Culture War Witchery Strikes Again

So much for Bernie Sanders's prediction that a President Joe Biden would, after a 50-year conservative political career, become a raging progressive in the vein of FDR if we only give him the chance.

With the specter of a far-right Supreme Court tribunal controlling the country for at least another generation, Biden just nixed the antidote of Democrats packing the court.and ending the Senate filibuster, should he win the presidency. Even though the Republican majority has locked in the votes to confirm Donald Trump's nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Biden was still appealing to them to examine their consciences and delay the vote until after the November election.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett, widely believed to be a shoo-in for the nomination, is, like Biden a devout conservative Roman Catholic, and the jurist that Democrats believe will usher in the final death-blow to Roe v Wade.

Biden could very well be delighted with this nomination, given that he already had to bow to liberal pressure and in 2019 disown his longstanding support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortion. He has always opposed late-term abortions, voted against aid to organizations which promote legalizing abortion overseas, and, as vice president, he unsuccessfully fought for increased religious exemptions to birth control coverage in the Affordable Care Act.

So, in keeping with his outreach to conservative Republican voters and his dismissal of such progressive policies as Medicare For All and a Green New Deal,will Biden now openly pander to the "right to life" advocates whom he so sorely disappointed when he disowned the Hyde Amendment last year? His ongoing silence on the issue speaks volumes.

Meanwhile, the increasing liberal angst surrounding a newly revived and very serendipitous (for the duopolistic oligarchy, that is) wedge issue of abortion is all of a piece with the much more contrived angst over Donald Trump's trolling revival of the eugenics movement.

Much is being made of how his praise of the "good (Nordic) genes" of Minnesotans and "racehorse theory" is inspired by the rhetoric of Nazi Germany. But none of these current critics add that Adolf Hitler was himself directly inspired by the American eugenics movement that held sway in the interwar years of the 20th century. The Nuremberg Laws barring Jews from full status as German citizens contain numerous glowing references to America's racist Jim Crow laws.

 The designated targets of xenophobic exclusion from the US in the early decades of the century were Southern and Eastern Europeans, mainly Italians and Jews. The latter group was later denied refugee status and barred by draconian US immigration laws from entering the country to escape Nazi oppression. Tens of thousands of Jews are believed to have been killed when they were forced to return to Nazi-controlled territories.

Trump's allusion to racehorse theory actually stems from an American book called "The Passing of the Great Race" published by Charles Scribner & Sons in 1916 and heavily promoted and praised by politicians, intellectuals and such media mainstays as Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post and the New York Times. Its author, Madison Grant, was once widely lauded as one of the leading thinkers and environmental activists of the Progressive Era.

It's no surprise that forced sterilization, along with xenophobia as government policy, is also making a comeback. Anybody who is shocked, shocked that imprisoned migrant women are reportedly undergoing forced hysterectomies in a  Georgia ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) prison shouldn't be. Laws upholding sterilizations of the "unfit" were on the books in many states until fairly recently. The irony that these procedures are now allegedly being performed under a Republican administration which purports to be anti-birth control should not be lost on us. The purported religious principles of the "right to life" crowd is simply a fig leaf serving to mask their real agenda, which is the empowerment and enrichment of the ruling classes though the debasement of women, minorities  and let's face it, just about anybody who has no power and no money.

Trump may be a throwback to an era when racism and xenophobia were openly celebrated and championed by the most respectable elements of American society. But he is certainly no anomaly in the big historical picture.

And speaking of the Supreme Court: it has never expressly overturned its ignominious Buck v Bell decision, an oversight which theoretically makes the reported ICE sterilizations perfectly legal. In the 1927 opinion against Carrie Bell, a woman wrongfully committed to a Virginia asylum for the "feebleminded" after her rape by the son of her wealthy foster parents who'd used her as their personal maid, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote (relying upon the fake "science" which claimed that deviance and imbecility are passed down from generation to generation):

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, not Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was actually the first liberal rock star of the Supreme Court, thanks in large part to the mainstream media marketing and fawning by his elite peers. Lionel Barrymore even played him in a hagiographic movie.

And speaking of irony - First Amendment champion Holmes also wrote the opinion which upheld Woodrow Wilson's reactionary Espionage Act, the law under which Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was indicted. Confined to a Dickensian British prison while his extradition trial proceeds, Assange is essentially being punished for exposing American war crimes and political corruption. The First Amendment itself is effectively on trial, while mainstream corporate media remains largely silent.

