The Political Play Is Literally The Thing

Poster From John Carpenter's The Thing

Because despite all the suspense and the horror and the shape-shifting and the gaslighting, our current crew of political actors are discovering to their great chagrin that there is a limit to the times that you can remake a smash hit and create a franchise, and still expect people to show up at the box office to gawk and tremble and purchase the merch.

Even Dick Cheney playing a rehabbed Darth Vader at the January Sixth Capitol extravaganza, and even Nancy Pelosi piping in ditties from the cast of the neoliberal Broadway hit Hamilton to paper over her crass championship of congressional insider trading, did not garner the ratings and the rave reviews the producers obviously intended and fully expected. 

Joe Biden, plain-speaking actor that he fancies himself to be, had already addressed the reality of the elites' declining ratings a few years ago during his campaign for the White House. He acknowledged the truth of The Thing to be self-evidently apparent. 

 But despite that brief moment of candor, he still made a great big show this week of marching to the Capitol to pretend to be "fighting for" the right of every American to score food and water from their fellow citizens while standing in long lines to vote. Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema managed to steal top cinematic billing from his latest role, as she histrionically pretended to hate the same filibuster reform that Biden now pretends to love Not even his shout-out to dead racist Senator Strom Thurmond at his Georgia performance earlier in the week swayed Sinema to change her mind or her script. And why would it, when even the supporting cast and crew of what the late Glen Ford dubbed the Black Misleadership Class boycotted Biden's performance? 

Striving mightily nonetheless to perform his trademark down-home candor while admitting that mail-in ballots and food and water for waiting voters are GOP mountains far too high for him and the Democrats to climb, Biden plaintively remarked at the end of his truncated Capitol cameo part that "the honest to God answer is I don’t know whether we can get this done."

But actors must do what actors must do, and summoning up his very best Jimmy Stewart Mr. Smith Goes to Washington impression, Biden raised it to the next decibel and growled “As long as I’m in the White House, as long as I’m engaged at all, I’m going to be fighting.”

Are the Oscar nominations already a done deal, and I'm too late to register to vote? Oh, wait... mere audience members are not allowed to vote in the Oscar elections. Elites not only have weighted votes in "democratic" elections, they also have exclusive votes when it comes to nominating one another's theatrical performances. That goes not only for people employed in the movie business, but for the financiers of the movie business. Here's looking at you, Jeff Bezos, who pays no personal income tax but just donated a hefty sum to help construct the Chicago shrine of that consummate political actor, Barack Obama.

But all hope should not be abandoned. Because it is the Republicans, of all the villains in the annals of performative villainy, that just announced that they will no longer participate in the quadrennial spectacular known as the Presidential Debates. Of course, they are probably planning a whole series of alternate entertainments in the slasher genre that promise to be a lot more horrific and profitable than those boring affairs we're so tired of sitting through. Whatever the form of Campaign 2024, it will be a real Thing, what late critic Roger Ebert called "a great barf bag of a movie."

Speaking of ennui and nausea, Bill and Hillary Clinton reportedly are not only bored with being pariahs, but they smell the anemic Biden blood in the water and are planning a comeback. According to Politico, they are especially heartened that the latest "American Crime Story" season, depicting the Lewinsky scandal, did not get big ratings. Perhaps it was because the series was aired on a subscription channel, and the proles are already maxed out on inflated rent and food bills?

But here's The Thing, or as Joe Biden riffs on and on about it ad infinitum, Here's The Deal, Folks.  The horror show will end only when we stop buying tickets for the privilege of helplessly gawking at whatever capitalistic life-forms that The Thing is currently mutating into and at the same time to resist being assimilated into its maw. The Thing that the political-media-military-carceral-surveillance complex is selling is nothing more and nothing less than fear itself.

We just have to stop being awed by political performers and their stale narratives. Instead, we might take a tip from the simultaneously cruel and egalitarian Aztec civilization and, as recounted by the late David Graeber and David Wengrow in their riveting new book "The Dawn of Everything," we should subject all aspiring and de facto elected officials to an acid test involving "fasting, sleep deprivation, blood-letting and a strict regime of moral instruction."

We should implement a Dick Cheney reverse torture regimen on their sorry selves. Psychological, of course. Maybe do a little enhanced interrogation at least.

"Clearly, taking up office in this indigenous democracy required personality traits very different to those we take for granted in modern electoral politics," the "Dawn" authors observe in dry understatement about the Aztec proles.

Just imagine Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi being forced to relinquish their faltering theatrical careers for a long stint in political rehab and public self-abnegation as the only way to prove to the audience just how sincere they really are, and how much they truly feel our pain. Actually doing the right thing as opposed to being seen as doing the right thing should be a requirement for everyone entering public service, and a litmus test for staying in their positions once chosen. The goal should not be the acquisition of power, but rather the privilege of representation. No wonder the corporate press hates this book.

The mere thought of these miscreants having to publicly flagellate themselves in front of the cameras in order to prove their bona fides makes me feel better already. It makes me feel like torturing them, if only rhetorically, for yet another day.

Trump Sees Dead People, Elite Hysteria Ensues

There's something kind of forlorn about Democrats threatening to launch Impeachment 2.0 when the Scoundrel-in-Chief has only a couple of weeks to go before he is: 

A) Dragged kicking and screaming from the White House on Inauguration Day after trashing the Lincoln Bedroom in a fit of evicted pique.

B) Spoiling Joe Biden's Big Day by shockingly adhering to Norms and actually showing up for the inaugural address, and proceeding to shock all that is decent by making his silly scowling eye-rolling faces and performing various hand gestures from his prominent front row seat, in a very successful attempt to steal all the televised media attention for himself.

