The Only Thing Between Trump and the Golden Pitchforks

After two years of urging Democrats to patiently await the results of the Mueller investigation before even thinking about impeachment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved the goalposts on Monday.

As she sees it, the report is only a prelude. It is merely a template, or book of clues which Congress must carefully examine in order to finally arrive at The Truth. So much for Robert Mueller III being the avenger and final arbiter of the fate of Donald Trump.

It's almost as though Pelosi is pulling an Obama, who back in 2009 told a group of nervous Wall Street bankers that "I am the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks," tacitly assuring them that they would not face criminal prosecution under his benevolent watch.

Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in the land, is the only thing standing between a blustery and very paranoid Trump and the golden pitchforks of the liberal pundit and political class, more and more of whom are demanding that impeachment proceedings begin. This is especially true of those running for president and who are in dire need of fuel to fire up the voters. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have yet to catch fire in the polls, and are among the impeachment advocates. Of course, since they sit in the Senate, and it's the House that has to get the ball rolling, their calls for impeachment require no further effort or political capital on their part.

As for Pelosi, her neoliberal bipartisan agenda trumps bringing Trump to any form of justice. For starters, she is anxious to get the Trump-backed corporations and the Democratic Party-backed corporations together in a closed room to arbitrate drug prices without any input from the actual House of Representatives. A drawn-out impeachment process would just take all the energy away from enriching the oligarchy in the bipartisan manner to which it has become accustomed.

And since Pelosi had also refused to bring George W. Bush to justice for his illegal torture and surveillance programs, and for lying us into a war that killed, maimed or displaced millions of people, bringing Trump to justice for playing a mob boss and thwarting the Mueller investigation would seem kind of petty, wouldn't it? This is especially true since Pelosi herself was secretly briefed on Bush's torture program in 2003, and did nothing to expose or stop it.

And that would make her seem kind of complicit in war crimes, wouldn't it?

Well, not according to Pelosi. She said she was only following the secrecy rules. She is no Chelsea Manning-style whistleblower. The fact that Republicans attacked her on the torture issue did the bipartisan trick, too: it brought loyal Democrats to her immediate defense, just as the Democratic "witch-hunt" against Trump brings the GOP to his immediate defense.

Unaccountability is built right into the permanent American power structure. The rulers rely on the Constitution and other arcane rules whenever it's convenient, not because it's right. When it's not convenient, then they don't. That is the main function of the Duopoly: theatrics and grandstanding in public, and disdaining the public good and the public's wishes in private.

Fast-forward to 2019.

Politico reports:

"We can investigate Trump without drafting articles," she said during a call with House Democrats.... We aren't going to go faster, we are going to go as fast as the facts take us."

"It is also important to know that the facts regarding holding the President accountable can be gained outside of impeachment hearings," she wrote earlier Monday afternoon in a letter to House Democrats.

This should throw cold water on the continuing hysterical insistence by the Golden Pitchforks crowd that Donald Trump is a secret Russian agent and guilty of treason. I don't think that even Nancy Pelosi has reached the level of corruption that would allow her to desultorily hunt for facts about how, exactly, Vladimir Putin is actively ruling our country and ruining our democracy.

Her inaction should be all the proof the Russophobes need to relinquish their fantasies once and for all. But now that they've created their own alternate reality, inconsistencies and plot-holes are so easy to ignore. The play is the thing, as Shakespeare once observed.

Therefore, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, typical of the Golden Pitchforkers of the Plutocracy, writes:

So all the “fake news” was true. A hostile foreign power intervened in the presidential election, hoping to install Donald Trump in the White House. The Trump campaign was aware of this intervention and welcomed it. And once in power, Trump tried to block any inquiry into what happened.
Never mind attempts to spin this story as somehow not meeting some definitions of collusion or obstruction of justice. The fact is that the occupant of the White House betrayed his country. And the question everyone is asking is, what will Democrats do about it?
But notice that the question is only about Democrats. Everyone (correctly) takes it as a given that Republicans will do nothing. Why?

Translation: We will keep spinning the Russiagate fairy tale and foist all the blame for the Democrats' failure to hold Trump accountable for "treason" on the usual GOP suspects, who do not believe in "American Values." This is like a prosecutor who refuses to indict a suspect because he doesn't have an ironclad guarantee of a conviction. It's akin to the Obama administration refusing to prosecute Wall Street bankers because it is too complicated and institutions must never be allowed to fail. 

It is cowardice and complicity,and yes, it is obstruction of justice in its own right. It is so much easier to accuse one side of the Duopoly of not adhering to "American values." It saves the corporate Resistance the trouble of examining their own consciences and acknowledging their own roles (2016 Bernie Buzzkill) in enabling the election of Trump.

These Democratic pitchforks come custom-equipped with nice, soft protective cushions over their shiny, well-oiled tines. Liberals come to scare and enrage Trump, and to be ostentatiously disgusted by him. They don't want to really hurt him. He is too valuable a commodity and diverting media personality.

My comment on Krugman (held by the newspaper's censors for 10 hours prior to publication):

If Speaker Pelosi believed that Trump is a traitor to his country, she'd be pushing impeachment. She's averse to it because she knows Trump is just your ordinary homegrown mobster who's "not worth it."

 She thinks it's safer to run out the clock till Election Day. as we're regaled with a steady procession of piecemeal investigations and subpoenas that Trump will (true to form) obstruct every step of the way.

Enough of Russiagate. It feeds his paranoia. He used his campaign as a marketing opportunity, and dealing with the Russian mob was just one of his many scams.

 Where's the corporate media outrage over his veto of the congressional bill to stop the US-enabled genocide in Yemen? Where's the angst over the US meddling and attempted coup in Venezuela, or his economic assault on Iran, or his continued caging of refugee children at the border?

As for the GOP, when did they ever "believe in" anything, except serving their paymasters? They're not scared of the corporate Dems, who serve their own paymasters. They fear only true progressives like Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren - who, to her great credit, was the first liberal senator to utter the "I" word.

