$ound and Fury At the Democratic Debate

On the same day that the Centers for Disease Control warned that the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) will inevitably hit the US with an historic vengeance, both the inept CBS moderators and the "moderate" candidates on Tuesday night's stage nevertheless persisted in castigating Bernie Sanders's Medicare For All campaign platform.

Maybe once people start dying in the street by the thousands because they can't afford a doctor visit or a day off from work when symptoms hit or they've become exposed, maybe once our consolidated for-profit "health care systems" (hospitals) become unable to cope with a possible epidemic, maybe once children can no longer attend school, the neoliberal Ruling Class Racketeers will finally stop asking "But how you gonna pay for it!?!" 

Maybe once the lords and ladies of capitalism themselves become inconvenienced, they might belatedly realize that their selfishness comes with a high price. Guaranteed universal health care would not only help the sick, it would also trickle up to maintain the fortunes and health of the wealthy.

All the boutique hospitals and all the concierge healh care in the world will not shield the rich from being infected by the hoi polloi or even by the private medical personnel they pay so handsomely to attend exclusively to their needs and to their needs only.

Of course, I could be wrong. Lloyd Blankfein could go down gasping that he'll vote for Trump in the next life, and smarmy Pete Buttigieg will be doing his Obama impersonation and "turning the page" in that great McKinsey consulting corner office in the sky, and Chris Matthews' nightmares of Bernie Central Park executions will follow him right into the corporate media bardo green room.

But back to Tuesday night's South Carolina debate, of which I do have one nice thing to say. And that one nice thing is that CBS made it readily available for viewing on YouTube. Unlike in last week's NBC/Comcast spectacular, I didn't even have to download a special app so that they could send me ads to enhance my experience. I was able to cast the show right to my cable-free TV instead of peering at it on my cheap smartphone. The train-wreck became almost life-size. And sound-wise, it was even screechingly larger than life.

Michael Bloomberg, whose $60 billion fortune will immunize him from neither infectious disease nor from the epidemic viral video clips covering his entire predatory career, had the best revelatory line not only in the debate but possibly also in his whole predatory career. Scoffing at Joe Biden's boast that he'd helped turn the House of Representatives blue in 2018, Bloomberg drawled in that trademark nasal monotone of his:

"Let's go on the record, they talk about 40 Democrats - 21 of those were people that I spent $100 million to help elect. All of the Democrats that came in put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave Congress the ability to control the president. I bough - I got them."

It might appear at first glance that Bloomberg spent his millions in bribes unwisely, given that not only have his handpicked political servants failed utterly to "control" Trump, they have given him most of what he wants, from his anti-immigrant militarized border, to his pro-corporate reworking of NAFTA, to his grotesque Space Force, and $700 billion for his expanded war machine, to even most of his right-wing judicial nominations. In other words, they gave Bloomberg everything he wanted.

If you think Bloomberg is in the race primarily to defeat Trump, think again. He's here to defeat Bernie the nominee. Failing that, he'll try to defeat Bernie the president.

In case you were confused when the audience erupted in cheers upon Bloomberg's Freudian slip acknowledging that he is one of the country's leading oligarchs in full control of the corrupt American duopoly,rest assured that the audience was largely comprised of his fellow oligarchs, as well as the various lackeys, consultants and others he had paid handsomely to be there for him. They, in turn, had paid the Democratic Party the hefty exclusive price of admission to the extravaganza. Tickets ranged from $1,750 to $3,200.

Since the manufactured outrage over Bernie's past praise of Cuba's literacy rate under Fidel Castro nearly caused the debate stage to spontaneously combust, there was sadly not enough time to discuss the climate catastrophe that is rapidly combusting the actual world. 

The inept CBS "journalists" who failed so miserably to moderate the immoderate flamed-out centrists sucking up all the oxygen on the stage also failed miserably to bring up the name of journalist Julian Assange, whose treatment as a joint US-UK political prisoner has more than a passing resemblance to the show trials common in 1930s Stalinist Russia. 

Only hours before the debate aired, news emerged that on the first day (Monday) of his extradition hearing at Woolwich Crown Court in London, the WikiLeaks founder had been handcuffed, stripped naked and had his case records confiscated in order to prevent him from appearing and taking part in his own trial.

Because Assange exposed US war crimes, and because the CIA had him under surveillance while he was living in exile at the Ecuador embassy, and because the CIA is also actively interfering in the current presidential election by linking both Trump and Sanders to "Russian interference," and because both the Democratic Party and the corporate media airing the debates have an intimate working relationship with this unaccountable fourth branch of government, it was probably deemed much safer to let the red-baiting of Bernie proceed as scheduled.

