Forget about Joe Biden's promise to restore The Soul of America - whatever the heck that even is. How about restoring the heart, soul and purpose of journalism, a/k/a The Fourth Estate?
Granted, "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted" was always more or less the aspirational motto of American journalism. As Edward Bernays noted nearly a century ago in his seminal Propaganda, at least one quarter of all the front page articles in the New York Times were unabashed corporate or government propaganda. Still, the line between the news pages and opinion pages was almost always taken seriously, If you wanted to sneak a point of view into a straight news story, then you had to go about it stealthily, through the discreet use of innuendo, or the occasional omission of a salient fact.
Not so in the Age of Trump, when reporters double as #Resistance Fighters in the interests of careerist justice. And with only eight weeks to go in this sad, scary and ridiculously close presidential contest between a carnival barker of a mob boss and a mediocre career politician teetering on the edge of dementia, the line between reporting and punditry has been erased right off the journalistic ethics map.
It is no longer enough to dispassionately expose Trump's serial crime spree. It is incumbent upon the increasingly consolidated corporate media to also become the unabashed boosters of the #resistant Democratic Party, which itself might be better described as a coalition of corporate and military/security state interests whose sole agenda is the return to the same neoliberal status quo which produced Trump in the first place.
Fox News, which for decades had been the de facto propaganda arm of the Republican Party, now finds itself in the uncomfortable position of criticizing its erstwhile biggest fan, Donald Trump, himself now reduced to manically re-tweeting various right-wing websites and dark web conspiracy groups.
The turn of the "liberal" media to outright party boosterism took off like a shot last week with the obviously orchestrated Atlantic scoop that Trump had been overheard, a couple of years ago, disrespecting the military by calling dead soldiers "losers" and "suckers". The only shocking thing about this belated reportage is the amount of time it took for four anonymous sources to become shocked and appalled enough to spill the beans to The Atlantic, or alternatively, for the magazine itself to become shocked and appalled enough to finally publish them. It's as though they were hoarding the Big Reveal, that Trump is a clear and present danger to national security, for the sole purpose of winning an election.
The owner of The Atlantic just happens to be billionaire Democratic mega-donor Laurene Powell Jobs, whose Emerson Collective think tank is headed by former Obama Education Secretary and school privateer Arne Duncan. Her editor and the author of the Trump story is neoconservative pundit Jeffrey Goldberg, who proved his own boosterism bona fides years ago by cheerleading George W.Bush's invasion of Iraq. If you point out these facts, or if you notice that within hours of the article's publication, the Democratic Party was already running slick TV ads expressing shock and outrage about Trump's remarks, or that Joe Biden already had a major speech written on the subject, complete with the inevitable comparison between Trump's spurious bone spurs and the noble military service of the late Beau Biden, then you are in danger of being exposed either as a Russian operative or loony conspiracy theorist.
You are not, however, in any danger of being exposed as a closet Republican. That is because the Democratic Party has embraced with open arms such "moderate" Republicans as unindicted former Michigan governor and Flint water-poisoner Rick Snyder while relegating Bernie Sanders supporters ("purists") to the dust with a whole chorus line of high-kicking designer jackboots.
You are hereby on strict notice. With only eight weeks to go in The Race, ask not what Joe Biden can do for you. Ask instead what you can do for the Biden-Soul of Your Country.
That's a tall order for sure, especially if you've lost your job and your health insurance and you might be kicked out of your rented digs once all those eviction moratoriums conveniently expire right after the election.
So why not forget about your own fear and trepidation as you are being pressured to declare publicly that yes, you will hold your nose and vote for Joe Biden. Wallow instead in the high-minded fear and trepidation that your financial and intellectual superiors are also wallowing in. They are, deep within their credentialed souls of America, veddy veddy afraid. They're just like you!
"Our Democracy Is Deeply Imperiled," is the top news story in Wednesday's Guardian, and it is tailor-made to get you gripping your nose in a frenzy of highly motivated fear, relying as it does on the "ominous forebodings" of five "leading figures in the non-partisan (my bold) world of democracy reform and civil rights."