 Republicans win because they co-opt populism in the service of elitism. Trump's way too skilled a comic diversion to relinquish. Add to him the hucksters of the Evangelical "Greed is God" cult, and they haven't got a qualm in the world. Ethics? What ethics?

Speaking of ethics, lack of same is very much a bipartisan affair. 

Pelosi used the same language of collegiality and cooperation in 2006, when widespread public antiwar sentiment cost Bush the lower House. She grotesquely equated justice with pettiness. In her world, it's always better to ostentatiously extend olive branches to war criminals and forget about the war dead and the trillions of wasted dollars.

As the New York Times reported, 

She said the GOP, which frequently excluded Democrats from conference committee hearings and often blocked attempts to introduce amendments, would not suffer similar treatment.
“Democrats pledge civility and bipartisanship in the conduct of the work here and we pledge partnerships with Congress and the Republicans in Congress, and the president — not partisanship.”
She also extended an olive branch to Bush on the war in Iraq, saying she plans to work with him on a new plan but will not support the current strategy and supports beginning redeployment of troops by the end of the year.
Pelosi also said she supports the idea of a bipartisan summit on the war.
“We know, ‘stay the course,’ is not the way,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi said she received a brief, early-morning call from Bush, who invited her to lunch on Thursday.
“We both expressed our wish to work in a bipartisan way for the benefit of the American people.”

She mildly scolded Bush for his authoritarian language the same way that she now mildly scolds Trump for his. It's not even Nerf-brand toy pitchforks that Nancy Pelosi wields. It's a few slimy strands of overcooked spaghetti.  

When she keeps repeating that her goal is to benefit "the American People," her definition of people is the United States Corporate Empire, limited to the very rich, the very militaristic and the very interconnected.

Here's another response to Krugman's claim that Republicans have no American values. This one was written by my alter ego, "Nicky Sardo," and also held overnight by censors: (many "regular" commenters besides me have been similarly and regularly exiled. In keeping with the Unaccountability Code of Values adopted by the American ruling class and their media propagandists, the Times ascribes its censorship practices to the vagaries of a top-secret algorithm.)

There is at least one American Value that the Republicans sincerely believe in. And that is the value of the almighty dollar. Billions and billions of them, to be precise, all parked tax-free in the pockets of a few tycoons who own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population combined.

 They also believe in vote suppression, particularly in Southern states with majority Black populations. They accomplish this with their Unholy Trinity dogma: voter ID laws; incarcerating record numbers of Black people and then denying them suffrage based upon their convictions; and gerrymandering.

  They also believe in denying poor white and black and brown people a decent education. Trump himself once boasted that he "loves the uneducated." Because if you keep people down long enough, they'll vote for Republicans out of ignorance, fear, desperation, resentment of "the other" - or they'll be too broke, apathetic, sick or disgusted to even bother to vote at all. And failure to vote is usually a default vote for a Republican, unfortunately.

 Whether Trump is an actual traitor is beside the point at this point, because Americans have been shafted by unfettered neoliberal capitalism for decades now. Forget about Putin and the Russians. We have the Kochs, the Adelsons, the Mercers, the Wall Street banks, the consolidated media spewing corporate propaganda and rich men's wars at us 24/7. The fact that they still invite us, even beg us, to vote is proof that democracy is pretty much a delusion.

America Loves a Mob Boss

The comparisons of Trump World to the hit mafia TV series The Sopranos intensified Wednesday with the testimony, before the House Oversight Committee, of the president's convicted former fixer, Michael "The Rat" Cohen.

Although not nearly as bloody or profanity-ridden as the HBO drama, the nine-hour spectacle did its best to titillate, as members of the committee (with the possible exceptions of Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) tried to steal the show in a series of truncated showboating walk-on appearances.

Worst actress honors should probably go to former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who was forced to resign from that role (but unfortunately not from Congress) when WikiLeaks dumps revealed she had done underhanded things to hurt Bernie Sanders and swing the nomination to Hillary Clinton. Her scripted part in the hearing therefore consisted largely of one series of blame-shifting words: "Russiarussiarussiarussia," despite the admonitions from Committee Chair Elijah Cummings to his repertory company to steer clear of that delicate topic during the soliloquies masquerading as questions.

The delicate topic of Russiarussiarussia was to be explored in a separate closed-door hearing before the House's judiciary committee next week. So we will have to satisfy ourselves with the one-man show to be performed by Committee Chair Adam Schiff in order to get a secondhand account of the next episode.

Meanwhile, if the critics are still wondering why as much as 40 percent of the electorate are still 'uge fans of Donald Trump, they should remember that a shockingly large proportion of die-hard Sopranos viewers were also rooting for mob boss Tony Soprano as he whacked and lied and threatened his way into the hearts and minds and living rooms of America. David Chase, the show's creator, often expressed chagrin that his brilliant satire of American organized crime and political corruption, and its biting portrayals of the rank stupidity, viciousness and greed of Tony and his assorted henchmen, enablers, hangers-on and complicit relatives, were construed by much of the public as a slightly bloodier, cooler version of Father Knows Best. Chase worried that his critical portrayal of violence was making violence normal and even desirable in viewers who got hooked on the weekly knee-capping scenes juxtaposed with the enviable luxuriant lifestyles of the whacky cast of knee-cappers 

Cohen is probably right to fear for his own safety and that of his family members. All that Mob Boss Trump has to do is send out a mass tweet, and at least a few of his vast unpaid army of fans and true believers are bound to take the bait and strive to create and act out their own bit parts in this saga.

When James Gandolfini, the late actor who portrayed Tony Soprano, was hurt in a scooter accident in New York City one day in 2006, a concerned fan rushing to his aid frantically asked: "Tony, are you O.K.?"

Gandolfini, obviously upset that his TV role had typecast him, snarled at the fan through his pain: "I am not Tony. That's just a character that I play!"

