme Court with far-right ideologues. 

Speaking at the White House on Wednesday before traveling to Kentucky for an event to highlight last year's bipartisan infrastructure law with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Biden said of Republicans, “I hope they get their act together.” Biden said that “the rest of the world is looking” at the chaotic scenes on the House floor but that his focus was on “getting things done.”

One of the things Biden is not getting done is returning the millions of dollars of campaign cash donated by indicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. And anyway, "getting things done" iis just bipartisan-speak for reducing social benefits to everyday people while funding the US hegemon's endless wars and corporate welfare packages and paranoid surveillance activities.

Therefore chaos at the very highest levels of government should instill just a wee smidgen of hope in the rest of us. Oppression delayed is oppression denied, even if it's only for one more day, until somebody gets bribed, and caves, and then it's trumpeted as a victory for democracy.

Happy New Year, fellow Sardonickists!

Oh Say, Can You AOC?

Lots of people professed to be shocked, shocked when Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of all the democratic socialist celebs, so jarringly appeared amongst the bright stars and broads in stripes at this week's opulent Met Gala. 

But why shouldn't she be there? The theme of this year's exclusive charity fashion event was, after all, "American Independence." And nothing says independence like wearing a white designer gown with bloody red letters spelling "Tax the Rich" all over the back of it. It would have been so tacky and off-putting to guests who'd paid $35,000 a ticket if she'd plastered the slogan like a banner on the front of the dress where they'd actually have to look at it while schmoozing with her.

The font was eerily similar to the notorious "I Don't Care, Do U?" message worn on the back of Melania Trump's jacket during her trip to the border to visit immigrant prisons. 

 

 Maybe you would have preferred that AOC show her working class bona fides by wearing her old bartending duds, just to entrap the guests into ordering her to fetch them another drink. And worse, if she'd accessorized it with an Abolish ICE insignia, they'd only complain that their drinks were too warm, and demand a refund on their tickets.

Although AOC had a masked male lackey so gallantly holding up the streaming train of her gown as she made her grand entrance past people protesting neo-feudalism behind police ramparts, she had already pre-emptively lashed out at what she called her "haters" by tweeting that she and the gown's Black immigrant designer were about to "kick open the doors of the Met." She'd only meant to be figurative, of course, even strategically quoting Marshall McLuhan for the woefully non-savvy hordes of haters out there: "The medium is the message."

But the message-bomb that was meant to burst in the rarefied air at the Met Gala turned out to be kind of a dud, once word leaked out that designer Aurora James is actually a native of Toronto, Canada and is the girlfriend of wealthy Seagrams heir Benjamin Bronfman.

AOC aims to have her cake and eat it too. She is both the user and the used. She used Met Gala founder and storied Vogue editor Anna Wintour to help elevate her brand and her progressive platform.  Wintour is a major political power player and one of the Democratic  Party's most successful bundlers and fundraising event hostesses, having raised millions of dollars for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But she has also faced significant criticism from even her own staff for excluding black and brown people from her publishing and fashion empire.

As a New York Times critique published a year ago told it:

As Ms. Wintour ascended, Vogue’s publication of “hurtful or intolerant” content rarely resulted in lasting negative attention for her. But Black journalists who have worked with Ms. Wintour, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said they had not gotten over their experiences at a magazine whose workplace mirrored its exclusive pages.

Under Ms. Wintour, 18 people said, Vogue welcomed a certain type of employee — someone who is thin and white, typically from a wealthy family and educated at elite schools. Of the 18, 11 people said that, in their view, Ms. Wintour should no longer be in charge of Vogue and should give up her post as Condé Nast’s editorial leader.

“Fashion is bitchy,” one former Black staff member said. “It’s hard. This is the way it’s supposed to be. But at Vogue, when we’d evaluate a shoot or a look, we’d say ‘That’s Vogue,’ or, ‘That’s not Vogue,’ and what that really meant was ‘thin, rich and white.’ How do you work in that environment?”

Fast forward to the Met Gala one year later, and AOC, who is Puerto Rican, was personally invited by Wintour herself, in an epic feat of woke-washing, to sit at the main table, helping to burnish her own neo-diversified brand. The splashy but rear-facing "Tax the Rich" message was, of course, safely hidden from the sensitive view of the very rich, very white, and very thin Anna Wintour. If AOC knows that she herself was used as a mere ass-covering accessory, as were the rest of the minority models, movie stars and designers at the event, then she didn't let on.

Meanwhile, if she doesn't challenge Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for his New York senate seat in a primary, she will be among the first in line to succeed him when he retires. And from there, she will no doubt make a run for the presidency. To achieve her goals, she is going to need Anna Wintour. AOC's attendance at the Met Gala was nothing if not one long drawn-out dog whistle to the ruling class that she is absolutely no threat to them.

We'll just have to wait and see whether she and her Squad entourage follow through on their threat to kill the Senate's bipartisan infrastructure bill currently in front of the House unless the already watered-down $3.5 trillion social welfare bill passes first with the unanimous Democratic support that it needs.

The latest offer on the negotiating table  to "centrists" is to delay Medicare dental coverage for the elderly until 2028. What, after all, are a few million more lost geriatric teeth, oral infections and associated morbidity and mortality in the grand scheme of things? It may be the American twilight's last gleaming, but at least if the rich get taxed the cajoling AOC way, we'll have some gleaming choppers or shiny dentures to look forward to - if we can only hang on for a few more years in fires, floods, heat waves and hurricanes.

 As sick as we are and as sickened as we might feel, let's be healthily skeptical of AOC and of course, of every other politician who claims to feel our pain. Despite her melodramatic kvetching about "I and my body (being) relentlessly policed from all corners,"  criticism of the powerful by the powerless is not hatred at all. It's an attempt both at self-preservation and the preservation of society as a whole. It's actually a form of love.

Meanwhile, I say let AOC pursue her transactional career in political performance art. Don't let the shallow spectacle get you down.