Political Mob Families Call Christmas Truce

It's that most wonderful time of the year, when the racketeers in Congress put aside their petty partisan differences just long enough to have their big party and pay their annual mob dues before they all head off to the beaches, the ski slopes and the high-dollar fundraisers.

It's an especially rewarding time for President Donald Trump, whom the House Democrats just honored for his cruel treatment of immigrants and his cruel cuts to the SNAP (food stamp) program by giving him his very own Space Force, a bona fide fourth branch of the military, along with enhanced killing powers by way of another nearly trillion-dollar stocking stuffer for his Pentagon. This was an especially generous gift in light of the publication of documents in the Washington Post which show that the past three administrations have deliberately lied about the "progress" of the multi-trillion dollar Afghanistan war and occupation. Adam Schiff, the Democrat who spent all last week lambasting the unpatriotic and corrupt Trump, grotesquely gushed that the Democrats' gift to the president is "the most progressive defense bill we have passed in decades."

 The Democrats even gave Trump his very own worker-punishing NAFTA clone package with his name on it. In a grab-bag ripoff if there ever was one, the Democrats in return got a relatively paltry twelve weeks of paid family leave for federal workers only. They apparently didn't want to act too greedy by demanding that Bad Santa Trump also reverse his cruel pre-Christmas decision to cut nearly a million people from SNAP (food stamps) which also includes cuts to home heating assistance.

This hellish Saturnalia kind of makes the much ballyhooed and ridiculously limited articles of impeachment the House is debating in the same breath look like dessert for Donald Trump.. It's more of a six-course meal for him, because he'll get unprecedented nonstop TV time soon after the holidays. It won't matter if the corporate media strives mightily to cast this as negative publicity for him, because he'll cast his own self as a victim-hero for the ages. 

He'll be able to make hay, and rightly so, over the shocking revelations that among its other crimes, the FBI actually tampered with the physical evidence it presented to the FISA court in its investigation of his campaign operative Carter Page. No matter that the otherwise scathing report by Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice Inspector General, feebly concluded that the actual investigation itself was begun legitimately, and that there was no evidence of political motivation for FBI malfeasance and no evidence of a Deep State plot against the president. That's simply because, he acknowledged in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the people at the FBI were vague when questioned about their motivations and he doesn't purport to be a mind reader. 

The FBI, now joined at the hip with the Democratic Party in its utterly phony #Resistance, Inc. movement, has been revealed to be rotten to its very core, and the undemocratic Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has (not for the first time) been revealed as a rubber stamp for all manner of abuse. It is so rotten that even extremist Republicans like Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz came off as righteous civil liberties champions during Thursday's Senate hearing on the matter. For the first time since 9/11, the most diehard war hawks are questioning the wisdom of having a secret court where the targets of investigations aren't even informed that they're under investigation. No matter if, when Graham said "it can happen to anyone," he was mainly thinking about himself and his fellow right-wing politicians.

Sometimes mistakes get made, and justice trickles down by sheer luck. Until, that is, the political racketeers figure out that even a trickle of democracy threatens to erode capitalism, and in a reactionary panic they turn up their own fire hoses of freedom to full throttle and aim them at the huddled masses both at home and abroad. But they're running dry on their excuses, and the pathetic hot air left in the wake of their mendacious gushers hasn't got the power to terrorize us, let alone convince us of their kindly flag-wrapped motivations.

Why else would Speaker Nancy Pelosi allow for a minimalist impeachment of Trump, other than to ensure that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren remain trapped in a Senate trial while corporatists Biden, Bloomberg and Buttigieg pretend to fight Trump out there and she pretends to fight him over here, in the cynically-named People's House?

Decoding the Umpteenth Rising of Hillary

What better time for Hillary Clinton to cash in with the rest of the Democratic Doomsday Cartel than right before the congressional and statehouse elections?

Straight Outta The Atlantic

Fresh off her sticker-selling Internet campaign for the little people,  Clinton has now penned a self-righteous "op-ed" in The Atlantic aimed at members of her own class. The first tell is that she uses the pronoun "we" and not "you" when she offers her litany of dangers to "democracy", or should I say, the oligarchy. And lest you get the mistaken impression that she is entirely altruistic in her concern, there is this tiny-print nugget at the end of the piece: 

This essay was adapted from the afterword of the paperback edition of What Happened, which will be published on September 18.

As Ralphie groused about the Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Pin Ovaltine scam in A Christmas Story, "It's nothing but a lousy commercial!"

 This isn't to say that lousy commercialism is anything new or unexpected. There's always a profit motive in modern politics. Making money is what the recent mass outpouring of angst about Trump by the permanent Ruling Class essentially is. What they call the public good is really the private good of the rich and the well-connected. Trump sells, and not only for his own greedy benefit.

So it matters not that Hillary Clinton's essay is the epitome of self-serving hypocrisy and that each of her anti-Trump talking points apply just as aptly to her and her husband, and that her invective is a de facto boomerang. She doesn't care if everybody in the bottom 90% knows she is a bundle of lies. There are the "irredeemable" bottom-dwellers in her Basket of Deplorables whom she despises openly. And then there are those obsequients who are simply too afraid of Trump to criticize Democrats. These groups can effectively cancel each other out, as far as she and her cohort are concerned. And what's left of the Left? Sniff. She endorsed corrupt right-wing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo over progressive Cynthia Nixon. That "special place in hell for women who don't support other women" dreamed up by Madeline Albright only ever applied to Bernie Sanders supporters.