C) Invisibly skulking off to Mar-a-Lago to no fanfare whatsoever, a scenario that will leave the establishment media howling about the restriction to their access of the usual staged poignant presidential departure photo-op of Marine One circling nostalgically over Washington.

With the terrifying void of having no Donald Trump to kick around, will the feckless Dems nonetheless bring new Articles of Impeachment against him?  Lacking any actual agenda to make people's lives better during the worst public health and economic catastrophe in modern times, they do have to justify their existence somehow. As far as the feckless Republicans are concerned, one subset of them are nihilistically posturing to deny the presidency to Joe Biden. The other subset, who are proclaiming themselves aghast at the "coup" attempt, are the same ones who hope to run for president themselves a few short years from now to bring the real corporate coup against democracy to a swift and total completion.

So with only a few weeks to go before Joe Biden finally dodders into the White House to go about his soul-restoring business, all the media attention remains riveted on Trump's latest attempt to overturn the election via strong-arming Georgia officials into "finding" him the necessary votes to achieve his desired outcome. These mobster antics are causing massive conniption fits among the more civilized and discreet members of the criminal ruling class, including virtually all the surviving US "defense" secretaries of War, Inc. and most of the predatory reigning moguls of Wall Street and corporate America. It seems that Donald Trump is once again single-handedly destroying the sublime stature of America as the world's bastion of superpower democracy, even as America can't even get its act together to protect its own citizens by giving them health care and a modicum of financial relief.

The narrative therefore has conveniently morphed from thousands of needless deaths from Covid-19 into Donald Trump starring as Haley Joel Osment in a remake of The Sixth Sense. 

Here's Trump talking to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger playing Bruce Willis this past Sunday on that blockbuster hit of a taped phone call:

The other thing, dead people, so dead people voted. And I think the, the number is in the close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number. And a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters. The bottom line is when you add it all up, and then you start adding, you know, 300,000 fake ballots. Then the other thing they said is in Fulton County and other areas, and this may or may not be true. This just came up this morning that they are burning their ballots, that they are shredding, shredding ballots and removing equipment. They’re changing the equipment on the, on the Dominion machines. And, you know, that’s not legal. And they supposedly shred. And I think they said 300 pounds of, 3,000 pounds of ballots. And that just came to us as a report today. And you know, it’s a, it’s a very sad situation.

On second thought,  Donald Trump is actually lost in a remake of the far grislier and darkly funnier Night of the Living Dead. Not only are thousands of corpses rising from the grave to vote, Trump makes it sound like they are reading their own obituaries and shredding documents the same way that George A. Romero's zombies shredded and devoured human flesh. They are also moving out of state, only to shamble back over the Georgia border to shred his chances of staying in the White House.

But here's where Trump is definitely mistaken: they couldn't possibly have burned any ballots, legally or otherwise. If he was paying attention, he'd know that the only thing that terrifies hordes of roaming homeless out-of-state zombie voters and stops them right in their tracks is fire. He is probably too shocked that he's actually been fired from anything for the first time in his long misbegotten life to pay much attention to the finer details.

The only "sad situation" is Trump's real or feigned dementia. Equally sad, as Trump fade-rages into the sunset, is that the media is still treating him as though he were a dire existential threat to American supremacy and imperialistic democracy, a/k/a global "standing." Sure, he has two more weeks in which to wreak havoc, maybe start a war after four years of not starting a new war, roll back a few more environmental rules that Biden can reverse on Day One, pardon a few more of his fellow hoodlums. But the over-the-top reactions to Trump's last gasp of run-of-the-mill buffoonery are simply the attempts of the war-mongering elites to foist their own toxic version of reality upon us.

They'll be scapegoating Trump, the undead monster that they themselves created, long after his funeral.

When Journalism Becomes Corrupt Boosterism

Forget about Joe Biden's promise to restore The Soul of America - whatever the heck that even is. How about restoring the heart, soul and purpose of journalism, a/k/a The Fourth Estate?

Granted, "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted" was always more or less the aspirational motto of American journalism.  As Edward Bernays noted nearly a century ago in his seminal Propaganda, at least one quarter of all the front page articles in the New York Times were unabashed corporate or government propaganda. Still, the line between the news pages and opinion pages was almost always taken seriously, If you wanted to sneak a point of view into a straight news story, then you had to go about it stealthily, through the discreet use of innuendo, or the occasional omission of a salient fact.

Not so in the Age of Trump, when reporters double as #Resistance Fighters in the interests of careerist justice. And with only eight weeks to go in this sad, scary and ridiculously close presidential contest between a carnival barker of a mob boss and a mediocre career politician teetering on the edge of dementia, the line between reporting and punditry has been erased right off the journalistic ethics map.

It is no longer enough to dispassionately expose Trump's serial crime spree. It is incumbent upon the increasingly consolidated corporate media to also become the unabashed boosters of the #resistant Democratic Party, which itself might be better described as a coalition of corporate and military/security state interests whose sole agenda is the return to the same neoliberal status quo which produced Trump in the first place.

Fox News, which for decades had been the de facto propaganda arm of the Republican Party, now finds itself in the uncomfortable position of criticizing its erstwhile biggest fan, Donald Trump, himself now reduced to manically re-tweeting various right-wing websites and dark web conspiracy groups.

The turn of the "liberal" media to outright party boosterism took off like a shot last week with the obviously orchestrated Atlantic scoop that Trump had been overheard, a couple of years ago, disrespecting the military by calling dead soldiers "losers" and "suckers". The only shocking thing about this belated reportage is the amount of time it took for four anonymous sources to become shocked and appalled enough to spill the beans to The Atlantic, or alternatively, for the magazine itself to become shocked and appalled enough to finally publish them. It's as though they were hoarding the Big Reveal, that Trump is a clear and present danger to national security, for the sole purpose of winning an election. 