Not that all the supporting players in The Sopranos were necessarily upstanding humans in their true lives, though. Some had real-life mob associations, and one was even convicted of murder after appearing in the series. The last season of the show really hit close to home for me and my own family, when an actor named Louis Gross, playing the part of Tony Soprano's bodyguard, suddenly appeared on our TV screen. It was the very same Louis Gross who had bullied my daughter, among other pupils, about a decade before when they were in middle school.

Although he got away with his rotten behavior in middle school, Gross was not so lucky in high school, when he and his pals still thought that throwing rocks at girls from behind bushes was cool, and he got suspended. In adulthood, if you can call it that, he was arrested for allegedly beating up his girlfriend and for trying to spend some counterfeit hundred-dollar bills that he had xeroxed himself. It turned out that he was one of those die-hard Sopranos fans who loved Tony so much and took the show so seriously that he reportedly bulked up on steroids to win the part of "Muscles Marinara." 

As Cohen testified on Wednesday, Trump himself is a consummate actor who only ran for president to market his business empire and his floundering TV series. He never expected to win the highest office in the land. Unlike Gandolfini, he is a character actor playing himself in his own virtual spin-off of a reality show, a character who has fully embraced his new, unexpected and much-expanded star turn as Mob Boss of the entire country.

And, Cohen warned, if Trump's latest hit series is cancelled in 2020, it won't be an abrupt Sopranos-style blackout. After that series finale, all that the fans and critics could do was complain that it was lazy cop-out on David Chase's part, and that they were unfairly cheated out of a satisfying final bloodbath, if not a happily-ever-after denouement.

 When The Trumps ends, Cohen told the panel in the cliff-hanging finale of his own episode, “Indeed, given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power, and this is why I agreed to appear before you today.” 

Cohen acknowledged that his remarks were edited, if not actually scripted, by his pro bono attorney, longtime Clinton henchman Lanny Davis, the author of such brilliant but underrated scripts  as "I Was the Back Channel Bag Man of the Illegal US Coup in Honduras."

That particular show got low ratings because Davis didn't actually kneecap or bludgeon to death the democratically elected president of Honduras to prevent him from raising the minimum wage and returning land, stolen by corporate American agribusinesses, to subsistence farmers. Davis, acting on behalf of the Clinton State Department, merely subcontracted out to the military the job of frogmarching the president out of his house in the middle of the night. It was a bloodless coup, with the main bloody violence and refugee crisis coming afterward. The US media didn't hype it, so American viewers were not attracted to it.

It's no wonder that Cohen's testimony was conveniently scheduled for the very same day that Trump was negotiating a (failed) peace deal with North Korea. The neocons and permanent security state henchmen really running this show don't want peace with North Korea. It's hard out there for a godfather president trying to negotiate with a minor, but no less dangerous, mob boss when the Big Guy's grisly reputation is being dragged through the mud by the corporate duopoly back home on live TV. Lanny Davis (pictured below at left) just couldn't seem to keep the smirk off his face during the nine hours that Michael the Rat was being "grilled" by the actors of the Oversight Committee.  

Cohen himself could barely keep the smirk off his own face at times as he explained all the mistakes that were made before he got caught.

But not to worry. This series will not be ending any time soon, as Democratic leaders hastily reiterated their pledge that impeachment is still totally off the table. Oversight Chair Cummings even bragged, “Isn’t it interesting that not one person on our side even mentioned the word impeachment? Not one.” 

When you want to hook the country on a mobster soap opera and keep the ratings high, it is always best not to cram too much mayhem and satisfying closure into any one episode, lest people get jaded or bored. As Cummings told reporters, "It's best to proceed cautiously."  

Because cliffhangers sell. So do new and recurring characters and subplots and campaigns for awards shows.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who's been getting rave reviews for her own lead part as Trump's feminine foil in The Wall episodes, did her best Carmela Soprano impression after Wednesday's hearing, disingenuously claiming to know nothing at all about it. She told reporters she had been "too busy" to pay any attention to it.

The show must always go on. Actors gotta act.

"If True..."

*Updated below.

It's another bombshell to end all bombshells: two of those anonymous FBI sources told the sometimes-reliable BuzzFeed News that Donald Trump had personally instructed his convicted former fixer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about the failed bribery attempt to build another Trump Tower in Moscow. This is despite the fact the president has readily admitted this attempt happened while he was actively running for the presidency and well-positioned to win the nomination if not the actual election.

Like any savvy businessman, Trump had to keep all his options open. It's the all-American way.

The reason that this is such a bombshell, according to BuzzFeed, is that for the very first time, Trump didn't bother to use a variant of wink-and-nod Mafia code to protect himself, via the plausible deniability route, but specifically instructed his minion to lie, lie and lie again, both vocally and in writing.  

The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.
This revelation is not the first evidence to suggest the president may have attempted to obstruct the FBI and special counsel investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
But Cohen's testimony marks a significant new frontier: It is the first known example of Trump explicitly telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia.

And here Trump was, openly colluding with the Pentagon just the other day on a new multi-billion dollar "Star Wars" initiative. Little did he know that BuzzFeed would try to ruin the latest diversionary tactic by cadging the marketing slogan of the cheaper Star Trek franchise. Forget about space being the final frontier. Cohen's utterly reliable testimony is now the official newest frontier of the bombshell to end all bombshells Russiagate franchise.

Just when you thought the crater couldn't get any deeper, it gets deeper. It's the crater that will change everything.  

Still, absent the concurrent leakage of any actual alleged "cache of documents," members of the seamlessly joined political-media complex are also keeping their own options open, salivating over and promoting the story while being very careful to preface their glee with the standard avalanche of "if this is true" caveats.

"If this is true," discreetly said former Attorney General Eric Holder, "then Congress must start impeachment proceedings." Because not only will Trump have obstructed justice, he will have suborned perjury. Cohen is expected to testify to Congress on Feb. 7th about what he claims he knew and when he claims he knew it. House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, meanwhile, vows he will do everything possible to find out if the BuzzFeed story is true. Good luck suborning the First Amendment to demand from the reporters the identities of their two anonymous FBI agents.