Notwithstanding that with the exception of the head of the NAACP, which does not endorse candidates, The Guardian's "non-partisan" sources all have close or even direct ties to the Democratic Party. Vanita Gupta, CEO of the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, is a former Obama administration official. Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice is a former Bill Clinton speechwriter. K. Sabeel Rahman, currently CEO of the Demos think tank, hails from the oligarch-funded New America Foundation, which is led by former Clinton State Department official Anne- Marie Slaughter.
And then there's Deirdre Schifeling, the founder and director of "Democracy For All 2021."
"A few years ago," credulously writes Guardian chief US correspondent Ed Pilkington, "she came to the realization that there was a growing disconnect between the will of the American people and their political representation in federal and state governments."
Would it be indelicate or even treasonous of me to surmise that Schifeling arrived at her Eureka moment as miraculously late as The Atlantic came to its own shocked realization that Trump doesn't care about dead soldiers - because her paycheck depends upon her not realizing that this reality existed even when Joe Biden was vice president?
Democracy For All is a project of the dark money SuperPAC called the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which also paid the PR firm of Anita Dunn, Biden's deputy campaign director, the whopping sum of $3,2 million for its own "consulting work" in 2018.
This is chump change next to the $140 million furnished by Sixteen Thirty's anonymous donors to other "left-leaning" organizations and political campaigns in that mid-term election year, which ushered in a hyped-up "Blue Wave" of centrist Dems, many of whom hail from the military and the CIA.
As Politico reported about Sixteen Thirty last November:
The spending was fueled by massive anonymous donations, including one gift totaling $51.7 million. That single donation was more than the group had ever raised before in an entire year before President Donald Trump was elected. Most of the group's funders are likely to remain a mystery because federal law does not require "social welfare"-focused nonprofits to reveal their donors.
The group's 2018 fundraising surpassed any amount ever raised by a left-leaning political nonprofit, according to experts, who pointed to the Koch network and the Crossroads network as rare right-leaning groups that posted bigger yearly fundraising totals at the height of their powers.
This is the kind of operation that The Guardian's Ed Pilkington actually casts as being in "the world of democracy reform and civil rights." It kind of makes you think that their definition of democracy reform is simply getting rid of it, and that civil rights are plutocratic rights, and plutocratic rights are civil rights.
Not for nothing, moreover, are the Democrats moaning about "fake news" and Russian interference in said democracy. As the Center for Responsive Politics reported recently, Sixteen Thirty also funds numerous party-aligned news sites which dishonestly pose as local independent journalism outlets.
Democracy For All 2021, which depends entirely upon dark oligarchic money for its very existence, nonetheless brags on its website, without a hint of irony, that it wants to "ensure transparency for all political spending."
It's no surprise that Democracy For All's idea of an anti-Trump health care platform is restricted to reproductive rights. Forget about polls showing that the majority of Americans support Medicare For All. Because 70 percent of Americans also support the be-all and end-all of Roe v Wade!
If you demand both, then you're apparently asking for way too much. You have to pragmatically pick the battles that are so carefully selected for you by the credentialed Knowledge Class.
Pilkington explains:
Yet Schifeling found herself spending more and more of her time defending Planned Parenthood against the aggressive attacks of a small minority of extremist anti-abortion politicians. Despite the settled nature of the law, and the clear progressive bent of public opinion, women were finding it increasingly difficult in practice to secure their reproductive rights.
She reached a reluctant and unhappy conclusion: “Our government is not able to represent the will of the people.”
Since then, Schifeling and her peers have been looking at the causes of this dysfunction and searching for solutions.
Schifeling has not yet come to the reluctant realization that affording guaranteed single payer health care to all citizens in the middle of a pandemic is among the obvious solutions for this dysfunction. We wouldn't want Democracy For All (Wealthy Socially Liberal People) to explode, or for their lifestyles to fundamentally change, would we?
It's their constant searching that really counts, right along the complicity of the churnalists operating right out there in the open as oligarchy-boosters.
They don't call it the Media-Political Complex for nothing.
Former Clinton campaign aide and Obama/Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan has a piece up in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas explaining how the centrist Democrats have finally seen the light that their centrist message is not a big hit with voters.
But try as he might, he just can't hide the bait-and-switch behind a hodgepodge of progressive rhetoric. The fraud of replacing the conservative "New Democrats" with the brand new "New Old Democrats." is exposed right at the start of his piece -- which, as the editors helpfully inform the time-pressed among us, is a "41-minute read."