The owner of The Atlantic just happens to be billionaire Democratic mega-donor Laurene Powell Jobs, whose Emerson Collective think tank is headed by former Obama Education Secretary and school privateer Arne Duncan. Her editor and the author of the Trump story is neoconservative pundit Jeffrey Goldberg, who proved his own boosterism bona fides years ago by cheerleading George W.Bush's invasion of Iraq. If you point out these facts, or if you notice that within hours of the article's publication, the Democratic Party was already running slick TV ads expressing shock and outrage about Trump's remarks, or that Joe Biden already had a major speech written on the subject, complete with the inevitable comparison between Trump's spurious bone spurs and the noble military service of the late Beau Biden, then you are in danger of being exposed either as a Russian operative or loony conspiracy theorist.

 You are not, however, in any danger of being exposed as a closet Republican. That is because the Democratic Party has embraced with open arms such "moderate" Republicans as unindicted former Michigan governor and Flint water-poisoner Rick Snyder while relegating Bernie Sanders supporters ("purists") to the dust with a whole chorus line of high-kicking designer jackboots.

You are hereby on strict notice. With only eight weeks to go in The Race, ask not what Joe Biden can do for you. Ask instead what you can do for the Biden-Soul of Your Country.

That's a tall order for sure, especially if you've lost your job and your health insurance and you might be kicked out of your rented digs once all those eviction moratoriums conveniently expire right after the election.

So why not forget about your own fear and trepidation as you are being pressured to declare publicly that yes, you will hold your nose and vote for Joe Biden. Wallow instead in the high-minded fear and trepidation that your financial and intellectual superiors are also wallowing in. They are, deep within their credentialed souls of America, veddy veddy afraid. They're just like you!

"Our Democracy Is Deeply Imperiled," is the top news story in Wednesday's Guardian, and it is tailor-made to get you gripping your nose in a frenzy of highly motivated fear, relying as it does on the "ominous forebodings" of five "leading figures in the non-partisan (my bold) world of democracy reform and civil rights."

Notwithstanding that with the exception of the head of the NAACP, which does not endorse candidates, The Guardian's "non-partisan" sources all have close or even direct  ties to the Democratic Party. Vanita Gupta, CEO of the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, is a former Obama administration official. Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice is a former Bill Clinton speechwriter. K. Sabeel Rahman, currently CEO of the Demos think tank, hails from the oligarch-funded New America Foundation, which is led by former Clinton State Department official Anne- Marie Slaughter.

And then there's Deirdre Schifeling, the founder and director of "Democracy For All 2021."

"A few years ago," credulously writes Guardian chief US correspondent Ed Pilkington, "she came to the realization that there was a growing disconnect between the will of the American people and their political representation in federal and state governments."

Would it be indelicate or even treasonous of me to surmise that Schifeling arrived at her Eureka moment as miraculously late as The Atlantic came to its own shocked realization that Trump doesn't care about dead soldiers - because her paycheck depends upon her not realizing that this reality existed even when Joe Biden was vice president?

Democracy For All is a project of the dark money SuperPAC called the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which also paid the PR firm of Anita Dunn, Biden's deputy campaign director, the whopping sum of $3,2 million for its own "consulting work" in 2018.

This is chump change next to the $140 million furnished by Sixteen Thirty's anonymous donors to other "left-leaning" organizations and political campaigns in that mid-term election year, which ushered in a hyped-up "Blue Wave" of centrist Dems, many of whom hail from the military and the CIA.

As Politico reported about Sixteen Thirty last November:

The spending was fueled by massive anonymous donations, including one gift totaling $51.7 million. That single donation was more than the group had ever raised before in an entire year before President Donald Trump was elected. Most of the group's funders are likely to remain a mystery because federal law does not require "social welfare"-focused nonprofits to reveal their donors.
The group's 2018 fundraising surpassed any amount ever raised by a left-leaning political nonprofit, according to experts, who pointed to the Koch network and the Crossroads network as rare right-leaning groups that posted bigger yearly fundraising totals at the height of their powers.

This is the kind of operation that The Guardian's Ed Pilkington actually casts as being in "the world of democracy reform and civil rights." It kind of makes you think that their definition of democracy reform is simply getting rid of it, and that civil rights are plutocratic rights, and plutocratic rights are civil rights.

Not for nothing, moreover, are the Democrats moaning about "fake news" and Russian interference in said democracy. As the Center for Responsive Politics reported recently, Sixteen Thirty also funds numerous party-aligned news sites which dishonestly pose as local independent journalism outlets.

Democracy For All 2021, which depends entirely upon dark oligarchic money for its very existence, nonetheless brags on its website, without a hint of irony, that it wants to "ensure transparency for all political spending."

It's no surprise that Democracy For All's idea of an anti-Trump health care platform is restricted to reproductive rights. Forget about polls showing that the majority of Americans support Medicare For All. Because 70 percent of Americans also support the be-all and end-all of Roe v Wade! 

If you demand both, then you're apparently asking for way too much. You have to pragmatically pick the battles that are so carefully selected for you by the credentialed Knowledge Class.

Pilkington explains:

Yet Schifeling found herself spending more and more of her time defending Planned Parenthood against the aggressive attacks of a small minority of extremist anti-abortion politicians. Despite the settled nature of the law, and the clear progressive bent of public opinion, women were finding it increasingly difficult in practice to secure their reproductive rights.

 She reached a reluctant and unhappy conclusion: “Our government is not able to represent the will of the people.”

Since then, Schifeling and her peers have been looking at the causes of this dysfunction and searching for solutions.

