Surreal Times In the Good Old USA

Can't order find common cause with chaos? Can't sanity and insanity just please finally get along?

It's long past time to get realistic and pragmatic and centrist, people. Joe Biden's Build Back Better legislation is as good as dead in the polluted water.  So let's give three cheers for the new and improved Whittle Down Worse Wisely agenda, which is certainly a lot smarter than the reckless Shave Away to a Sad Pile of Sawdust that those nasty old Republicans are rooting for. 

American politics can be visualized as a Salvador Dali painting. As Albert Camus observed, the essence of surrealism is that it is both irrational and triumphant. "The surrealists, while simultaneously exalting human innocence, believed they could exalt murder and suicide," he wrote in The Rebel.

 The New York Times is only too happy to aid and abet the Democrats at their own hard passive-aggressive work of whittling down wisely in order to placate their murderous mutual overlords. The main tactic is to frame the narrative into an honest debate between two equal factions: the very sincere, poor people-hating deficit hawks, and the equally sincere, innocent, and very smug climate catastrophe acknowledgers.  You see,  the issue is not one of life and death. The only issue is how "we" can sustain economic growth. Everybody can irrationally agree, after all, that there can be a bright side to cancer.

Or as tax and economics reporter Jim Tankersley more decorously concern-trolls it:

It is a stealth battle over the fiscal future at a time when few lawmakers in either party have prioritized addressing debt and deficits. Each side believes its approach would put the nation’s finances on a more sustainable path by generating the strongest, most durable economic growth possible.

Get it? There are only two designated "sides" in this surreal intra-oligarchic debate. Tankersley actually recasts the Wall Street-spawned Third Way think tank as the environmentally conscious liberal good guy in the contrived narrative, while arch-conservative economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute gets to be magically transformed into a "centrist."

Strain is such a reasonable, moderate guy that his solution to poverty is to give unemployed people a bus ticket out of town so they can find a job at sub-minimum wage to help them get back on their feet without any of those horrible government handouts.

Third Way, founded by the late billionaire Pete Peterson for the sole purpose of unraveling the New Deal via deficit hysteria, desperately wants the separate infrastructure bill to pass, given that it contains so many corporate subsidies for the repair (and privatization!) of our crumbling roads and bridges. Therefore, the Times turns to Josh Freed, Third Way's vice president in charge of climate and energy, for the requisite scientific expertise. Freed says the reason to reverse climate catastrophe is not so much to save lives now as it is to avoid wasting money on the victims of future disasters, which would put a real damper on the profits of the ruling class.

Or, as Freed more decorously concern-trolls it for easy digestion by Times readers:

“Those are the table stakes for the reconciliation and infrastructure debate. It’s why we think the cost of inaction, from an economic perspective, is so enormous.”

Translation: investors have to extract and spend public money - not their own hoarded wealth, mind you - in order to make enormous private profits later. And it's all for the good of the planet. This is otherwise known as green-washing everything in sight to slap an Earth-friendly gloss over corporate greed and rapacity.

Freed, an alumnus of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, also serves on the board of the Clean Energy Leadership Council. which according to his Third Way profile, is "an organization dedicated to equipping a diverse set of emerging leaders with the skills and expertise to lead the transition to a clean energy economy."

Have you ever noticed that these philanthrocapitalist do-good fronts are never about solving problems in the here and now, but all about capitalism tooting its own horn and gauzily imparting its skills and inspiration to the youthful leaders of Tomorrow?

And sure enough, the Clean Energy Leadership Council gets the bulk of its funding from energy companies and their various representatives and lobbyists. The notorious Con Ed of New York is listed as a "foundational partner," along with the public-private New York State Energy Research and Development Association. One "kilowatt supporter" is listed as Van Ness Feldman LLP,, a law firm which boasts on its own website that it is one of the nation's top three lobbyists for the oil and gas industry. It also boasts of its "diversity and inclusion," proving once again that the Greenwashing/Wokewashing Partnership is a ubiquitous plank in corporate propaganda across multiple industries.  Pollution and greed are proud equal opportunity employers.

Another kilowatt supporter is an outfit called Adaptive Change Advisors, which modestly claims on its website that it has taught everybody from White House personnel to Google, to Microsoft, to the United Nations to the World Bank how to win friends and influence people. Based upon a Harvard University-developed system, it is essentially about elites instructing elites on how to be more elite. If there is any adapting to be done, those targets shall remain nameless. But you know who you are! I am taking a wild guess that Advanced Whittling For Dummies is part of its core curriculum. Also too, there are probably instructions on how to write a concern-trolling New York Times article which frames narratives and phony debates around rich-people interests, while hammering home the point that There Is No Alternative. So, Lessers, adapt to murder-suicide already!

Did I mention that Jim Tankersley, author of the aforementioned misleading New York Times think piece, is also a "media fellow" at Stanford University's neoliberal Institute For Economic and Policy Research? This particular think tank was founded by the late George Shultz, who held four different Cabinet positions in Republican administrations and who later headed the Board of Directors of Theranos, whose own founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is currently on trial for defrauding investors. His other claims to fame were leading the global energy company Bechtel and devising George W. Bush's policy of preemptive war.

Why else would there be no mention of the US Military being the biggest single polluter by fossil fuels on the face of the planet? Why else do you never read about the "affordability" of war in the New York Times, or in any of the five or six media conglomerates and allied tech titans that own both the discourse and the means of delivering the discourse?

There used to be a great journalistic organization called Muckety, which actually drew convoluted spider-webby diagrams explaining how virtually all the members the ruling class are interconnected.  One day, the site simply disappeared off the Internet without a trace and with no explanation.

Convoluted diagrams that resemble hairy spiders are so headache-inducing anyway. So I'll let the late great George Carlin whittle it all right down for ya:

First As Tragedy, Then As Chris Matthews

The paranoia of the plutocrats is morphing from farce to insanity at the speed of the Coronavirus. Loath to share their wealth with the rest of us, they are nevertheless magnanimous enough to share with the rest of us their abject terror of the unthinkable prospect of ordinary people having better lives under a Bernie Sanders administration.

"Fear the Bern" is their imaginative theme.

We're supposed to magically forget, of course, that "ordinary people" and "the rest of us" are the exact same entity. The spidery elites are thus cordially inviting us, the Lower Slobbovians of the Bottom 90 Percent, in to their luxury parlors, just long enough to become the victims of a new strain of Stockholm Syndrome. We are asked to transfer their abject fear of the mass of people into an abject fear of our own selves. They euphemize this disease of victims identifying with their oppressors as "party unity."

