But politics is not by any means his first career choice. Schiff is a failed Hollywood screenwriter who, despite his current job, is still working on another script in hopes of finally making it as big in hometown Tinseltown as he's making it big in Washington.
The impeachment report that he wrote and just released to glowing mainstream media reviews has all the trappings of the spy thriller which he admits to crafting in his spare time. I predict that Tom Hanks will be tapped to play the part of the intrepid screenwriter-turned-prosecutor-turned congressman who, with the help of a few unaccountable and unelected patriots of the CIA and the State Department, saved the Permanent War State from Donald Trump's oafish transactional diplomacy and tepid and phony gestures toward world peace.
Schiff himself can do the off-screen sonorous voice-over of himself reading from his jingoistic, overblown Impeachment Report as the opening credits roll on the big screen, or more likely, on the small Netflix screen after the star-studded premiere at Constitution Hall or the Kennedy Center. Hear him now as you read the script:
America remains the beacon of democracy and opportunity for freedom-loving people around the world. From their homes and their jail cells, from their public squares and their refugee camps, from their waking hours till their last breath, individuals fighting for human rights, journalists uncovering and exposing corruption, persecuted minorities struggling to survive and preserve their faith, and countless others around the globe just hoping for a better life look to America. What we do will determine what they see, and whether America remains a nation committed to the rule of law.Now, if the impeachment movie about the impeachment movie that is currently playing out in real, or actually unreal time, is a documentary rather than a fan-fic of the right-wing Neocon Democratic/CIA/ War Party in a pretend-battle against the ultra-right Neocon Republican/CIA/ War Party, among the images we should see on our screens are:
--The half million homeless people living in America on any given night. The situation is especially dire in Schiff's home state of California, due in large part to the mortgage foreclosures of the last decade, unaffordable rents charged by private equity landlords like Blackstone, job losses, lousy wages and other miseries orchestrated by and for the Oligarchy with the help of the corrupt political duopoly.An average of three homeless people die on the streets of Los Angeles County every single day. The death toll is expected to rise to a thousand in 2020.
--Record numbers of mainly black and brown people locked up in America's for-profit privatized prisons, while white collar criminals like WeWork's Adam Neumann are not only going free, they're collecting billions of dollars in exit packages. And yes, there is already a Hollywood movie about this massive fraud in the works to give us a sense of theatrical justice in lieu of a televised perp walk or another true-life prison documentary.
--Increasing numbers of refugees and migrants arriving at our borders and Europe's to escape the crime and poverty engendered by US-led regime change coups and wars to advance corporate interests - what Adam Schiff and the Impeachers euphemize as "national security." Above all, the refugee crisis is engendered by the Capitalocene Epoch's destruction of the environment through forcing monoculture upon global populations at the very same time they imprison them with debt and austerity through International Monetary Fund loans. Border concentration camps for kids, with imprisoned refugees crying for freedom but mostly crying for their parents would be a top impeachable offense if it weren't so inconveniently bipartisan.
--As Schiff intones the words "to their last breath," we might see footage of Americans dying prematurely in record numbers because they can't afford to see a doctor. We might see child refugees drowning in bodies of water as disparate as the Rio Grande and the Mediterranean Sea in a futile attempt to escape the wars and famines directly caused by the same American foreign policy apparatus that Donald Trump is so seriously offending by using it for his own selfish political purposes.
--Schiff's introductory voice-over would conclude with the victims of America's drone wars. As he bloviates about how "persecuted minorities struggling to survive" look to America for hope, we will see terrorized Yemeni, Pakistani and Afghan children unable to sleep at night as they listen for the tell-tale signs of drone activity above their heads.
They need not wonder whether the removal or defeat of Trump will protect them. With the Obama Justice Department secretly drafting a "rule of law" which allows any president to act as their judge, jury and executioner, with no oversight and no accountability for "collateral damage," nobody is safe. The bodies are not even being counted.
They need not wonder whether America will protect them when Adam Schiff himself was among the Impeachers who just voted to renew the Patriot Act, granting the despised and feared Donald Trump the continuing power to conduct unfettered mass surveillance. This is on top of most Democrats gifting him with more than $700 billion this year for more drones, bombs and such military hardware as a Hellfire missiles equipped with razor-sharp blades designed to slice people to death. Described as a 100-pound flying switchblade or "The Flying Ginsu." the CIA and Pentagon developed this horrific weapon in secret, and justify its use by claiming that it spares "innocent civilians." So perhaps the Schiff movie could end with pictures of responsible slicing and dicing of humanity as a way to preserve the faith of the whole world in America's beneficence. After all, if the Guillotine could have been so successfully marketed as a humane death machine during the Reign of Terror, why not a guillotine that actually flies and kills by remote control?
As a matter of fact, the Trump war machine just deployed another Flying Ginsu near the Turkey- Syria on Monday - the very same day that Adam Schiff released his impeachment recommendations. The razor blade bomb also reportedly was the weapon that took out ISIS leader Abu Khayr Al Masr two years ago.
The Impeachment Movie itself is a Grade Z slasher dud with some truly terrible and trite dialogue. And Adam Schiff and his supporting cast of complicit media and political enablers are reactionary box office poison.
Personally, I could barely get past that one blood-curdling introductory paragraph of his report, which is nothing more than a propaganda broadside to gin up popular support of more endless wars for profit, the most deadly of which is currently waged by Ukraine proxy between two nuclear powers. That potential apocalypse makes the Flying Ginsu look like a preschool Nerf sword set.
But look over there! A corrupt president on one side of the US oligarchy tried to use an American-controlled corrupt foreign leader to investigate a corrupt domestic political rival on the other side of the US oligarchy. It's the only crime or scandal in the world that they're willing to talk about as they struggle to sell their competing narratives to a public that is either riled up out of all reason, or just plain bored.
They want to deflect your attention from the real horrors, small or large, that afflict you and your fellow human beings every single day. If the corporate media doesn't cover them, they do not even exist.