Schifeling has not yet come to the reluctant realization that affording guaranteed single payer health care to all citizens in the middle of a pandemic is among the obvious solutions for this dysfunction. We wouldn't want Democracy For All (Wealthy Socially Liberal People) to explode, or for their lifestyles to fundamentally change, would we?

It's their constant searching that really counts, right along the complicity of the churnalists operating right out there in the open as oligarchy-boosters. 

They don't call it the Media-Political Complex for nothing.

Season Three, Episode 97: "Bill the Barr-barian"

Attorney General Bill Barr appeared before Congress, got lashed with a wet noodle by Democrats, and then shockingly refused to return for another lashing. It is so utterly contemptible, they're taking firm action by calling him a criminal liar and threatening to hold him in contempt of Congress, for which there is no penalty whatsoever.

Stop the presses - and turn up the volume to high in the media echo chamber, because Barr called Bob Mueller "snippy" for criticizing Barr's misleading spin of the Mueller report. Barr must resign, immediately! And that is so crazy, because Billybob used to be Besties and Trump has totally come between them and maybe even broken them up forever.

How are Democratic leaders cynical? Count the ways, if you have the patience and the disposable time.
Me? I take the Clintonoid wing of the party's sage advice and do my own counting in very tiny, pragmatic, progressive, incremental baby steps.
One week it's blasting Nancy Pelosi's stupid "Pay-Go" rule as a device to punish people and make them feel grateful about going poor and dying prematurely as long as they can believe they'll be able live longer once they're reincarnated and the nasty old Republicans have been tamed.
Another week, it's reminiscing about Barack Obama's serial scolding of these same sick and indebted people during his eight-year term, a function which he continues to perform today from any number of safe, neutral international locations when he's not raking in $400,000 speaking fees and inking $50 million Netflix deals to produce content so inspiring that it tames 140 million paying subscribers into believing in a better life tomorrow.
And then it's on to Joe Biden, whose son Hunter recently quit his gig on the board of a corrupt Ukraine gas company for appearance's sake. And ad infinitum. The work is never done, because these horrible people are always doing something horrible and giving us something to kvetch about.

Today, for a huge change, let's talk about the latest Trump drama. Because keeping our minds off the fact that the Democrats are wholly complicit in the attempted coup in Venezuela even as they hypocritically wail that "Russia is invading us" is of the utmost pragmatic importance to them and to their electoral prospects.

The essential truth of the matter is that the corporate Dems love the Trump drama. Hating Trump certainly trumps loving the people who voted for them, and it helps them pretend that their "Love. Not Hate!" campaign theme actually means something They pragmatically pretend to be plodding through the bestselling Mueller report to figure out how best to investigate the conclusions of a two-year investigation conducted by some of the allegedly finest prosecutorial minds in the country. You can never investigate investigations enough. It's the best stalling method ever devised by the ruling class in order to maintain the Status Quo.
Nancy Pelosi says impeachment is off the table because "Trump is not worth it." It almost makes you think that impeachment is an awards show and Trump already has enough TV time. He's already the center of attention. Why spoil him even more by making him the center of the center of the attention? Nobody manipulates Madam Speaker, not even Donald Trump!

To be fair to Pelosi, at long last she is serendipitously honoring the wishes of the electorate, for whom punishing Trump's high crimes and misdemeanors is the least of their quotidian worries. Polls show that two-thirds of voters are not in favor of impeachment - about the same percentage as those who are in favor of Medicare For All.

Meanwhile, stenographers in the corporate media cover for Democrats by keeping the liberal consumer hatred churning at a constant furious boil during Perpetual Presidential Campaign season and spinning Hunter Biden's corruption as a product of the nasty Republican opposition. Their most commonly used technique is to pretend that everything was, if not as perfect as we might like, at least more tasteful and palatable before Trump and his minions appeared out of nowhere to spoil everything and overturn every beloved norm in the book.
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie even preposterously claims in the sub-head of his latest column that "In America, no one is above the law - except the president and everyone who does wrong in his name."

Say what? Just making a quick mental list in the recommended pragmatic, incremental baby steps, I don't seem to remember any BP executive going to jail over the criminal negligence and cover-up of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Maybe I forgot that Wall Street bankers lost their jobs and pensions and bonuses, if not their physical freedom, for bilking their customers and fraudulently foreclosing on millions of mortgagors. Did George W. Bush and Dick Cheney answer for their war crimes and torture at The Hague, and I was napping the whole time?

Bouie writes:

On Wednesday, when Attorney General William Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Mueller report, he addressed lawmakers more as if he were a member of President Trump’s legal team than as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Barr framed Trump’s actions as fully justifiable, even arguing that if the president feels an investigation is unfounded, he “does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course.”
Whether out of sycophantic loyalty or a deep-seated belief in executive impunity, Barr has used his position to insulate the president from legal scrutiny. He has done everything in his power to downplay the impact of the special counsel’s investigation.
He did not hesitate, for example, to frame Robert Mueller’s findings as an exoneration of the president, despite a report that said otherwise. By itself, this gave Trump the appearance of vindication, as major media outlets declared him innocent of “collusion.”

My published response:

When Trump bragged that he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and get away with it, he wasn't kidding. Barr is only paying it forward. He's protecting not only Trump, but the entire teflon-coated ruling class racket.

Toadying to power is the norm. The standard slime that we've come to expect gets new coatings of toxic sludge practically every single day. Those with the power to clean it all up don't have the will. They seem to have left their soap and scrub-brushes at home.

Republicans are in full aggrieved paranoid mode, with Trump sending email blasts to his fans, urging them to show their $olidarity against those "radical socialist witch-hunting Democrats."

