Pity the Poor Congress-Critter

 The 535 high-net-worth Congressional servants of oligarchs, war profiteers and corporations are becoming very rattled by the growing number of threats being leveled against them by a very tiny subset of the electorate.

Two articles in this week's New York Times squarely point the finger of blame at the generic public itself, rather than at the Congress which is theoretically elected to represent the interests of the public.

 The first piece conveniently ignores this year's five-point dive in the already-rock bottom approval ratings and myriad justified reasons for anger against the legislative body, concentrating instead on people having racial and gender-based motives for the mostly verbal, but sometimes physical, threats. This has resulted in several members having to dig deep into their own pockets for security - beyond the $10,000 that they just allocated themselves for that purpose.

Even in the second article, in which the Times explores the "toxic relationship" between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, blame is once again deflected away from the petty and the powerful. and toward regular people. If Pelosi has called McCarthy a moron, among her other pithy insults,  and if McCarthy once quipped that he'd like to beat the Speaker over the head with her own gavel, then it's all the fault of the teeming masses. The paper quotes former Democratic Speaker Dick Gephardt as saying: 

“This disdain is really part and parcel of where we are in the country between the parties and between people. Congress is a reflection of the people. If the people are polarized and divided and hateful, then Congress is going to be the same.”

Gephardt, one of the original architects of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s and now a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs and the private health insurance cartel - among other antisocial corporate entities - not only shows his own disdain for the electorate with that glib statement, he also pathologizes them.  He essentially claims that "the people" are so diseased that even two of the most powerful politicians on the entire planet are unable to withstand the malignancy of the lower orders. 

 It should thus come as no surprise that Gephardt has also successfully lobbied Congress to protect the patents of the profiteering pharmaceutical industry and block the manufacture of more affordable medicines for those horrible polarized people.

To delve into the rampant, pre-existing corruption that has long been an integral strand of the congressional DNA is obviously more than either Gephardt or the Paper of Record can bear to contemplate. They also have no interest in mentioning the studies which reveal that since the rich and powerful bankroll Congress with their often-dark money, Congress usually gives the rich and powerful whatever they want in the way of legislation and public policy. The exceptions seem to come only once every two or four or six years, at election time. A recent example of this truth is President Biden's own belated and obviously grudging approval of only some education debt forgiveness for only some student borrowers.

The recent kvetching from elites that our "democracy" is so suddenly under attack by a monolithic Trumpism is also disingenuous, given that the aforementioned studies (Gilen and Page) concluded nearly a decade ago that it is the elites themselves who endanger what passes for democracy with their outsize influence, especially with the recent Supreme Court decisions which bestow political speech rights upon the wealth of billionaires and corporations. How can democracy, or rule by the people, possibly be threatened when it already has devolved into an oligarchy? (Hint: it's predatory capitalism itself that is under threat - from a resurgent labor movement to climate activism to the independent journalism running rampant on the Internet despite their best efforts at censorship.)

It's funny how the definitions of "people" and "public" also keep changing according to the evolving needs of the ruling elites themselves. Of course, since everyday Americans (actually, our votes) are now enjoying one of those rare periodic bursts of minimal leverage, it is incumbent upon them to dose us with gaslight even as they allow the electorate their brief turn in the limelight. Their personal fear of violence and loss of power must be coupled with the instillation of fear of certain manufactured enemies of their own choosing.

This cycle, Republican elites are recycling the dog-whistled fear of immigrants and crime in the streets, accusing Democrats of wanting to abolish police departments and to let murderers roam free courtesy of modest bail reform agendas. Democratic elites, who had nearly half a century to codify abortion rights, warn the populace that Republicans want to kill women. These issues, manufactured and enhanced for our voting pleasure and incessantly broadcast in negative attack ads, conveniently blot out any mention of the inflation and the wealth and income inequality and the basic unaffordability of life itself that are foremost on the minds of people. We are voting to avoid something rather than to gain something. Fear is the only way they can get us to the polls next month.

Meanwhile, our politicians can so, so relate to you! These poor vulnerable souls are threatened with even worse things than we are being threatened with. Our rent may be too damned high, but just look at what they have to fork over for bodyguards! They're not threatened because they're corrupt, or because they won't give us nice things, like pandemic relief and a living wage law. According to the Times, they're threatened solely because they are targets of racism and misogyny. If you can't relate, for example, to the fear of Maine Republican Susan Collins when she had a storm window broken at her house in the wake of her vote for anti-choice justice Brett Kavanaugh, then who can you relate to?

After all, she is as human as you are, as human as Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is Black and Muslim and apparently is being attacked purely on the basis of her gender and skin color, and not for her support of Palestine.. Ditto for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who never met a creepy incel Twitter troll she wouldn't feistily engage with, and who considers voters who are justifiably angry over her retreat from Medicare For All legislation to be incipiently "violent" whenever they show up to protest at her district office.

By concentrating on the direct physical and even sometimes-armed physical confrontations with lawmakers, especially with women of color,  and expressly linking these threats to the January 6th Capitol riot, the Times is tacitly warning us to tone down our own legitimate anger at the people we vote to represent us and end up betraying us. You never know when your justifiably angry voice will become a trigger for the nut-job next door, or way across the country, to act out violently and even kill a politician.

But to show how terribly fair that this establishment rendering of a profound social problem is, the article reports that nearly a third of the threats are made by Republicans and almost one quarter are made by Democrats. This little nugget had the result of infuriating not a few party-loyal readers, who accused the Times of "both-siderism," and "false equivalency" - thereby confirming the elite claim that this nation's polarization emanates from the bottom up, that it is not a carefully nourished if not wholly manufactured Divide and Conquer technique and media narrative employed by the powerful to stay in power, ever since the dawn of what passes for civilization.

Given they have chosen to ignore the myriad reasons why citizens might confront or attack elected leaders, the Times measures the intensity of the threats by the dollars that the congress members spend on their own security. Liz Cheney, the neocon pro-war anti-Trump dynastic Republican, must be especially vulnerable, the article implies, because she's spent the most money of anyone in her party for her security detail. That apparently puts her in the same boat as Missouri Democrat Cori Bush, a Black progressive representative who once had to live her car after an eviction. Ditto for Senators Ted Cruz and Raphael Warnock, who have achieved a measure of collegiality and bipartisanship simply by virtue of having spent roughly equal amounts of money to protect their bodies from the ravening mob.