So after approximately a one-minute read comes this disclaimer about why the New Dems have been acting more like Old Republicans for about the last trillion minutes:
It turned out to be a 30-year tide, one that shifted the center of political gravity dramatically. From Ronald Reagan’s “[t]he most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” to Bill Clinton’s “[the] era of big government is over,” all the way through the 2012 election, a new consensus shaped by Reagan prevailed. Democratic presidents, Clinton and Barack Obama, surely advocated for and pursued progressive policies, but within limits defined for them, forced to trim their ambition compared with the Great Society and New Deal eras. Republican presidents, meanwhile, aggressively dismantled the progressive scaffolding of those earlier periods. Along the way, economic inequality skyrocketed—and America’s middle class kept losing ground.
If Sullivan right off the bat refuses to take ownership of the Democratic Party's policies and decisions, you can pretty much rest assured that the next 40 minutes will be a slog of blame-gaming, revisionist history and gaslighting. He deprives both Clinton and Obama of any personal agency at all. They were "forced" by those nasty old right-wingers like Pat Buchanan to "trim their ambitions" according to the limits defined for them and not by them.
At least Sullivan doesn't tack on the standard apologists' trope that "the progressives/left let them down."
But thankfully, that fickle liberal public is now finally waking up and believing that government can and should make people's lives better. It's just too bad that the simultaneous epiphany of Jake and his fellow New Old Dems is being so drowned out by the fickle media's addiction to Donald Trump's tweets.
And, Sullivan continues, the media shouldn't really be fretting that the Party is moving too far left, particularly in the direction of de facto Old Dem Bernie Sanders - who, by the way, is as dotty and detail-free as he ever was. That's because you can be a corporate centrist and a progressive at the very same time! Or more accurately, you should be able to sell voters on the notion that you can serve corporations and struggling people at the very same time.
But back to Jake Sullivan's personal epiphany about the pressing need to change, not the actual plutocrat-serving policies of the New Old New Dems, but the message they are selling to voters:
I am obviously not the first person to see these trends or make these points. Others have been advancing this case for a while now. In fact, I have to confess that I did not fully appreciate the need for a more dramatic rethink at the start of the 2016 campaign. I was Hillary Clinton’s senior policy adviser, responsible for developing and rolling out proposals on everything from tax policy to bank regulation. But before that, I was a child of the 1980s and 1990s, steeped in the centrist politics of the era. And I had spent the years leading up to the campaign working on foreign policy, traveling the world and learning what was happening “over there” instead of coming to terms with what was going on back here.
That was the apology to Hillary Clinton that all her minions have been issuing in print lately. Jake was in such a Reagan bubble and flitting around the world so much that he was incapable of bursting the Reagan bubble that Hillary herself was helplessly trapped in. Jake let Hillary down, big-time, and now he's reinventing himself as the Great Progressive New Old Dem Hope. He repeats himself, just in case Hillary did not get the message the first time:
This is not to rebuke the New Democrats of the 1990s. For one thing, the Clinton years, while imperfect, produced greater growth and fairness—with rising wages across the board and particularly strong gains for disadvantaged groups–than anything we’ve seen since. For another, the political constraints of the time were real. Bill Clinton came into office with a big, bold agenda, but the defeat of his health-care plan (remember Hillarycare?) and the walloping he took at the ballot box in the 1994 midterm elections forced him to dial back his ambition and seek more incremental progress where he could find openings.
Sullivan omits the fact that the booming economy of the Clinton years was largely the result of a bubble engendered by an orgy of deregulation: the repeal of Glass-Steagall banking regulations and the passage of telecommunications legislation which enabled the consolidation of the mass media into five or six giant corporate entities. He fails to mention the record poverty soon to become apparent thanks to the 1996 repeal of FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children. And he fails to mention that one reason "Hillarycare" failed was not so much the result of those "Harry and Louise" TV ads, but because Hillary refused any outside input from advocates of single payer health care. Its failure was more the result of bickering between the giant insurance companies and smaller insurance companies and her stubborn penchant for secrecy.