And since the"Intelligence Community" has, as Senate Minority Chuck Schumer acknowledged in an epic Freudian slip worthy of Bloomberg, "six ways from Sunday to get back at him (Trump)" if he doesn't kowtow to the CIA, Bernie himself is taking no unnecessary chances. He already has been "briefed." And he appears to have received the message loud and clear that he'd best go along to get along with the contrived and diversionary Russiagate Narrative by issuing the required obligatory denunciations of Vladimir Putin.

Bernie could well win the nomination and then beat Trump. But the Surveillance State, birthed some 70 years ago by the very plutocratic establishment  ("The Georgteown Set") whose ideological heirs he so vociferously campaigns against, will still be calling most of the shots.

Democracy, CIA-Style

By artificially narrowing the Trump impeachment inquiry to "Ukraine-gate" under the auspices of the House Intelligence Committee, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has all but assured that this constitutional remedy for removing a criminal president from office will proceed largely in secret, away from the public eye and away from public accountability.

At the very least, much if not most of the star witness testimony of the unnamed CIA official, who is rather ridiculously being marketed as a "whistle-blower," will not be held in a public forum. This is for the ostensible reason of protecting him from the nefarious machinations of Doctor Evil, a/k/a Donald Trump.

To help effect public compliance with this essential secrecy, the ubiquitous Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff is waxing breathless to the point of asphyxia on the corporate cable shows about all the complicated security protections needed to be put in place in order to keep the Informer's identity anonymous and his physical well-being assured.

Once the script of the CIA official's testimony has been honed and edited to self-serving perfection, this individual may finally make his debut before the cameras incognito, probably with a hood over his head and his voice disguised by some of the cool technology that we so admire in the Hollywood movies about our sexy, daring, cool and selfless Intelligence Community. Whatever props can elicit the maximum cloak-and-dagger excitement for the TV audience, the better that the producers of the Democratic Party-Security State-Media Complex, or Impeachment, Inc. will look.

Meanwhile, we'll have to be satisfied with such tawdry episodes as The Rudy Giuliani Story. In perhaps the most extreme role reversal and plot twist in modern political theater history, the once-lauded Mayor of Nine Eleven has morphed from prosecuting mob bosses to defending them. 

Lest the Impeachers come across as too James Bond-ish, Nancy Pelosi has carefully leaked her own secret list of solemn Impeachment Talking Points for use by the supporting congressional cast as they head for their home districts for a two-week recess to try and convince their constituents that the national security of the elites should be of grave concern to one and all.

Forget hassling your elected representatives about health care and the climate catastrophe and your crushing college debt and your unaffordable housing costs. Because the fates of certain centrist Democrats are more important than your lives. Pelosi and her henchmen are thus embarking on an unabashed Psy-Ops campaign of the type first devised by the CIA itself some 75 years ago in order to convince the world that they were not safe from Russian aggression in the aftermath of World War II. 

And make no mistake: "Ukraine-gate" is not only about impeachment, it's about the reanimated Cold War against Russia waged by an ever more militarized United States. With 800 to perhaps one thousand global bases under dire threat by Putin's grand total of nine, the USA is obviously in profound danger from "the Russians" - not least because they posted a few thousand cheesy Facebook ads to swing the election to Donald Trump and to sow domestic discord in the Happiest Place on Earth. That's right: America was a consumer paradise, a virtual Disneyland on steroids before Trump came along to spoil the mood and make American consumerism look bad to the whole free world. If we can only get rid of him and go back to the Status Quo, all will be well.

As it is, Trump is such a profound threat to the world order that even his imposition of more economic sanctions on Russia and his trashing of a nuclear arms accord were not enough for the order-mongers. The fact that he withheld, or is accused of withholding, a fortune in deadly weapons from the US-sponsored Ukrainian fighting forces was the last straw. It was more than the American Security State can be expected to bear.

So think of this artificially narrow impeachment inquiry as a proxy battle in the larger US-backed Ukraine vs. Russia war. The CIA has always acted in behalf of US multinational corporations anxious to plunder the wealth and natural resources of other countries and anxious to overthrow "corrupt" socialist-leaning or worker-friendly regimes. The CIA has always partnered with or installed US-friendly right wing puppets, arming them and training their death squads.