And that leads me to my final question. Why the hell do we even have a Supreme Court? It has become more than ever the equivalent of the archaic and unelected class of priests which have always existed in authoritarian regimes. The highest court is neither the check nor the balance that our own overly-honored Pantheon of Founders envisioned.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, that great 19th century literary critic of American pathology, reminds us that neither right wing authoritarianism nor liberal hypocrisy nor personality cults nor culture wars are anything new under the Trumpian sun. From his novel The House of the Seven Gables about the execution of Matthew Maule, an accused witch:

"He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion which should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen - the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day - stood in their inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived."

Biden Plagiarizes Both Obama and Trump

Well, maybe plagiarism is too harsh a word to hurl at the old reprobate copycat, whose own stated goal is to keep serving the fat cats and defending their right to crush everybody else into oblivion. But his much-maligned Medium post, in which he accused Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren of "my way or the highway"elitism, absolutely was ripped right out of Barack Obama's anti-progressive playbook.

It was only last week that Obama briefly emerged from his luxe retirement to once again chide the serfs who refuse to suffer the American system of neo-feudalism gladly, who call their lords and masters nasty names on Twitter rather than reaching across the class divide to find common cause with the very people who are making their lives nasty, brutish and short. Contrary to Biden's oafish attack on Warren, however, Obama's sermonizing about the dangers of "cancel culture" was almost universally praised by the mainstream media as being a "breath of fresh air" in this divisive Age of Trump.

Headlining the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago, where plans for his presidential center and golf course on public parkland have run into legal challenges from neighborhood activists who are crying foul because of gentrification and rising rents and the damage to the environment that his project is already causing, the former president expressed his displeasure with a gaslighting attack upon citizen activism in general:

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly.”
“The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”

As Obama had previously admonished those protesting the location of his Center, occasional appearances by Chance the Rapper should alleviate all their concerns about his refusal to sign a community benefits agreement to offset the rising rents of gentrification and the destruction of their public park. After all, if the former president could once be generous enough to call misanthropic former House Speaker, sadistic Ayn Rand fanboy and less refined victim-blamer Paul Ryan "a good man, a family man," why can't the lesser people also put away their "wokeness" and stop making so many unreasonable demands for a better, more equitable life for themselves and their communities? 

Why be an independent activist when the Obamas are touting their planned shrine as "a catalyst for activism and social change" without offering any information about how this would actually happen?

Enter Joe Biden, who is now being eclipsed by Elizabeth Warren in many polls. He's also being eclipsed by Bernie Sanders. But, thanks to the relentless media blackout of Sanders, Biden can keep on pretending with the rest of them that Bernie doesn't even exist. He therefore limits his umbrage to Warren, who has rightly accused him running in "the wrong primary" because of his opposition to Medicare For All and soaking the rich to help the less well-off.

Biden therefore summoned up his inner deflective Obama: 

But at another level these kinds of attacks are a serious problem. They reflect an angry unyielding viewpoint that has crept into our politics. If someone doesn’t agree with you — it’s not just that you disagree — that person must be a coward or corrupt or a small thinker.Some call it the “my way or the highway” approach to politics. But it’s worse than that. It’s condescending to the millions of Democrats who have a different view.It’s representative of an elitism that working and middle class people do not share: “We know best; you know nothing”. “If you were only as smart as I am you would agree with me.”

Accusing the victims of your own cruel, nasty policies of being nasty and scary is a common tactic of right-wing authoritarian leaders.

Joe Biden hurling the "elitist" epithet at Warren not only ignores his own life-long service to, and enrichment by, the Elite, it allows him to portray himself as just a regular working-class guy. Not only has he ripped a smarmy page right out of the scolding Obama playbook, he's going one step further. He is essentially plagiarizing  Donald Trump, stealing the successful fascistic technique of reversing the dichotomy between perpetrator and victim.

Just as Biden, the elitist in anti-intellectual blue collar clothing, uses Warren as proxy for the estimated 84 million uninsured and underinsured Americans and their advocates, selfish and unreasonable extremists for demanding single payer health insurance as a basic human right, Trump, the phony populist, for his own part scapegoats the victims of racism as being the direct causes of racism. When, for example, he was confronted last year by a Black reporter about his white nationalist rhetoric, he retorted: "That is such a racist question!"  