As a sidelight, Trump's nominee for attorney general, William Barr, told congressional inquisitors this week that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's own report on Russiagate may never even be made public. This suppression would presumably be done to protect other innocent guilty parties in Trumpworld and beyond.

It will also conveniently tie Congress's hands regarding an impeachment and trial. The "resistance fighters" of the opposition party have already stated that they are loath to do anything that might ham-handedly interfere with Mueller's ever-so-delicate and selective surgical probings into whether Trump's long history of sleaze actually translates into his being a treasonous witting or unwitting Putin puppet.

The same Democrats who have been relentlessly promoting the Russiagate propaganda -  our democracy is under attack by the Kremlin! - for the past two years are now professing to be alarmed that Trump wants to start a new Cold War with the Kremlin via his space weapons missile "defense" gambit. It seems like only yesterday they were professing themselves alarmed that Trump was being too chummy with Putin. Actually, they are still professing themselves to be alarmed over two mutually contradictory things. Maybe nobody will even notice, especially the talking heads of the corporate cable TV propaganda mills.

Sure sounds like collusion to me. But it's probably neither completely witting nor completely unwitting. If true, it's more like half-witting.  

*Update, 1/19. If what Mueller's office says is true, then the BuzzFeed bombshell is a complete dud. This, according to the Russiagate franchise, is mighty confusing, because the special counsel spokesman didn't specify exactly what isn't true. Is it a lie that Trump ordered Cohen to lie, or did the secret FBI sources lie to BuzzFeed, and furthermore, Mueller should just go ahead and release the cache of documents BuzzFeed breathlessly reported on without seeing them or otherwise verifying their alleged existence.

As the HuffPo is reporting, this is all too confusing. It has morphed from the bombshell to end all bombshells into a frantic roller coaster ride with a three-way fight in mid-air among BuzzFeed, Trump and Mueller.

So far, as far as I know, nobody in the Russiagate franchise has yet accused Mueller of being a Putin puppet, a closet Trumpie, or an unwitting Russian stooge.

The Wall Plus Russiagate Equals Distraction

Donald Trump is rattled about the Mueller investigation. Therefore, the Democrats colluded with him on Tuesday to change the subject from his legal woes to The Wall and the usual pre-Christmas government shutdown threats. The only thing they have to fear is that their marketing of Fear to the rabble is less successful than it used to be.

So Trump once again played his grotesquely seductive spider part to perfection as he sent his always-irresistible invitation to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to join him in his sticky oval-shaped web of a parlor.

The House Speaker-in-waiting and the Senate Majority Leader played their own supporting roles reasonably well, mawkishly casting their desperate gazes and pleadings toward the whirring TV cameras in the room as often as they directed them at their arachnoid host. 

Vice President Mike Pence had even less of a supporting role, because his non-speaking function as Chief Toady consisted entirely of swiveling his little white metronome of a head at the Democrats to Trump and then back again. To his credit, though, he was able to maintain a stolid manspreading pose throughout the skit that had him glued in the chair next to his more voluble manspreading boss. 

I don't know who was in charge of the sound system for this latest episode of the Trump Reality TV show, but somebody certainly neglected to give Pelosi a proper working microphone. Trump boomed out his incoherence, and even Chuck came through loud and clear as he vied with Trump for the opportunity to interrupt Nancy at every turn. Pelosi sounded like she was talking through a mask of cotton wool as she wonkishly and patiently and ineffectually attempted to lecture Trump on the mechanics of legislation.

It was a performance designed to show Trump at his bullying superior best next to the schoolmarm persona dreaded by many an American male even long after he's escaped the physical classroom. Trump succeeded mightily in showcasing the Democratic leaders as the hapless weaklings they are. Schumer was reduced to sputtering that Trump had lost two states, when he should have used his TV time to wax indignant over the very xenophobic idea of a Wall to keep out refugees and immigrants.

For her part, Pelosi carefully saved her (strategically leaked) anti-Trump vitriol until after the meeting, when it would be least effective. If only she had questioned his manhood right to his manspreading corpus and right to his sneering face, then it might actually have meant something. 

But that's not what Democrats do. They portray themselves as emotionally and intellectually superior victims in a futile attempt to create some space between GOP corruption and Democratic corruption. The maintenance of their smugness is more important to them than, say, agitating for Medicare for all and a federal jobs program. 

The Wall and the Shutdown of Doom episode momentarily deflected attention away from Trump's legal woes for the space of one more Trump-orchestrated 24 hour news cycle. With the corporate media and their talking heads so busily talking among themselves about impeachment and Oval Office manners and the "unprecedented" bicker-fest among America's top political leaders, there simply have not been enough resources left to cover matters of more pressing concern to the ordinary people who have been co-opted into giving these chronically weak people their very powerful jobs.

There certainly hasn't been enough time to cover the immensely popular Yellow Vests movement in France, other than for the occasional editorial bemoaning of President Emanuel Macron's imperialistic style and his failure to tamp down the discontent as ably and as glibly as his neoliberal pro-bank American counterpart, Barack Obama, so recently did.  

Decoding the Umpteenth Rising of Hillary

What better time for Hillary Clinton to cash in with the rest of the Democratic Doomsday Cartel than right before the congressional and statehouse elections?

Straight Outta The Atlantic

Fresh off her sticker-selling Internet campaign for the little people,  Clinton has now penned a self-righteous "op-ed" in The Atlantic aimed at members of her own class. The first tell is that she uses the pronoun "we" and not "you" when she offers her litany of dangers to "democracy", or should I say, the oligarchy. And lest you get the mistaken impression that she is entirely altruistic in her concern, there is this tiny-print nugget at the end of the piece: 

This essay was adapted from the afterword of the paperback edition of What Happened, which will be published on September 18.

As Ralphie groused about the Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Pin Ovaltine scam in A Christmas Story, "It's nothing but a lousy commercial!"