 They view Donald Trump as the Putin surrogate who has had the absolute chutzpah to denigrate corporation-serving NATO forces even as he caved to their Russophobic demands in a futile attempt to show that he can be just as vicious a team player as the rest of the elite American establishment. 

It hasn't worked. He just can't keep his big oafish mouth shut, and his clumsy paranoid tweeting thumbs still, and his self-dealing and corruption under as good control as his fellow elite leaders have historically done. He totally lacks the charm offensive skills so necessary in any chief executive, whether it be of a corporation or of the One Exceptional Nation itself. 

Donald Trump has got to go. He is not a good marketing or propaganda tool for our weaponized Democracy, neither the domestic variety nor the deadlier exported variety.

The Democrats and their "deep state" partners don't want to delve too deeply in Trump's long history of financial chicanery, however. Because as the Mueller investigation so painfully showed, some of their own respectable colleagues also run the risk of becoming collateral damage in such open-ended investigations. Witness the downfall of super-lobbyist Tony Podesta and the criminal trial of former White House attorney Greg Craig, who served under Obama and who was just acquitted of charges stemming from his own self-dealing in behalf of Ukrainian oligarchs.

But lest the corporate Democrats look even more like the hypocrites they are, they're claiming that a handful of valiant "front-line" representatives are in danger of losing their seats and the House of losing its majority if impeachment proceedings are not severely truncated and limited in scope.

"Front-line" is a telling bellicose adjective, describing a cadre of conservative congress critters who supposedly are just as endangered as the anonymous CIA "whistle-blower" due to their wins in solid GOP districts. Two of the most prominent Front-liners are Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin, who themselves are high-ranking (allegedly former) CIA officials.

Thanks to a highly coordinated week-long corporate media blitz calling for Trump's impeachment,"the polls have changed drastically on this," Pelosi said in a carefully-leaked "private" conference with her members on Sunday. In so saying, she used another common information warfare ploy: transforming a desire of the elite class into a desire of the non-elite class through the magic of propaganda and the measuring of its effectiveness through skewed, selective polling.

But lest the Party appear too gleeful and vindictive, she added:

“Our tone must be prayerful, respectful, solemn, worthy of the Constitution.”

As far as we know, she didn't suggest that congress critters appear at their constituent town halls decked out in religious garb and swinging incense-wafting chasubles, the better to awe-strike people who already are feeling mightily struck down by the worst income inequality of modern times. 

But as the New York Times reports, they will be "clutching talking points cards headlined 'No One is Above the Law.'"

These index cards contain a Holy Trinity of classic psy-ops techniques for the lawmaking preachers to inculcate into their congregations: (my interpretations in parentheses)

• that Trump “engaged in serious wrongdoing betrayed his oath of office and undermined national security;” (security for the ruling establishment and the maintenance of elite rule)

• that the president “pressured a foreign government to target a political opponent,” and what’s more, “tried to cover it up;” (instill fear in the populace by the "othering" technique, or xenophobia.)

• and that Democrats are planning to stick to just the facts in the inquiry as it moves forward. (the facts which fit the desired narrative, but which do not necessarily include facts which don't adhere to the narrowly defined narrative.)

It is an easy-to-understand, digestible narrative, unlike the other inquiries Democrats have been pursuing, including the Russia investigation, hush money payments and Mr. Trump’s business dealings.
“I still believe in story,” said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California and a close ally of Ms. Pelosi. “There’s clarity to this Ukraine story.”

Centrist Democrats must think that their constituents are real dolts, unable to understand even basic cheating or bribery, yet easily swayed by Cold War rhetoric and the fear and xenophobia that it instills. All people need in lieu of guaranteed health care and food on the table is a good story, especially if it has echoes of James Bond or Austin Powers to keep them diverted and entertained. 

The coincidental fact that the CIA whistle-blower law was just quietly changed to allow reports to be based on second-hand complaints and information should alert us to the inconvenient truth that this secretive, unaccountable "government within a government" has also arrogated to itself the power to remove, in collusion with our elected representatives, any elected representative that the ruling elites of Empire don't like - in this case, Donald Trump.

 Trump is the most criminal person ever elected to our nation's highest office, so you may ask why it should even matter if the CIA is coordinating his removal.

But it does matter, because a disturbing precedent is being set, one that is actually antithetical to the Constitution that Nancy Pelosi claims to so revere. 

What if by some miracle Bernie Sanders overcomes the Democratic Party's meddling and undemocratic machinations and does indeed become our next president?