So the hypocrisy of condemning Trump over his imprisonment of migrant children when Hillary just two years ago called for sending refugee kids back where they came from to send a stern message to their irresponsible parents is easily ignored. Instead, she concentrates on the "monstrosity" of Trump lying about deaths of Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, rather than concentrating on how private equity vultures and members of her own party have long been agitating for the neoliberal austerity regimen which was immiserating residents of the Commonwealth long before Trump gleefully threw paper towels at them.

 If you're feeling nauseous right about now, but hate the chalky taste of Pepto Bismol, then give Clinton's commercial a read. It'll feel like sticking your finger down your throat to make yourself vomit. But if that prospect sounds too intense, I'll put on my Secret Decoder ring to transmit the gist of it:

Trump does so many despicable, deplorable things and tells so many loathsome lies she can't keep track of everything, although she did keep track of that one time he told 125 lies in 120 minutes. John Adams certainly never called Thomas Jefferson "Crooked Thomas" during that presidential race. And she can certainly relate, because Jefferson owned slaves and Hillary also oversaw prison slave labor during her time as Arkansas First Lady. You wouldn't ever catch her trying to upend the Status Quo! Not then, and not now and not ever.

Even though there is no evidence that Russia installed Trump in office, she will continue to treat this as her own personal truth. Trump is doing nothing to protect us against an unproven threat!

Trump is going after journalists. Although he hasn't shut down the corporate-owned media conglomerate, he would if he could. Hillary certainly never would, because as much as she hates the media, she never called them fake or insulted them. She had staff for that. She merely hid from them as much as she could on The Trail, in between those times that she used them to air her grievances against their unfairness toward her and Bill.

What's more, the Obama administration was also going after journalists with a record vengeance. And as newly-released documents reveal, Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a secret opinion in 2015 which casts US journalists as foreign agents and therefore fodder for surveillance under the draconian FISA Act.

Let me depart for a moment from the synopsis and insert this direct quote from the Atlantic infomercial:

When we can’t trust what we hear from our leaders, experts, and news sources, we lose our ability to hold people to account, solve problems, comprehend threats, judge progress, and communicate effectively with one another—all of which are crucial to a functioning democracy.

In other words, if people can't or won't swallow corporate propaganda whole, the Ruling Class suffers. Ordinary people lose the respect for corporate-controlled government that the oligarchs need to thrive and prosper. If the consent of the governed can no longer be manufactured by the self-serving Masters of the Universe, and the "narrative" cannot be narrowly proscribed, the aristocracy of the Secret Circle will find it increasingly hard to function under this renegade bomb-thrower of a president.

Now on with the sardonic interpretation of Hillary's message:

Trump refuses to release his tax returns, which is not comparable to Hillary's erasure of the State Department emails from her own secret server in her private basement. He is profiting from the presidency, while the hundreds of millions of dollars Bill and Hill raked in from the presidency and continue to rake in through their money-laundering influence-peddling charity are too noble to even be mentioned. Even though Trump is totally in it for his private gain, her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, where she admitted that her public position is different from her private position, were stolen by Wikileaks and shouldn't be heeded. Kill the messenger and blame the Russians instead, even if you have to do it 125 times in 120 minutes, or at least in the space of an hour of Rachel Maddow. (Catch Hillary on Rachel tonight, by the way!)

Trump undermines the unity which normally makes bipartisanship for the rich such a great propaganda scam. When Hillary says Democracy is rowdy by nature, what she really means is that there are always these petty fake squabbles among the movers and shakers of the Ruling Class to keep us alternately entertained and numbed. As they tried to convey to the lesser people during the Great John McCain Funeral Spectacular, when George Bush shared his candy with Michelle Obama during a pre-arranged camera pan:

We debate freely and disagree forcefully. It’s part of what distinguishes us from authoritarian societies, where dissent is forbidden. But we’re held together by deep “bonds of affection,” as Abraham Lincoln said, and by the shared belief that out of our fractious melting pot comes a unified whole that’s stronger than the sum of our parts.

In the good old affectionate days, the Clintons were actually good transactional buddies with the Trumps. They even attended Donald and Melania's wedding. And normally, those "free debates" are carefully orchestrated by a corporation instead of by the quaint League of Women Voters, and pesky third and fourth party candidates are barred from appearing. And most recently, of course, the Bernie Sanders challenge was effectively quashed by purges of primary voting rolls and a severely truncated primary debate schedule. Although Hillary bought her way into control of the Democratic Party, this was not corrupt or authoritarian.

So now that it's that magical time of year when they allow people to vote and where corporate control of candidates does not apply in every single case, the aristocracy must fear-monger for all that it's worth. And it's worth a lot.

Therefore, Hillary will call for reform in the form of the same piecemeal solutions which catapulted her to a de facto victory on both coasts in 2016. Get the money out of politics, but not for her. Expand national service programs so that the lesser people, at little to no pay, can pretend they're making a difference and that this is really a democracy - when what they're really doing is protecting the status quo of extreme, obscene and unequal wealth. Let's have automatic voting registration too. And then making choosing between pre-vetted corporate candidates mandatory under law!

When we think about politics and judge our leaders, we can’t just ask, “Am I better off than I was four years ago?” We have to ask, “Are we better off? Are we as a country better, stronger, and fairer?” Democracy works only when we accept that we’re all in this together.

Accept your lot, proles. At least you are allowed to live in the same geographical space as your betters, so shut up already about Medicare For All and free higher education. Because the most pressing concern is that "we" (the very rich) stay better off. That's how fake Democracy works.

The End.

Or is it? 

This woman is not going away. They say the third time's a charm, so who's to say it can't also be a third chance for the charmless?

Pass the Ovaltine with a chaser of Pepto.