The Times concludes its article by linking the increasing threats with the near- fatal shootings of Democrat Gabrielle Giffords and Republican Steve Scalise in the years before Trump came to power. The paper does not mention that both of these assaults were committed by people with significant psychiatric issues.

The paper also somehow forgot to mention that Giffords was a staunch gun rights advocate before she got shot and changed her mind, and that Scalise voted against gun reform even after he nearly died from a bullet wound in the torso.

And, tellingly, no Democratic politician has yet spoken out against the recent veiled death threat made by Donald Trump against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It must not fit the narrative, for some reason.

The ultimate inconvenient truth is that the bipartisan Congress has always enthusiastically rubber-stamped weapons sales and trillions of dollars for both direct and proxy wars, and has also approved violent economic sanctions against the poor people in authoritarian regimes that it wants to overthrow - all in the interests of "democracy." 

Since democracy is their buzzword for capitalism, I suppose we should at least give the elites some credit for veracity as they moan, all day and every day, that democracy is now under such unprecedented attack. Something has got to give as the rich no longer hide that they got that way by stealing from the poor, and that they despise and blame the poor for it.

So, it's hard out there for the average high-net-worth individual in Congress. They comprise a living buffer zone between the ultra-high-net worth individuals who bankroll them, and the low/no-net-worth individuals that they use as cover to install themselves in office every two or six years.

 Maybe if we had a multi-party or parliamentary system instead of a de facto House of Lords with two right wings, and they were actually held accountable even in the off-season, they wouldn't be feeling so damned vulnerable right now. 

The Global Class War Is Getting Really Ugly

The economic war declared on Russia by the US and its NATO client-states is, on the surface, payback for Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine. But this intra-global war of oligarchs is at its very essence a war of rich against poor. It's all about which oligarchy gets to extract the natural resources of one of the poorest nations on earth.

The 2014 US-backed coup against Ukraine's democratically elected president, Victor Yanukovich. was a victory not just for NATO, but for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose historical core purpose is to "open up" distressed nation-states for looting ("investment") by multinational corporations. Yanukovich had to go, because he was reneging on his agreement to impose austerity on his constituents as the price for borrowing money from the global financial system. Even worse as far as "the West" was concerned, he thought that he could get a better financial deal from Putin.

 Among the conditions that the IMF had imposed upon Ukraine for loaning it billions of dollars was raising the retirement age of Ukrainians to 60. This may sound like a reasonable demand, until you consider that Ukraine ranks a dismal 99th in the world in terms of life expectancy, and that at the time of the coup, the average Ukrainian male would be dead by the age of 67. Raising the retirement age was tantamount to a massively cruel cut in benefits.

Even so, one year after the coup, the Ukrainian government was still balking at "reforming" its pension program and raising the retirement age. It already had complied with such  IMF loan conditions as drastically increasing domestic gas prices to consumers and reducing energy subsidies.

As economist Michael Hudson noted in 2014, the US-backed coup's ensuing austerity policies, administered by the US and the IMF, would not only turn Ukraine into another Greece or Spain, they'd make Ukraine (already being even poorer than Greece and Spain) "a lot more miserable":

 German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told the press last month, with all the sensitivity of a Cliven Bundy or Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling, that Greece could serve as a model for Ukraine. This is like saying that the United States’ Great Depression could serve as a model for Ukraine.

But we don’t have to look to Greece or Spain to see the risks of signing on to a program of fiscal austerity and “reforms” run by the IMF and its European directors at this time. Ukraine has had its own experience not that long ago: in just 4 years from 1992-1996, Ukraine lost half of its GDP as the IMF and friends took the wrecking ball to both the Russian and Ukrainian economies . Ukraine’s economy didn’t start growing again until the 2000’s. For comparison, the worst years of the U.S. Great Depression (1929-1934) saw a real GDP loss of 36 percent.

Enter then-Vice President Joe Biden, the Obama administration's designated "point-man" for Ukraine, who brayed a year later that the austerity-driven Obama administration itself could also serve as an inspiration for Ukraine. 

 Much, actually over-much, has been made of Biden's putative task of "rooting out corruption" and punishing the "bad" oligarchs who had been looting Ukraine's treasury since the fall of the Soviet Union. (His son Hunter's own lucrative gig with a newly privatized energy sector in Ukraine was brushed off as working for a "good oligarch" who allegedly did not have a corrupt bone in his whole body.)

But when Biden showed up to give a hectoring speech to the Ukrainian Rada, or parliament, right before Christmas 2015, it was not only to inveigh against the ongoing corruption, it was also to demand that ordinary Ukrainians continue to bear the brunt of both the corruption and the predatory IMF debt.

Once Biden got through all the preliminaries, moving to soften up the the assembled politicians with the carrot of more financial aid, and the obligatory flattery for their allegiance to democracy, freedom, and human rights, he finally went full hit man and wielded his big stick: 

Yesterday I announced almost $190 million in new American assistance to help Ukraine fight corruption, strengthen the rule of law, implement critical reform, bolster civil society, advance energy security.  That brings our total of direct aid to almost $760 million in direct assistance, in addition to loan guarantees since this crisis broke out.  And that is not the end of what we're prepared to do if you keep moving. 

But for Ukraine to continue to make progress and to keep the support of the international community you have to do more, as well.  The big part of moving forward with your IMF program -- it requires difficult reforms.  And they are difficult.  Let me say parenthetically here, all the experts from our State Department and all the think tanks, and they come and tell you, that you know what you should do is you should deal with pensions.  You should deal with -- as if it’s easy to do.  Hell, we're having trouble in America dealing with it.  We're having trouble.  To vote to raise the pension age is to write your political obituary in many places. 

Don't misunderstand that those of us who serve in other democratic institutions don't understand how hard the conditions are, how difficult it is to cast some of the votes to meet the obligations committed to under the IMF.  It requires sacrifices that might not be politically expedient or popular.  But they're critical to putting Ukraine on the path to a future that is economically secure.  And I urge you to stay the course as hard as it is.  Ukraine needs a budget that’s consistent with your IMF commitments.

Anything else will jeopardize Ukraine’s hard-won progress and drive down support for Ukraine from the international community, which is always tenuous.  It’s always tenuous.  We keep pushing that support.