The CIA, promoted and even initially staffed by some of this country's most eminent intellectual and financial elites from the cosseted world of the Ivy League, the landed aristocracy,Wall Street and prominent mainstream media outlets, will no doubt perform its sworn duty and do everything in its power to remove him from office, on any pretext whatsoever. A coordinated, relentless, disempowering stealth campaign of red-baiting to prevent any resurgence of the New Deal would probably begin within a day of his election.

And it would all be perfectly legal. It was during Christmas week 2016, when nobody was paying much attention, that Barack Obama very modestly, quietly, and un-Trumpily signed into law the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which allows the State Department to coordinate its own domestic propaganda programs with other agencies and mainstream media outlets in order to battle so-called foreign disinformation. Such domestic propaganda from government agencies, specifically aimed at US citizens, had previously been banned. 

As Mint Press News reported,

Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”

 “As Russia continues to spew its disinformation and false narratives, they undermine the United States and its interests in places like Ukraine, while also breeding further instability in these countries,” Kinzinger explained in a statement. “The United States has a role in countering these destabilizing acts of propaganda, which is why I’m proud to introduce [the aforementioned bill]. This important legislation develops a comprehensive U.S. strategy to counter disinformation campaigns through interagency cooperation and on-the-ground partnerships with outside organizations that have experience in countering foreign propaganda.”

Make no mistake — this legislation isn’t proposing some team of noble fact-finders, chiseling away to free the truth from the façades of various foreign governmental narratives for the betterment of American and allied populations. If passed, this legislation will allow cumbrously pro-‘American’ propaganda to infiltrate cable, online, and mainstream news organizations wherever the government deems necessary.

Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, hails from the US Air Force's elite Special Ops division. A veteran of the war on Iraq, he is a currently-serving member of the Air National Guard and was recently deployed to the militarized Texas border "to oversee security." 

California Democrat Lieu, an early proponent of Trump impeachment, also hails from the Air Force, with a current rank of colonel in the Air Force Reserve Command. Pelosi appointed him her assistant whip in 2017

It's no big surprise that Nancy Pelosi and Impeachment, Inc. are limiting the scope of their investigations. They don't want to expose themselves as the loyal anti-social and anti-socialist servants of the oligarchy and the Military-Industrial Complex that they always have been.

They are just as much the enemies of democracy as the more boorish Trump.

John Brennan Drones On

You have to hand it to Donald Trump. Not only is he an expert at controlling the media he only pretends to despise as "fake," he also knows how to stir up corporate churnalism to a sustained furious boil, salted liberally with outrage from a can.

It took a Trump to turn George Bush's torture architect and Barack Obama's drone assassination guru into Resistance, Inc's latest action hero. John Brennan, former CIA director, has now usurped Omarosa Manigault's top spot in the daily news cycle. Not only does he merit the top left corner of the New York Times homepage, he's also glommed onto the upper right plot with the newspaper's lead editorial. I guess that makes him an extreme centrist.

Refusing to become another victim of the cartoon president, Brennan vows that Donald Trump will never silence him. This is pretty rich, given that his Times op-ed tacitly attempts to silence what he calls dupes of Russia. True spook that he is, though, he doesn't bother naming any names: (He no doubt has them all written down on a piece of  paper which he keeps cosily in his pocket.)

Before, during and after its now infamous meddling in our last presidential election, Russia practiced the art of shaping political events abroad through its well-honed active measures program, which employs an array of technical capabilities, information operations and old-fashioned human intelligence spycraft. Electoral politics in Western democracies presents an especially inviting target, as a variety of politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright by Russian intelligence operatives. The very freedoms and liberties that liberal Western democracies cherish and that autocracies fear have been exploited by Russian intelligence services not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation, increasingly via the growing number of social media platforms....

 They troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters. Too often, those puppets are found.

The implicit message is that independent media dissent against the status quo should be suspect, if not of Russian origin... unless proven otherwise. This is the very same rationale that Brennan used when devising his Kill List during the Obama years. All Muslim males in the prime of life are deemed to be militants until (never) proven otherwise.

And of course he doesn't mention the CIA's own role in fomenting dissent and crafting intelligence in other countries besides our own. 

It is really quite stunning that the Times gifted Brennan with its prime real estate on the very same day it moralistically published a free press manifesto from the nation's newspapers. Even more stunning, and disheartening, is that the vast majority of reader comments on Brennan's op-ed are overflowing with praise and gushing, fawning thanks for his courage, patriotism and service.

My own deeply buried comment:

How does Trump deflect the public's attention from the Omarosa book, with its juicy revelations of racism and corruption?

