Crouching Cuomo, Hidden Biden

Is the unified Biden-endorsing Democratic leadership already finessing plans to replace Uncle Joe with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo?

An email slugged "Official Democratic Poll" asking voters nationwide to share their feelings about Cuomo landed in my inbox yesterday:

"In these uncertain times where we're depending on our mayors and governors to save our lives, Andrew Cuomo has shown incredible leadership. He's doing what Trump isn't."

 Of course, the official tracking poll devised by the Stop Republicans.Org data team is essentially fund-raising spam  It's just another name for the Progressive Turnout Project, which is just another name for Progressive Takeover. It's a Chicago-based party veal pen run by a trio of former Obama and congressional campaign operatives. In order to participate in the "poll" attesting that you admire Cuomo and can't stand Donald Trump, you must first give them your money.

The phony poll could also serve double duty, though, to gauge Democratic voter support for a Cuomo run. Uncle Joe, the presumptive nominee, is carefully never even mentioned in the email.

The increasingly fragile-sounding and reclusive Biden certainly must be giving Team Obama some second thoughts. Under the guise of party unity, the manufactured positive Cuomo media coverage and name-dropping could also be the sound of them sharpening the same set of long knives they used to plunge into Bernie Sanders on that infamous South Carolina night only a few months ago.

Then again, they could simply be using Cuomo as a proxy or a magnet, drawing in more voters disenchanted with Biden, who now also faces credible sexual assault charges that he is probably too senile to even respond to personally. In contrast, we are supposed to be irresistibly drawn to a brand of authoritarian thuggery (Cuomo) that sounds a lot more erudite than Trump's ravings.

For the centrist wing of the party, Cuomo is actually too good to be true. He accomplished the single-handed feat of striking Bernie's name from the New York primary ballot before the June voting was ultimately canceled due to the coronavirus. This underhanded ploy served the dual purpose of avoiding the embarrassment of Bernie coming too close to Biden and also discouraging disappointed Sanders voters from showing up at all to cast their ballots for the progressive candidates also running for local and state offices.

Besides outright replacement of Biden, or simply using Cuomo as cover for their zombie candidate in the basement, the third possibility is that the Democrats are not so much interested in winning as they are in raising tons of money as they pretend to "resist Trump." In their cores, they love Trump. He makes their own corruption smell sweet by comparison as they give him most of what he wants. Both parties, after all, serve the same oligarchic masters.

This email push-poll spam is a new tactic for the PTP. It's set up exactly like the Republican email "polls" testing how much you love Trump and hate socialist Dems like Nancy Pelosi, who are so Marxist that they're in bed with Wall Street.

Alex Morgan, the "progressive" group's field director, told The Hill last year that his PAC's $46 million budget would be used to open 66 field offices and hire  1100 workers to knock on the doors of the 7.1 million people who did not come out to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“We don’t waste money on TV ads, direct mail, or anything else that’s just white noise to most voters," he bragged before sending out his own blast of white noise emails this week."We can't rely on the high energy we saw in 2018 to carry over to 2020 unless we start engaging with voters now.... if we wait until September to counter Trump with field efforts, we're toast."

“We focus our efforts on what works best — multiple in-depth conversations with voters who are disillusioned with politics as usual. Democrats haven't been doing a good job of speaking to them on an intrinsic level beyond broad party platitudes, and Progressive Turnout Project is aiming to change that.”

Then Covid-19 happened. Depth conversations between voters and political canvassers would morph right into conversational death traps. So brace yourselves for what will very likely be an unprecedented and relentless onslaught of political emails engaging you on such substantive topics as The Incredible Cuomo and Be Very Afraid of Trump. The hordes of operatives must have some way to spend their hundreds of millions of dollars to extract even more hundreds of millions of dollars from you in order to live the pre-pandemic lifestyles to which they have become accustomed. 

Since even former Bernie Sanders campaign operatives have to eat, they've started their own PAC to "rally progressives" around Hidin' Biden, who "has shown a willingness to move in a more progressive direction" by deigning to allow Sanders  a bit of input in the creation of a pandemic task force operating out of Joe's basement bunker.

As proof of the progressive direction that Joe is heading, his busy little fingers typed out their own mass email Tuesday:

Hey there, I'm Joe Biden and I'm writing to you about a truly special moment in our campaign.
This afternoon, Secretary Clinton announced she's endorsing  us.  I'm so proud to have her support.

The letter is nothing but a slavish testimonial to Hillary, and how they used to have breakfast together at his vice presidential mansion when they were both in town, and how he learned how powerful she was when he didn't run for president himself. Her candidacy was so wonderful and so historic that this email reads like a de facto endorsement of a Clinton restoration. So when I clicked on the source of the encomium, it shockingly turns out it was not sent from Biden Basement Central at all, but from Onward Together - Hillary's own super pac!

His probing fingers probably didn't even write the email themselves. If they had, Joe would've inserted at least one "Here's the deal" or "I'm the guy" or "C'mon, man!"