 This isn't to say that lousy commercialism is anything new or unexpected. There's always a profit motive in modern politics. Making money is what the recent mass outpouring of angst about Trump by the permanent Ruling Class essentially is. What they call the public good is really the private good of the rich and the well-connected. Trump sells, and not only for his own greedy benefit.

So it matters not that Hillary Clinton's essay is the epitome of self-serving hypocrisy and that each of her anti-Trump talking points apply just as aptly to her and her husband, and that her invective is a de facto boomerang. She doesn't care if everybody in the bottom 90% knows she is a bundle of lies. There are the "irredeemable" bottom-dwellers in her Basket of Deplorables whom she despises openly. And then there are those obsequients who are simply too afraid of Trump to criticize Democrats. These groups can effectively cancel each other out, as far as she and her cohort are concerned. And what's left of the Left? Sniff. She endorsed corrupt right-wing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo over progressive Cynthia Nixon. That "special place in hell for women who don't support other women" dreamed up by Madeline Albright only ever applied to Bernie Sanders supporters.

So the hypocrisy of condemning Trump over his imprisonment of migrant children when Hillary just two years ago called for sending refugee kids back where they came from to send a stern message to their irresponsible parents is easily ignored. Instead, she concentrates on the "monstrosity" of Trump lying about deaths of Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, rather than concentrating on how private equity vultures and members of her own party have long been agitating for the neoliberal austerity regimen which was immiserating residents of the Commonwealth long before Trump gleefully threw paper towels at them.

 If you're feeling nauseous right about now, but hate the chalky taste of Pepto Bismol, then give Clinton's commercial a read. It'll feel like sticking your finger down your throat to make yourself vomit. But if that prospect sounds too intense, I'll put on my Secret Decoder ring to transmit the gist of it:

Trump does so many despicable, deplorable things and tells so many loathsome lies she can't keep track of everything, although she did keep track of that one time he told 125 lies in 120 minutes. John Adams certainly never called Thomas Jefferson "Crooked Thomas" during that presidential race. And she can certainly relate, because Jefferson owned slaves and Hillary also oversaw prison slave labor during her time as Arkansas First Lady. You wouldn't ever catch her trying to upend the Status Quo! Not then, and not now and not ever.

Even though there is no evidence that Russia installed Trump in office, she will continue to treat this as her own personal truth. Trump is doing nothing to protect us against an unproven threat!

Trump is going after journalists. Although he hasn't shut down the corporate-owned media conglomerate, he would if he could. Hillary certainly never would, because as much as she hates the media, she never called them fake or insulted them. She had staff for that. She merely hid from them as much as she could on The Trail, in between those times that she used them to air her grievances against their unfairness toward her and Bill.

What's more, the Obama administration was also going after journalists with a record vengeance. And as newly-released documents reveal, Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a secret opinion in 2015 which casts US journalists as foreign agents and therefore fodder for surveillance under the draconian FISA Act.

Let me depart for a moment from the synopsis and insert this direct quote from the Atlantic infomercial:

When we can’t trust what we hear from our leaders, experts, and news sources, we lose our ability to hold people to account, solve problems, comprehend threats, judge progress, and communicate effectively with one another—all of which are crucial to a functioning democracy.

In other words, if people can't or won't swallow corporate propaganda whole, the Ruling Class suffers. Ordinary people lose the respect for corporate-controlled government that the oligarchs need to thrive and prosper. If the consent of the governed can no longer be manufactured by the self-serving Masters of the Universe, and the "narrative" cannot be narrowly proscribed, the aristocracy of the Secret Circle will find it increasingly hard to function under this renegade bomb-thrower of a president.

Now on with the sardonic interpretation of Hillary's message:

Trump refuses to release his tax returns, which is not comparable to Hillary's erasure of the State Department emails from her own secret server in her private basement. He is profiting from the presidency, while the hundreds of millions of dollars Bill and Hill raked in from the presidency and continue to rake in through their money-laundering influence-peddling charity are too noble to even be mentioned. Even though Trump is totally in it for his private gain, her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, where she admitted that her public position is different from her private position, were stolen by Wikileaks and shouldn't be heeded. Kill the messenger and blame the Russians instead, even if you have to do it 125 times in 120 minutes, or at least in the space of an hour of Rachel Maddow. (Catch Hillary on Rachel tonight, by the way!)

Trump undermines the unity which normally makes bipartisanship for the rich such a great propaganda scam. When Hillary says Democracy is rowdy by nature, what she really means is that there are always these petty fake squabbles among the movers and shakers of the Ruling Class to keep us alternately entertained and numbed. As they tried to convey to the lesser people during the Great John McCain Funeral Spectacular, when George Bush shared his candy with Michelle Obama during a pre-arranged camera pan:

We debate freely and disagree forcefully. It’s part of what distinguishes us from authoritarian societies, where dissent is forbidden. But we’re held together by deep “bonds of affection,” as Abraham Lincoln said, and by the shared belief that out of our fractious melting pot comes a unified whole that’s stronger than the sum of our parts.

In the good old affectionate days, the Clintons were actually good transactional buddies with the Trumps. They even attended Donald and Melania's wedding. And normally, those "free debates" are carefully orchestrated by a corporation instead of by the quaint League of Women Voters, and pesky third and fourth party candidates are barred from appearing. And most recently, of course, the Bernie Sanders challenge was effectively quashed by purges of primary voting rolls and a severely truncated primary debate schedule. Although Hillary bought her way into control of the Democratic Party, this was not corrupt or authoritarian.

So now that it's that magical time of year when they allow people to vote and where corporate control of candidates does not apply in every single case, the aristocracy must fear-monger for all that it's worth. And it's worth a lot.

Therefore, Hillary will call for reform in the form of the same piecemeal solutions which catapulted her to a de facto victory on both coasts in 2016. Get the money out of politics, but not for her. Expand national service programs so that the lesser people, at little to no pay, can pretend they're making a difference and that this is really a democracy - when what they're really doing is protecting the status quo of extreme, obscene and unequal wealth. Let's have automatic voting registration too. And then making choosing between pre-vetted corporate candidates mandatory under law!