He trolls John Brennan and other exiled military/surveillance actors, revoking some arcane thing called "security clearance."

Brennan, who couldn't even be confirmed by the Democratic majority during Obama's first term because of his alleged role in Bush's torture program, has thusly become the #1 hero of Resistance, Inc. The comments section is awash with gratitude for his patriotism and service to his country.

The condemnation that the CIA under his watch garnered for its admitted burglary of Senate computers during the torture investigation is but a hazy memory now, thanks to the common enemy named Trump.

The American values which John Brennan holds so dear include the program he dubbed the Disposition Matrix, aka the rationale for droning suspected terrorists - defined by him at the time as any Middle Eastern male in the prime of his life. We still don't have a full accounting of those killed and maimed by Predator drones, so I look forward to an op-ed from Mr, Brennan giving us the full information we deserve.

As a latter-day free press champion in the Age of Trump, Mr. Brennan has certainly come a long way from his advocating censorship of the Egyptian media during the Arab Spring..

Meanwhile, where is the outrage over Trump's complicity in the Saudi genocide in Yemen, which includes the recent bombing of a school bus full of children?

Gina Haspel's House of Waffles

After Gina Haspel's weasel-worded performance at her Senate hearing for the CIA directorship this week, the only surprise (besides her arrogance, that is) is the fact that so many lawmakers are still "waffling" over whether to confirm her to the post.

It's not because Haspel supervised torture sessions, including waterboarding, at a secret black site prison in Thailand and later destroyed the video evidence of same that the senators are wringing their hands, or pretending to. It's because she refused to be straightforward about whether she has a moral code or not. She refused to acknowledge that while torture may once have been deemed "legal" by the Bush administration, it has always been inherently immoral. She refused to admit there could even be a gap between bad law and basic morality.

This has put many politicians and corporate media pundits into a quandary, at least insofar as their own public personae are concerned. If only she'd groveled a little and said she has a few regrets for her war crimes, the wafflers (mainly liberals but also a smattering of conservatives) would feel free to wash their own hands of the sordid past, in which many of them were complicit at the time, if only by their very silence. They desperately want to look forward, not backward. But they can't. It's all nasty old Trump's fault, you see. 

If Barack Obama was able to successfully appoint torture apologist and architect (if not actual practitioner) John Brennan to lead the agency, and then later to suppress huge classified chunks of the Senate's report on CIA torture, redact Haspel's name, and instead classify Brennan, Haspel and their co-workers as "patriots who tortured some folks," then who are liberals to defy his conventional wisdom? Who are they to possibly sully Obama's carefully manufactured reputation as he rakes in the big bucks on the speaking circuit?

Their dilemma is that Trump is simply not capable of being as glib and discreet as Obama was in deploying the sadism and protecting the sadists in grand old circumspect American tradition. Trump has bellowed on more than one occasion that he'd love to bring back torture as official US policy rather than just continue outsourcing it, as Obama quietly did, to other countries. 

So if the Democrats make too big a public stink about Haspel and refuse to give her the job, it will be a slap on the wrist to Obama himself and a betrayal of all that the Democratic Party now stands for: unquestioning allegiance to the "intelligence community" as the manufactured foil to the Trump presidency.

The real unexamined issue is the existence of the CIA itself, which has operated as an unaccountable rogue state since its inception nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

How big a monster is it?

Well, when President Harry Truman said he never lost a minute's sleep over his atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but rued the day he created the CIA in 1947 through the National Security Act, you get the picture. Right from the very start the agency has operated without the "moral code" the Senate now pretends to insist upon for its leader. It has operated far outside the rule of both domestic and international law, toppling foreign governments and killing leaders and "meddling" in the elections of war-torn Europe and beyond.  

So to ask Gina Haspel whether she's developed a moral compass since her benighted torturing days is like asking Jack the Ripper if he has a good bedside manner.

An excerpt from Plain Speaking, Merle Miller's oral biography of Truman:  

Merle Miller: Mr. President, I know that you were responsible as President for setting up the CIA. How do you feel about it now?

Truman: I think it was a mistake. And if I'd know what was going to happen, I never would have done it....the President needed at that time a central organization that would bring all the various intelligence reports we were getting in those days, and there must have been a dozen of them, maybe more, bring them all into one organization so that the President would get one report on what was going on in various parts of the world. Now that made sense, and that's why I went ahead and set up what they called the Central Intelligence Agency.