Whenever neoliberal politicians inflict their pain on the masses, they love to insist that it hurts them as much as it hurts you. They are altruistic enough to risk their own careers for you! After all somebody has to save you from yourselves.  And so with the class war, as with any kind of  war, they appeal to your patriotism, asking that you "share the sacrifice" with the rich, who are being ever so politely asked to pay a bit more in taxes. You then will feel so much better about waiting a few more years to collect your Social Security, just so long as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk also have to pay reasonable capital gains taxes. Of course, despite all of this neoliberal posturing and gaslighting, the oligarchs eventually come out as the only winners. There are always a few useful idiots or bad cops like Joe Manchin or Mitch McConnell around to willingly take the blame.

So when Biden was so delicately urging Ukraine to raise its retirement age, or risk "losing the support of the international community," he was also implicitly bragging about the ultimately failed "Grand Bargain" with Republicans that he and Obama had pursued to raise both the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages in the United States, thereby imposing a massive cut in lifetime benefits. Biden tried to paint his administration as a role model for the Rada, having been so politically courageous in its own pursuit of austerity for the masses of people. 

It was not for nothing that Obama had a plaque on his Oval Office desk reading "Hard Things Are Hard." 

To make the hard things less painful, the impending doom less noticeable or more akin to the proverbial frog boiling to death at a low temperature, Ukraine politicians have tried to salvage their own careers by raising the retirement age in six-month increments until 2025, while at the same time gradually increasing the work requirement years for people to qualify for a pension. 

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are fleeing their country by the millions, and their current president is begging the "international community" for fighter jets, ammo and bulletproof vests. And Joe Biden's domestic approval rating and positive media coverage have gotten just the boost that you might expect. Because hard things and hard people are hard!

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is deep in the throes of one of its periodic fever dreams. This current one is even more intense and xenophobic than the pandemic of paranoia and jingoism that we witnessed after 9/11. As The Guardian newspaper, for just one example of the war hysteria afflicting us these days, gushed in its Sunday edition:

 Just as Biden’s empathy was seen as ideal for meeting the moment of the coronavirus pandemic, and just as his record of bipartisanship was thought to be well suited to healing America’s divisions, so his storied foreign policy experience and faith in multinational institutions appear to bode well for this test.

That is certainly the view of Democrats who believe that Biden, who at 79 lived every moment of the cold war, including its gnawing dread of nuclear annihilation, has risen to the occasion. Last month he authorised $350m of military equipment – the biggest such package in US history – to bolster Ukraine’s courageous fighters who have exceeded all expectations.

Who needs an adequate pension, and freedom from poverty, and cancellation of onerous IMF debt when you can be pawned in their game as a courageous freedom fighter?

The Grotesque Meanness of Exceptional USA

Now that they've passed the all important milestone of announcing that yes, Virginia, there will indeed be deep cuts in their own social welfare legislation to satisfy their needy corporate owners, the Democrats are regaling us with much hand-wringing over just how miserable they can make us without coming off like the mean jerks that many of them are.

The current narrative has them babbling over whether 'tis better for their re-election chances to give some of the people the least possible amount of bare-bones relief most of the time, or whether 'tis better to give all of the people slightly more bare bones relief for the shortest time possible.  

To means-test new social programs or not to means-test them? That is the manufactured question.

Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the Democrats' current chief of the Bad Cop police, is all for means-testing stuff like universal subsidized pre-school, lest the One Exceptional Nation turn into an "entitlement society" for everyone who is not already filthy rich by virtue (or vice) of being the entitled scion of a coal mining dynasty who in turn sired a pharmaceutical baroness who nearly sextupled the price of life-saving EpiPens that prevent susceptible people from succumbing to anaphylactic shock if they're exposed to something as innocuous as a peanut  or a strawberry.

To counter that pathological Manchean meanness, House Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal is mulling a scheme which would give most people - even high earners - subsidized child care and direct cash aid, and dental care when they get old. To placate Manchin and other professional greedsters, though, these and other "sweeping" universal relief programs would only last for a couple of years, or at least until after the 2022 midterms. Because even if (when) the Republicans take back Congress, the Democratic calculus goes, it will be hard for even permanent de facto President Mitch McConnell to yank these goodies away from constituents. The programs will be so popular, even with diehard Trump loyalists. that the pitchforks will be out for the GOP rather than for the designated Marxist Commies of the corporate DNC. Or at least that's the hope.

Both parties have traditionally been loath to just give people money with no strings attached, money which doesn't go through a middleman like a corporate employer airily promising to create new jobs in return for tax-free sweetheart deals involving public land in "opportunity zones", or the property developer who pockets millions of dollars in public money to build luxury housing for the rich while setting aside a few "affordable" units and inviting thousands of poor people to compete for a slim chance to win a lease on one of them.

The halcyon days of stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, eviction moratoria, and cost-free medical care for Covid are long over. All that direct cash aid lifted people out of poverty, big-time. All that guaranteed housing security and freedom from wage slavery at precarious jobs lifted a weight off people they barely knew they'd been suffocating under until it was gone.  

This peace of mind and happiness on such a grand scale simply will not do. The State of Exception that was the Covid pandemic has been declared officially over, despite the fact that it is far from over. If it isn't quite over, the elites of the ruling class scold, it's all the fault of the willfully unvaccinated spreading their germs and their Trumpian ideologies to the righteous liberals who had so responsibly gotten their own jabs many months ago. No matter that a good percentage of people who have not been vaccinated are uninsured and live in poor or rural areas and have not enjoyed he privilege of "accessing" any kind of health care at all for themselves for entire decades, and who therefore don't trust the medical-industrial complex all that much. No matter that many, if not most, of the unvaccinated do not have paid time off to deal with the side effects of the shots. Why else would low-paid workers wait until the last possible minute to finally get vaccinated - that is, when they were threatened with the loss of those jobs?

Capitalism's response to Covid is not only a shameful public health scandal in the richest country on the planet, it has devolved into a closed political and culture war feedback loop of Maskers vs Anti-Maskers, Vaxxed vs Unvaxxed - with the central battlefield becoming the already-embattled and newly reopened public school system.

If America did not already have a public school system, you can rest assured that Congress would be fighting over means-testing all the potential pupils. But since America already does have a public school system, they've had to settle for dismantling and/or defunding it. 

Public education is largely though not exclusively funded through property taxation, ensuring that rich neighborhoods have the best schools. Meanwhile, private equity vultures and other investors place bets on "charter schools" in poorer neighborhoods and treat kids like regimented cattle futures. The word "public" has become increasingly selective and exclusionary.