When we think about politics and judge our leaders, we can’t just ask, “Am I better off than I was four years ago?” We have to ask, “Are we better off? Are we as a country better, stronger, and fairer?” Democracy works only when we accept that we’re all in this together.

Accept your lot, proles. At least you are allowed to live in the same geographical space as your betters, so shut up already about Medicare For All and free higher education. Because the most pressing concern is that "we" (the very rich) stay better off. That's how fake Democracy works.

The End.

Or is it? 

This woman is not going away. They say the third time's a charm, so who's to say it can't also be a third chance for the charmless?

Pass the Ovaltine with a chaser of Pepto. 

A Critique of Obama's Speech

There are two main "takeaways" (unappetizing packaged choices in the limited corporate news menu) from Barack Obama's speech at the University of Illinois on Friday. The first one is that he finally let loose and pummeled Donald Trump into pulp. The second one is that he has joined the progressive wing of the Democratic Party because he is endorsing Medicare for All.

The first observation is correct as far as it goes. Beating Trump into jelly is not exactly a hard thing to do. Since I didn't watch the speech, I have no idea how "fiery" it actually sounded, and with Obama, it's always smart to separate the soaring delivery from his actual words. So I have read the transcript rather than watching the video.

The second observation by fans, both within and without the corporate media,  is the same kind of misinterpretation of Obama's passive-aggressive verbosity that got them so inspired, and later so disappointed, during his eight-year tenure.

Despite all the hype, Obama is not advocating for single payer health care, not by a long shot.  Here is what he actually said to his audience of college students: 

So Democrats aren’t just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they’re running on good new ideas like medicare for all, giving workers seats on corporate boards, reversing the most egregious corporate tax cuts to make sure college students graduate.

That's it. That's all he said about Medicare for All. It's a "new" (huh?) good idea, some Democrats who aren't party leaders are running on it, ergo support all Democrats at the polls in November. Obama failed to mention that his own first set of official endorsements for Democratic candidates does not include the names of such Medicare for All proponents as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, or in fact any progressive primary challengers to sitting congress critters. He is not endorsing these progressive policies outright, but only insinuating that he is for the express purpose of getting disaffected young people to the polls. It's a classic bait and switch, but the mainstream press is jumping all over that one little paragraph in an act of massive complicity.

In another bit of classic Obama, the former president began the speech by praising the civil rights and economic justice warriors of yesteryear, not as examples we should emulate via direct action, but merely as examples of who should inspire us to dutifully cast our votes for Democrats:

 I cannot tell you how encouraged I’ve been by watching so many people get involved for the first time or the first time in a long time. They’re marching and they’re organizing and they’re registering people to vote and they’re running for office themselves.

Obama made absolutely no mention of the recent teacher strikes, including the latest actions in Washington state and (soon) in Los Angeles.

The corporate media are not calling out Obama on this bit of right-wing humblebragging, either:

And by the time I left office, household income was near its all-time high, and the uninsured rate hit an all-time low, poverty rates were falling. I mention this just so when you hear how great the economy is doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started. I’m glad it’s continued, but when you hear about this economic miracle that’s been going on, when the job numbers come out, monthly job numbers and suddenly Republicans are saying it’s a miracle, I have to kind of remind them, actually, those job numbers are the same as they were in 2015 and 2016 and -- anyway. I digress.

So we made progress, but -- and this is the truth -- my administration couldn’t reverse 40-year trends in only eight especially once Republicans took over the house of representatives in 2010 and decided to block everything we did. Even things they used to support.

So we pulled the economy out of crisis, but to this day, too many people who once felt solidly middle class still feel very real and very personal economic insecurity. Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, got Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder that come streaming through people’s televisions every single day. And these challenges get people worried and it frays our civic trust and it makes a lot of people feel like the fix is in and the game is rigged and nobody’s looking out for them.

Correction: household income for only the richest 10 percent is at an all-time high. And of course, if you average Jeff Bezos's wealth with that of the average Amazon employee, then yes, household wealth has skyrocketed.

Obama had two years with a congressional majority to "reduce those trends," but he preferred not to, not least because, as Wikileaks has revealed, his entire cabinet was not only vetted by Citigroup but generously peopled with its direct representatives. And isn't it so sad, he self-servingly goes on, that people "feel" so precarious even though he killed bin Laden and "wound down" -- not stopped, mind you -- the wars in the Middle East. These are not policies Obama says he himself created, but mere challenges to the ruling class about how to deal with people who "feel" the fix is in and the game is rigged.

His solution is not to offer solutions, like an end to wars and urging government criminal prosecutions of ruling class racketeers, but to guilt-trip young people into voting in the November midterms. If they don't, he lectures them, they are both cynical and lazy and not living up to the great civil rights leaders of the past, who paved the way for progressive success stories like Barack Obama.

Despite the allegedly inspiring and "fiery rhetoric" praised by the sycophantic media, Obama still cannot disguise the fact that he is offering the same old neoliberal, for-profit agenda as the only possible countermeasure to Trumpian "insanity." 

We know that people are tired of toxic corruption and that democracy depends on transparency and accountability, so Democrats aren’t just running on good old ideas like requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns, but on good new ideas like barring lobbyists from getting paid by foreign governments.

We know that climate change isn’t just coming. It’s here. So Democrats aren’t just running on good old ideas like increasing gas mileage in our cars, which I did and which Republicans are trying to reverse, but on good new ideas like putting a price on carbon pollution.

We know in a smaller, more connected world, we can’t just put technology back in a box. We can’t just put walls up all around America. Walls don’t keep out threats like terrorism or disease. And that’s why we propose leading our alliances and helping other countries develop and pushing back against tyrants.