Just as Trump brags about his nonexistent high poll numbers among African-Americans, Biden brags that "millions of Democrats" are, just like him, dead-set against their fellow human beings being afforded a healthy, secure life. Both Biden and Trump deploy the ultra-right weapon of transforming groups of people who have traditionally been the targets of oppression into oppressors themselves. They play divide and conquer with a vengeance.

A series of debates between these two senile servants of the oligarchy would constitute a gruesome mind meld of epic proportions. Obama will rue the day that he ever kvetched about "cancel culture" if he ever gets to witness Trump and Biden canceling each other out on live corporate TV.

Commentariat Central: Post-Kavanaugh Blues

As long as the New York Times keeps ignoring the war-mongering Atlantic Council's advice to shut down reader commentary, I'll keep shoving my two cents into their digital piggy bank of views, which they euphemize as "sharing our thoughts."

It seems like only yesterday that the liberal press was editorializing against Brett Kavanaugh, and it seems like only today that we're being advised to put all those bad memories of rape and corruption and mendacity behind us and redirect our energies toward the vaunted Blue Wave, and support corporate Democrats.

In his latest column, Paul Krugman describes the trauma of Christine Blasey Ford as being of "of secondary concern" within the big picture of looming Republican authoritarianism and Trumpist brownshirts. His colleague Charles Blow sarcastically tells readers to "rue the day and rend your garments" like hormonal lunatics, because Kavanaugh should suddenly be the least of your enemies. "Liberals get so high-minded, they lose sight of the ground war," he chides, referring to the looming midterms.

And about those loudmouthed protesting women beating on the doors of the Supreme Court:

On one level this would provide relief and release for a pent-up demand by most Americans to be heard and to calm some of the chaos. But, catharsis is an emotional response and an emotional remedy.

Hear that, ladies? Charles Blow says it's time to stop emoting and follow the sage advice of Charles Pierce, scribe of Esquire, "the magazine for men", and get to work fighting the racist Constitutional originalists by organizing a brand new constitutional convention which will require the permission of only two-thirds of our divided states.

First, my response to Blow (much inspired by my current reading of "Black Reconstruction In America" by the great socialist W.E.B. Du Bois):

If the Kavanaugh Caper proves anything, it's that the white men of the GOP are pining not so much for the Founders as they are for the oligarchic slave-owning planting class of the antebellum South.

Here's looking at you, Mitch McConnell.

This isn't a new civil war, as some pundits claim. The old civil war never ended. It's been going on with varying intensity more than 150 years. Donald Trump just ushered in one of its greatest revivals yet, abandoning the smarmy dog whistle for a bullhorn.The GOP has likewise stripped itself bare, flaunting its racism and sexism in an orgy of shamelessness.

That's not to say we should therefore put our blind faith in the Democratic Party, some of whose leaders are already urging us to "move on" for the sake of our sacred institutions, as they abandon any idea of impeaching Kavanaugh. That would be too, too unseemly. All you "purists" must realize that if the Dems pull this stunt, the GOP will only get their revenge down the road. And anyway, as the Times just reported, Wall Street is putting its corrupt money on the Democrats this year.

The media coverage of Trump's "victory" this week has also been downright disgusting. How quickly the pain of Dr. Blasey Ford and countless other women has been forgotten in the group-think coverage of horse race politics.

Co-opting, dividing and conquering regular people is how the ruling class racketeers roll. Don't fall for it. Vote, and then keep afflicting the comfortable.

And in response to a critical reader who thought I was unfairly sliming Trump voters as one bigoted monolithic voting bloc:

To clarify: I'm talking about the white male leadership of the GOP, not white male voters who vote Republican. Trump has displayed his own racism and sexism in countless ways, both verbally and operationally - his Access Hollywood remarks, describing Mexicans as rapists, his attempted dismantling of social safety programs, and of course his notorious birther campaign.

He co-opts the white working class male just as the oligarchic planters did during slavery. Poor whites fought the Civil War for the rich and were the hired overseers of slaves and bounty hunters of slaves so that the rich could bask in their own laziness while producing absolutely nothing. They deflected their own bad qualities on their enslaved work force and propagandized to the poor whites that with a little hard work, they too could aspire to the owner class. Likewise, Trump pretends to be on their side because after all, they have their white masculinity in common.