So in the spirit of Hillary, please join Joe in the Battle For the Soul of Our Nation. Liberals are urged to tune in to the suspense of which lady will win his vice presidential beauty contest even as they lambaste Trump over his treatment of women.  Each and every one of these liberal #MeToo champions is still in it to win it despite Tara Reade, and Anita Hill before her. In fact, like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, he is using and hiding behind powerful women to defend him. Stacey Abrams, high on the list of vice presidential picks, points to the New York Times's smear piece against Tara Reade as evidence of his innocence. It's the same thing as Dick Cheney pointing to the Times articles spoon-fed by the Bushies to reporter Judith Miller as "proof" that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons.

It's also all too sickeningly reminiscent of the Democratic Party's shoddy treatment of Monica Lewinsky during the Bill Clinton scandal. You might remember that Gloria Steinem acted the same part that Stacey Abrams is now playing for Biden.

"I'm not here to ask you for money," Biden's fingers meanwhile reassure recipients in his closing policy argument. "I know first I have to earn it. So I'm asking you to think about what is at stake, give me a chance, and join my campaign."

Whereupon he only asks for money once you press the link he has so thoughtfully provided as a way to keep his word and to immediately earn your trust.

Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Gloom of Plague...

... stays the couriers of the Permanent Security State from the swift completion of their appointed task of #Russiagate fear-mongering.

As dozens of people are dying in New York every hour of Covid-19, and the portable refrigerated morgues are outnumbering the ambulances parked outside metropolitan hospitals, and the whole nation is in various stages of misery and panic caused in large part by our government's criminal failure to heed warnings and to make the most basic preparations, the New York Times today sounds the warning that it's still those damned Russians who are sowing the political discord and the social strife!

Ahead of November’s election, American intelligence officials and others are on high alert for mischief from Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

Just because government prosecutors just dropped the criminal case against the Russian troll farm doesn't mean that the RIRA isn't still a clear and present danger. Normal people might have characterized their campaign as a few hundred cheesy, cartoonish Facebook ads. Yet, in the midst of the worst human catastrophe of modern times, a virus spreading death and pain and grief and financial ruin all over the world, the New York Times today bemoans the "incendiary spreading" of Facebook messages which stoke discord on race issues. These kinds of ads, we are supposed to believe, helped to hand the 2016 election to Donald Trump.

In other news, the Paper of Record did not even bother to report on Saturday night's race-based rioting in the streets of Newburgh, a poor city located only about one hour north of its vast newsroom. Crowds took to the streets when a city councilman wrote an incendiary Facebook post claiming that police had fatally shot an unarmed black man. (Body cam footage later showed the man firing a gun at cops who had approached him with an arrest warrant for illegal gun possession.) Irate citizens rapidly emerged from Lockdown. Rocks and bottles were thrown and fires set in the street. One police officer was shot and wounded.

Hundreds of cops from miles around duly converged on the scene. There was not one face mask or canister of hand sanitizer among them, given that the ridiculously praised Governor Andrew Cuomo has not supplied them to law enforcement agencies. Cuomo is simultaneously refusing to back down from his nefariously neoliberal plan of cutting the state Medicaid funds - which most residents of this historically impoverished city rely upon for their health care. He is forging right ahead with his campaign of austerity, notwithstanding the congressional bailout package offering billions of dollars to shore up New York's Medicaid budget.

Social distancing? What social distancing? The day after:

Information on Newburgh's civil unrest has been hard to come by even in local media, given that there is very little local media left. The lack of advertising revenue engendered by the pandemic is rapidly shuttering even the skeleton crewed newspapers and news sites that still exist in small towns and big cities all over the country.

 The lack of coverage of what in normal times would be considered news in the public interest speaks to the dangers of ultra-consolidated media. Journalism in the control of only a few corporate hands serves both to suppress reality and to disseminate whatever skewed version of reality the oligarchs and their corrupt politicians want us to consume. 

Therefore, the ever more powerful New York Times shields us from the crimes of the oligarchy by spreading the manufactured news that the Internet Research Agency has evolved beyond Amateur Hour - progressing from telltale grammar, syntax and spelling errors to nefariously cutting and pasting "chunks of text" from other sources, like Wikipedia, in order to avoid detection.

The Russian trolls, the Times warns even as the corpses pile up right outside its own windows,  also are also shockingly republishing Facebook and Twitter screenshots of posts created by "real Americans." Be afraid, be very afraid.

So in order  to make Real America great again, plague or no plague, the Intelligence Community and its various Wall Street and weapons industry-financed think tanks and media outlets are warning the quarantined, the sick, the grieving and the newly unemployed that the Russian trolls' latest sneaky tactic has been to deliberately set up new social media accounts with fewer followers. What you cannot see is even more dangerous than what is right in front of your lying eyes!  Russian invisibility is even more incendiary than the actual fires being set by the increasingly desperate people in your own town or city.

These propagandists are the same Cold War 2.0 troops who were caught with their pants down when the Coronavirus hit. Of course, as the pandemic was spreading from China to the rest of the world, the Real American Cold Warriors and their corporate media lackeys were too busy impeaching Trump on the Ukraine bribery scandal, aka Son of Russiagate. That is, when they weren't too busy cashing in on the coming plague and dumping their stocks without informing the public of what was about to hit us. 

Donald Trump is far from being the only pathocratic clown in these United States of Kakistocracy.