It's gone beyond the more or less subtle "manufacturing of consent" as explained by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. This is the forcing of their raw pathological sewage into the mass communication feeding tube attached to too many of our brains.  After all, since they've already primed us to become true-believing anti-Trump resistance fighters in the service of the FBI, the CIA, Wall Street, Hollywood and the trillion-dollar military monster, they might as well also prime us to ditch the creeping menace of Bernie's FDR-style liberalism and the dangerous hope of better lives for ourselves.

Leading the surge in the media's unabashed psychological warfare campaign against the American voter, MSNBC personality Chris Matthews insinuated that a Bernie Sanders presidency would even usher in mass public executions. Here's his reverse Joe McCarthy somersault with one and a half spittle-inflected twists:

Chris Matthews is, of course, doing nothing less than embracing his own inner Trump, engaging in the fascistic tactic of psychological projection. The socialists were the targets of the HUAC and McCarthyite 50s Cold War domestic purges and persecutions - not its executioners. Former, current and suspected lefties were the victims of a coordinated right-wing bipartisan campaign to destroy labor unions and the social welfare programs of FDR's New Deal. With this diminished Left now threatening to come back to life, Cold War McCarthyism also is coming back to life bigger and better than ever. 

The big tell in Matthews' diatribe is that these supposed socialist executions -  cheered, if not directly ordered, by a President Bernie Robespierre Sanders - would take place in Central Park, the gentrified back-yard of many a luxury penthouse and corporate boardroom. What Chris Matthews and his cohort are really afraid of is not getting literally shot, but of being parted with the tiniest smidgen of their obscene wealth. "Castro and the Reds" is code for the bottom 90 Percent of Lower Slobbovia having the unmitigated gall to demand universal health care, guaranteed affordable housing and a debt-free education.

Ordinary people wanting better lives for themselves and their families, friends, neighbors and co-workers are even described as a "cult" by Matthews' MSNBC colleague,Democratic consultant and Clinton campaign operative James Carville. He raved last week that he is "scared to death" that a Sanders victory would transform the party into a "cult that alienates large swaths of America."

Since teachers top the professions which donate to the Sanders campaign, Carville's description of Bernie supporters as a "cult" is an oblique smear of teachers themselves. It used to be that it was only the Republicans who so vociferously attacked public education.

These liberal paranoid plutocrats can do psychological projection every bit as ruthlessly as the reactionary president whom they only pretend to despise. The truth is that it's the oligarch-owned Democratic Party - not the Sanders campaign - which has worked so hard and so adeptly to alienate such huge swaths of the American electorate that millions of these swaths stayed home rather than submit any longer to the Neoliberal Gospel Cult  - led by the decidedly uncharismatic Hillary Clinton. It was the party leadership under Barack Obama that lost nearly a thousand seats in ten years.

The class war against the bottom 90 percent is being fought by two competing oligarchic political factions: the Republicans (de facto Trumpians) and the Democrats (soon to be renamed the Bloombergians). These factions are utterly united in their desire to defeat Bernie Sanders and to smother the lives and hopes and dreams of the electorate.

Lacking any human decency or morality or any intellectual heft to speak of, the elites' desperate bipartisan tactic is the manufacture of consent via the manufacture of fear. It's the creation and enhancement of hatred between and among the increasingly desperate factions of the working class and the outright down-and-outs. 

Fear and hate are the traditional weapons that elites have always used to keep the "swaths" of humanity under control. You really have to hand it to Donald Trump, though. He has successfully lowered the bar on how these twin assault weapons are utilized to Limbo stick proportions. The weaponized propaganda no longer needs to be well-polished. They simply fire wildly in all directions in hopes that at least some of their dummy bullets maintain enough smart black-ops magic to keep us under their spell.

Since that seems to be happening with less and less frequency, the special media psy-ops teams are going totally bonkers. They're flailing with their fists and their inchoate verbal spittle is reducing their manufactured narrative into one great big sodden mess.

The only thing we have to fear is the prospect of even a few of our fellow citizens taking these farcical experts even remotely seriously.

James Carville: Beatings Will Continue, So Join Us!

Commentariat Central: Bernie Edition

One of my New Year's resolutions is to comment more frequently on New York Times articles than I have been doing in recent months. This vow, of course, is contingent upon at least partially overcoming the nausea and rise in blood pressure that accompany reading the articles prior to responding to them. This is particularly true of the op-eds. For the sake of my own sanity and health, I long ago gave up perusing the silliness of Gail Collins and the banality of David Brooks. Brooks and Paul Krugman, his erstwhile nemesis, actually sound banally alike as #Resistance, Inc. fighters in the Age of Trump.

Here is my first Times comment of 2020, in response to another article about Bernie Sanders by Sydney Ember, co-written with Thomas Kaplan. The underlying theme of their piece is that since Bernie's record fund-raising haul from small donors is eclipsed by Donald Trump's bank account, Bernie might not be electable, despite the small-dollar donations from "loyal supporters who are faithful to him despite his setbacks."

The piece is less openly derogatory than Ember's previous anti-Bernie articles, but that is likely to change as the first primaries draw nearer. Knowing that the public is on to their bias, Ember and other mainstream journalists appear at this delicate moment to be very carefully covering their asses.

My published response:

The wording in the side-by-side headlines about Sanders and Yang's fundraising totals is a perfect example of how to subtly slant a story and cast doubt on a popular candidate.

Whereas "Yang raised $16.5 million, His Campaign Says" we are told that "Sanders Says He Raised $34.5 million."

 The subtle implication is that one is fact and the other is just a claim. Bernie "says" he raised the money and Yang definitely did, with the journalistic ploy of sourcing his campaign for the info, as a kind of afterthought. And then, as other commenters have rightly noted, the article goes on to ridiculously compare Sanders's stash to that of an incumbent president who is running unopposed. Cast the doubt and cast it as wide and as shallowly as what passes for journalistic ethics permits. 

It will be a lot of fun deconstructing the anti-Bernie rhetoric coming from the establishment media from here on in. Right now it's as subtle as they can make it, but as the plutocratic panic over his rise becomes ever more palpable, watch out for the subtlety to go out the window and for the more blatant smears to begin afresh. To Bernie's own great credit, he is not shy about calling the media out this time around. Last time, he was way too nice.

