Killing the Antiwar Message Along With the Messenger

It's better to hate Tucker Carlson than to hate war.

That's the theme of Frank Bruni's latest New York Times column, in which he accuses naive peace-loving progressives of developing a crush on the Fox News personality for his audacious antiwar messaging and his critique of Donald Trump's assassination of Quassim Soleimani.

Suddenly you’re digging him. At least a little bit. I know, I’ve seen the tweets, read the commentary, heard the chatter, detected the barely suppressed cheer: Hurrah for Tucker Carlson. If only we had more brave, principled Republicans like him.
Right out of the gate, he protested President Trump’s decision to kill Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian military commander, noting that it didn’t square with the president’s determination not to get bogged down in the Middle East and warning of the possibility and horror of full-blown war. Your pulse quickened. You perked up.

Never mind the lack of brave, principled Democrats, whose own opposition to Trump's actions was limited to a nonbinding resolution that only pretends to limit his war powers. Because Fox News regularly and unfairly blasts the Democratic Party, it behooves us to defend establishment Democrats even when the criticism "from the other side" is valid. Therefore, Bruni gushes that Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposed the Iraq invasion but only very grudgingly admits that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer voted for it.

Instead of writing an antiwar column of his own, from a more humanistic point of view, Bruni chooses instead to highlight Tucker Carlson's history of racism and Trump-worship, thereby giving both the liberal interventionists and the neocons a complete pass and tainting antiwar sentiment across the board.

As Matt Gertz of Media Matters perceptively noted, Carlson’s antiwar stance “is not a break from his past support for Trump or his channeling of white nationalist tropes, but a direct a result of both.” Gertz explained that in the mind-set of Carlson and many of his fans on the far right, energy spent on missions in another hemisphere is energy not spent on our southern border. It’s no accident that, in regard to the Middle East, he and (White nationalist Richard) Spencer are on the same page.

See how subtly Bruni simultaneously gaslights and indirectly smears by association the leftist antiwar movement? I'm only surprised he didn't pounce, as other pro-war establishment Democrats have done, on the appearances of Glenn Greenwald and Tulsi Gabbard on Tucker Carlson's show to offer their own more leftist critiques of US imperialism and militarism. 

Bruni's column succeeds in completely changing the subject. It also ticks off the requisite "shoot the messenger" box. If you still think Tucker Carlson might have something valid to say, the warning is, then you'd better think again. You don't want to get caught inadvertently quoting him and then risk getting called a racist or a closet Trumpist by your friends, do you?

  Since Tucker Carlson holds such loathsome views on many social issues, the implicit message is, then it must naturally follow that liberals make up for wars' destruction by being more inclusive and diverse and sincere and well-meaning. All Bruni is saying by omission is, give war a chance. And never mind that the bipartisan bombs dropped in the past two decades on at least eight different countries in Africa and the Middle East are almost exclusively killing and maiming black and brown-skinned people. War and imperialism and colonialism are racist in both thought and in deed. The "good side" of the oligarchic duopoly simply stifles the racist rhetoric more adeptly than the "bad side" does.

My published comment on Bruni's column:

With CNN and MSNBC stuffed to the gills with CIA and Pentagon analysts. it should come as no surprise that one of the few antiwar pundits left standing will attract a certain amount of squeamish liberal enthusiasm.

 Does anybody remember when MSNBC summarily fired Phil Donahue for his own antiwar sentiment during the run-up to the Iraq invasion? Follow the weapons industry/fossil fuel/corporate sponsor money!

An overlap between liberalism and libertarianism is nothing new. Ron Paul, for instance, attracts a fair number of lefties for his opposition to the war/surveillance state despite his connections to the racist John Birch Society and his opposition to government health and welfare programs.

One of the best antiwar analysts writing today is Andrew Bacevich, who contributes regularly to The American Conservative. and who has criticized US wars of aggression from Vietnam to Iraq and beyond. His latest book, "The Age of Illusions," chronicles how the end of the Cold War unleashed a rampage of neoliberal capitalism and neoconservative militarism which have become the subversive new definitions of democracy. It also helped usher in the Trump presidency.

 Of course, Trump himself will likely never read this book or any other book for that matter. So if it disturbs you that a racist antiwar poser like Carlson occasionally stays the itchy trigger finger of our Fox News addict of a president, that's a clue that we need many more progressive antiwar voices in the media.

New York Times Discovers Cyber Racism

There is a ton of ugly, nasty, racist stuff on the Internet, and it occasionally inspires somebody to tear himself away from his screen long enough to commit mass mayhem. And The Times is on it.

In light of the well-publicized eruption of Internet-addicted people who act out correlating with Trump's racist rhetoric, columnist Frank Bruni goes so far as to flatly predict that "the Internet will be the death of us."  

