Culture War Cats Edition

Just in case you still had any doubts, Donald Trump's official job description is our self-proclaimed culture warrior-in-chief. His latest act was to disinvite Super Bowl champions, the Philadelphia Eagles from a White House celebration. He instead used the occasion to outdo embattled Culture Warrior Princess Roseanne Barr in belting out one of our great national hymns. Donald didn't have to take a knee to disrespect the flag. He kneed the sensibilities of the entire nation with his botched lip-synced rendition of God Bless America. The god in question, of course, being himself.

Vying for attention with the latest rendering of Great American Culture Wars is the new game show sensation, "Where In the World is Melania Trump?" Except for a blurred glimpse at a different, closed military-themed White House affair this week, she hadn't been seen in public for nearly a month, ever since undergoing a minor kidney procedure in May. My own catty theory is that she had a little cosmetic surgery - a facelift, an eyelift, a whatever-lift - along with, or even instead of, the alleged kidney embolization. This is what extremely wealthy, famous women do after plastic surgery. They go on an extended vacation to a secret location, or they stayed holed up in their mega-mansions until the scars and bruising fade, a process which can take many weeks. So when I read a report that Melania had been spotted wearing dark glasses indoors as she strolled through the West Wing, my cat-sense went into high alert.

If my theory is true, then my recommendation to Melania would be to go the iconoclastic Betty Ford route and become a national spokesperson for the benefits of cosmetic surgery. Betty was the trailblazer, having had the first ever public First Lady Facelift, frankly admitting at the time that she had an eye job and neck tightening because "I wanted a fresh new face to go with my beautiful new life." 

Betty Ford was also forthcoming about her mastectomy during her husband Jerry's truncated White House tenure, an announcement that encouraged many women to seek out mammograms and detect early cancers. She was later famously honest with revelations about her drug addiction.

  Again, assuming that I'm right about Melania, she could even out-do Betty and become an advocate for making cosmetic surgery available under Medicare and Medicaid --  or, to make her hubby and his party really pissed off, Obamacare silver and bronze plans.

Of course,Donald (who decades ago underwent his own scalp reduction surgery) would probably nix the idea, given how he'd so cattily Twitter-mocked former friend Mika Brzesinki's "bleeding face" last year at Mar-a-Lago (she later staunchly denied having had had a facelift) as well as mean-spirited remarks from Trump supporters about Hillary Clinton's own rumored work and reputed Botox injections.

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Speaking of cattiness, Paul Krugman has been having a field day lambasting fellow Ivy League academic Niall Ferguson for urging his conservative Stanford students to do "oppo research" on the life of a liberal student activist on campus.  This act of unseemly cattiness, the New York Time's chief Bernie Bro-bashing intellectual writes, is emblematic of the "bad faith" of conservative intellectuals in general:

And yes, I do mean “conservative.” There are dishonest individuals of every political persuasion, but if you’re looking for systematic gaslighting, insistence that up is down and black is white, you’ll find it disproportionately on one side of the political spectrum. And the trouble many have in accepting that asymmetry is an important reason for the mess we’re in.

But how can I say that the media refuses to acknowledge conservative bad faith? While some journalists remain squeamish about actually using the word “lie,” and there’s still a tendency for headlines to repeat false talking points (which are only revealed to be false in the body of the article), readers do get a generally accurate picture of the extent to which dishonesty prevails within the Trump administration.

True, Trumpism is infectious -- but the anti-Trump oligarchic resistance antidote of more austerity and more corporate Democrats in Congress and more allegiance to the authorities of the "intelligence community" is an equally addicting and dangerous off-label regimen. Manufactured "divisiveness" sells, and both sides of the corporate Duopoly profit, whether they be electoral winners or losers.

My two-part published response focuses on the suppression of free speech and dissent:

 "Registered Republican professional historian" is an oxymoron.

Phony intellectuals like Ferguson are, in fact, really nothing more than the "snowflakes" they love to accuse liberals of being.