Meanness is baked right in to the DNA of the ruling elites. But to deflect our attention from this universal truth, these same ruling elites are in a veritable sanctimonious frenzy of pitting people against one another. It's a Hobbesian war of all against all on crack and steroids. So it's no surprise that a Korean series called Squid Game is the most popular thing on Netflix right now. You can never get enough bare survival drama, especially if you're at least flush with enough spare cash to be able to afford to watch other people compete to simply live other day from within the comfort of your own home.

And not for nothing is the economic war on the poor and working class being waged in tandem with the war on women newly surged by the grotesque cabal of black-robed Puritan fundamentalists on the Supreme Court. The Texas abortion ban is nothing if not an anti-Enlightenment evolutionary throwback.

So what better time than Indigenous Peoples Day (formerly known as Columbus Day) and the season of Halloween than to acknowledge that the eternal Witch Hunt has always been an integral weapon in the class war of the rich against the rest of us?

As Marxist critic and feminist Silvia Federici observes, 

What has remained unacknowledged is that, like the slave trade and the extermination of the indigenous populations in the New World, the witch hunt stands at a crossroad of a cluster of social processes that paved the way for the rise of the modern capitalist world...

The African slaves, the expropriated peasants of Africa and Latin America, and the massacred native population of North America become the kin of the sixteenth and seventeenth century European witches who, like them, saw their common lands taken away, experienced the hunger produced by the move to cash crops, and saw their resistance persecuted as a sign of a diabolical pact.

To extrapolate from Federici's thesis, then, what's the difference between "the woman burned at the stake for raising her pitchfork against the tax collector," and the women of Texas now being denied their reproductive rights by the paid moralizers of the oligarchy?

These right wing functionaries and pathocrats could not care less about the "right to life". What they do care about is controlling the bodies, minds and spirits of the dispossessed. Whether it's by forcing a woman to carry an unwanted and largely unaffordable pregnancy to term, and then refusing government help to the family while forcing women back to low-paid jobs right in the middle of a pandemic, it's all the same old story of oppression. 

Even the "good" rulers of the Democratic Party punish the poor of all genders by forcing them to jump through myriad bureaucratic hoops and to abjectly grovel for every last morsel of grudging relief. The poor must be controlled, punished and surveilled, whether it be from a place of liberal kindness or conservative callousness. If programs like government-subsidized child care were guaranteed for both the rich and the poor, there could be no shame, no punishment and no continued surveillance. And there would, perhaps, not be as much resentment among people and silo-ing of political interest groups trucking in outrage. Solidarity might actually stand a chance!

As the New York Times has just reported, the United States spends only $500 per year per toddler for nursery care, compared to an average of $14,000 in other advanced countries. America is indeed the One Exceptional Nation. If the ruling elites bearing their meager time-limited gifts can't make us sweat and ruthlessly compete against one another as we kiss their rings, then what possible good is their largesse?

To take just one recent example of their stingily charitable mindset, the federal government's multibillion dollar Emergency Rental Assistance Program was designed not so much as a tenant relief program as it was a landlord bailout program. In most states, all back rent awarded goes not to the tenant but directly to the landlord, who is not even legally required to accept the funds. In New York state alone, two thirds of the funds provisionally approved after lengthy delays are not yet disbursed, simply because landlords are not cooperating. They apparently relish the physical power they have over tenants, by way of evictions and extreme rent increases, more than they value getting their past-due rent money into their bank accounts.

As Bryce Covert writes in The New Republic:

Having children is the single greatest predictor of whether someone will face eviction. It can be difficult to make rent and support a family, especially for women of color, who on average are paid less than white women, and single mothers living on one paycheck. Landlords—eager for an excuse to rid themselves of tenants whose children might cause noise complaints or property damage, or for whom lead hazards have to be abated or child services called—are often all too happy to begin eviction proceedings.

When you consider that the vast majority of tenants who are behind in their rent, both in New York and nationally, are single women with children, the simultaneous imposition of draconian anti-abortion laws makes the essential witch-hunt aspect of neoliberal capitalism all that more grotesque.

Gargoyles of the Oligarchy: High Relief For Me, But Not For Thee

The Obama Iconography Tour

 The insipidly iconic Mona Lisa sadly will not be embarking on any more world tours to entertain and inspire the teeming desperate masses of our dying planet. For despite the pleas of French officials anxious to prove their diversity cred, her handlers at the Louvre nixed the idea for good and all in 2018.  La Giaconda, as she is also known, has become so fragile that every time the art medics remove her from her bulletproof glass-encased frame for her annual airing, a new crack extending from the tips of her fingers to the top of her forehead grows just a wee bit wider. She'll never leave home again. There's even been talk of canceling her altogether, given that not only is she falling apart, she is vastly overrated as a work of art. She is above all a marketing product of unfettered capitalism.

No such danger for the more nouveau official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama, which the art-marketing world declared to be instant classical icons the very minute they were unveiled at The Smithsonian for good and all in 2018  The Obamas themselves may have developed some cracks in their own carefully curated images as a result of that ill-advised pandemic birthday bash they staged earlier this month at their faux chateau on Martha's Vineyard. But you wouldn't know it from the sold-out opening of the Brooklyn Art Museum leg of their national iconography tour this past weekend. 

 Advance reservations, proof of vaccination and photo I.D.s are all required to stand in awe before the Obama simulacra for no longer than 15 minutes. Tickets are already going fast, according to the Brooklyn Brownstoner, a real estate guide whose core mission is alerting the upwardly mobile to the latest million-dollar bungalow in Crown Heights.

Not for nothing is one of the major financial sponsors of the show a New York real estate developer and gentrifier named Donald A. Capoccia. Other backers include Hollywood director Stephen Spielberg, racehorse  breeder Robert Meyerhoff, and insurance tycoon Tommie Pegues. 

The tour's biggest corporate sponsor is the notorious Bank of America, which reached one particular sweetheart settlement (out of several) with Obama's Justice Department for mortgage and securities fraud that actually gifted it with $2 in government credits for every dollar that it returned to its foreclosed victims. Bankrolling the Portraits Tour is the least that BOA can do for its loyal protector.