Now, if we could only get him to stop prefacing his Biden critiques with "Joe is a good friend of mine"...

My other two Times comments are actually from last month, in response to a couple of Paul Krugman's op-eds, both of which caused the nausea and angst that are the necessary impetuses (impeti?) for me to take to the keyboard in a desperate attempt to at least temporarily relieve my symptoms.

Krugman's more recent column, titled "The Legacy of Destructive Austerity," rather ridiculously posits that the corporacracy's punishing deficit obsession agenda disappeared in 2015 and that it was mainly a Republican effort to stop Democrats (who from 2009 through 2011 controlled the presidency and Congress)  from doing what they really, really wanted to do.

Specifically, debt fears were used as an excuse to cut spending on social programs, and also as an excuse for hobbling the ambitions of center-left governments. Here in the United States, Republicans went through the entire Obama era claiming to be deeply concerned about budget deficits, forcing the country into years of spending cuts that slowed economic recovery. The moment Donald Trump moved into the White House, all those supposed concerns vanished, vindicating those of us who argued from the beginning that Republicans who posed as deficit hawks were phonies.

Note the passive voice in the first paragraph, subtly absolving the true-believing deficit hawks in the Obama administration of culpability. Krugman feels so vindicated now that it's been proven beyond all doubt that the Republicans were only pretending to be austerians all along. What he unethically fails to acknowledge is that the Democratic leadership still are true-believing, wealth-serving, bought-and-paid for deficit hawks.

My published comment:

Paul Krugman doesn't mention that the Austerity Project was a totally bipartisan affair, what with President Obama himself convening the aptly-named Catfood Commission to cut the deficit as the economy was crashing. Congress did not force him to do this.

  Far from ending in 2015, austerity still rules, with the so-called opposition party addressing an epidemic of homelessness, sickness and premature deaths from despair by tinkering around the edges of catastrophe. The House leadership grudgingly agreed to control costs for only a handful of outrageously priced drugs while refusing to address the surprise hospital bills being sent out in droves by the private equity vultures who increasingly run our deeply sick health care system.

Last spring, Speaker Pelosi was once again a guest of honor at the late billionaire Pete Peterson's annual austerity conference. Complaining that Trump was taking all the media attention away from the "agenda," she said: "Pete Peterson was a national hero. He was the personification of the American Dream. I loved him dearly. He cared deeply about working people. He knew that the national debt was a tax on our children. He always said to me, 'Nancy, always keep your eye on the budget!"

 And thus does the oligarchy sing the same tired old refrain about why people (a/k/a "purists") have to suffer: "But how you gonna pay for that?"

They could start by withholding the trillion-odd dollars they keep gifting Trump every single year for our endless wars.

The other December column to which I responded had Krugman trying to absolve himself from his own destructive anti-Bernie rhetoric during the 2016 campaign, in which diehard austerian Hillary Clinton had fiendishly vowed that Medicare For All would "never, ever come to pass" under her leadership.

His column was a thinly-disguised campaign commercial for the faltering Elizabeth Warren, who is currently suffering the slings and arrows of billionaires from the right and progressives from the left as a result of her efforts to please all of the people all of the time.

Ridiculously once again, Krugman points to allegedly low unemployment numbers as proof that there was never any "skills gap" to blame for the nation's joblessness. He doesn't acknowledge that most of the jobs created since the 2008 financial collapse are of the low-wage, temporary and precarious variety. What counts is that he has been proven right, and the deficit hawks and the inflationistas were wrong, as were the oligarchs who blamed the unemployed for their own plights. These oligarchs have an inordinate influence on policy and are coming after Warren.

Krugman concludes:

Which brings me back to the 2020 campaign. You may disagree with progressive ideas coming from Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, which is fine. But the news media owes the public a serious discussion of these ideas, not dismissal shaped by a combination of reflexive "centrist bias" and the conscious or unconscious assumption that any policy rich people dislike must be irresponsible.

 And when candidates talk about the excessive influence of the wealthy, that subject also deserves serious discussion, not the cheap shots we've been seeing lately. I know that this kind of discussion makes many journalists uncomfortable. That's exactly why we need to have it.

I just could not help myself. Those high-falutin' hypocritical words were exactly why I typed out this response:

An amazing thing is happening in Punditville. Some of the same outlets that only last week were engaging in a virtual Bernie Blackout are suddenly taking the opposite tack, admitting that hey, this guy might just clinch this nomination, especially since he looks to win Iowa and New Hampshire. leads in California, and even has a decent shot in South Carolina, whose millennial Black voters favor him overwhelmingly. Biden's current national lead is still based largely on name recognition rather than any fondness for his retro center-right policies.

 Cheap shots by this liberal columnist in 2016, such as "Bernie is becoming a Bernie Bro!" because his policy proposals for the greater public good were supposedly outweighed by nonspecific "serious character and values issues" are now conveniently buried under the rug. Given a choice between Trump and a winning Bernie-Liz ticket, it behooves even establishment types to acknowledge that the rich are losing this class war of ideas, that the oligarch-owned and controlled media are rapidly losing credibility for reasons that have nothing at all to do with Trump's own deranged critiques of "fake news."

Not, of course, that I'm complaining about mainstream journos suddenly gushing about the newly spry and funny Bernie so soon after gleefully pouncing on the heart attack to concern-troll the message that his candidacy was over. They don't want to be blamed if they once again trash Bernie so hard that they hand Trump another term.

This is different, of course, from what I suspect is their subliminal desire to actually hand Trump another term. They don't want to contend with a Sanders nomination or presidency because they would then be forced to expose themselves as wealth-serving careerists. They can champion progressive policy initiatives or they can keep their jobs. But they would not be able to do both. It would be far easier for them and more lucrative for their employers  to have Trump to kick around for another four years, to keep Russiagate propaganda on life support, and thus keep their hypocrisy more or less hidden from public view.

As I mentioned in my first Times comment, deconstructing the plutocratic propaganda promises to be very fulfilling, almost as fulfilling as the $14 increase I just got in my Social Security check.

Debate & Switch: They Got Nothing

I'm sorry to report that I couldn't consume Wednesday's Democratic talking point telecast as voraciously as my assigned civic duty of passive spectator dictated that I should.