Democratic leaders, for their part, continue to rail against his regime's crimes while waffling on impeachment, preferring to limit their agenda to "We're Not Trump" and thereby downplaying policies that would actually make regular people's lives better. They seem to fear that the "socialist" label will scare their donors away.

  Plus, if they did their Constitutional duty and impeached Trump in campaign season, all the fun and profit of the #Resistance would disappear in the wink of an eye. It's better for ratings to keep Trump around for awhile. Think of the billions of dollars in revenue for the media and the corporations, which are truly running this spectacular show.

Meanwhile it's the poor who get fined or thrown in jail, just for existing ("loitering" or "vagrancy").

And let's not forget the draconian imprisonments of the two brave whistle-blowers and muckrakers, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who are locked up for exposing the high crimes of the Bushies and other teflon-coated minions of the exceptional United States Imperium. 

Pelosi: Leggo My PayGo!

As expected, Nancy Pelosi won the House Speakership this week and has thereby solidified her position as chief Democratic Party austerian in service to the rich.

Widely praised as a genius at extracting campaign cash from wealthy oligarchs for her members and for deftly co-opting their loyalty in the process, one of her first orders of business was reinstating the so-called PAYGO rule, which requires that all new spending be offset either by new taxes or by cutting funds from other programs. Critics say the move - which passed on Thursday with only three Democrats dissenting - is a deliberate attempt to prevent such progressive policies as Medicare For All from ever reaching the floor for debate, let alone a vote for actual implementation.

It's also an ideological return to the Obama era austerity politics that immiserated millions of people and paved the way for the Donald Trump victory.

Defenders of the rule point out that it is actually only a toothless little offshoot of the real PayGo law, and that this law, enacted in 2010, can be waived at any time and indeed, has been waived in the past. Of course, the most recent waiver benefited only the richest of the rich, via Trump's deficit-ballooning tax package.

And that leads skeptics to ask why Pelosi would insist on such a redundant rule in the first place. 

Even Paul Krugman of the New York Times, while gushing that Pelosi is "the best House speaker of modern times," observes:

In fact, even the deficit scolds who played such a big role in Beltway discourse during the Obama years seem oddly selective in their concerns about red ink. After all those proclamations that fiscal doom was coming any day now unless we cut spending on Social Security and Medicare, it’s remarkable how muted their response has been to a huge, budget-busting tax cut. It’s almost as if their real goal was shrinking social programs, not limiting national debt.

'Tis a puzzlement. But Krugman just can't bring himself to accuse the neoliberal governing cabal, of which the Democrats are in integral moving part, of subterfuge and actual corruption.

So I did, in my published comment:

As Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page established in their studies of affluence and influence, wealthy donors get what they want from their politicians: a big return on their investment.

And what they don't want is Medicare For All, free public college, expanded Social Security, living wage legislation, a Green New Deal, or just about anything that improves the lives of ordinary people.

The Democratic leadership can't come right out and admit this, so they set up their convoluted PayGo gimmick while glibly assuring their members and constituents that they can waive their silly old rule any time they feel like it.

 Maybe they'll feel like it in another several decades, by which time tens of thousands of the uninsured and underinsured will be conveniently dead, or the ignored climate catastrophe does us in whether we have platinum plans or not.

Right now, they just don't have time to feel like it. If returning and new members accepted money from the DCCC, they'll be forced to spend half of each working day raising more money for the party coffers. (Since the DCCC never funded Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's run for office, she has the rare luxury of serving her constituents rather than the party.)

When the Democrats took back the House in November, most people assumed Nancy Pelosi misspoke when she crowed "Let's hear it more for pre-existing conditions!"

 Not likely. She will indeed go down in history as one of the most effective Speakers our Banana Republic has ever had.

Of course, it's way too early to predict whether "AOC" and her progressive cohort of newbies will develop any real clout within the hallowed halls of Congress. As Bill Scher writes in Politico, she is so far zero for two in her nascent battle against Pelosi, losing in her demand for a climate committee with real teeth and subpoena power, and only enlisting two other Democratic members in the "just say no to PayGo" rebellion.

Pelosi has not exactly hidden her disdain for those on the activist left who push proposals she considers foolish. In a New York Times interview conducted before the midterm elections but published shortly afterward, she sarcastically said, "I have those who want to be for impeachment and for abolishing ICE... two really winning issues for us, right? In the districts we have to win? I don't even think they're the right thing to do."

That's what distinguishes Pelosi from Republican speakers. She does not hesitate to keep her party's idealogues in check.

So the Times, whose hagiographic treatment of Pelosi rivals that of their fawning coverage of the Michelle Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsberg personality cults, voluntarily refrained from publishing Pelosi's disdain for ordinary people until her party and herself were safely back in semi-power. Since her Speakership victory, she has had nothing to say about American border patrols firing tear gas across the border at Central American refugees. But she has been inordinately hasty to say that impeaching Trump is as much as off the table, as is the Democratic House's issuance of a subpoena for his tax returns.

To be fair to Pelosi and as evidence of her true devotion to even-handed bipartisanship, she similarly had nothing to say when Obama's border patrol agents also regularly deployed tear gas against immigrants and refugees. Nor, when the Democrats took back the House in 2006, did she move to bring articles of impeachment against George W. Bush for his illegal invasion of Iraq and for his illegal torture program. In fact, she has joined the rest of the Democratic Party in rehabilitating Bush's bumbling war criminal image by proclaiming a wistful nostalgia for him.

The Nancy and Donald Show is being hyped by the media as a Dancing With the Stars battle of the sexes tango between two aging factions of the Ruling Class Racket. It promises to get huge ratings and lots of clicks as it engenders globs and globs of manufactured outrage and cheers from the populace, who have been carefully taught to define themselves mainly by their party allegiances.