But never mind all that stuff he never even mentioned, Sullivan soothes. Because "we're in a different moment now" and have always to look forward, not backward. Sure, Hillary was wrong to denigrate Bernie Sanders as too pie-in-the-sky. But she was wrong only in her choice of denigrating words, not in the substance of her critique:
He was offering prescriptions for the world as it once was, not the world as it is and will be. His worldview was rooted in the 1970s; he had little to say on the changing nature of work, the changing character of American families, or the enduring realities of globalization. (For example, his agenda lacked clear plans for dealing with workers in irregular employment relationships, or those dislocated by technological change.)
I must have read that paragraph ten times (adding many wasted minutes to my 41-minute allotment) and I still couldn't understand what it meant. It finally dawned on me. It doesn't mean anything at all. It simply conveys the same old denigrating message that Bernie is a doddering old dinosaur who wouldn't know a real family if one smacked him in the face. He is so, like,'pre-Reagan 70s and doesn't understand that globalization is a natural phenomenon and, just like the weather, beyond the control of the neoliberal politicians like the Clintons who gladly helped finish what Reagan started.
But my time's a wastin' and so is yours, so I'll skip the fluffy filler and go straight to Sullivan's Platform for the New Old Democrats:
Recognize that the "future of work" is actually "the present of work." (Since it's already a gig economy right this very minute, we have to discuss things like buying into Medicare -- rather than, say, demand single payer coverage for everybody regardless of their employment status. Apparently forgetting that he'd just criticized Bernie for his lack of details, Sullivan writes about worker rights: "If we start from this basic premise ('the future is here') we can figure out the details so we can both promote innovation (my bold) and protect workers."
(This is the same old neoliberal centrism. "Innovation" is code for the profits of big business, which must be protected with the same old enthusiasm causing the increasing stagnation of wages over the past 40 years. Sullivan just cannot quit being a New Dem.)
The roles and responsibilities of families have changed... People aren’t looking for handouts. These are working adults looking for a fair deal for their participation in the workforce. Hillary raised these challenges incessantly in her speeches, but they didn’t count as part of an “economic message,” because they were seen as soft “family” issues. They’re not. They are core economic issues.
(Therefore, what families need are not single payer health care or subsidized child care, but rather just a little "help" paying for these exorbitant costs out of their own pockets. This is Classic Neoliberalism 101. There will be no end to the privatization of everything and everything for a profit.)
Recognize the service sector.
This is another way of suggesting that the Old New Dems should give up on the stereotypical male Trump voter, forget the factory workers and the steel workers, and concentrate on working class women, like home health aides. He writes, "So Democrats need to develop a story and a strategy for ensuring that workers in the caring economy, the services economy, and the value-added manufacturing economy receive not just a decent income and stronger benefits, but also dignity and respect along the way. I confess I don’t have the answers for how exactly to make this happen, but I do know that we should elevate these questions in the national policy dialogue."
(He just gave away the con, again. Before these workers get their fair wages and health care, the New Old Dems have to spin them a yarn because of course he doesn't have any actual answers for them. I suspect he doesn't imagine any of these overworked servants/ listeners are reading his piece in "Democracy" - a concept which does not seem to apply to actual people any more. But hey, as long as actual people get some "recognition" then what more do they want from the Newbie Oldies?)
Education, education, education!
The emphasis should therefore shift away from degrees and diplomas and toward skills and credentials. Instead of prioritizing “free college,” we should prioritize debt-free lifelong learning: Every American willing to meet basic requirements should be able to find a training opportunity, at any stage of their lives, that provides them with job-relevant skills at a cost they can (truly) afford, and a job on the other end. This approach will both assure the ongoing vitality of middle class families and their children, and also provide new pathways for children of poverty to enter the middle class.
How many neoliberalisms can you count in just that one paragraph? You have exactly two minutes, and the clock is running right now! So I'll just give you a time-saving synopsis of what Sullivan is actually saying:
People are mainly stupid compared to us Old New Old Dems, so keep learning your whole life until you drop dead. Don't expect any help in meeting those basic requirements and always strive for a job that you can afford and never expect your boss to be able to afford you. Because that's not how it works in the Now-Future. Of course, the life-goal of every poor person is not to eat or find shelter, but to "seek a path to the middle class." Thankfully, though, Sullivan has replaced those rickety "ladders of opportunity" offered by the New Dems to the "launchpads of opportunity" now being sold for a very limited time by the New Oldies But Moldies.