Since the latest edition of Perpetual Primary was hosted by MSNBC and the Jeff Bezos Gazette, and since the only way that cable-free households could watch it was by downloading the NBC app, and since the NBC app kept freezing up, losing audio or crashing completely on my cheap smartphone, I had to resort to the New York Times live blog to get their elite take on the festivities.

It was weird. because when the Times reporters were carping about Tulsi Gabbard's refreshingly blunt attack on the Democratic Party and thrilling over NBC-WaPo's orchestrated  smear of Gabbard through the willing, shrilling mouth of Kamala Harris, this exchange had not yet appeared on my tiny screen. It was a real spoiler from the Times, who never questioned the whopper that Gabbard had spent Obama's entire second term trashing him on Fox News rather than serving in Congress.  And when the exchange finally did appear on my screen a minute or two later, the Times live-blog had already moved on to inserting its own video of a Deval Patrick campaign event in order to give private equity's stalking horse equal time.

I don't know whether the Times reporters pimping for Patrick did so to avoid covering one of the few times that Bernie Sanders was allowed to speak, but it wouldn't surprise if they had. I quickly logged off the Times's Deval Patrick gush-fest and turned back to my tiny little sputtering screen.

The best part of the consumer experience for me was Amy Klobuchar's mouth moving and no sound coming out -  until the part where she actually said that when she's president, nobody is getting a free car. A free car apparently is her code for guaranteed health care. And then they went to commercial break for another annoying December to Remember Lexus commercial for those willing to work hard, play by the rules and go high when "they" go low.

And that brought back so many unpleasant memories of the earlier part of my wasted day, when I'd watched hours of impeachment hearings, or what the media outlandishly calls The Smoking Gun Episode..Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the E.U., came right out and said that US military aid to puppet state Ukraine was predicated entirely upon Ukraine's president going on live TV and announcing he was digging up dirt on the Bidens and Russiagate. No matter that Trump had already boastfully admitted to this exercise in corrupt diplomacy a couple of months ago on live TV.

For some reason, NBC streamed its impeachment coverage on YouTube, graciously allowing me to watch it on live TV without having to download their horrible app. NBC also treated me to endless loops of Donald Trump bellowing "I want nothing! I want nothing! I want nothing!" as he read directly from notes saying "I want nothing! I want nothing! I want nothing!" in those large block letters so eerily reminding me the threatening letters we used to get at my newspaper from one particular person well-known to the authorities. Those letters were also big on frenzied repetitions, such as "You will die! You will die! You will die!" 

Fast forward again to my less than satisfying NBC app of a debate consumer experience later in the day. Remember when you were a kid. and how much fun it was to turn off the TV sound and make up your own dialogue for the characters on the screen, or else put on "Nowhere Man" when Nixon was talking? Well, maybe you don't because you didn't and I was just this weird kid - okay, young adult - having another one of my oddball moments.

But last night when Mayor Pete's face froze right in the middle of a sneer, I imagined him saying "You'll get nothing. You'll get nothing. YOU'LL GET NOTHING!  because all I care about is reaching across the aisle and getting STUFF done even if it kills you!"

And when the camera panned to Rachel Maddow and the screen got so fun-house loopy that even her wonkish outsize eyeglasses couldn't sharpen her image for me, I pretty much assumed that all her questions consisted of a noun, a verb, and Russia. 

Andrea Mitchell, a/k/a Mrs. Alan "Ayn Rand" Greenspan, did not seem to get a whole lot of airtime, but I assume that there was at least one "but how you gonna pay for that?" in her repertoire.

In the spurts of actual dialogue among the ten candidates that did escape from my phone in tinny little soundbites, I heard a lot of agreement and very little argument, signalling that at least half the candidates on the stage are simply vying for vice president or cabinet positions. Absent the bullying of Tulsi Gabbard, it was an exercise in mutual back-scratching. 

Elections, like everything else in Neoliberalandia, are presented to us as pure, for-profit entertainment, at the lowest possible cost to the oligarchs and at the highest possible social cost to us, the citizen-consumers.The consolidated media-political complex controls both the information and the delivery of the information. Both the information and the delivery of the information have become so distorted and so corrupted that the "free" commercialized cheap applications they offer those who are unwilling and/or unable to pay high cable prices to access a simulacrum of democracy are an epic, abject failure. The dialogue intended to spurt straight from the belly of the corporate media beast into our living rooms in one smooth stream of projectile vomitus got stuck right in their own craws last night. They effectively choked on the distorted byproducts of their own gluttony.

They got nothing, they got nothing, they got nothing from their message of "You'll get nothing because you are nothing. So vote for me!" 

You might think that if the medium crashes, the messages of the politicians can't get out to the public, and then we all lose as a result.

But I beg to differ. I'll take a frozen grimace and a multitude of silently flapping gums over empty platitudes any time. Their techno-enhanced silences and freeze-ups on the debate stage spoke volumes of unintended truth. They have nothing, they offer nothing, and they know that we know that it's all a big nothing-burger.

It's long past time, anyway, that we mute their distorted volume-product and create our own democratic dialogue.

Kafka Does Christmas In July

#Christmas planning has begun in the East Wing at the @WhiteHouse. I'm looking forward to sharing our final vision for this unique tradition in the coming months.

The ominous phrase "Final vision," juxtaposed as it is with Donald Trump's caging of thousands of migrants and refugees on the Southern border, certainly does bring back memories of past traditions. Just not the pleasant memories and traditions that Melania Trump's public relations shop wanted to distract us with.

But perhaps we should interpret her clumsy Tweet another way. Maybe she's getting started on Christmas way early because she doesn't plan on being in the White House very much longer. Maybe she got caught up in all the media hype telling us that Father of Our Country Robert Mueller's congressional testimony was going to be the final word, the real coup de grace,for her chubby hubby wubby. And then it turned out that not only is Mueller the Deadbeat Dad that so many feared that he was upon seeing his final tepid report. He's a Demented Deadbeat Dad on his last mental legs.

So call Melania delusional and lacking in good taste to your heart's content. Because anybody who still puts any credence in the #Russiagate franchise after Mueller's bumble-wumble testimony on Wednesday should probably also have his or her own head examined.

Was there anything more delusional and Kafkesque and surreal, for example, than the New York Times's headline that blared Mueller's claim that "the Russians" are in our country right now, interfering in our elections, placed right next to a sidebar analysis bemoaning how confused the aging prosecutor has been acting lately?