Don't forget to root for your favorite, and be sure to call in or text your uncounted votes before the end of the latest episode.

About Those "Grassroots" Pro-Mueller Rallies

To read and listen to all the media reports, Thursday night's nationwide protests against Trump's firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and in support of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's Russiagate probe arose almost spontaneously.

From CBS News:

Protests have sprung up across the country Thursday night calling for the protection of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into possible collusion between President Trump's campaign and Russia. Several hundred had gathered in New York's Times Square and other places like Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, North Carolina, Tennessee and Philadelphia.
In New York, demonstrators could be heard chanting "Hands off Mueller" and "Nobody is above the law" as they marched downtown. The Associated Press reported some held signs like "Truth Must Triumph" and "Repeal, Replace Trump."
Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois joined several protesters in Chicago's Federal Plaza, AP reported.
Organizers of the protest said the naming of acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was a "deliberate attempt to obstruct the special counsel's investigation," according to AP.
Thursday's show of disapproval came a day after President Trump asked Jeff Sessions to resign as the nation's top law enforcement official. He was then replaced by Whitaker, Sessions' chief of staff, who has been critical of Mueller's investigation.

Whenever an elected politician joins a "spontaneous" grassroots uprising, your bullshit detector should immediately escalate into the red zone.

What the corporate media carefully doesn't tell you about the protests' organizers should disabuse you of any notion that these protests simply "sprang up" out of any mass outrage over the discredited Russiagate probe, which has been going on for almost two years and has resulted in just a handful of indictments against Russian troll farm workers and the usual sleazy mix of money launderers and low-level political operatives.

Polls show that most people don't put the alleged Trump-Putin "collusion" to swing the 2016 election away from Hillary Clinton even close to top of their list of concerns and fears. Politico even recently warned all those Russophobes out there to tamp down their enthusiasm for any earth-shattering revelations or indictments from Mueller's office. And even if Mueller has or will uncover Trumpian malfeasance, his findings may never even be made public.

Therefore, the concern and the fear must be manufactured and packaged and marketed in order to get the citizenry ready for an otherwise issue-free Democratic Party presidential campaign season. It's slick, but it's also painfully obvious. 

I mean, what harried citizen would have the wherewithal to spontaneously construct a glitzy neon sign showing support for Iraq War cheerleader Robert Mueller, of all people? Summoning the proles to "save" this plutocrat is almost as bad as Trump summoning the proles to his neofascist rallies.

All you have to do to discover the powerful individuals and organizations and the scads of money behind these spontaneous grassroots protests is to visit the NobodyIsAboveTheLaw website and look for the fine print hidden beneath all the hype. Buried deep within the astroturf is a whole treasure trove of former and current Democratic Party politicians and consultants, alumni from the Clinton and Obama administrations, representatives of the permanent Security-Military State, and a healthy smattering of billionaire venture capitalists and hedge fund honchos.

Whether they realize it or not, the thousands of well-meaning participants in Thursday night's rallies were manipulated into serving power just as creepily as Trump's fans have been manipulated into serving power. The corporate media covering the rallies deliberately suppressed this vital information from its readers and viewers.

Among the protests' funders is Stand Up America, an astroturf propaganda mill started by Facebook billionaire Sean Eldridge, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2016 in my district after purchasing a mansion for that express purpose.  His top issue is not health care, civil rights or gun control. It is protecting Robert Mueller's investigation and by extension, vindicating Hillary Clinton and maybe even setting her up for a third run -- or as she seems to prefer, a coronation by acclamation at the 2020 party convention when the Superdelegates take over after an orchestrated first ballot failure.

So naturally, the Clinton fan club called Pantsuit Nation is also one of the main organizers of the spontaneous protests. It describes its main mission as "story-telling."

Libby Chamberlain created Pantsuit Nation as a “secret” Facebook group in late October 2016, inviting about thirty friends to wear pantsuits to the polls on Election Day. The group's emphasis on “going high” and a commitment to creating a troll-free space in which Clinton supporters could enthusiastically support their candidate struck a nerve. In the span of twenty-four hours, the group exploded to 24,000 members (new members can only be added by friends already within the group). Within a few weeks, group membership exceeded 3 million people. Our current membership is over 3.8 million people around the world.

Wow. "Exploding" sounds so much more spontaneous than "springing up", don't you think? There's nothing like spontaneous combustion to set all that plastic astroturf on fire and create a lot of smoke in the process.

And how grassroots can it possibly be without billionaire venture capitalist Tom Steyer's NextGen outfit in the mix? Maybe he can extend his get-out-the-youth-vote and impeachment franchise into petting zoos and puppies to keep the spontaneous protesters warm, if not fired up, on the next big march or rally.

One thing you can't help but notice as you click and scroll through all the grassroots "partners" is how eerily similar their websites appear, right down to the fonts and the layouts and the mission statements. As a matter of fact, many of them are renamed clones of one another, with the same consultants and directors. This broadcasts the message that there are many, many more spontaneous groups than really exist.

One such group,dubbed Every Voice, appears to be nothing but a re-tweeting platform and clickbait email aggregator whose Board of Directors all hail from the other organizations listed on the main NobodyIsAboveTheLaw website, including the Sierra Club and Democracy Matters. Those busy folks from the Democratic Consultant Class sure do get around, don't they? As a matter of fact, NIATL itself is the spontaneous creation of  MoveOn.Org, one of the Democratic Party's major clicktivist veal pens whose original purpose was to urge liberals to "move on" from the Lewinsky scandal.  It's a tangled web, for sure.