Obama carefully does not mention that it was his policy idea to put immigrant families in prison and to deport more refugees and migrants than any other previous administration. He still limits desirable immigrants only to "dreamers and strivers" -- true believers in corporatism and capitalism rather than true believers in social justice and basic human survival. He carefully does not mention that he continued to press for the secretive and toxically corrupt corporate coups of the TransPacific Partnership and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) right up to the very end of Hillary Clinton's ill-fated campaign. The former Obama voters who opted for Trump were from some of the same rust belt states that saw their jobs disappear to "free" trade agreements and their sons and daughters' very lives disappear from fighting rich men's wars.

The newer trade agreements, the details of which were to be kept secret even for the first five years after ratification, assisted multinational corporations in bypassing the regulations of individual nation-states. They would have grossly expanded the use of Investor State Dispute Settlement Courts, which allow companies to sue governments if those governments' policies cause a loss of profits. They would allow transnational corporate actors to neutralize elections and dictate the policies of democratically-elected governments.

  Therefore, Obama calling Trump a "radical" for failing to uphold neoliberal norms is pretty rich. If he were honest, Obama would have decried the fact that unlike himself, Trump is not bothering to hide the realities of the class war of the rich versus the rest of us. Trump has dispensed with the soaring rhetoric or obfuscatory pretty words like Obama, who kept most of the people in line most of the time. Trump is endangering the ruling class right along with the working class. That is the real danger which has inspired Obama to speak out forcefully against his successor, who is not, as he once gushed, just another player in the 40-yarn line of the self-satisfied oligarchy. 

Here's what Obama cynically chuckled in a 2013 TV interview:

I mean, in most countries, you’ve got — you know, people call me a socialist sometimes, but, no, you’ve got to me real socialists. You’ll have a sense of what a — what a socialist is. (Laughter.) You know, the — I mean, I’m talking about lowering the corporate tax rate. My health care reform is based on the private marketplace. Stock market’s looking pretty good last time I checked, and, you know, it is true that I’m concerned about growing inequality in our system, but nobody questions the efficacy of market economies in terms of producing wealth and innovation and keeping us competitive.

Medicare for All? You have got to be kidding. There's not enough profit and cutthroat competition in it. To question capitalistic plunder is to question the goodness of the wealthy getting more wealthy by the day. It wouldn't be a faux democracy if the oligarchs couldn't innovate and compete with each other.


Is it a coincidence that the former president is coming out of his hedonistic cocoon the same week that Michael Moore's new documentary, "Fahrenheit 11/9" is hitting the big screens? While lambasting Trump, the film also takes direct aim at Obama and the Clintons and the Democratic Party for allowing Trump to come to power in the first place. One scene shows Obama taking that infamous dainty little sip of heavily filtered Flint water in a stunt to show the country that the lead-polluted water was safe. He got the usual appreciative chuckles from the complicit officials seated at the table as he promised some new pipes one of these decades. The water was not safe back in 2016, and it still is not safe today, despite Obama's glib reassurances to one of the poorest populations in America.

Unlike the corporate media narrative, which holds that Trump decided to run out of pure, racist jealousy of Obama, Moore posits that his entry into the 2016 race was really inspired by jealousy of rock star Gwen Stefani getting paid more money by NBC than he was.

And while the film is being widely lauded as an effective takedown of Trump, not many of the reviews are taking note of Moore's equally scathing takedown of Obama.

An exception is (surprisingly) the Washington Post, which writes in its own review:

As many shots as he takes at President Trump, the provocateur filmmaker is also eager to expose a Democratic establishment he says has not done enough to push back against the White House or advance a progressive agenda.

“One of the reasons I made this movie is that I’ve come to the conclusion that the old guard of the Democratic Party is a greater roadblock to social progress than Trump is,” Moore said in an interview. “Because they’re taking half-measures, because they’re beholden to the same money and interests.”

*****

As a further antidote to the tediously contrived Obama vs Trump made-for-TV infotainment spectacle, here's Chris Hedges talking about his latest book, America: the Farewell Tour. As one member of the audience at the recent Politics and Prose bookstore appearance in Washington, D.C. observes, Hedges is a lot more fiery and militantly hopeful in person than he is in his writings.  

Trump Is Perfectly Normal (*Updated)

Let me qualify that. Donald Trump is every bit as perfectly normal as the pathological soul-destroying capitalism which passes for democracy in our so-called free world.

That's why I find the overreaction (*see update below) to his gaslighting tour of Europe this week to be so amusing. Once again, our renegade president is single-handedly destroying all the advanced Norms of Civilization, which, legend has it, reached their finest hour in the McCarthyite post-World War II years of American Empire. The smell of neoliberal punditry in the morning, mourning Decline and Fall, is both bracing and nauseating.

The earthshaking news is that Trump insulted Theresa May in the pages of a British tabloid (yuck) when she'd so movingly laid out the red carpet for him at Winston Churchill's palatial estate, and he so awkwardly grabbed her hand like an adolescent swain wearing his first tux to his first prom. Fetch the smelling salts, pronto, to alleviate the horror of what the New York Times called this "remarkable breach of protocol!" 

You'd think he'd pulled a Poppy Bush and puked all over her bright red dress or something, when all he was doing was making the world safe for capitalism, but minus the normal feel-good concern-trolling mask of smarmy neoliberal spectacle.

But n-o-o-o-h. He had to insult America's NATO client states right to their faces, demanding that they pay their fair share for continued inclusion in the Military-Industrial Complex welfare state for the very, very rich and the very, very powerful. It's extortion, I tells ya! And the defense contractors of America are laughing all the way to the bank while their media lackeys on CNN and MSNBC are phonily tut-tutting Trump's etiquette breaches in exchange for their seven-figure salaries.

What's being billed as the ultimate coup de grace to the so-called World Order is yet to come, when Trump meets Putin in Finland. What will he "give away" to this vile dictator, who so rudely annexed Crimea and who is so abnormally meddling in Iran and Syria and Eastern Ukraine? If you listen to the servants of the Military-Industrial Complex tell it, tiny Estonia with its thousands of heavily armed US troops protecting it is becoming newly vulnerable to the ghost of Stalin himself, thanks to our Kremlin Stooge-in-Chief. 