What a glittering dream of expanded knowledge and enhanced connection it was at the start. What a nightmare of manipulated biases and metastasized hate it has turned into....

The internet is the technology paradox writ more monstrous than ever. It's a nonpareil tool for learning, roving and constructive community-building. But it's unrivaled, too, in the spread of lies, narrowing of interests and erosion of common cause. It's a glorious buffet, but it pushes individual users toward only the red meat or just the kale. We're ridiculously overfed and ruinously undernourished.
It creates terrorists. But well shy of that, it sows enmity by jumbling together information and misinformation to a point where there's no discerning the real from the Russian.

Bruni fights disinformation not with truth, but with disinformation of his own. It seems that he either didn't hear, or chooses to ignore, those rumors of the premature death of RussiaGate - despite recent sheepish obits from some of its own proponents. We've all been ridiculously overfed on a red-baiting mystery meat diet of Clintonoid nothing-burgers from Bruni and his Times cohort for going on two years now. 

So now, they also want you to believe that it's not the past 40 years of Reagan/Clinton neoliberalism, aka government welfare for billionaires and corporations and austerity for everyone else, but the monolithic Internet which has been sowing all these divisions among people who otherwise would be feeling all warm and tolerant toward their fellow men and utterly satisfied with their own precarious lives. 

For all that liberals like Bruni decry the divisiveness sown by Donald Trump, they ignore the divisiveness sown by the most extreme wealth inequality in modern history, an inequality created deliberately by a political plutocracy that has since devolved into an oligarchy. 

Blaming "Russians" for all our ills is no better than Trump blaming Mexicans and Muslims for all our ills.

And since he has duly declared the Internet to be the root of all evil, Bruni has no solution other than to monitor/censor free speech and prevent people from talking to each other. Because "Democracy is at stake." And we're all gonna die.

Democracy, you see, has nothing to do with actual people. Democracy as defined by the Establishment is Capitalism. The truth that we are all more likely to die from climate-destroying neoliberal capitalism than we are from the Internet must be suppressed at all costs. Instead, we are urged to cling to our "common cause" without the necessity of such a thing even being defined for us.

My published comment:

About a year ago I Googled "Martin Luther King," and near the top of the list was a website called "Martin Luther King. org."

The site was/is run by a white nationalist organization devoted to sliming Dr. King.

This year, under pressure, Google finally adjusted its algorithm. The hate site isn't there any more, at least not among the first several pages of search results for MLK.

But it makes you wonder how many impressionable people, including kids researching MLK for school assignments, clicked on the site and had their minds poisoned.

Cyber racism has been around as long as the Internet. It's illegal in Australia, but not in any other country that I know of.

Meanwhile Google, in its newfound socially responsible zeal, has also started suppressing material from legitimate sites which it deems not to be "mainstream" enough.

This censorship is a double edged sword, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to mangle a couple of metaphors. lt's like randomly installing spike strips on a freeway. Reckless drivers and careful drivers alike are indiscriminately stopped in their tracks. Many of the reckless drivers get away anyhow by finding detours, while many careful, responsible drivers become too leery even to venture out, lest driving "be the death of them."

Since (to use another cliche) you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, one solution would be to teach children, beginning at a very young age, how to think critically and to separate truth from lies.

Concentrating on Trump and such fringe-dwelling lowlife racists as Dylann Roof (who shot up an all-black South Carolina church in 2015) and most recently, Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers, also diverts public attention from the fact that police kill an average of three citizens a day, and that more black people are in prison today than were enslaved prior to the Civil War. The foreign victims of our state-sanctioned drone assassinations and undeclared wars are neither named nor cared about, not even on the Internet. Google and Facebook are helping see to that via their censorship policies.

The other side of cyber racism and cyber hate is the mass epidemic of media complicity and public apathy as it pertains to state-sanctioned violence. This attitude of complicity and apathy is beginning to change somewhat, but only because Donald Trump is president and he has dispensed with the dog-whistle racism and patriotic platitudes of "normal" presidents in favor of a bullhorn hybrid of Bull Connor and Benito Mussolini. Politicians and corporate media personalities are finally willing to call people like Sayoc and Bowers "domestic terrorists." Not because it is right, but because it makes Trump look bad and Democrats look good. 

You might remember that then-FBI Director James Comey heartily resisted calling Dylann Roof a terrorist back when the USA was so busily funding Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria and then entrapping/arresting American youths for "aspiring" to join ISIS.

Liberals in the Age of Trump are finally beginning to accept the fact that racist attitudes are not just limited to the "red state" South, but are as American as apple pie, and that the US is not, as Paul Krugman blithely posited during those epic Confederate flag tear-downs after the South Carolina church massacre, "a much less racist nation than it used to be."