A Russophobe in good standing might be "halting and hesitant" about remembering what is in his own report, but when it comes to meddling he miraculously recovers from the muddling. He regains Father of Our Country status and mental sharpness as long as he sticks to the corporate propaganda that Hillary Clinton lost the last election not because of her own ineptitude and corruption, but because of a group of underpaid Kremlin Internet trolls.

So I say let Melania have her own visionary deluded fun as we anxiously await the grand final vision of the Trump family leaving the White House forever. It's a big asylum, and thank goodness we ain't in it.

Merry Christmas, and may Kafka's Goddess of Liberty bless us, everyone.

The Biden Critic Who Came In From the Cold

What's a well-paid New York Times columnist who moonlights as a regular MSNBC contributor to do when, repulsed as she is by Creepy Uncle Joe, realizes that her career probably depends on at least passive-aggressively promoting Creepy Uncle Joe in the interests of her corporate sponsors?

If you're Michelle Goldberg, and you have previously opined that Biden should never run for president, then the first step in your rehabilitation is to write a chastened column about all the polls that show Joe Biden with a substantial lead. You then subtly denigrate the anti-Biden "online left". You provide no evidence to back up your claim that this group has little to no influence over the vast, silent majority of Democratic "moderates" for whom the defeat of Trump trumps everything else. Defeating Trump is more important than Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. Those nice things are for the "future" of the Democratic Party, not for the precarious present of the actual people and the planet they live on.

As horrible a candidate as Joe Biden is, after all, he could never be as horrible as Donald Trump.

Goldberg seems to want to have it both ways. She gives her reluctant tacit approval to the "electable" Biden, while still clinging tenuously to her faux-progressive feminist brand:

 I still think it’s a bad idea for the party to nominate a man who, among other things, voted to authorize the Iraq war and oversaw the televised humiliation of Anita Hill. But while it’s still very early, his poll numbers suggest that those of us who’d written Biden off could be the ones who are out of step with a lot of Democrats. (my bold).
The future of the Democratic Party is still with left-wing social media dynamos like Ocasio-Cortez. As Niall Ferguson and Eyck Freymann recently wrote in The Atlantic, she’s “often described as a radical, but the data show that her views are close to the median for her generation.” Right now, though, her generation is mostly in charge only online.

How odd that even though Goldberg had long ago dutifully joined the media chorus insisting that a Russian troll farm swayed an entire election by posting a few hundred cheesy ads online, the "Online Left" back home in the USA does not wield similar power and influence.

One explanation for this alleged lack of power and influence, she continues, is that MSNBC doesn't give lefty ideas as much coverage as Fox News gives to those in its own right-wing audience.

MSNBC (where I’m a contributor) doesn’t play a remotely similar role in mainstreaming fringe ideas. Polls tell us that Democratic voters don’t rely on it as their main news source the way Republican voters do with Fox, and it doesn’t take its cues from online left-wing subcultures. In fact, it often seems that Fox News pays more attention to progressive Twitter than MSNBC does, because the right-wing network loves to jeer at anything that looks like lefty overreach.

She doesn't mention that MSNBC also loves to regularly jeer at leftists, including but not limited to Bernie Sanders. The most infamous incident took place in March, when a different on-air contributor falsely claimed that Sanders had not mentioned gender or race until 23 minutes into his campaign announcement speech. (He had mentioned them immediately, and to this day, MSNBC has not issued a correction or apologized.)

She also doesn't name any "online left-wing subcultures," other than AOC's twitter account, or even explain what she means by this dismissive term. But by lumping them all together into one fringe-dwelling pot, she does manage to make them seem both suspect and scary. At most, she damns them with her very faint praise. They're not radical at all, but by golly, they're still fringe-dwellers despite the overwhelming support of more than 90 percent of registered Democrats for single payer health care.

I suspect that if Michelle Goldberg had mentioned the inconvenient truth that MSNBC is essentially a corporate Democratic Party propaganda mill and regularly lies by both commission and omission, she would no longer have her lucrative gig on MSNBC. Members of its revolving stable of occasional contributors get paid a reported average $85,000 to $100,000 a year to be available to rehash and promote their articles, their think tank research papers, and their Democratic Party consulting work. Their job is to agree with each other, and occasionally debate GOP operatives and politicians in the interest of "balance" and for shouting-over purposes. This keeps the audience glued to the screen in a simulacrum of mass indignation and righteous liberal solidarity. If it's not about the anti-Trump #Resistance, Inc., "the Russians," or the Mueller Report soap opera, then it does not exist.

Michelle Goldberg

Goldberg seems to have gotten the message that the time has now arrived for even the mildly restive liberal stable to get trotting in unison in the spectacle of the Horse Race, mainly by endlessly promoting that P.R. gimmick called "electability." (As I wrote last week, the electability gimmick was dreamed up in the 1980s by the Democratic Leadership Council to justify implementation of the undemocratic superdelegate system as a means to steer the party toward the right and keep it there permanently.)

Goldberg thus dutifully continues:

In his own horrific way, Trump seemed to expand the possibilities of American politics, making it seem as if the old rules of electability no longer applied. Many of us assumed that the expansion would go in both directions, since Trump’s rise represented such a catastrophic failure of the political center. But there are a lot of Democrats who don’t want a revolution, or even a protracted political fight. They just want things to be the way they were before Trump came along, when ordinary people didn’t have to think about Twitter at all.

My published comment: 

 The media promotion of Biden proceeds apace. Michelle Goldberg basically shrugs "what do I know?" as she pivots from finding Biden borderline-abhorrent to acknowledging that The Polls Speak.

 But what about those polls? What percentage of the people questioned were contacted by cell phone as opposed to landline? Few young people have landlines. "Biden leading by double digits!" is about as far as most people read. The polls then become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a magnet for the undecided voter.

Meanwhile,there are fewer stories about Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and other candidates. There are Zero stories about Tulsi Gabbard, whose opposition to the regime-change wars embraced by both establishment parties and mainstream media outlets makes her persona non grata in the "official narrative."

 Michelle Goldberg acknowledges that she is also a contributor on MSNBC, which exposes yet another problem of journalism. One corporate outlet or personality quotes another corporate outlet or personality, and ad infinitum until it all becomes "the conventional wisdom."

Beating Trump is now the be-all and end-all as news and political personalities and the "horse race" supersede deep discussions and reporting about the everyday problems of ordinary people.