In case you can't score the same sort of timed tickets to gawk at and take selfies with the Obama simulacra that the Louvre requires of tourists to gaze upon the Mona Lisa, please don't despair. You can have all the time you need to eyeball facsimiles of the facsimiles of the Obamas in a very special souvenir coffee table book published just for the occasion.

The Smithsonian gift shop ever so subtly pitches the merch to the discerning art lover: 

After witnessing a woman drop to her knees in prayer before the portrait of Barack Obama, one guard said, “No other painting gets the same kind of reactions. Ever.” The Obama Portraits is the first book about the making, meaning, and significance of these remarkable artworks.

Richly illustrated with images of the portraits, exclusive pictures of the Obamas with the artists during their sittings, and photos of the historic unveiling ceremony by former White House photographer Pete Souza, this book offers insight into what these paintings can tell us about the history of portraiture and American culture. The volume also features a transcript of the unveiling ceremony, which includes moving remarks by the Obamas and the artists. A reversible dust jacket allows readers to choose which portrait to display on the front cover.

If you didn't fall for that pitch, then you might be suspected of occult Donald Trump fandom. Worse, if you don't think that Obama starting more wars, dropping more bombs, deporting more migrants and evicting more people from their homes than any other modern president were positive achievements by the Adult In the Room,  then you might as well just stoop to sneakily viewing them right here, for free, in all their glorious lo-def pulchritude: 

Or, if you tastelessly insist upon realism in your art:

Meanwhile, if you're among the millions of renters in Brooklyn and all over America who are in imminent danger of losing your home because the Supreme Court cruelly overturned the national eviction moratorium, don't fret. Because arch-conservative Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett showed that she really does have a heart after all, in favoring Obama and unilaterally denying a bid by environmentalists and neighborhood preservationists to block construction of his massive shrine. (dare to read the fact-based criticism of this vanity project at Jackson Park Watch.)

  Look on the bright side, naysayers! To prove that there's no such thing as the class war, to demonstrate that there really is equality between plutocrats and struggling renters, the Obama Foundation will now be forced to pay rent. They signed an unconscionable lease with the strapped city of Chicago for a staggering $10 yearly rate (not a typo!)  for the next 99 years. Lucky people like you and me, on the other hand, have the freedom to commit to unconscionable leases every single year of our lives.

 And what's with people needing affordable housing and boring public parks anyway? According to the Obama Foundation, what people in the Jackson Park area need most of all is a state-of-the-art recording studio in the neighborhood to inspire, empower, and uplift them. As Obama himself was always wont to say: "Don't be cynical. Stop complaining. Get out there and vote!"

As the cutting-down of as many as 800 shade-providing, pollution-filtering, oxygen-creating, art-inspiring trees in Jackson Park begins, the Obama project explains that all that iconic lumber will be responsibly used to custom-build furniture to fill his own monument.

 The Foundation celebrated the groundbreaking like this:

The project serves as a catalyst for long-overdue investment in and around historic Jackson Park — creating a new destination to move visitors from hope to action, breathing new life into the park, and delivering amenities and economic benefits to the community the Obamas called home."

Notice the past tense. Besides their mansion in Washington, D.C. and their ocean-front chateau on Martha's Vineyard, the Obamas are also constructing a winter vacation compound in Hawaii. They will breathe new life into the South Pacific air even as they help exterminate life in the actual Pacific Ocean. As ProPublica reported last year, Obama friend and Foundation president Martin Nesbitt finagled an expansion of the sea wall to ensure that they get the privacy they crave. This construction will endanger such species as monkfish and sea turtles, and is otherwise banned in Hawaii. Nesbitt, incidentally, is also one of the backers of the current Obama Icon Tour, whose ostensible purpose is to foster good will and art appreciation among Peoples. 

Climate change? When you have a manufactured icon sharing the planet with you, what more could you possibly want? For as long as their shell games are plastered with enough glitter to disguise the gruesomeness, as long as there's oligarchic Superglue both to sniff and to mend the widening cracks in their facades, as long as glib performance art is more valued than human decency, there will always be Obamas.

America Gets Mitch-Slapped

One of the more gleefully repulsive enforcers of our Great American Oligarchy is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. His latest act of villainy is nixing a floor vote to give modest, one-time $2,000 relief checks to people struggling to survive during the worst biologic and economic catastrophe in modern history.

Well, he is willing, but there are strings attached. Actually, there are reinforced steel chains attached. People will only get the extra money, McConnell smarmily insinuates, if the Democratic Party-aligned social media companies are made bereft of their legal protections. Some of them - namely Facebook and probably Google - already face antitrust lawsuits because they own and control the entire world, and censor content that their "deep state" Establishment partners don't like. Republicans also want them stripped of their legal protections against also getting sued for third party defamation contained in public commentary.

 McConnell is further demanding that people lose more of their voting rights through a crackdown on alleged electoral fraud. In other words, he wants the power to thwart the public will and to nullify electoral results he doesn't like by expanding voter disenfranchisement into a redefinition of American citizens as real or incipient fraudsters. 

As far as the fortunes of the coddled Silicon Valley billionaires are concerned, I say why not take them all to court at every opportunity? The liability shield protecting them was enacted way back in the 90s, long before they morphed into the monstrous undemocratic and unaccountable sovereign surveillance and data extraction states that they are today. Solve the problem by simply breaking them up.

  But McConnell's disenfranchisement gambit is a whole different story. It is not only a poison pill, it is a million-gallon cocktail of arsenic, strychnine and ricin spelling absolute and speedy doom for the body politic.

If McConnell has his way (and when hasn't he gotten his way?), then the only stimulus we'll get, on top of those seductive $600 love-taps, will be a hard, resounding and very contemptuous bitch-slap in the face.

As far as President-elect Joe Biden is concerned, he already has pre-emptively vowed never, ever to "embarrass" McConnell and his other Republican friends in public. “My leverage is, every senior Republican knows I’ve never once, ever, misled them,” he bragged to a select group of establishment journalists recently.

His leverage with the American people is, he doesn't need the American people. He has never cared whether or not we know that we are being misled because a majority of us elected him as our newest misleader.

Rarely, in fact, do the interests of the predatory pathocrats and the interests of dispossessed people align. It's about as rare an event as Jupiter and Saturn aligning in the night sky every 600 years or so. But, as spectacular a sight as Republicans and Democrats, and Wall Street and Main Street, all joining together in the common humane purpose of meaningful pandemic relief may be, it is largely an illusion. Just as to the naked eye Saturn and Jupiter seemed to be embracing in a blaze of light while 456 million miles apart, so too is the comity between politicians and their constituents, the Haves and the Have-Nots a matter of highly skewed perspective. It's hardly the dawning of a New Age of Aquarius.