 But it got out of hand. The fella ... the one that was in the White House after me never paid any attention to it, and it got out of hand. Why, they've got an organization over there in Virginia now that is practically the equal of the Pentagon in many ways. And I think I've told you, one Pentagon is one too many.

Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don't just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there's nobody to keep track of what they're up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they'll have something to report on. They've become ... it's become a government all of its own and all secret. They don't have to account to anybody.

That's a very dangerous thing in a democratic society, and it's got to be put a stop to. The people have got a right to know what those birds are up to. And if I was back in the White House, people would know. You see, the way a free government works, there's got to be a housecleaning every now and again, and I don't care what branch of the government is involved. Somebody has to keep an eye on things.
And when you can't do any housecleaning because everything that goes on is a damn secret, why, then we're on our way to something the Founding Fathers didn't have in mind. Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix. And if what happened at the Bay of Pigs doesn't prove that, I don't know what does. You have got to keep an eye on the military at all times, and it doesn't matter whether it's the birds in the Pentagon or the birds in the CIA.

Since the Senate never even put its own legal rubber stamp on the creation of the CIA, the supposed accountability that Gina Haspel and her agency owe to our publicly elected representatives is just so much fiction, and it always has been. Housecleaning? Sure, if you count giving war criminals and other miscreants a lick and a promise, or if your idea of hygiene is sweeping dirt under the rug. The only cleaning up our elected officials ever seem to do is cleaning up on the fund-raising circuit, or in whatever realm of legalized bribery the Supreme Court has seen fit to allow.

As the great socialist muckraker Upton Sinclair once so saliently observed, our two political parties are nothing but "the two wings of one bird of prey."

So I predict Haspel's eventual, albeit as narrow as decently possible, confirmation, with much hand-wringing and pragmatic posturing. Blue Dog Democrats will vote her in to placate their Trump Country bases and the more "progressive" Dems will say Nay, particularly if they have their eyes on the Oval Office. If and when one of them does win the highest office in the land, he or she can pretend the hand-wringing (or wing-fluttering) never even happened. We must look forward, not back, as Gina Haspel either continues her unaccountable ways or retires to much fanfare and a generous pension and a gig on cable "news" shows and an advisory role in some awesome Hollywood spy movies and TV series glorifying the CIA.

So far, according to CNN's "whip count" for Haspel, the vast majority of Senate Democratic birds are still undecided, with only the hawkish Joe Manchin of West Virginia declaring himself firmly in favor.  Bernie Sanders has sliced his own waffle right down the middle, tweeting soggily and jingoistically: "We need a new CIA director who is committed to the rule of law and will heed the advice of U.S. military leaders who vigorously oppose torture and uphold the values that have made us a great and respected nation. Ms. Haspel is the wrong choice to lead the CIA."  The other progressive Senate lion, Elizabeth Warren, declares herself a No or a "Likely" No.

Pass the syrup along with the blank ammunition.

Six Ways From Sunday

Senate Minority Weasel Leader Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) warned Donald Trump more than a year ago that the US intelligence agencies have "six ways from Sunday" of eliciting his respect and making him believe that Russia interfered in the elections. Schumer told Rachel Maddow that even a savvy businessman like Trump was being "really dumb" for comparing the meddling claims to the false intelligence on WMDs leading to the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

And of course he isn't behaving himself in office and believing what he has to believe. The last straw for the permanent political class came when Trump fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe two days before what was to have been a very lucrative, perk-heavy retirement at the ripe old age of 50. Former CIA Director and current NBC performer John Brennan blasted out this mighty Tweet to Trump on Saturday:

When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you. https://t.co/uKppoDbduj— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) 

 You know we've reached the point of no return when the architect of Barack Obama's drone assassination program, the burglar who ordered the hacking of Senate computers containing still-repressed torture documents, and the once-and-future champion of dirty tricks and torture, is lecturing Donald Trump on morals and corruption. That's the beautiful thing about Trump. He makes all kinds of scoundrels not only look like choirboys, he has actually promoted them to Cotton Mather status. And the corporate media are falling all over themselves to furnish this new breed of militaristic virtue signaler with their own bully pulpits.