 No wonder impeachment is "off the table." It would take attention away from the candidate whose main policy platform is "restoring America's soul." Whatever that even means.

 Who's up? Who's down? Who cares?

The Discreet Charm of the Never-Bernies

How can wealthy liberals, anxious to protect their fortunes and their heirs from the predations of the poor, destroy Bernie Sanders without being seen as destroying Bernie Sanders? That is the delicate question.

The current tactic is the playing of the hypocrisy card. With revelations (by Sanders himself) that he is now a millionaire, thanks to his book sales, his fellow millionaires and not a few actual billionaires point to this fact as being "problematic."

It is especially "thorny" because Sanders is acting so damned "prickly" about it whenever the topic of his new membership in the One Percent Club is brought up - say, about every 10 minutes in the video chat rooms known as cable news shows and in the pages of such elite gossip rags as the New York Times.

"Good-natured" ribbing from late night pseudo-comedians is an integral part of this new front in the  destruction crusade, with the New York Times breathlessly reporting on Wednesday that Jimmy Kimmel observed that Bernie appears to have spent none of his fortune on personal grooming or couture.

The same article quotes Stephen Colbert, fresh off his London junket fawning over Michelle Obama in the latest leg of her book tour, as drawling:

“Yesterday Bernie Sanders released 10 years of his tax returns. Finally, now we can get the answers to all of our Bernie-related financial controversies. Like whether he writes off mothballs as a business expense or a snack.”

The Times is once again doing what it arguably does better than any other corporate media outlet: it is engaging in a personal destruction crusade in such an arch, knowing, nuanced way that it does not seem to be engaging in any personal destruction crusade at all. 

The problem which the Gray Lady and her corporate media cohort now face is that Bernie has gone mainstream, and most important of all in their world, he has more cash on hand than any of his Democratic rivals. It's certainly a long way from the good old days of 2016, when all the Times had to do, personal destruction-wise, was to alternately ignore Bernie and deride him. It's even a long way from last year and early this year, when the propaganda tropes that he is not liked by women and black people went nowhere fast, given that public polls have shown the exact opposite to be true.

So now it's on to how Bernie Sanders is causing such great angst among the altruistic liberal rich that they might even be inconvenienced by a dreaded Brokered Convention next year.

Times reporter Jonathan Martin engaged in some good old fashioned shoe leather reporting as he pounded the pavement on both coasts to plumb the plutocratic depths of the "Stop Bernie" movement 

Parachuting down to Flyover Country for a day or an hour is, let's face it, nothing but lazy stenography. The rich love to read about themselves and not about some deplorable out of work factory laborer, even if the literature is not always as flattering to them as they might like. It was the rich, the class which could afford to buy books in the 19th century, who helped make Thackeray's satiric Vanity Fair, for example, the enduring bestseller that it came to be. And what 21st century PBS fan wouldn't kill to live in the snooty Downton Abbey?

Anyway, satiric critical portrayals of the venal rich sometimes have a way of turning such conniving grasping characters as Becky Sharp into admirable heroines whenever the corporate entertainment world gets hold of them. When Vanity Fair was made into a TV movie in 2004, for example, Reese Witherspoon magically transformed her into a plucky, adorable, rags-to-riches ingenue. Did I mention that Witherspoon had also recently played a celebrity softball-pitcher at one of those spunky, rags-to-riches Michelle Obama book tour appearances, where front row seats go for thousands of dollars a pop?

Anyway, I digress.

Martin's faux-satiric characterization of Bernie Sanders fans as "an unwavering base" of "fervent supporters" who endanger party unity had the desired effect of eliciting nearly 3,000 outraged responses from readers who are still smarting from the newspaper's cavalier treatment, three years ago, of both themselves and their candidate. These responses seem designed to be an "I told you so" cathartic moment for the nervous rich, proving once and for all to the sensitive elite class that Bernie Sanders supporters are, in fact, a fervent and unwavering mob... and so veddy, veddy unreasonable and dangerous.

Secondarily, Martin's surface-snide portrayal of the rich donor class as selfish pearl-clutchers and canape-gorgers who are  terrified of Bernie's "avowed socialism" seems designed to plant the very tiniest seed of doubt into the minds of progressive readers. Never mind that Bernie is no socialist, but rather a de facto FDR Democrat who sees nothing wrong with wars or the arrest of Julian Assange or with a better-regulated capitalistic system in general. If you can only plant that seed in these early days, it might even sprout and thrive by the time any actual voting takes place a little under a year from now.

Comparing Sanders with Trump is still tops on the "Stop Bernie From Eating the Oligarchy!" agenda. Martin posits that Bernie is just as paranoid as Trump, probably because Bernie (rightly) believes that the Democratic Party and its media sycophants are aiming for his personal destruction.

The main weapon, therefore, that centrist corporatists plan to wield against Sanders is Trump himself. Even the Sanders campaign acknowledges that beating Trump is their top priority, before passage of a single payer health care bill and other policies can even be seriously discussed. The wealthy backers of the party are taking solace in the fact that, just as he did in 2016, Sanders has vowed to support the eventual nominee. Which, if they have anything to say about it, will not be Bernie Sanders. It is only his promise to be an avowed player that permits him to stay in the game. Thus, his calculated silence on the Julian Assange arrest. He is silent even though it was WikiLeaks which revealed that the corporate Democrats were really out to get him in 2016.

So, there's this important nugget in the Times's cautionary tale:

“Bernie Sanders believes the most critical mission we have before us is to defeat Donald Trump,” said Faiz Shakir, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager. “Any and all decisions over the coming year will emanate from that key goal.”
Or, as former (my bold) Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri put it: “One thing we have now that we didn’t in ’16 is the uniting force of Trump. There will be tremendous pressure on Bernie and his followers to fall in line because of what Trump represents.”

If the anguished wealthy liberal donor class needs a slogan, here's a suggestion for them: 

Never Bernie! Never Trump! Always the Plutocracy - Always!

When you finally wake up the golden drops of their beneficence trickling down upon you after they nominate one of their own in a super-delegate-rigged second ballot, they tacitly confide to the Times, you'll realize just how abjectly grateful to them that you truly are, and should have been all along.

The Insider Threat of Media Stenography

Well, at least CNN president Jeff Zucker is being honest when he whines that "we are not investigators. We are journalists."

He was responding to criticism that his network and other corporate media outlets had gotten the #Russiagate coverage totally wrong.