 Slavery ended, but the propaganda has proved more or less successful ever since. This is what I mean by divide and conquer. Our rulers would hate for the white working class and the black and brown working class to get together in solidarity against the modern day oligarchy.

Trump won because neither the white nor the black working class in rust belt states turned out for Hillary Clinton. Many who'd voted for Obama picked Trump. It's wrong to call all Trump voters racist and sexist. Plenty are just plain fed up and desperate.

As far as Krugman's standard diatribe against Trump and the Republicans' "paranoid style of politics" and incipient authoritarian rule is concerned, I do admit that I let my feminist anger get the better of me, and as a result, did not get many recommendations for this response:

 How quickly liberal men are calling the seating of Kavanaugh "of secondary concern" or "time to move on." That's a pretty callous response to the millions of women whose own pain at the hands of predators was rendered newly raw by the testimony of Dr. Blasey Ford and others with the courage to speak out. Now that Kavanaugh's in, we're lectured that too many angry women might be spawning a backlash and endangering the so-called Blue Wave of the midterms. It's disgusting.

So let's pivot again to Trump, Trump and nothing but the Trump and ignore the fact that he is but the symptom of the equally noxious neoliberal style of politics which been devouring labor rights and the social safety net for going on half a century now.

Authoritarianism is already here. Just witness the recent "no debate needed" bipartisan appropriation by a near-unanimous Senate of nearly a trillion more dollars to the dreaded Trump regime to wage endless war.

  Look at Joe Biden, the current front-runner for the presidency. A "New Democrat," he impoverished millions of women in the 90s with his bankruptcy reform legislation and helped send millions of men to prison in the misguided war on drugs, which was really a war on black drug users. He will never prevail against Trump, who knows where all the bodies are buried... because they either aided his fraudulent rise to riches, or they turned a blind eye to it.

That's Trump's fascistic appeal. He pretends to eat his own, and his base feels replete.

Here's how a fellow reader named "Gerry" cut me down to size by erecting a straw-woman:

I think you paint with a too broad brush when you condemn liberal men as aiders and abettors of the Republican supporters of Trump. I don't hear any of my male liberal friends saying that the seating of Kavanaugh is of secondary concern and that it is time to move on. We are doing what we can to regain control of the House by volunteering and contributing. We are supporters of the Mueller investigation.
You sound mixed up to me. What are your politics?

My reply to "Gerry" --

 Um...Paul Krugman used the words "of secondary concern" right here in this column. He sounds like too many other liberal male pundits I've been reading and listening to these several days.

As far as my sounding "mixed up" is concerned, that his exactly how how Brett Kavanaugh and others described Dr. Blasey Ford. They also demanded to know what her politics are.

There has been much attempted gaslighting of women by both liberal and conservative men. The liberals concern-troll it by calling us emotional and confused, while the conservatives come right out and pronounce us nuts and liars.

But according to you, it's all good as long as Dems support Mueller and give money to candidates.

I rest my case.

The proscribing of the "narrative" to one's required membership in either right wing of the duopoly serves to stifle dissent. Liberalism is not the same thing as leftism, despite the ridiculous claims of Republicans who accuse the centrist business-friendly leaders of the Democratic Party of being Marxists. Thinking outside the corporate partisan box simply does not compute. The establishment media have done their job, and done it well.
======

Meanwhile, David Brooks, who is now practically indistinguishable from his liberal right-wing Times colleagues in their obsessive loathing for the lone corpus of Donald Trump, is back from book leave and has wisely completely ignored the Kavanaugh Caper and the midterm elections. 

Instead, he's shilling for another for-profit venture which involves corporations getting into community organizing by funding programs which use poor (mainly black) children as data banks. He desperately describes it as "A Really Good Thing That's Happening in America."

Visiting one South Carolina center called the "Spartanburg Academic Movement," or SAM, Brooks gushes:

SAM organizes the community of Spartanburg around a common project. Then it creates an informal authority structure that transcends public-sector/private-sector lines, that rallies cops and churches, the grass roots and the grass tops. Members put data in the center and use it as a tool not for competition but for collaboration. Like the best social service organizations, it is high on empathy and high on engineering. It is local, participatory and comprehensive.