Trump has effectively canonized the FBI, so maligned throughout its history for its own dirty tricks, ranging from the Palmer Raids, to spying on Martin Luther King Jr and later urging him to commit suicide, to infiltrating the anti-war and civil rights movements, to entrapping Muslims in manufactured terror plots, to breaking up the Occupy movement, to spying on American citizens on the Internet. And this is not even including its investigative failures, such as not heeding Russian warnings of the Boston Marathon bombing and most recently, its inaction on several tips related to the Florida school shooter. The FBI, the NSA and the CIA are now posing as moral bastions of democratic liberalism, which in turn has been newly and perversely defined as McCarthyism and Russophobia. And many Democrats are eagerly embracing thia authoritarian dogma, in a reactionary frenzy once thought to have been the sole purview of rightwing fanatics and Dick Nixon's Moral Majority.

Fired FBI Director James Comey even posed as liberal Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on Twitter for awhile before mistakenly outing himself and then going all preachy-moralizy under his own name. Virginia Heffernan wrote a scathing take-down of this sub-manic, golly gee willikers Tweeter for Politico last year. His folksy book is already a bestseller on Amazon and it hasn't even been released yet.

Trump has single-handedly made war criminal John Brennan into something of a Democratic Party folk hero - not to mention indirectly enriching him via his new high profile gig as NBC's #Resistance fighter. Ironically, Brennan's platform is the very same behemoth media corporation which made Trump himself into the postmodern folk hero of cruel capitalism, rich and famous beyond his own wildest dreams. 

in what now seems like the distant past, liberals were actually so outraged about Brennan's defense of torture - he'd Trumpily and falsely claimed that it saved American lives - that he was forced to withdraw his name when Barack Obama first nominated him to head the CIA in 2008.

But by 2013, as Glenn Greenwald observed in a New York Times op-ed, Obama was so popular that his fans willingly followed his lead in embracing Brennan as the country's top spook. Nobody cared that Obama was killing hundreds or thousands of Muslims from a Kill List devised by Brennan. Regarding the former president's refusal to prosecute Bush-era CIA torturers, Greenwald wrote, "Obama's Orwellian decree that we must 'look forward, not backward' has convinced huge numbers of citizens to sweep this all under the rug and pretend it never happened. That is what explains how Brennan went from radioactive and unconfirmable in 2008 to uncontroversial in 2013."

Long before Trump won his own nomination and the election, the abnormal was becoming the new normal. Brennan was actually being lauded by officials and pundits and politicians for pivoting from the gruesome torture and imprisonment of Muslims to humanely droning them to death. Even U.N. drone watchdog Ben Emmerson praised the Brennan appointment, saying that he would be a "moderating influence" on the CIA's expansion of drone assassinations in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"By putting Brennan in direct control of the CIA's policy [of targeted killings], the president has placed this mediating legal presence in direct control of the positions that the CIA will adopt and advance, so as to bring the CIA much more closely under direct presidential and democratic control," Emmerson told Wired.
"It's right to view this as a recognition of the repository of trust that Obama places in Brennan to put him in control of the organization that poses the greatest threat to international legal consensus and recognition of the lawfulness of the drone programme."

Orwellianism knows no bounds. Kinder, gentler - and most of all lighting-quick - murder by Predator missile is fine, as long as it is committed in the name of democracy. Who cares if a rogue organization poses a great international threat, as long as it is controlled by a law-loving, moralistic man like John Brennan?

Lambert Strether of Naked Capitalism has done yeoman's work constructing a valuable spreadsheet which documents the creepy prevalence in the 2018 mid-terms of the MILO (military, intelligence, law enforcement) candidates actively recruited to run by the Democratic Party establishment.

 So what's to stop the party from recruiting Brennan or Comey to run at the top of the ticket in 2020?

Stranger things have happened, including the Democrats seriously courting Oprah to run for president. America truly is the land of opportunity for the permanent ruling establishment. If John Brennan can go from despised to tolerated to admired in the space of a few short years, anything is possible. They aim high while Trump goes low. He is the gift that keeps on giving to the oligarchs who would, as Obama once said, really just like to play nicely together within the 40-yard line.

Everything was so mellow for the ruling class back in 2013, as Brennan was preparing to finally take the helm of the CIA. From a video interview:

BARACK OBAMA: In my conversations with Republicans, I actually think the divide is not that wide. So what we just have to do is find a pathway where Republicans in the House in particular feel comfortable enough about process that they can go ahead and meet us.
This, by the way, Gerry (sp), I think is a good example of something that’s been striking me about our politics for a while. When you go to other countries, the political divisions are so much more stark and wider; here in America, the difference between Democrats and Republicans — we’re fighting inside the 40-yard line, maybe –
SEIB: You fooled most people on that in the last few months, I’d say.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: No, but — but — (laughter) — well, no, no, the — I — I would — I would distinguish between the — the rhetoric and the tactics, versus the ideological differences.
I mean, in most countries, you’ve got — you know, people call me a socialist sometimes, but, no, you’ve got to me real socialists. You’ll have a sense of what a — what a socialist is. (Laughter.) You know, the — I mean, I’m talking about lowering the corporate tax rate. My health care reform is based on the private marketplace. Stock market’s looking pretty good last time I checked, and, you know, it is true that I’m concerned about growing inequality in our system, but nobody questions the efficacy of market economies in terms of producing wealth and innovation and keeping us competitive.