Phew! I'm sorry to say that having gone way beyond my allotted 41 minutes, I was unable to launch myself to the blissful end of this piece and sadly did not achieve full neoliberal Nirvana. But if you follow the helpful link in the first sentence of this much briefer synopsis, then you too can have the opportunity to get access to every golden word, regardless of your level of wonkiness or lack thereof.
Good luck, and have a great sardonic weekend.
You may have heard that Hillary Clinton's "highly anticipated" new book is due out in September, so set your countdown clocks to Zero Hour and get buzzed on all the buzz. From what little has officially leaked out so far, Hillary will portray herself as a circus acrobat with no other safety net than her stash of hundreds of millions of dollars:
In "What Happened," the former Democratic presidential nominee
will discuss the roles of former FBI Director James Comey and Russia in
her loss to Donald Trump, according to sources familiar with the book.
“In
the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be
careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I’m
letting my guard down," Clinton writes in an excerpt from the book's introduction.
Why the declarative title What Happened, as opposed to the interrogative What Happened? Or for that matter, What the Hell Happened?
In an exclusive interview with Sardonicky, Hillary explains it all in her own words. (The following remarks were lightly edited for something resembling clarity.)
I chose What Happened because it sounds so authoritative. Put a period on it, it's done... by me, Hillary Clinton. Nobody puts Baby in the corner. What, you were expecting Great Expectations or something? No cobwebby old Miss Havisham jokes from the haters of the vast right wing conspiracy, thank you very much. Plus, if I made my book title into a freaking question, I would then be forced to answer it, not to mention inviting more tiresome debate. But if you really insist upon knowing, the only possible answer is: Shit Happened. To me, Hillary Clinton, not to the citizens of this country. I will do just fine with my long walks in the woods and my slugs of fine wine.
Of course, if I really wanted to be truthful, I would call it Bullshit Happened. And if I wanted to be really, really truthful I'd put it in the present tense: Bullshit Happens. After all, I am the one writing this book. And since the unproven trope "Russia Meddled in My Campaign, a/k/a Our Democracy" will be a main theme of my book, I will probably leave out the part where my DNC operatives mysteriously refused to let the FBI investigate our computers, lest evidence of an Inside Job destroy our whole Putin-Did-It narrative. Especially now that this narrative threatens to start World War III.
If I wanted to be really really really truthful, I would also admit that I am paying (depending on sales and if he's very lucky) one of my former speechwriters to write my book for me. We've been flying back and forth between coasts at regular intervals to collude, I mean collaborate.
And I wasn't about to call it Something Happened, because that is a brilliant, albeit forgotten, novel by Joseph Heller. Although it is fiction, it is way, way more honest than anything I could ever bullshit my way through, even if my very life depended on it. As a matter of fact, if you read Heller's book, you will discover that his satiric observations on bullshit come bleakly and uncomfortably close to who I am and how I ran, or didn't run, my campaign. For example, in the following section, Heller perfectly captures how Team Clinton put way too much stupid faith in polls giving me a 99% chance of winning, and how we relied on outdated demographics and algorithms instead of paying attention to people's real problems:
We had no way of knowing whether the information on which we based our
own information was true or false. But that didn't seem to matter; all
that mattered is that the information came from a reputable source.
People in our market research division were never held to blame for
conditions they discovered outside the campaign that placed us at a
competitive disadvantage. What was, was - and they were not expected to
change reality, but merely to find it if they could and suggest
ingenious ways of disguising it. To a great extent, that is the nature
of my own work, and all of us worked closely with the sales department and
the public relations department in converting whole truths into half
truths and half truths into whole ones.
In any event, Something Happened (!) is far too exclamatory and singular,
and it implies that only one bad thing happened to spoil my victory dance.
Since I am Hillary Clinton, and I have whole shitloads of blame to lob
at so many people, my book will be about the many many horrible things that happened to the singular woman who is me, Hillary Clinton.