SAM is not a lone case. Spartanburg is one of 70 communities around the country that use what is called the StriveTogether method. StriveTogether began in Cincinnati just over a decade ago. A few leaders were trying to improve education in the city and thinking of starting another program. But a Procter & Gamble executive observed, “We’re program-rich, but system-poor.” In other words, Cincinnati had plenty of programs. What it lacked was an effective system to coordinate them.

Yep, you guessed it. This is the same market-based neoliberal approach to government and social services that helped produce Donald Trump, and turned the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and the Republican Party into Insanity Central. Just the mention of P & G should set off alarm bells. It is what's called an oligopoly, a consolidated corporate behemoth which has cornered the market on most of the items you see on your grocery store shelves, with its garish plethora of brand names offering a false "choice" to consumers. 

That's the noxious genius of neoliberalism itself it just keeps rebranding itself. Life itself is just one great big advertisement.

David Brooks does not, of course, go there. Instead he is so excited about the continuing privatization of public spaces and the corporate enslavement of human lives that 

Frankly, I don’t need studies about outcomes to believe that these collective impact approaches are exciting and potentially revolutionary. Trust is built and the social fabric is repaired when people form local relationships around shared tasks. Building working relationships across a community is an intrinsically good thing. You do enough intrinsically good things and lives will be improved in ways you can never plan or predict. This is where our national renewal will come from.

My published response:

 While sounding warm and fuzzy, the gathering of data on children "from cradle to career" does have sort of an ominous Brave New World ring to it.

Who becomes the eventual recipients of all this valuable and intrusive data? Facebook, Amazon, the NSA, for-profit testing companies, anti teacher union PACs, or any corporate entity prepared to pay money for it?

This sounds suspiciously like another iteration of the increasingly discredited for-profit charter school movement which has sought to supersede good government education policy and the expenditure of public money on children.

So rather than unquestioningly celebrate the efforts of philanthrocapitalists and corporations seeking to burnish their public images with these kinds of slick "community" programs that purport to "measure" pupil progress, our free and fair press should dig deeper and do their journalistic duty: follow the money.

Rather than simply concentrate on kids "from cradle to career", America must start concentrating.on all its people from cradle to  grave. We already have some of the worst education and health outcomes in the civilized world.

A pivot to government in the public rather than private interest would include Medicare for All, debt-free college, a guaranteed federal jobs program... in other words, a rebooting of the New Deal for the 21st century.

If the wealthy investment class really wants to help poor children, let them stop bribing our politicians and start paying their fair share of taxes.

Should Big Brother Be Public or Private?

According to a new Pew poll, Americans hate the idea of the government controlling what they see, hear and read. But they're just fine with Silicon Valley calling the shots over what is and what is not "fake news."

Or so it seems on the surface. You see, the pollsters artificially limited their survey to just those two choices: public control of information vs. private control of information. Respondents were not asked whether they'd prefer no  censorship at all. See the explanatory note at the bottom of the graphic: "Respondents who did not give an answer are not shown." 

The non-answerers appear to have taken a tip from Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener: as a form of protest against bullshit and control, they "preferred not to" to choose between two Big Brothers. So as far as the Pew Charitable Trust is concerned, the refusenicks don't count as desirable authoritarian personalities.

Offering people that third sensible alternative of nobody controlling internet information would not be in keeping with the aims of the Surveillance State. Let's face it: there is no real dichotomy between the nation-state and the corporate social media giants. Silicon Valley is essentially a nation-state in its own right, what with its annual GDP far exceeding that of many sovereign countries.

Therefore, offering people a "choice" between control by the Empires of Twitter, Apple, Google and Facebook, or control by their elected representatives is no choice at all. The oligarch-controlled government and the tech empires are essentially the same parasite, existing only to feast and grow fat off the money and data of the citizen-consumers of America.

Both legislators and social media tycoons will now be able to wave this distorted poll around as proof positive that Americans would dearly love to have all their news consolidated and monitored for their own protection. The only controversy will be which powerful entity can protect us better.

In an effort to keep the truth about the distorted nature of the poll from as many citizen-consumers as possible, the Pew people then proceeded to artificially divide the citizen-consumers of America into the artificial categories of Democrat and Republican. This is the standard fake attempt to make some fake sense out of the "fake news crisis initiative" that's taken precedence over discussion of social policies for the public good.

 It's all about the marketing of fake freedom.