Back in the olden days, there was such a thing as shoe leather reporting, when news professionals would literally pound the pavement in search of the truth. Today it's rare for a reporter to ever tear him or herself away from the computer screen long enough to venture out of doors to talk to actual people on the street and where they live, or to comb through boxes of forgotten dusty files in courthouse basements and to treat with healthy suspicion the pronouncements and press releases of the wealthy and powerful.

Zucker and other media moguls complain that their news personalities are unfairly expected to be prosecutors with subpoena power, that they are ridiculously supposed to actually come up with their own hard evidence, otherwise known as documents and history and personal interviews with myriad people. It is not the job of journalists, in other words, to do something so extreme as to independently verify what they are told by powerful people.

To be fair, though, such investigative journalism has become much harder in recent years, particularly when the Obama administration began cracking down on government whistleblowers with such executive orders as the Insider Threat directive, issued in 2011, requiring workers to spy on one another to ascertain whether their colleagues are talking to reporters. As McClatchey News reported in 2013:

The program could make it easier for the government to stifle the flow of unclassified and potentially vital information to the public, while creating toxic work environments poisoned by unfounded suspicions and spurious investigations of loyal Americans, according to these current and former officials and experts. Some non-intelligence agencies already are urging employees to watch their co-workers for “indicators” that include stress, divorce and financial problems.
“It was just a matter of time before the Department of Agriculture or the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) started implementing, ‘Hey, let’s get people to snitch on their friends.’ The only thing they haven’t done here is reward it,” said Kel McClanahan, a Washington lawyer who specializes in national security law. “I’m waiting for the time when you turn in a friend and you get a $50 reward.”

If it isn't digitalized or predigested, and if it doesn't come from a think tank or a political party or an approved government spokesperson, it simply doesn't exist to a whole generation of cowed stenographers toiling away in their increasingly repressive and consolidated corporate media hives. The exceptions are natural disasters like hurricanes, or unnatural disasters like the latest school shooting. Only then can they escape into the physical world to get some fresh air and maybe even gain some fresh insight from people who normally wouldn't be given a platform.

On the rare occasions that reporters do venture forth to take the pulse of the nation, they proudly pat themselves on the back for performing a bold feat of "parachute" journalism to prove that they care, they really care, what people in the Heartland are actually doing or thinking. They make sure everybody knows that they're not the elitists whom people, a/k/a the Deplorables, so often accuse them of being.

Zucker admits that his brand of journalism doesn't dig for the facts independently, but relies upon the "facts" that the media are given by their public relations and marketing colleagues in the government, electoral politics and private industry. His brand of journalism is often restricted to presenting  two differing - but not too differing - viewpoints on a given manufactured issue and then sitting passively back as the various factions duke it out on air.

Jeff Zucker is still completely in denial, proclaiming to the New York Times that he is "entirely comfortable" with having spread disinformation for the past two-plus years. It's not the media's fault that Mueller absolved Trump of "collusion", because it is not the media's job to debunk what the ruling class and their sponsors in the oil, weapons and pharmaceutical industries want them to sell to the public. 

And the most valuable product that they want to sell to the public is fear, to deflect attention from the "enemy within" to some amorphous "enemy without." One handy way that the media have accomplished this feat is to constantly lambaste Trump for his anti-Muslim, anti-Latino xenophobia and to replace it with their own anti-Russian xenophobia.

The various news organizations are still wallowing in the grief-stages of denial, depression, and bargaining, with just a hint of anger that they themselves have become the targets of criticism which does not come solely from Donald Trump. The president's own vengeful crowing is such overkill, in fact, that they shouldn't really worry about the continuing hatred from him and his base.

The only thing that they really have to fear is a sudden drop in their ratings and ad revenue now that #Russiagate is dead. Even MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, whose Russophobic fear-mongering over the last two years topped everybody else's, has seen her ratings plunge since the synopsis of the Mueller report was released. She has even been demoted in some media accounts from hard-hitting crusading reporter to "cable TV personality."

While they're rushing to conduct some fake soul-searching, the media-political complex is no doubt plotting the next meta-narrative. Trump, as ever, reliably contributes to the lucrative franchise by playing the Bad Cop, railing against the media as he obligingly performs his various Outrages Du Jour to suck up all the undivided passive attention. 

This week, it was killing Obamacare, yanking funding from the Special Olympics, and caging migrants underneath a Texas overpass. Trump acts, and the media reacts. The virtue-signaling soars to fever pitch. And the money flows in torrents of outrage into the usual select pockets.

The New York Times, for one, has reported record profits during the Russiagate panic, with executive editor Dean Baquet going full Edith Piaf: "We wrote a lot about Russia, and I have no regrets. It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality."

Sing it, Dean!

Meanwhile, Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange, under secret US indictment for his investigative journalism, is still a virtual prisoner in the Equador embassy. And whistleblower Chelsea Manning is still locked up in solitary confinement.

And despite his avowed disdain for Barack Obama and rhetoric about invaders from the Global South, Donald Trump has not only retained Obama's Insider Threat division for the suppression of truth, he has expanded it.

Last November, the Trump administration released a 19-step "maturity framework" directive for the detection of insider threats. The press release strives to mitigate the fascistically authoritarian nature of the  program by repurposing the entire federal work force as the "Insider Threat Community."

Details and required course material for government employees, devised by federal law enforcement and intelligence officials, are readily available online. For example, one section advises employees how to detect mental illness in their co-workers and how to report suspected sufferers to supervisors. Workers must simultaneously be "sensitive" to the stigma associated with mental disorders and still be cognizant that mentally ill people might pose a grave internal national security threat. 

Since Donald Trump does not have a supervisor other than a complicit Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, guidelines regarding his alleged psychological issues do not apply and do not exist.

Still, somebody over at the Insider Threat School does seem to be trying to send a message. This chart, posted on the online course on mental illness, illustrates warning signs that government workers should be on the alert for and report to supervisors (click to enlarge):

Who, if anybody, is going to report this brilliantly subversive artist?

The Stages of #Russiagate Grief

I wish I could say that the long-awaited Meh Report, in which Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no conspiracy and no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, spells the beginning of the end of the corporate Neocon wing of the Democratic Party and all its associates in the zombie establishment media.