But it could be a glimmer. Senator Bernie Sanders is doing his theatrical utmost to, as David Sirota describes it, not only embarrass McConnell, but "out-McConnell McConnell." He is putting a hold on the veto override vote for the defense appropriations bill (the death industry's corporate welfare package) and his bravura performance at least is forcing the Senate to stay in town for the New Year's holiday. Come 2021, the wars and the weapons profiteering will seamlessly continue as though Bernie's  filibuster never even happened.

It all comes down to the pair of Senate runoffs in the state of Georgia, culminating next Tuesday. Two plutocratic GOP grifters, who each got even richer on insider trading deals after secret Covid-19 briefings early this year, are struggling in the polls against two centrist Democrats being bankrolled by corporate interests.  For purposes of winning power, the whole quartet is championing those $2,000 relief checks. The outcome will determine whether McConnell continues to rule the Senate.

Original Check Champion Donald Trump, who these days more resembles a mutilated turkey on the golf course than a lame duck in the White House, is said by the corporate media to have "blindsided" the Duopoly with his sudden demand for the added money, after Congress had worked so hard giving ordinary people the equivalent of half a month's rent and wealthy bosses a tax break on their three-martini business lunches. The media are no longer reporting the original story, which had Trump figuratively bound and gagged by his White House minions after he called for $2,000 checks long before the midnight compromise between Republicans and Democrats was finally reached.

Despite the questionable motivations behind his sudden concern for the masses of people as he exits the White House, Trump's words are having their beneficent effect, in that they expose the political perfidy in his various bipartisan enablers. He also just shockingly ousted Barack Obama from his 12-year reign as the Gallup Poll's Most Admired Man In America. 

Miracles do happen. Illusions replace illusions. The Emperor always does have new clothes. But there will also always be outsiders to point out the naked truth to anyone who's interested in seeing or hearing it, not to mention acting upon it.

Doctor Mengele Rising

The only way that Donald Trump and his kleptocratic cronies can make their America great again is to make their servants work for them again. This is notwithstanding the corrupt political duopoly's relative pittance of $1,200 checks and a few extra months of guaranteed enhanced unemployment benefits. These are nothing but the shiny little baubles they twirl before us in order to mask the multi-trillion dollar permanent slush fund that they've allocated for themselves.

Democracy is not only a myth, it has officially been declared a dead myth. This is especially true when more than a few "experts" and media propagandists have openly asserted that if people have to die so that they and their Plutonomy may live, so be it.

As they plunder the wealth of a nation and a globe in their orgy of disaster capitalism overkill, all remaining shreds of their propaganda masks are getting ripped off their smirking faces at the speed of the avoidable death rate directly attributable to the orchestrated dearth of the cheap face masks essential to protect human beings from infection by COVID-19.

The value they place on money over human life has always been a given. It's just that, until now, they've been fairly subtle about it, succeeding, through their political lackeys,  at convincing enough people that this is still a democracy because we are allowed to vote every two and four years.

With their own lives at stake even as they rob and plunder in full public view,  they're caught between the rock and the hard place of both despising us and needing us. Their contempt has only served to once again display the abject fear they so nakedly exhibited when Bernie Sanders had briefly appeared to be beating Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.

Much to their chagrin, the coronavirus is now more threatening to their continuing rule than a million Bernie Sanders could ever be. They can't cheat the virus, red-bait the virus, lie the virus out of existence, or make fun of the virus's odd little spikes the way that they made fun of Bernie's Brooklyn accent, wispy hair and flailing arms.

It seems like only yesterday that  MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah went on the air to complain that "Bernie makes my skin crawl." Fast forward a couple of months, and she's got herself an enemy that actually infiltrates your skin and has the potential to drown you to a painful death as your lungs fill up with fluid.

Not that she and her fellow plutocrats had to worry about Bernie, who just caved by not showing up for the final vote for the aforementioned corporate coup and slush fund bailout of the despised billionaire class.

Matt Stoller@matthewstoller·1h Love all the Bernie stans arguing that for practical reasons he *had* to compromise and do what Schumer wanted. I don’t remember such charitable feelings when Elizabeth Warren organized her Medicare for All plan. Weird double standard.

So how ironic that the non-wealthy service sector - which runs the gamut from nurses and teachers and child care workers to sanitation truck drivers and delivery people and grocery clerks - turns out to be more indispensable than the corporate media borg and the leagues of scolding neoliberal Thought Leaders and lecturing elite technocrats!

When Donald Trump says he wants America's churches packed by Easter, what he really means is that he wants the service sector back on the job by Easter so that the oligarchs can enjoy the glorious Slush Fund Resurrection of their wealth and power in ungodly comfort as they feast at the altar of Mammon. Who's going to make all the beds and manicure all the lawns at Trump's properties, maintaining him and his class in the comfort to which they have become accustomed?  We certainly cannot expect Melania to load her own dishwasher or Ivanka to do her own hair and makeup.

Or as Wells Fargo CEO Dick Kovacecic so bluntly puts it, "Healthy workers below about the age of 55... we'll gradually bring those people back and  see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don't know.... Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you'll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience? Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose."

To make matters even worse, with the Hamptons and Martha's Vineyard now full to bursting with off-season wealthy New York City refugees, Flyover Country is actually warning rich potential virus-carriers to stay the hell away. Several upstate New York counties, for example, have informally banned them from entry. These well-heeled refugees find themselves being treated uncomfortably similarly to the "illegal" migrants they have either caged or enslaved at sub-minimum wages, as the need and their whimsy dictates.

Despite the pyrrhic Senate victory which officially turned the Republic into a formal rather than de facto neofeudal oligarchy, the class war is getting turned right on its ear. Now it's the poor who have established gated communities to keep out the rich. The poor all over the world are refusing in ever increasing numbers to return to work and to risk their lives for abysmally low remuneration and no benefits.

We are rightly outraged by pundits and politicians glibly discounting both the working class and the indigent as expendable, and treating our health and survival as secondary in importance to the economic growth that benefits only the few. We purport to be astounded that in Italy, elderly pandemic victims are being denied ventilators in favor of giving younger victims a fighting chance at survival..