Meanwhile, a recent survey by the PEN press rights group shows that more journalists are actually self-censoring out of fear of government reprisals.

With no real ideology other than Greed is Good, the right wing's m.o. is the stifling of the very First Amendment rights they purport to champion.

Take the case of Cal State writing professor Randa Jarrar, who sent the phony moralizing hordes to the fainting couch this spring when she tweeted that the late Barbara Bush "was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal."

Although the college initially seemed to bow to demands from reactionary media for her firing, she kept her job.

These same reactionaries are now having conniption fits because Samantha Bee got away with calling Ivanka Trump a bad name for her insensitivity to Daddy's ripping tots way from their mothers' arms at the border, while complaining that Trump Show prima donna Roseanne Barr got unfairly fired for her louder, crasser racism.

Ferguson is simply a bully and a coward for "punching down" on a student from his position of power. He might as well declare himself Roseanne's replacement as best supporting actor in the Trump Show, which is what the GOP might actually rename itself.

If it were honest, that is. Which it most definitely is not.

(And following up with a reader pointing out that renowned war critic and historian Andrew Bacevich is a registered Republican) --

Notice that I used the term "reactionary" -- not conservative -- to describe the modern Republican Party.

Not all conservatives are alike, and of course they should not be painted with the same broad brush. Maybe Ferguson is a smart guy, but he was very stupid to buy into the divisive tactics perfected by Trump.

I hadn't realized that Andrew Bacevich, whose work I admire, was still a registered Republican. He writes for, besides outlets like TomDispatch, The American Conservative. While I strongly disagree with much of this site's sexist and even "colorblind" racist content (Pat Buchanan is a regular), it is also reliably critical of American imperialism, endless war and especially neoconservatism. They publish a variety of viewpoints.

Here, for example, is an article on the US drone war, which has gotten especially vicious and unaccountable under Trump:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/targeted-killing-donald-...

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 To his great credit, centrist Times columnist Frank Bruni is not taking Bill Clinton's appearance on the Today show (see my Monday post) kindly. In a scathing piece aptly called "the Sultans of Self-Pity," he writes:

Move over, Alec Baldwin. Bill Clinton does a much better impersonation of Donald Trump.

The hair is wrong but the air is right — self-righteous, self-pitying and suffused with anger that anyone would peddle a version of events less heroic than the one that he prefers. We’re shaming him about ancient groping when we should be showering him with eternal gratitude. And what about his pain?

“I left the White House $16 million in debt,” Clinton said, in an interview that NBC’s “Today” aired on Monday, batting back questions about whether he had demonstrated sufficient contrition for converting a 22-year-old’s romantic idolization of him into sexual favors and setting off a sequence of events that savaged her. I don’t know what legal bills have to do with a moral ledger. But I can see that his fixations on money and martyrdom are intact.

The Clinton team is now in full damage control mode. The Times swiftly disappeared Bruni's column from the top right corner of the digital home page, and Stephen Colbert invited Bill on his Tuesday show not for a comb-over gag, but for a moral makeover - or as Colbert termed it, a "do-over." Now that Bill has summoned up enough moral courage to finally utter Monica's name right out loud, maybe he hopes he can get on with his book tour without further ado. Let us hope that he cannot. (Hiss, scratch.)

My published response to the Bruni column:

One common theme in the MeToo movement is that the perpetrators aren't getting called to account until relatively late in their lives,often decades after their predatory behavior was an "open secret" within the overlapping spheres of power they inhabit.

Better late than never, of course, but oh what damage these men have done, not only to their female victims, but to the country and society at large.

During the Lewinsky episode, leading feminists, most notably Gloria Steinem, came to Bill's defense. His abuse of power was cast as a purely partisan issue, with blame deflected from him onto the much nastier and hypocritical Republicans. At the same time he was castigating Bill, Newt Gingrich was cheating on his own wife.