Unfortunately, the title A Singular Woman has also already been taken. It's the biography of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham. I am also thinking of blaming her, simply for having spawned the first man with the effrontery to steal the presidency from me. But you'll just have to wait for September when the book comes out to find out how much ink I will actually spill on direct Barry-blaming. (Hint: my publicists have already planted the story that No Drama Obama deliberately ignored RussiaGate before my publicists thought to invent it mere days after I lost my second election, to Donald Trump, whom my publicists had planted in the press as one of the Pied Piper candidates it would be a cinch for me to beat.)
But Goldwater Girl that I am, and for purposes of the austerity (for others) which has been my whole life's work, I am sticking to What Happened, Period. It gives out the perfect whiff of control and personal agency while also passive-aggressively absolving me, Hillary Clinton. of any accountability for my decisions. It also leaves enough space on the book jacket for a photo of me for a possible second and last printing. For now, though, we're going with the appropriately stern plain vanilla look. My publicists were leaning toward that now-iconic silhouette profile, which sends the message of a singular woman who holds her nose very proudly in the air so as to avoid actually looking at such things as middle class voters. So stay tuned. There may be multiple covers available to mirror my multiple reinvented public personae. One thing I can promise my readers is authentic high grade glossy paper milled from genuine dead trees.
Meanwhile, since I'll be heading out to the Vineyard and/or the Hamptons in the next couple of days, you won't see me in the woods around your neighborhood. But not to worry. I will be hard at work putting the finishing touches on the galleys. I will work my heart out for you, and continue my SuperPac fundraising for other centrist Democrats as they tout their new inspiring slogan, A Better Deal.
As my beleaguered millionaire pal Nancy Pelosi said just the other day, it's not the Democratic Party's de facto agenda of steak for the wealthy and crumbs for the poor that matters - it's the way that they put out their message. "We'll be making not a course correction, but a presentation correction," she announced.
It's not the economy stupid after all. It's the propaganda stupid.The main course of the feast for the Haves will stay exactly the same.
That is such a profound observation by Nancy I might even fit in my book somewhere, most likely in the acknowledgment section. That's the part, after unloading brick by brick my entire shitload of blame, where I air-kiss my myriad donors, celebrity fans, and enablers. It will take up at least a third of the entire book. This will give my memoir the appearance of intellectual heft and thereby justify my charging an outrageous sum of money for it.
We corporate Democrats are walking a mighty fragile tightrope these days. The danger is getting swept away by our own virtue-signalling. When "they" go low, we go so high that we get oxygen-deprived sometimes. I don't mean to say that's a bad thing, because our enthusiasm for tiny incremental solutions becomes so contagious that it usually infects enough of the people at least some of the time. We only lost about a thousand national and state seats in the past decade, after all.
So as I so coyly teased in my leaked preface, we always run the risk of completely losing our balance performing such a multitude of verbal stunts as we seek public office. Especially when one is as clumsy as I was/am in the trickery department. And, channeling Joseph Heller again, when we lose sight of the fact that our bullshit is bullshit, we start relying too heavily on our version of the truth. We forget that the Big Lie has to be constantly honed to achieve maximum effectiveness. We get lazy and sloppy and self-satisfied, even after we lose one here or there. We nobly walk in the woods of our estates and guzzle our Chardonnay and attend many Broadway shows to prove to other wealthy members of our class that we're okay and smarter than the average bear.
Nonetheless. we have trouble distinguishing between the private positions we share with our patrons and donors and colleagues in the global finance capital cartel and the public positions we share with the hoi polloi. We become focus-grouped and poll-tested and trial-ballooned out of all rationality and meaning. We get so confused, that when we do get caught out in a lie or a grift, we have the chutzpah to channel Honest Abe and compare our paid speeches to Goldman Sachs with Lincoln freeing the slaves.
We become mere ghosts, diminished to dictating our bullshit to ghostwriters.
Of course, that is far more honesty than my reputation as Warrior Victim Queen could ever possibly bear.
Did I forget to request that this conversation be off the record? I did? Well knock me over with a Scaramucci feather! When I wrote in my teaser of a preface that I'd be letting my guard down and forgoing the safety net, I must have mistakenly meant what I said for once in my life.
What the hell.?!.?!