Italy has single payer health care, which gave Joe Biden the perfect hook to decry Medicare For All at the recent debate with Bernie Sanders. He didn't mention that the outsourcing of manufacturing of medical equipment in the "free trade" deals he has spent his entire political life championing is what has led to the global shortage of life-saving supplies to fight the virus. The health care systems offering free treatment at the point of entry have nothing to do with the virus's morbidity and mortality rates.

Biden campaign adviser Ezekiel Emanuel, for example, has long advocated for letting old people die when they are no longer useful to society and to the bottom line.

In a controversial 2014 Atlantic piece, the self-described "medical ethicist" and leading Obama administration health official wrote:

But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic....

 Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible. This has become so pervasive that it now defines a cultural type: what I call the American immortal.

I reject this aspiration. I think this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive. For many reasons, 75 is a pretty good age to aim to stop.

Emanuel apparently has not advised his own client, the 77-year-old cognitively declining Joe Biden, that he is already two years past "the pretty good age to stop."  But perhaps instead, he has suggested that Biden be kept out of the public eye as much and as long as possible to stop all the public speculation about his cognitive decline.

(For more on Emanuel's neoliberal ethic, please read "Medicare, Doctor Mengele, and You.")

To mangle both the Mengele metaphor and the late great George Carlin: not only is it a big club that you ain't in, they want to club you over the head with it. 

While they're wielding their weapons, let's wield ours with a massive general strike. Let's stop making their beds, mowing their lawns, tutoring their pre-Ivies, paying their rents, building their mansions, cooking and delivering their food, fighting their wars, and manipulating their balance sheets to effectuate their tax evasions.

As soon as this pandemic ends, and it will end, we must don our yellow vests. We might not win, but at least it will feel good trying. At least we can make them feel moderately uncomfortable about killing people in new record numbers.

The Overreach Concern Trolls

If it's not the damned Russians coming to get us, it's those damned Overreachers.

The Overreachers are a brand new breed of bogeymen. They've popped up virtually overnight from the deepest depths of the Democratic Party, taking up residence beneath every punditory bed, jostling for precious space with Putin and his rabid apricot poodle, Donald. It's an uncomfortably tight and alarming squeeze for all the corporate journalists and columnists so desperately trying to keep up with all the ins and outs of Group Think. 

Only the cleverest among them can manage to put Russia and Democratic Party Overreach into the same column or article or cable TV shout-fest. If they can blame Russia for sowing the desires and demands among the electorate to have single payer health care and debt-free education, then they've got themselves a real plot.

Overreach manic-depression is emerging as a real invented disease, thought to be genetically related to Trump Derangement Disorder and Russophobia Syndrome. Symptoms include terror of Medicare For All, with its unthinkable lethal outcome of treating and healing tens of millions more sick people. Also of great worry to Overreach phobics are Bernie Sander's education and medical debt jubilees.What totally sick, anti-capitalist ideas, according to the diagnosticians of the media-political complex. They might even be more deadly than heart disease or diabetes or cancer. 

Overreach, besides being a monstrous malady in itself, can also act as either a hypnotic or a stimulant drug, depending on the pusher or the user. If left-leaning candidates like Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser but no less terrifying extent, Elizabeth Warren don't stop spreading this crack opioid epidemic of Overreach to the rest of the liberal class, and to their fellow candidates and citizens, delicate arms are likely to get jerked right out of their sockets. And then Resisters Inc. won't be able to flail and punch at Donald Trump as virtuously and as daintily as they do now. And then what? Trump might win a second term and then they'll be reduced to typing out their columns and speeches with their toes.

Concerned New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall therefore asks: "How Can Democrats Keep Themselves From Overreaching?" 

 Edsall studiously ignores the voices of actual voters in his piece, turning instead to the usual cast of credentialed experts from corporate-funded think tanks, academia, Party leadership (Clintonite talking head Paul Begala among them) and polling agencies. 

For example, there's this nugget which hilariously conflates progressive activists and the Left with the rich donor class:

The role progressive activists play in setting the Democratic agenda provided Trump with an ideal target, helping him portray the Democratic Party as dominated by a doctrinaire elite. In The Atlantic, Yascha Mounk, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute, characterized these progressive activists as:
Much more likely to be rich, highly educated — and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African-American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are.

This one paragraph insinuates the false, but standard. centrist talking point that Blacks are poorly represented among progressive activists. This trope ignores both the history of the bottom-up civil rights movement and current movements like Black Lives Matter. It ignores the fact that labor movements, by their very nature, are the farthest thing from elitism you could probably ever imagine. The current labor movement, among teachers, nurses and auto workers, is multi-racial and multi-ethnic. The subliminal message Edsall imparts in this paragraph that if you're a leftist, you are also racist and probably also an elitist snob. 

Edsall does not disclose that the Agora Institute is bankrolled by the Niarchos shipping dynasty, or that The Atlantic is owned by multi-billionaire investor Laurene Powell Jobs. And although "agora" is the Greek word for the public square, there is no sign of the actual public or any actual demos anywhere to be found among the Institute's aptly named Board of Overseers. Rather, the new oligarchic definition of "public square" is a bastion of neoconservatism and neoliberalism: transnational corporations, private equity vultures, weapons industry think tanks and even representatives of such repressive US client states as the Kingdom of Jordan. Thomas Edsall's climate change denialist and right-wing colleague, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, is also listed as an elite Overseer of the Agora, as are the Board Chairman of Merck Pharmaceuticals, the senior adviser of Henry Kissinger Associates, and Gary Kasparov, founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative, whose neoconservative main purpose, besides fomenting Cold War 2.0 against Russia, is overthrowing leftist governments in Latin America under the guise of human rights.

Edsall thus performs the usual centrist trick of using right-wing sources to concern-troll on the alleged behalf of the liberal left. The irony of using this rhetorical sleight-of-hand to criticize an Overreach Monster that exists only in the heads of the war-mongering aristocracy and its publicists seems to be quite lost on him. Then again, he's only reporting what the credentialed experts tell him.

And make no mistake. The plutocrats who get rich off our endless wars are the very same climate-destroying plutocrats who adamantly oppose the health, debt-free education, and financial well-being of everybody else. 