Meanwhile, Bill had connived with Newt to "end welfare as we know it" with the ensuing cruel reform package condemning millions of women to whole lifetimes of poverty.

 It's not surprising that Trump and Clinton, who were both once considered "outsiders" in New York high society, golfed together at Trump's club. It's not surprising that the Clintons attended Trump's third wedding. Not because they liked Trump, of course, but because these "transactional" things are what rich and famous people have to do to maintain their lifestyles and images and status and power.

How ironic that Bill is now promoting pulp called "The President Is Missing."

In reality it's the presidency that's missing, since Trump's organized crime cartel has effectively hijacked it.

(photo credit: Bob's Blog)

Bill Clinton's Ruling Class Lament

As part of the great national wokeness serving to expose and shame the predators in the highest echelons of media and political power, the New York Times has graciously allowed former President Bill Clinton to perform his own reckoning, in his own words.

Clinton reckons that the biggest problem America faces is not that the powerful and the rich and the criminal are exploiting and assaulting the poor and the defenseless. It's that defenseless Americans like you and me just can't seem to get along with one another. Forget about coming clean about his own sordid past as an accused rapist. This man won't even come clean about how his administration's neoliberal, wealth-serving policies have directly created some of the worst human misery in the history of our young republic.

Regular readers of this blog might remember that one of my regular features was the deconstruction of Barack Obama's weekly addresses to the nation. Unlike Donald Trump's self-centered bombast, Obama's messages sounded,  on the surface, very reasonable and eloquent  and even empathetic - until you carefully read between the lines, and realized that they were largely dog-whistles of support to Wall Street and jingoistic drumbeats for the perpetual war machine.

So, when I read Clinton's op-ed in the New York Times, it was like deja vu all over again. Let the deconstruction begin!

Americans Must Decide Who We Really Are, by Bill Clinton.

America has a lot going for it.

We are in the second year of rising incomes across all income groups. Our work force is relatively young, hardworking and productive. America’s universities and other research institutions are strong in areas like materials science, software development, nanotechnology, biotechnology, genomics and many other fields that are important to our future economic growth and employment. We continue to move toward more energy independence and cleaner energy, with advances in battery storage for solar and wind power and a vast untapped capacity to generate electricity from both.

This sounds like a subtle dig at Obama, who oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the working classes to the rich in all of American history, as well as a subtle compliment to Trump's second year in office coinciding with the second year of allegedly rising incomes. If any low-income workers have gotten slight raises in the past few years, it's been largely the result of their own Fight for 15 movement and not the result of any beneficence of employers like the Walton family. This retail dynasty now owns as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the population combined, but their workers rely on government-funded programs like Medicaid and SNAP to barely survive. Of course, it helps that the Walton clan have been big funders of the Clinton clan over the past several decades.

Bill Clinton fails to mention that the technological research being conducted in public universities is for the ultimate benefit of private corporations, which, thanks to patent laws written by their lobbyists, will continue to milk the public for generations to come. Meanwhile, the skilled but onerously indebted graduates of such institutions will work until they drop.

And that's the good news. Clinton now proceeds to give lip service to his neoliberal version of the dark side:

 We also face serious economic challenges: severe inequalities in income and wealth; low work force participation by adults without college degrees, especially white men; dramatic differences in growth between prosperous urban and suburban regions and counties full of small towns and rural areas; gaping shortfalls in our national infrastructure, from inadequate roads and bridges, to rusty, dangerous water pipes, to an electrical grid incapable of moving the cleanest, cheapest energy from where it can be produced most efficiently to where it is most needed, to the absence of affordable, rapid broadband internet in areas that desperately need to be included in the national economy.