 And most distasteful of all, the over-hyped "bromance" of Trump and Putin is having the awful side-effect of eliciting latent anti-gayness in all those lovable liberals for whom celebration of diversity substitutes for actual progressive policies. (see the homophobic... er, I mean iconoclastic, New York Times animated cartoon treatment of the imagined TrumPutin sodomy if you don't believe me.)

"Trump must not capitulate to Putin!" shrills former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice in the latest of her long series of fear-mongering moralistic op-eds selling the concept of Russophobia to explain away all of her own boss's decisions favoring Wall Street over Main Street.

( )... precisely because President Trump is anything but typical — including in that his campaign is under investigation for possibly coordinating with Russia to win the presidency and that he consistently lauds Vladimir V. Putin while denigrating our closest allies — his coming summit with Mr. Putin in Helsinki is a dangerous and counterproductive undertaking. The risks are many and the benefits, if any, are difficult to discern.

It's Donald Rumsfeld's damned known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns all over again. But in keeping with the prescribed Bromance narrative, Rice at least tries to keep it subliminally sexy, if not quite Kama Sutra-ish: 

In normal circumstances, the American president would press Russia on multiple fronts. He would refresh demands that Russia: withdraw from Ukraine and renounce its illegal claim to Crimea; cease backing the murderous Assad regime in Syria and work for a diplomatic outcome that protects the rights and security of all Syrians; stop supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan; halt provocative military actions on NATO’s periphery and harassment of United States personnel in Moscow; extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty on nuclear weapons and come clean on its violation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty; press the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, to denuclearize completely; cease destructive cyberoperations; and halt interference in America’s electoral processes and domestic politics, or face harsh additional sanctions. There is a rich and full agenda to pursue, if only we had a president who cared to advance American interests.

As a loyal member of the Duopoly, Rice doesn't even have to outline what "American interests" are, because she is not writing for a general audience. Through the ever-reliable Times, she is addressing her own class, aka the Establishment-in-Exile, aka the Flailing Brotherhood/Sisterhood of the Travailing Pants (as in very heavy breathing, not couture) Still, I do have to admit that her arcane prescription for "split-yielding" at the Bromance summit does have some teasing erotic potential.

Meanwhile, where would aphrodisiacal Resistance punditry be without Paul Krugman?

According to his latest column, the United States leadership spectacle was absolutely chock-full of considerate lovers and moral heroes before Trump came along to destroy the myth of great American male-centered greatness. Ignoring Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and all the CIA coups in between, Krugman defends the Pax America myth with all the passionate punditry he can muster:  

The institutions Trump is trying to destroy were all created under U.S. leadership in the aftermath of World War II. Those were years of epic statesmanship — the years of the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan, in which America showed its true greatness. For having won the war, we chose not to behave like a conqueror, but instead to build the foundations of lasting peace....

 And what Trump is trying to do is undermine that system, making bullying great again.

My published response:

  Trump is the personification of capitalism run amok.

He fires at whim. He's immune to public shaming.. His pursuit of wealth and power is relentless. He cares for nobody but his immediate gene pool, just as the capitalistic system itself has no regard for anyone other than owners and the investor class.

He's a very stable crook and a master gaslighter. Taunting his prey one minute and fawning over them the next is how he keeps them off-balance before either lunging for the kill or leaving it for later.

This is exactly how bosses, from CEOs all the way down to middle managers, instill fear into workers every day of their precarious lives.

Thanks to both our major parties moving further right in the past 50 years, there are now few legal restraints against either public and private tyrannical behavior or graft. 

 It's no surprise that Trump confuses "the country" with "my company." It's no surprise that the longstanding, pre-existing world order of profits over people has produced such a glut of reactionary global leaders like him.

It's no use griping that Trump is destroying "norms," or pretending that everything was cool before he came along. More than a dozen wars, with millions killed and trillions of dollars wasted since World War II, coupled with the constant assaults on our social programs, have created a virtual Petri dish for all kinds of Trumps to grow and thrive like Blobs.

We need some social democracy, and we need it right now.

A new New Deal or bust.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

*Update 7/14: I wrote the above before Friday's indictment of the dozen Russian hackers, announced just as Trump was breaching all kinds of protocol with the queen, not least of which was failing to bow and walking ahead of her while reviewing the guards with the beaver hats.

It's not surprising that #Resistance, Inc. is treating the indictment as a conviction instead of the standard accusation requiring presentation of evidence in a court of law. That is because the accused will never show up for a trial. That is because the Justice Department and Robert Mueller do not expect there ever to actually be a trial, other than the kind performed in the media. Otherwise, they would have indicted Wikileaks and Julian Assange, who, unlike the Russians, is very vulnerable to extradition. 

This is so obviously a political wrench in the works of the Trump-Putin summit it doesn't even bear further analysis. The New York Times is even editorializing on its news homepage that Trump ordered Russia to "hack" the computers of Hillary and the Democrats, and that Russian intelligence became Trumpist lemmings in the space of a New York minute.

It seems to me that if there were true treason at work here, Trump would have been gone by now.

All Mueller would probably have to do to get Trump on felonies is produce his tax returns and bank records to prove any number of sordid financial (not treasonous)  ties to Russian oligarchs. I suspect the problem with that gambit is that it would expose too many other valuable Establishment figures and political donors to be worth the risk. John Podesta's lobbyist brother has already been tainted from the Manafort indictment, after all, so I'm sure there are more where he came from. Trump has gotten where he is today by importuning all kinds of politicians from both establishment parties, along with their bankers, factotums and relatives. 

I can't help wondering whether Hillary Clinton will use the indictments as vindication, proof that Donald Trump is a Russian stooge who stole the election and therefore a rationale for a third time's-the-charm rerun. My suspicions are raised not by her relentless fundraising emails on behalf of various progressive veal pens, but by the planted news stories last week of her and Bill flying coach on not one, but two, occasions. She is telegraphing her born-again down-home populism, folks! 

Happy Bastille Day.