My published response to Edsall:

Have you noticed that those warning of Democratic "overreach" are the centrists and the plutocrats? Begala's party is the one that deregulated Wall Street and the telecoms, rammed through NAFTA and reformed "welfare as we know it" - all contributing to the most extreme wealth inequality in modern history.

 The Democratic Party is increasingly the party of the rich, and the rich usually get what they want in the way of policy. Thus they rail against such egalitarian measures as Medicare For All while championing LGBT rights and the inclusion of a few select historically oppressed "identities" in their boardrooms and corner offices. They sell us a more diverse oligarchy as a substitute for true racial, gender and economic justice.

They are loath to even mention such a thing as the class war.

The media, meanwhile, give us wall-to-wall impeachment coverage as it mainly ignores how hard most of our lives are. We're supposed to care about "Ukraine-gate" and not notice that Trump once again is cutting food stamps, and that he just signed an executive order further privatizing Medicare.

 Many Trump voters actually support Medicare For All. So if the Democrats want to win people back, they'll give us at least some of what we want and need instead of saying that nice things are impossible with the country so divided right now. We're supposed to accept the free flow of trillions of dollars to our bloated military, and meanwhile pragmatically agree to just die sooner.

No more.

Maureen Dowd Versus The Mob

In the third installment of her summer series "Confessions of the Designated Nancy Pelosi Whisperer," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd abandons channeling Madam Speaker's now-backfired attacks on the Squad of four progressive congresswomen of color, and unsheathes her worthy literary claws on the Vast Twittering Left.

The hook for this week's attack was a tweet by NBC News personality Howard Fineman, who boasted about his attendance at one of Dowd's apparently famous Georgetown parties. He affixed a photo of Dowd greeting honored guest Nancy Pelosi and her date for the evening, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Outrage then ensued from all across the political spectrum. Poor Howard Fineman was forced to delete his tweet, in utter shock that his "benign big shot brag" had elicited such "vicious" reactions from the hoi polloi. In the olden days, he implied, people would have been more duly awed by the doings of the high and mighty. The twitter taunts thus only gained in intensity. He and his hostess Maureen Dowd both interpret these negative reactions as pure class envy rather than as legitimate criticism of the cozy, incestuous relationship between government officials and the journalists who are supposed to be holding them to account.

As I mentioned above, it is no longer feasible for Dowd to directly attack the Squad, given that the first two installments of the Pelosi Whisperer franchise had only served to raise their public profiles and elevate their progressive agendas - and worst of all, had provided the perfect opening for Donald Trump to launch his own vicious triangulated racist attacks on them. Poor Maureen was temporarily reduced to dishing out sloppy seconds, such as a statement she retweeted from media mogul David Israel calling the four women "the Squad of Vuvuzelas."

Vuvuzelas are the extremely loud, even deafening, monotonal horns invented and used by the Zulus of southern Africa to summon distant community members, and are now widely used at soccer games and other sporting events. Given the ethnicities of the Squad and the fact that one of them, Ilhan Omar, is a refugee from Somalia, it's an interesting choice of metaphor. 

But back to Maureen Dowd's latest column, in which she expresses wonder that her vivid description of Speaker of the People's House Pelosi wearing $995 pumps, munching on bonbons, and relaxing at her Napa Valley vineyard evoked such sour grapes of wrath from people:

After I interviewed Nancy Pelosi a few weeks ago, The HuffPost huffed that we were Dreaded Elites because we were eating chocolates and — horror of horrors — the speaker had on some good pumps.

 Then this week, lefty Twitter erected a digital guillotine because I had a book party for my friend Carl Hulse, The Times’s authority on Capitol Hill for decades, attended by family, journalists, Hill denizens and a smattering of lawmakers, including Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Susan Collins.

I, the daughter of a D.C. cop, and Carl, the son of an Illinois plumber, were hilariously painted as decadent aristocrats reveling like Marie Antoinette when we should have been knitting like Madame Defarge.
Yo, proletariat: If the Democratic Party is going to be against chocolate, high heels, parties and fun, you’ve lost me. And I’ve got some bad news for you about 2020.

The actual bad news is that Dowd has erected a straw man. This version is comprised of the latest group-think narrative trope that progressives are a monolithic bloc whose constant harping on impeachment rather than on Party Unity will only serve to give us another term of Trump. 

They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough while placing all their hopes in a color-inside-the-lines lifelong Republican prosecutor appointed by Ronald Reagan.
The politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty.

Dowd carefully names no names within her horde of stupid puritans. Nor does she mention that the loudest voices for impeachment have not been those of ordinary people, more of whom are leaning toward some form of socialism to solve our problems, but rather the corporate class of journalists on MSNBC and CNN and her own colleagues at the Times. But since the much-ballyhooed testimony of Robert Mueller turned out to be such a dud, scapegoats must be devised by these discredited corporate journalists so fixated on #Russiagate, and they must be devised in a hurry. The corporatists of the incestuous media-political complex are not our natural allies. In fact, they're the exact opposite. 

Hippie-punching and voter shaming are the standard tactics of last resort for these amoral establishment fools, and Dowd is only too happy to join the fray and deflect the blame. When Trump wins another term due to the lack of a populist agenda from the centrist Democrat whom they hope to undemocratically nominate, they will then refrain from blaming themselves and as usual, blame people with no power and no money.

My published comment on Dowd's column: 

The tweet by pundit Howard Fineman bragging about canoodling at Dowd's digs with the very same officials that journalists are supposed to afflict was what roused the ire of both left and right. It had nothing to do with "progressives'" disappointment over Mueller's overhyped (by corporate journalists like Fineman) performance.

This may come as a shock to the Beltway Bubble, but opinions on impeachment vary among progressives. Some are for, some against. But I suppose it's easier for Maureen to call them nasty purists than it is for her to address such core progressive policy proposals as single payer health care or to write about epidemic student debt, the growing climate catastrophe, the unaffordability of housing, the caging of refugees, and the fact that Flint, Michigan still has no clean water.

Nobody out here in Lower Slobovia cares about your Georgetown shindigs or your angst about peevish purists who do not show proper deference to the Knowledge Class and its insulated meritocrats.. Most of us are too worried about paying the bills and what kind of future our children and grandchildren face in a country where representative democracy has devolved into winner take all predatory capitalism.

But keep writing columns like this one, because the more you scold the have-nothings the less they will heed your infinite wisdom, and the more they will spare themselves the tedium of reading the next self-pitying installment.