Whenever neoliberals want to avoid a true reckoning, they employ the weasel word "challenges." This allows them to avoid the reality that it has been their own policies (deregulation of the financial sector; privatization of public spaces, and housing stock, and public schools; the deliberate creation of a carceral state in which one out of every three black men now spends part of his life locked up in prison; the bipartisan whittling away of social insurance benefits) which have created the "challenge" of so many millions of people now needlessly suffering. These "challenges" have come about precisely because of leaders like him. Rather than admit this, Clinton blames the victims by pointing to the convenient "skills gap" canard.  This malarkey suggests that only a costly college education can ever bring neoliberalism's victims out of their own doldrums. Oh, and maybe a little broadband rural Internet. That should keep the "folks" hoping against all hope and against all reason. Maybe they'll vote Democrat next time, instead of for Republican demagogues like Donald Trump. Right?

There are human resource challenges, too. Our K-12 education system includes some of the world’s best schools, but that excellence has been hard to replicate across districts and states with widely varying conditions.

Bill Clinton would not be the loyal neoliberal ideologue he is if he didn't define human beings in purely market-based terms. We are not people - we are "human resources"  who must be ready, willing and able to be mined to our very depths. Never mind that these "challenges" will get even worse with the new tax legislation. Among its other atrocities, the GOP plan is expressly designed to destroy public education as we know it, by limiting the local and state property tax deduction to a measly $10,000, and thereby depriving neighborhood schools of most of their revenue for infrastructure and teacher salaries.

Clinton goes on to complain that although the Affordable Care Act has brought a modicum of medical coverage to a select and lucky portion of the population,  

... we have wasted too much time fighting over efforts to repeal that progress when we should be fixing the problems that remain and preparing for the aging of our population. 

 He studiously avoids any mention of Medicare for All, the true government-sponsored single payer health care being touted by progressives like Bernie Sanders, and which is widely supported by the public. On the contrary: what Clinton vaguely calls preparing for those old folks sounds ominously like a willingness to wheel and deal with the GOP on just how much funding it might be feasible to cut from Medicare for the Few.

 The future of undocumented immigrants — including the “Dreamers” and millions of people who are working hard and paying taxes — is uncertain at a time when our work force cannot grow without them; the birthrate among native-born Americans is barely at replacement levels.

Again, Clinton simply cannot resist couching social policies and problems in strictly economic terms. Only those immigrants who "work hard and pay taxes" are deserving immigrants. He does not mention the global refugee humanitarian crisis at all, probably because by doing so he would have to admit that American wars, both direct and proxy, are responsible for it.  He complains about the declining American birthrate without mentioning that people who do not make a living wage at a steady job simply cannot afford to have children  - especially when they are burdened by lifelong college debt. He also doesn't mention that the highly skilled foreign workers he wants to enter the country usually earn much lower salaries than native-born workers.

From Charleston to Charlottesville, we are reminded that the racial divide remains a curse that can be revived with devastating consequences. And the opioid crisis and its progeny, heroin and fentanyl, are killing and disabling Americans at a staggering rate. For several years we’ve known it’s a huge public health challenge, yet almost nowhere do we have the resources and organization necessary to turn the tide.

That was a very Obamesque alliteration - Charleston to Charlottesille. Its glibness masks the reality that our "racial divide" was actually just the ticket for Clinton's victory in 1992. He ran on a racist platform of "ending welfare as we know it," and he also championed the Crime Bill, which has sent record numbers of black men to prison on minor drug charges. Hillary Clinton's own "super predator" rhetoric did its own racist, ultra-right, placatory part.

As economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case have established, the opioid epidemic and worsening death rate are largely the result of working class despair - a despair partly engendered by the offshoring of jobs and the closing of factories brought about by Clinton's North American Free Trade Agreement. (NAFTA) But to Clinton, it's just one more "challenge." And as a sop to the centrist deficit hawk crowd, "almost nowhere do we have the resources to turn the tide."  If he were honest, he would acknowledge that the "resources" are there, but they've been earmarked for providing billionaires and corporations with more tax reductions, more art collections, more luxury homes, more private jets, and more super-yachts.

Finally, we have a serious set of security challenges, from nuclear proliferation, to terrorism, to climate change, to cybersecurity, the last of which may prove the most daunting because it puts all the systems we need to deal with the other problems, and our very democracy, at risk.