Mitt can't keep his story straight, and Barry doesn't even have a story to tell.
And both of them claim to really stink at juggling.
Romney went on a marathon of talk shows Friday to try to untangle his web of deceit, and succeeded only in continuing his exhausting tarantella, trapping himself even further in a snare of his own making. Nixon saved his vice presidential candidacy with his famous Checkers speech. Romney can't even fall back on a Seamus speech, because Seamus outsourced himself to Canada after his car-roof ride from hell. What would Mitt even say? That Ann confines herself to driving two plain Republican Cadillacs with cloth seats instead of Corinthian leather? This is a man who doesn't even try to pretend to be humble. Any speech about his tax returns, tenure at Bain, and offshoring and outsourcing will contain only one phrase, repeated ad infinitum: "I Won't I Won't I Won't I Won't and You Can't Make Meeeeeeeeh."
To hear Mitt tell it, he had a hard enough time juggling his various duties running the Salt Lake City winter Olympics during his Bain leave of absence to be able to manage juggling the Giant Slalom schedule with the Giant Offshoring schedule at the exact same moment in history. In fact, Mitt was so overwhelmed being Mr. Olympus that it was like jumping into an empty elevator shaft, according to Ann Romney. The guy is way too much of a nebbish to multi-task.
And Obama apparently can't walk and chew gum at the same time, either. In a cringe-worthy clip of a White House interview with Charlie Rose, (to be aired Sunday) he said his main mistake in his first few years was that he didn't spend enough time juggling his bullshit artistry skills with his other fantastic skills. Turns out he's just as lousy at juggling as Mitt:
When I think about what we’ve done well and what we haven’t done well, the mistake of my first term – couple of years – was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.
(snip)
It’s funny – when I ran, everybody said, well he can give a good speech but can he actually manage the job? And in my first two years, I think the notion was, ‘Well, he’s been juggling and managing a lot of stuff, but where’s the story that tells us where he’s going?’ And I think that was a legitimate criticism.
Yeah, Barry. Your policies -- or really the lack of policies -- which resulted in one out of every seven of us without health insurance, one out of seven of us on food stamps, stagnating wages, epidemic unemployment, continued corruption on Wall Street, never-ending wars -- would have been easier to swallow with just that one extra spoonful of your propaganda sugar. You backstabbed us behind closed doors, when you should have bullshat us to our faces. We don't need no food, we don't need no stinking jobs. In your book, we just need a goddamn bedtime story.
Somebody turn out the lights before I get accused of false equivalency.
No, that's a misleading headline. According to Reuters, the accurate quote is "Top Banks Say They Not Too Big to Fail." Actually, according to FishbowlNY, a Neanderthal headline writer at Reuters misquoted The Big Banks.They never said they not too big to fail. They said that if they do fail, they will not require taxpayer assistance to hasten their own destruction. They can self-immolate all by themselves, thank you very much. Or, if they do decide to live, they can administer their own CPR without government aid. These banksters no longer believe in public-subsidized health care, good little libertarians that they are. Or so they say.
According to an obscure portion of the monstrously defanged and defunded Dodd-Frank Act, bank regulators would supposedly put the failures out of their misery and bill the patient for their services. But if the Jamie Dimon situation is any example, regulators and CEOs are the same animal. There is no murder-suicide pact in Dodd-Frank. (I am of course writing figurately and not suggesting that Jamie should physically harm either of his selves: either the JPMorgan Chase self or the regulator on the New York Fed.)
Here. according to Reuters, is a subtle hint that the banksters' "Living Wills" are not worth the paper they're written on:
But some experts doubt how hard regulators will push the banks for changes or how useful hypothetical resolution plans will be in major financial crisis.
The public portions released on Tuesday and are a few dozen pages per bank summarizing thousands of pages submitted confidentially to regulators.
The banks argued in the public documents that their resolution plans will work, with no cost to taxpayers or great consequence to the financial system. They used technical generalities in their conclusions without specifically addressing the unpredictable and vicious nature of a credit crisis.
Viciously and unspecifically unpredictable. "Big Banks Say They Lie Through Their Predatory Fangs" is the real headline, folks. Just like LIBOR should really be LIE MORE -- although it's actually a great big bore to the un-outrageable general public.
