Political Mob Families Call Christmas Truce

It's that most wonderful time of the year, when the racketeers in Congress put aside their petty partisan differences just long enough to have their big party and pay their annual mob dues before they all head off to the beaches, the ski slopes and the high-dollar fundraisers.

It's an especially rewarding time for President Donald Trump, whom the House Democrats just honored for his cruel treatment of immigrants and his cruel cuts to the SNAP (food stamp) program by giving him his very own Space Force, a bona fide fourth branch of the military, along with enhanced killing powers by way of another nearly trillion-dollar stocking stuffer for his Pentagon. This was an especially generous gift in light of the publication of documents in the Washington Post which show that the past three administrations have deliberately lied about the "progress" of the multi-trillion dollar Afghanistan war and occupation. Adam Schiff, the Democrat who spent all last week lambasting the unpatriotic and corrupt Trump, grotesquely gushed that the Democrats' gift to the president is "the most progressive defense bill we have passed in decades."

 The Democrats even gave Trump his very own worker-punishing NAFTA clone package with his name on it. In a grab-bag ripoff if there ever was one, the Democrats in return got a relatively paltry twelve weeks of paid family leave for federal workers only. They apparently didn't want to act too greedy by demanding that Bad Santa Trump also reverse his cruel pre-Christmas decision to cut nearly a million people from SNAP (food stamps) which also includes cuts to home heating assistance.

This hellish Saturnalia kind of makes the much ballyhooed and ridiculously limited articles of impeachment the House is debating in the same breath look like dessert for Donald Trump.. It's more of a six-course meal for him, because he'll get unprecedented nonstop TV time soon after the holidays. It won't matter if the corporate media strives mightily to cast this as negative publicity for him, because he'll cast his own self as a victim-hero for the ages. 

He'll be able to make hay, and rightly so, over the shocking revelations that among its other crimes, the FBI actually tampered with the physical evidence it presented to the FISA court in its investigation of his campaign operative Carter Page. No matter that the otherwise scathing report by Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice Inspector General, feebly concluded that the actual investigation itself was begun legitimately, and that there was no evidence of political motivation for FBI malfeasance and no evidence of a Deep State plot against the president. That's simply because, he acknowledged in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the people at the FBI were vague when questioned about their motivations and he doesn't purport to be a mind reader. 

The FBI, now joined at the hip with the Democratic Party in its utterly phony #Resistance, Inc. movement, has been revealed to be rotten to its very core, and the undemocratic Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has (not for the first time) been revealed as a rubber stamp for all manner of abuse. It is so rotten that even extremist Republicans like Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz came off as righteous civil liberties champions during Thursday's Senate hearing on the matter. For the first time since 9/11, the most diehard war hawks are questioning the wisdom of having a secret court where the targets of investigations aren't even informed that they're under investigation. No matter if, when Graham said "it can happen to anyone," he was mainly thinking about himself and his fellow right-wing politicians.

Sometimes mistakes get made, and justice trickles down by sheer luck. Until, that is, the political racketeers figure out that even a trickle of democracy threatens to erode capitalism, and in a reactionary panic they turn up their own fire hoses of freedom to full throttle and aim them at the huddled masses both at home and abroad. But they're running dry on their excuses, and the pathetic hot air left in the wake of their mendacious gushers hasn't got the power to terrorize us, let alone convince us of their kindly flag-wrapped motivations.

Why else would Speaker Nancy Pelosi allow for a minimalist impeachment of Trump, other than to ensure that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren remain trapped in a Senate trial while corporatists Biden, Bloomberg and Buttigieg pretend to fight Trump out there and she pretends to fight him over here, in the cynically-named People's House?