This, unbelievably, is how Bill Clinton ends his op-ed. It's as if by glossing over nukes and terrorism and climate change, he is deliberately avoiding the fact that the US itself has committed a trillion dollars' worth of our allegedly dwindling "resources" into modernizing our nukes. It's as if he can't bear to admit that the US has deliberately exempted itself not only from accountability before international war crimes tribunals, but exempted the military from environmental standards meant to reduce America's giant carbon footprint all over the world. The Pentagon is a major contributor to man-made climate change.

Clinton hilariously complains that breaches in our cybersecurity system put our  "democracy" at risk. If he were truly honest, he'd just complain that an upstart billionaire named Donald Trump has put Clinton's faction of the oligarchy at risk. If he were being extra, extra honest, he'd just cut to the chase and say that he's still mad as hell that Hillary lost, and that there has been no Clinton Restoration.

This is the same guy Donna Brazile thinks can help save the Democratic Party by going around the country and campaigning for all the challengers to Republican seats.

Maybe if the Democrats could refrain for a minute from calling people and all kinds of deliberately manufactured human misery mere "challenges," then they might actually start to claw back a few of those thousand seats they've lost in the past decade. Otherwise, they'll end up not with a bang, but with the same kind of whimper with which Bill Clinton concluded his insipidly awful Times op-ed.

Reading it to completion was like a depressing slog through mental quicksand. It was a real challenge.

Party On

Be They Ever So 'Umble

A Good Ole Pair of Bellicose Bipartisan Bros

 
At a folksy gala held at his Dallas shrine on Thursday, George W. Bush told Bill Clinton and a group of military, business and civic leaders that the most important quality America's chief executive can possess is humility.

Whereupon he bragged that his friendship with Clinton was "one of the most unique relationships and important relationships in US political history."

That'll sure teach Donald Trump, the obvious target of the virtue-signalling. Were it not for Bush having been so blessedly meek, the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent global refugee crisis might never even have happened. He would have been too busy stomping all over Al Gore and still bragging that he won the election six months into his administration. If he hadn't been so modestly clearing brush in Texas during the summer of 2001 rather than wallowing in Washington and insanely tweeting, he might have made the huge narcissistic mistake of heeding the written warning that America was in imminent danger of being attacked. He would thereby have allowed a huge crisis go to waste.

As it turned out, Nine Eleven was the gift that keeps on giving to the global oligarchy. If it weren't for George Bush discreetly doing his cowboy shtick when it counted the most, the lucrative War on Terror never would have been possible.

"I think it’s really important to know what you don’t know and listen to people who do know what you don’t know,” Bush modestly and incoherently burbled."The decisions you make have a monumental effect on people."

He is right, because his decisions continue to reverberate all over the globe. Even as he bonded with Bill in Dallas, 10 women and children died of dehydration in an Iraq detention camp for relatives of ISIS fighters. That, according to Iraq Body Count, brings Bush's monumental effects on the people in that country alone to a grand total of 268,000 corpses.

 Bill Clinton jovially agreed with his bro about the lingering effects which ex-presidents have. “You want to be able to say, ‘Things were better off when I quit, kids had a better future, things were coming together, You don’t want to say, ‘God, look at all the people I beat.’”

You want to be able to say, look at all the women we forced off welfare and sent to work at low-paying jobs with none of that subsidized child care we promised. Look at all the black dudes we sent to prison, beating previous incarceration records. Look at how we deregulated the banks that crashed the economy. Look at how we monumentally doubled extreme poverty in the United States. It sure beats bragging about all the crooked politicians you were able to beat!

Campaign '16: Media Lothario Wars

Who's the more disgusting dirty old man, Donald Trump or Bill Clinton? Well, it kind of depends on which cheek of the duopoly you happen to favor.