 But I'd be fooling myself. Elite failures rarely go away. They simply fail upward. At the very worst, they temporarily disappear or go into propaganda rehab until such time that the public has moved on to the next new narrative or scandal. The more blatant cases will simply double down on their delusions for the foreseeable future.

Since Donald Trump is nothing if not a gleeful scandal of his own making, he will very likely make it ridiculously easy for the liberal failure class not only to survive, but thrive. He will scream "total exoneration!" and "witch hunt!" so many times that his words will lose their impact.

 Meanwhile, the primary media stakeholders of the #Russiagate franchise - MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post - are all churning violently in their various Five Stages of Grief whirlpools. As students of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross should know, the duration and the order of these stages are not set in psychological stone. They vary from person to person. They often overlap each other. And oftentimes, just when sufferers think they're finally cured, they revert back to the earlier stages.

This whole "closure" thing is a lot of malarkey.  

Therefore, just because Robert Mueller has gone from revered Father of Our Country to Deadbeat Dad who couldn't or wouldn't bring home the Siberian bacon doesn't mean that "the Russians" aren't still out to get us. After all, we have thus far only seen a synopsis of the report written by Trump-friendly Attorney General William Barr. There could be enough hidden nuanced nuggets lurking in the actual report to at least partially satisfy hungry true believers.

As the editorial board of the Times, wallowing in its own initial denial phase of #Russiagate grief, plaintively insisted:

We know that the Russian government interfered repeatedly in the 2016 presidential election, by hacking into computer servers of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. We know that it did this with the goals of dividing Americans and helping Donald Trump win the presidency. We know that when top members of the Trump campaign learned about this interference, they didn’t just fail to report it to the F.B.I. They welcomed it. They encouraged it. They made jokes about it. On the same day that Mr. Trump publicly urged the Russians to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails, they began to do just that. And we know that when questioned by federal authorities, many of Mr. Trump’s top associates lied, sometimes repeatedly, about their communications with Russians. None of this is in dispute.

The Times continues to parrot the conventional wisdom that it was "the Russians" who hacked the Clinton emails, even though the Democratic Party relied on its own investigators to reach this conclusion and refused FBI access to its computer servers to prove the Russian connection one way or another. The newspaper still refuses to believe that there was no collusion, even though Trump was more of a passive partner than they originally claimed. He may have been the bottom half of the missionary position, but he still had relations with those Russians. At the very least, he lusts after Putin in his heart, and therefore he is still guilty as sin.

The second traditional stage of grief - Anger - is not yet the overwhelming symptom evident in the Media-Political Complex. #Russiagate grievers were still too shell-shocked on the morning after Mueller's death-knell to get overtly mad at him personally. Mueller has been too elevated to mythological, godlike status for too long for people to immediately turn against him. On the contrary, many are making excuses for him. As valiantly as he strove to cure the Trump cancer, the disease was too far advanced for even a prosecutorial Marcus Welby to tackle. This is especially true given that the body politic under attack by the Trump malignancy was in such horrible shape to begin with.

Former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer pleads that Mueller couldn't indict Trump on obstruction of justice for the simple fact that the president has been acting out in full public view. The tumor was just too large and too slippery to excise:

This was apparently a significant consideration in the decision by Mr. Barr and Mr. Rosenstein not to prosecute (along with the determination that there was no underlying “collusion” legal offense). Here, once again, the president who is a demagogue — who is fully prepared to flout well-established, vitally important expectations about how American presidents faithfully execute the laws — can safely bring self-interested, self-protective pressure on the Department of Justice and undermine its public standing and authority.

In other words, Trump wasn't sneaky and occult enough. This is like claiming that it's easier to catch an embezzler than it is to nab an armed robber bumbling with guns a-blazing in broad daylight. Bauer's op-ed represents the overlapping stages of denial and bargaining, as he suggests that if only we had a stronger penal code, Trump might yet go to jail. All we need is the right legal miracle drug to catch this guy, juxtaposed with major changes in our legalized lifestyle regimens. It's the normalized shameless corruption, stupid!

Democratic politicians are similarly in bargaining mode. If only they can subpoena more miracle documents, then maybe, just maybe, the lucrative #Russiagate enterprise can remain on life support. If only they can raise enough money through a barrage of email appeals demanding that Barr "release the report now!," maybe the outcome will be different.

There's also a fair bit of pragmatic acceptance going on along with the understandable depression. Some pundits know when they're beat and already are urging the country to get over itself and move on.

And some Democratic leaders, like New York's Hakeem Jeffries, seem downright relieved that they finally have permission to collude with Trump, while they simultaneously investigate him, now that their manufactured Russia scare has largely outlived its political and monetary usefulness to them. The Mueller report has served the desired purpose of tamping down all that pesky impeachment talk and vindicating Speaker Nancy Pelosi's reluctance to go that route.

I hate to sound heartless here, but it's not as though the Russophobes weren't warned that their disease was terminal. As long ago as last October, legal experts were trying to impart the bad news in the gentlest possible terms. As Politico reported, 

The public, they say, shouldn't expect a comprehensive and presidency-wrecking account of Kremlin meddling and alleged obstruction of justice by Trump -- not to mention an explanation of the myriad subplots that have bedeviled lawmakers, journalists and amateur Mueller sleuths. Perhaps most unsatisfying: Mueller's findings may never even see the light of day.

And as recently as a month ago, Senate investigators themselves were trying to hammer home the sad fact that as hard as they'd tried, they too had found no evidence of a Trump-Putin conspiracy. All eyes then turned to Doc Mueller as the last best hope to come up with some factual crimes to fit their beloved conspiracy theories.

It must indeed be a buzzkill, after having spent more than two years of your life steadfastly performing conspiracy nursing duty, to suddenly discover that your seemingly viable patient has suddenly upped and died on you.  The demise of #Russiagate, to its devotees, must feel like losing a beloved family pet. To the most extreme among them, it might even feel like losing a child. 

So while I am not going to gleefully stomp all over irresponsible propagandists and #Russiagate birthers like Paul "beware the Siberian Candidate!" Krugman and Rachel "the Russians will freeze us to death!" Maddow, I do sincerely hope that they and their ilk will at least just quietly fade away for a week or a month and do their grieving and their bargaining and their teeth-gnashing in a dark closed room somewhere. Because thanks to them and hundreds of other handsomely paid corporate group-thinkers like them, this country has entered into another Cold War, complete with a renewed nuclear arms race.

Trump may have dodged an existential bullet. But the country and the world have not.