Still wondering why nearly 10 percent of Obama voters later abandoned the Democrats and voted for Trump? The Orange Menace is not the disease; he is merely the latest, most glaring symptom of the disease.

So when Brennan tweetily bellows to Trump that "America will triumph over you," he simply means that the military/surveillance/oligarchic coup, disguised as liberal democracy, is well-nigh complete.

Wargasms

It was almost enough to make you feel sorry for President Obama. It was almost enough to make you applaud the drone president for "standing his ground" when sprayed by a flood of saber-rattling spittle from the corporate press corps, some of whom had traveled to Turkey to "cover" the G-20 summit instead of to Paris to milk the terror for all that it's worth to their defense contractor sponsors.

And exploiting and enhancing and even creating terror is worth a whole hell of a lot to them. Glenn Greenwald has a chart showing that the stock of weapons manufacturers has taken off like a nuclear-fired missile since the Paris massacre. The so-called journalists bombarding Obama with their double-dog-dares disguised as questions all had their marching orders. And they marched in perfect lockstep.

Here's part of the official transcript. 

Margaret Brennan, CBS.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. A more than year-long bombing campaign in Iraq and in Syria has failed to contain the ambition and the ability of ISIS to launch attacks in the West. Have you underestimated their abilities? And will you widen the rules of engagement for U.S. forces to take more aggressive action?

Jim Acosta, CNN.
Q Thank you very much, Mr. President. I wanted to go back to something that you said to Margaret earlier when you said that you have not underestimated ISIS’s abilities. This is an organization that you once described as a JV team that evolved into a force that has now occupied territory in Iraq and Syria and is now able to use that safe haven to launch attacks in other parts of the world. How is that not underestimating their capabilities? And how is that contained, quite frankly? And I think a lot of Americans have this frustration that they see that the United States has the greatest military in the world, it has the backing of nearly every other country in the world when it comes to taking on ISIS. I guess the question is -- and if you’ll forgive the language -- is why can't we take out these bastards?

Ron Allen, NBC.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. I think a lot of people around the world and in America are concerned because given the strategy that you’re pursuing -- and it’s been more than a year now -- ISIS’s capabilities seem to be expanding. Were you aware that they had the capability of pulling off the kind of attack that they did in Paris? Are you concerned? And do you think they have that same capability to strike in the United States?
And do you think that given all you’ve learned about ISIS over the past year or so, and given all the criticism about your underestimating them, do you think you really understand this enemy well enough to defeat them and to protect the homeland?

So Obama is standing his ground, for now. But you have to ask yourself whether this whole "him against the world" performance was a big fat set-up. He had to have known that by selecting CNN, the official Terror Channel, he'd be pressured to vengefully bomb, strafe, slaughter, and bomb again. Is this the way that he justifies starting another war, or more accurately, revving up the one(s) he's already been waging, both secretly and openly? Is this press conference one of the ways he again gets to portray himself as a mythical reluctant warrior, being dragged kicking and screaming into yet more death and destruction and billions of dollars in added profits for the war and surveillance industries?

Given that his own CIA director is also stirring up the bellicose paranoid fever, I suspect that this is very much the case. Back in the safety of the Homeland, John Brennan hand-wringlingly denounced all the pacifist "hand-wringing" (which actually amounts to a few pinkie fingers vaguely twitching on the outskirts of Peaceville) and demanded even more blanket surveillance of ordinary citizens. While he was at it, he tacitly blamed the abuses of the government spying programs and war crimes on the very whistle-blowers, like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, who have exposed the abuses and the war crimes. One is in exile and the other is in prison while the abuses of Superpower go on, unimpeded by either popular protest or the prosecutions and impeachments of past and present government officials.

It must be so, so hard for one set of murderous sociopaths to keep track of another set of murderous sociopaths. Pity the poor CIA, which unleashed a half-century-long torrent of Islamophobia when it deposed the democratic government of Iran in order to make the world safe for BP.