Fox News got the Lothario sweepstakes started on Friday, with the revelation that Clinton was much more frequent of a flyer on convicted billionaire sex offender Jeff Epstein's jet than inquiring minds ever cared to know. The Big Dog took more than 26 separate international trips on the "Lolita Express," giving a whole new meaning to the Clinton Global Initiative. The plane was so named because it contained a bed for pig-men to have sex with underage girls. Mind you, there has never been proof that Bill Clinton himself victimized any teenagers on his trips, which date back more than a decade.

In the interest of bipartisanship, the New York Times today has its own big colorful spread on the misogyny of Donald Trump. However, in the more important interest of political correctness, the Paper of Record is framing its exploitative investigation into the seamy underworld of depraved plutocrats around how "uncomfortable" Trump has made various women feel over the decades. Dozens of women dished to Times reporters about how shabbily they've been treated by him both in the workplace and in private social situations. Bottom line and the Big Reveal: the Donald is unique among wealthy bosses. He is a pig-man extraordinaire, and the Times is on it. He therefore should not be allowed anywhere near the White House, which has such a grand history of treating women with the utmost dignity and respect.

 And in the meantime, the Gray Lady is not above titillating her readers just as much as Rupert Murdoch titillates his. What's an election for, if it's not about the ratings and circulation numbers of our famously free press?

It's going to be a very long six months, people.

Bill Kills

Last night while you were watching a bizarre Superbowl commercial featuring an ultrasound fetus seizing up at the sound of Daddy crunching Doritos, First Dude Wannabe Bill Clinton went full Quentin Tarantino with a bizarre verbal seizure of his own.

Dressed nattily and folksily in a Buffalo plaid shirt, the aging ex-prez outed himself as a pathetic troller of Internet trolls who are (shock!) bashing Wifey based solely upon her XX chromosomes. Of course, the way the New York Times headline described his puerile hissy fit, it was a lot more intellectual: "Bill Clinton Launches Stinging Attack on Bernie Sanders." 

But Bill's tirade against Sanders -- as well as against the supporters whom Hillary hopes to seduce should she win the nomination -- was more like a flailing sledgehammer than the skilled jabs of a boxer or polemicist. 

He told the sad but unverifiable tale of an anonymous "female progressive blogger" who has been personally injured in comments boards by those ubiquitous and largely nonexistent Bernie Bros. He ridiculed Sanders for voting for the Wall Street-friendly Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Clinton himself immediately signed after passive-aggressively sneaking it, at the last minute, into an 11,000-page lame duck omnibus monstrosity. Few legislators had a chance to notice it, let alone study it. Clinton now fails to mention why he signed it instead of vetoing it.

Clinton also went into high dudgeon because it appears that Bernie once slipped up and not only attended a DNC fundraiser, he had the gall to breathe the same air as the lobbyists in attendance. And on and on. If this is the best oppo research that the crack Clinton team can come up with, then Bernie is a shoo-in for both the nomination and the general.

It's almost as though Bill Clinton wants to put his wife's campaign out of its misery by killing it as quickly as possible. Or then again, maybe the whole idea is to deliberately make himself look like such an asshole that people will vote for Hillary out of pity. The anti-Bernie New York Times, for some odd reason, even described his appearance as "poignant." The reporter seemed to half-realize midway through dutifully transcribing Bill's unhinged remarks how truly bizarre they were.

Red-baiting has been proven ineffective. So has the ridiculous shaming of female voters by feminist "icons" Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem.

 Bill Clinton infamously co-opted the Reagan Revolution and turned the Democratic Party to the right by announcing during his first campaign that "the era of big government is over."

And now Bernie Sanders is proving through his own first campaign that the era of corrupt, Clinton-style identity politics is over. 

Trickle-down feminism of the type being espoused by multimillionaires Hillary Clinton, Albright and Steinem is as much a sham as trickle-down economics. Women living on the brink of financial collapse are not up for vicariously enjoying Hillary Clinton's shattering of any glass ceiling.

 We are all too aware of the falling, deadly shards that she has already left in her wake.