If it's a more diverse feel-good solidarity that you crave, then do check out the Truman National Security Project partner of the grassroots uprisings. I mean, any group named after the president who atom-bombed Hiroshima just to send a hegemonic message to the world and who later approved the unaccountable regime- changing CIA has got to have law and order on its side, right? Included on the board of directors is Hunter Biden, son of Joe, whose Ukrainian oligarchic connections are in direct capitalistic competition with Russia. Unlike Trump, though, he and Dad are apparently far, far above the law. Joining him is Steve Israel, late of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, whose job is to advance centrist candidates and to bury progressive ones. 

If you joined Thursday night's marches, you might even think that its backers are also fighting Trump's mendacious campaign against Medicare for All, because a group calling itself Health Care Voter helped pay for some of those glitzy pro-FBI/Mueller signs. Fugeddaboutit. It's nothing but a campaign commercial boosting centrist Democrats whose aim is merely to "protect" the profit-driven Affordable Care Act from GOP assaults. 

Then there's a site called Rapid Resist, whose director, Yoni Landau, hails from Bill Clinton's White House Office of Management and Budget and whose assistant, Jacinth Yohi, has overseen digital operations for Democratic candidates when not engaged in "community-building" at Google and Uber, where the de facto salary for its gig drivers is less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

That's only a small sampling of the interconnected anti-Trump partnership of Democratic consultants, donors and other operatives who orchestrated Thursday's grassroots uprising. Read them and click through them until your eyes glaze over from all that spontaneous and very lucrative redundancy. 

Meanwhile, some cynics are even suggesting that liberal activists start a GoFundMe page for the ousted Jeff Sessions, whose last desperate act before being kicked out of office was ordering a halt to federal consent decrees to curb police brutality and other law enforcement abuses of the poor, the black, and the brown. Of course, these decrees have traditionally been nothing but unenforced slaps on the wrist and warnings to offending police agencies in such poverty-stricken cities as Cleveland. 

Still, Sessions managed to dig in the racist knife even further, by ordering that political operatives - not career nonpartisan lawyers from the Justice Department - will now have the power to "discipline" police agencies. Additionally, such decrees will have sunset clauses, meaning that the offending departments can simply run out the clock and do nothing to reform themselves as they continue to act with impunity toward an increasingly vulnerable and disposable population. 

Red Fascists, Blue Fascists, Old Fascists, New Fascists

With the Democratic Party and its various media sycophants and fund-raising offshoots now planning mass rallies in support of fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, I think it's safe to assume that fascism has officially arrived in America. 

Rather than march against Trump's militarization of the border, or for that matter, the US's brutal global militarization in general, liberals will be marching to express their shock and displeasure at the ouster of one of the most racist and xenophobic officials in modern American history. 

House Speaker-in-Waiting Nancy Pelosi got knocked off the playground seesaw within 24 hours of verbally pandering to Trump - in the name of "national unity" - in the wake of her party's feeble midterm victory, and immediately characterized the firing as a "constitutional crisis" because it endangers the interminable RussiaGate investigation of Trump by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is subordinate to the Attorney General.  

The media-political complex is shocked, shocked that Trump would replace Sessions with a DOJ "loyalist," who, we learn almost in an aside, has also been employed by CNN as a legal affairs talking head.

The outrage is not so much that Matthew Whitaker crossed the red line between public service employment and private media employment, but that he allegedly is a hypnotized Trilby to Trump's Svengali.  

The New York Times editorialized:

 Mr. Whitaker — who has been called the “eyes and ears” of the White House inside the Justice Department by John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff — has expressed a Trumpian degree of hostility to the investigation he is now charged with overseeing. He has called it a “witch hunt” and, in its earliest months, wrote an opinion piece arguing that Mr. Mueller was coming “dangerously close” to crossing a “red line” by investigating the president’s finances. He has suggested there was nothing wrong in Mr. Trump’s 2017 firing of James Comey, the F.B.I. director, and he has supported the prosecution of Hillary Clinton. In an interview last year he described “a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment, and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.” In 2014, he headed the political campaign for Iowa state treasurer of Sam Clovis, who later became a Trump campaign aide and, more recently, a witness in the Russia investigation.

Rather than criticize the glaring conflict of interest in Whitaker's recent post at CNN, the Times carefully limits its ire to Whitaker's conflict of interest regarding the Russiagate investigation. That's because emphasizing the CNN connection would not be in keeping with the "narrative" that Trump persecutes the corporate media and its various personalities by calling them "fake news" and "enemies of the people."

As I wrote in my published response to Charles Blow, whose own column on the subject also concentrated on Whitaker's pro-Trump verbiage on CNN rather than on this Department of Justice official's monetized connection to CNN:

The only thing more (ahem) shocking than Trump firing Sessions is that his successor, Whitaker, also works as a paid CNN legal contributor. The conflicts of interest in this American oligarchy, which still ridiculously poses as a republic, extend so far beyond the Trump gene pool, it isn't funny.

You'd think that Trump would disqualify Whitaker because of his connection to CNN. But the truth is that Trump loves the corporate media, and they love him right back. They give him all the free air time he requires, and then some. He, in turn, supplies them with record-breaking ad revenue and viewership.

The back-and-forth at the post-midterms press con between Trump and CNN star Jim Acosta appeared completely staged to me. These men are filling their required roles for "The Spectacle" (in lieu of gathering actual news or discussing the problems of ordinary people.)

Trump relishes this role because casting himself as a beleaguered victim-warrior endears him even more to his fans, who have been manipulated into channeling their very real grievances into the Trump "kampf." The Republicans owned by the wealthy stay silent because plutocrats and fascists have historically made very cozy bedfellows. I think it's now safe to declare that fascism has arrived, blue wave or no.

What if Trump held a rally or a press conference and nobody televised it? He'd immediately collapse like the over-inflated balloon of fetid hot air that he is. And the corporate sponsors would be very sad.