 Majorities of both parties agree that people’s freedom to access and publish information online is a priority over having the government take action to curtail false information in a way that could limit those freedoms (60% of Republicans and Republican leaners say this, as do 57% of Democrats and Democratic leaners). There are partisan differences when it comes to steps from technology companies. A majority of Democrats (60%) favor action by technology companies to restrict misinformation, even if it includes broader information limits online. Republicans, on the other hand, are about equally divided between the two options: 48% favor technology companies taking steps to control misinformation, and 50% favor protecting freedoms.

That Democrats would favor the tech giants controlling and restricting information more so than do Republicans would be kind of surprising, were it not for the Democratic Party's relentless, 18-month-long Russiaphobia campaign. After being raked over the coals by the DNC for publishing anti-Clinton ads from a St. Petersburg troll farm, Facebook has now become penitent enough to hire thousands of security state and law enforcement personnel to make sure that this doesn't happen again.

But luckily for actual democracy, the poll found that younger people of all political persuasions are less likely to accept surveillance by the tech giants than are adults 50 or older, 64% of whom said they'd welcome their news being policed by private overseers. "Only" about half of younger respondents want their information to be so controlled.

Maybe the control-loving youthful half just haven't had enough post-secondary education yet, because most respondents with at least some college oppose outside efforts to curb "fake news" and prefer to make their own decisions about what is true and what is bogus. The less education that people have, the more willing they are to have others higher up the technocratic food chain make their decisions for them.

No wonder there is a war on teachers, kids, and public education. The only freedom that the ruling class racketeers are marketing to an ever more dumbed-down population is the freedom from independent, critical thought. Their method of enslaving people is to offer them them the illusion of autonomy and choice, and then cynically label it "empowerment."

And So It Begins

That he righteously shot Donald Trump to death in a Walmart parking lot is the novel defense of an upstate New York man actually arrested and charged with the murder of a UPS delivery driver.

Justin Barkley of Ithaca told a judge on Monday that not only did he kill Donald Trump on December 8th, he's eager to plead guilty to the charge on grounds that he had performed a great public service.

As reported by The Ithaca Voice, Barkley said: "I shot and killed Donald Trump purposely, intentionally and very proudly."

Claiming (either mistakenly or falsely) that he knew that Trump would be holding a rally in front of Walmart, Barkley added for extra emphasis, "I went there to purposely shoot and kill him and put him down."

 He told the court that he understood the difference between mistaking a person for being Trump and asserting that he actually killed Trump. When asked if any evidence could be presented to him to suggest he killed a different person, he said, "I would hope not."

The lawyers are understandably flummoxed. How best to try this case? A defense of not guilty by reason of insanity, or not guilty by reason of misplaced patriotism, or not guilty by reason of insanity caused by the forced mass media infliction of Trump's sneering face and braying voice on every TV screen? Those are just three of the possible choices.

Barkley, who is also charged with menacing a police officer, adamantly refused to plead Not Guilty to killing UPS driver William Schumacher by reason of mental defect. He wants to plead guilty to killing Donald Trump by reason of mental acuity.

When the judge asked him if it would be possible to plead guilty and confess to killing Schumacher because he mistook him for Trump, Barkley demurred, saying that he had never met William Schumacher and didn't know William Schumacher. He therefore had no reason to shoot Schumacher.

The case will resume on January 2, after Barkley is examined by psychiatrists.

***

In other upstate New York news, video has now emerged of the notorious bus driver who decreed that the children who'd opted for Hillary Clinton in her mock election the previous day would be forced to remain on the bus until all the loyal Trump fans had exited. The pupils, in grades K through 5, were ordered to raise their hands, if not their outstretched arms, to remind their driver for whom they had "voted"" on Nov. 8th. When some of the children indignantly responded that they were too young to vote, the driver scoffed that pro-Trump opinions carried just as much weight as an actual vote. The driver, who is seen wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with a Trump Tower logo, seemed a little shocked that the students had not been properly indoctrinated in their classrooms about the election.

Officials of the Canandaigua City School District, while promising to investigate the incident, also took great pains to heap praise upon the unnamed driver for her spotless safety record and for her many years of loyal service. Mistakes can be made, even by nice hardworking people with a hankering to resurrect the Hitler Youth movement right here in the United States of the Homeland.

Changing the Magic To The Tragic