For those of you who missed it, here's the full clip of Wednesday's press conference:

 As presidential press conferences go, it was a riveting and bizarre treat, an entertainment special tailor-made for the profit driven corporate media. It even has a sequel, with the White House later accusing Acosta of "touching" the White House intern who'd attempted to remove his microphone, and then revoking his press access to the building. As if that wasn't enough, Trump Press Secretary Sarah Sanders began sharing a doctored video of Acosta accosting the intern. And that has led to  further outrage from the champions of a free corporate-sponsored press who simultaneously and hypocritically applaud the censorship efforts of Facebook and Google as pertain to more independent (unapproved) news outlets. 

 All concerned are playing their parts to perfection. Nothing buries popular demands for the public good, such as Medicare for All, like Democrats attacking Trump from the right and rallying neoliberal neofascists to protest the firing of their new confederate anti-immigrant hero, Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III. It's a professionally coordinated "rapid response" astroturfed uprising reminiscent of the Tea Party.

Wall Street has declared itself well-pleased with all the outcomes of the Midterminals, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average shooting up more than 500 points after the cosmetic restoration of two-party, duopolistic rule. The record $5 billion invested by the oligarchy into the one democratic vestige we still have left was money very well spent indeed, because most of the Democratic wins came in affluent Congressional districts.

When, in her post-midterminal victory speech (pre-Sessions ouster), Nancy Pelosi gushed that these meager victories prove that "we have a marketplace of ideas that makes our democracy strong" she wasn't kidding. The emphasis on the "we" serves to define unfettered capitalism as democracy for the very few and the very privileged who. she said, "have all had enough of division." Oh, and maybe they'll even give a little token relief to "hardworking Americans" who can demonstrate a lot of skin in their game. Pelosi is so into plutocratic unity that she even cadged a page from the Trump playbook and promised to Drain the Swamp of dark unaccountable money.

"Let's hear it more for pre-existing medical conditions!" she unnecessarily added to the cheers of an exclusive crowd of party operatives and donors and, of course, those dedicated and unpaid volunteers.

Bitter Little Blue Pills

Are you still feeling positively giddy and drunk on your Blue Wave cocktails on this Midterminal Morning After? Or are you already hung over and in dire need of a jolt of reality-based caffeine?

To borrow some of the cool media parlance currently in vogue, let's unpack the hidden meaning of the outcomes by taking a deep dive in a search of multiple takeaways of all the myriad things you need to know this morning.

On second thought, let's not. I am too hung over from reading the multiple media accounts of The Results to think as clearly as I would like.

Just a few muddled preliminary thoughts then:

--Many of the Democrats who lost their Senate seats were de facto Republicans who might have been punished by voters for pandering too much to Trump and for not being progressive enough. Here's looking at you, Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly. I have absolutely no facts to back up this supposition, but it's pleasant to think about anyway.

--On that note, although Florida's Democratic gubernatorial contender, Andrew Gillum, narrowly lost, Floridians still voted to re-enfranchise more than a million of the state's convicted felons, most of whom are black or brown people once brutally imprisoned on minor drug charges or other nonviolent crimes. If that isn't progressive, I don't know what is.

--Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R-Kochtopia) is finally gone. That is a mammoth blue wave in and of itself.

-- As far as the Dems controlling the lower house of Congress is concerned, I've already covered it in some previous posts. The new committee chairs will engage in a frenzy of subpoena-issuing to Trump's corrupt cabinet. Executive privilege will be invoked. Referrals will be made to the Trump-led Justice Department. Lather, rinse, repeat. The neoliberal Octogenarian Troika of Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn will make deals with the nasty Republicans in the interests of National Unity. The smattering of newly-elected "diverse" progressives will make fiery speeches on the House floor in an effort to get the cynical electorate herded back into compliance for Campaign 2020. Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump will seesaw from cooperation to bickering and back again to keep everybody off-balance and guessing and tuned in to the never-ending reality show that substitutes for representative democracy.

--We ordinary slobs have still got our work cut out for us, despite what the New York Times is breathlessly over-hyping as the End of One-Party Rule, equating the blue wave panacea for electoral dysfunction with that other over-hyped little blue pill for erectile dysfunction. Who are they trying to kid? 

It'll be the same as it ever was. And just in case you don't understand that fighting and resisting Trump is not the same thing as making people's lives better, the Times gnaws off the bottle cap of bitter blue pills for you to swallow:  

But after eight years in the minority, Democrats hoping to reclaim the White House in 2020 will also have to prove they are interested in governing — and temper the liberal ambitions of the party’s most ardent left-wingers....

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader who now hopes to be its next speaker, pledged to “work for solutions that bring us together, because we have all had enough of division.”

Get the picture? When the Democratic leaders say they're willing to work with Trump, they mean that they will enthusiastically join his mendacious fight against Single Payer health care. This is despite the fact that more than two-thirds of the electorate are in favor of it. The Democrats' worst enemy was never really Trump. It's always been the Left. So now that you have done your civic duty and voted and provided them with the fig leaf they've so desperately craved to legitimize their power, you are hereby expected to shut up and let the ruling class racketeers just all get along with one another as they always have done. Sew up your mouths and stop sowing such divisions (with much help from social media security state censors) while they sew up their deals.

 The one solution that has always brought them together is the appropriation of untold trillions of dollars to the profitable and privatized and unified and unaccountable corporate war and surveillance and incarceration apparatus. But since the viewers at home must still be kept entertained and engaged, there will also be plenty of anti-Trump theater on offer between the stealthy appropriations and backroom deals. The price of admission is high, and the tickets will not be refundable unless enough people make enough of a noise about how badly they've been cheated.