Trump did not create neo-racism. He didn't invent American fascism. He just tapped into our pre-existing subterranean rivers, and sucked up the ancient polluted water, and spit it back out in words, actions, and more Trump-branded merchandise posing as political leadership.

The Bright Side of Despair

The Democrats have been so caught up in the witch-hunts of RussiaGate and selective #Me-Tooism that the blitzkrieg known as The Great Tax Heist of 2017 has them looking more like castrated deer in the headlights than usual. Far from erupting into a state of rebellion over the passage of the bill, they're cowering in a state of mass confusion when they aren't alternately complaining and seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

"Just you wait, you nasty Republicans, until 2018 or 2020, or the next century, when people will finally -finally! - wise up to your shenanigans!" is the common refrain echoing from the Democratic leadership and their all-too-complicit co-dependents in the mass media.

In a clueless nod to Stanley Kubrick's satiric masterpiece about bumbling Russophobes in high places, New York magazine chirpily offers "6 Reasons For Progressives To Stop Worrying and Love the GOP Tax Scam."

They are so very heartening that I'm sure you already know them all by heart. All together now:

1. It's so horrible, all that Dems need do is to sit back and relax and a restoration of "power" shall be theirs due to a mass outpouring of ruefully grateful voters. You can literally run as John Q. Generic, and you'll be a shoo-in.

2. When they do take back power, they will immediately expand the welfare state! ( just as Obama did back in 2009 when he had a Democratic super-majority in Congress and still rewarded Wall Street to the detriment of Main Street, and refused to use budget reconciliation as ruthlessly as the GOP has done this year.)

3. Trump raised taxes on everybody and therefore social democracy is inevitable! (um... large chunks of the middle class, unless they reside on the expensive coasts, will not realize they wuz robbed until about 2027, when their tax cuts are due to sunset even as the corporate rates remain permanent.)

 4. It should mollify Democrats' fear of deficits! (as we all know from our study of recent history, Obama's first reaction to the Bush administration's trillion dollars' worth of war debt and tax cuts for the rich was to delay sunsetting the Bush tax cuts for the rich as payment to his own donors, as he offered a tepid stimulus package hiding even more tax cuts and gifts to high finance. He refused to consider Medicare for All,  a guaranteed federal jobs program and living wage legislation, at the same time his Justice Department vigorously exonerated all the Wall Street malefactors. And then he used his supermajority to seat his infamous Deficit Reduction, or Cat Food, Commission.)

5. Blue states will be able to shield their own safety nets from GOP depredations! ( How? by raising state taxes, which have now been deemed non-deductible under Trump's federal codes? by taxing high-speed Wall Street trades, and Hollywood, and Silicon Valley to the hilt and thus do away with all the money that cash-needy Democratic candidates count on?)

6. Republicans probably won't have the votes for spending cuts! (But not to worry - there are always Democrats ready to play. If they were able to help put an end to long-term unemployment insurance benefits while they still had their majority during the Obama years, anything is possible.)

Now, if you still persist in seeing the light at the end of tunnel as the blinding glare of an oncoming locomotive ready to mow you down, rather than as a beacon of hope, then Frank Bruni of the New York Times has some strange love of his own to offer. Democrats should simply yank the Republicans' "values" talking points right out from under them, and make them their very own! (while still yammering away on Russia and partisan #MeTooism, of course, to show how original and bold they truly are.) They especially should not abandon the Clinton-Obama-Third Way lie that Deficits Matter and therefore give ammunition to the plutonomy's propaganda that social spending cuts which hurt regular people will have to - just have to! - offset the tax windfall for the obscenely rich.

Bruni gushes forth with a noxious blend of market-beholden neoliberalism and war-mongering neoconservatism:

Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility because they don’t pretend that they can afford grand government commitments — whether distant wars or domestic programs — without collecting the revenue for them.

Democrats are the party of patriotism, because they’re doing something infinitely more urgent and substantive than berating football players who kneel during the national anthem. They’re recognizing that a hostile foreign power tried to change the course of an American presidential election. They’re pressing for a full accounting of that. They’re looking for fixes, so that we can know with confidence that we control our own destiny going forward. The president, meanwhile, plays down the threat, and Republicans prop him up.

Democrats are the party of national security. They don’t taunt and get into Twitter wars with the rulers of countries that just might send nuclear warheads our way. They don’t alienate longtime allies by flashing contradictory signals about their commitment to NATO. The leader of the Republican Party does all of that and more, denying the G.O.P. any pretense to stewardship of a stable world order.

Democrats are the law-and-order party. While many Republicans and their media mouthpiece, Fox News, labor to delegitimize the F.B.I. and thus inoculate Trump, Democrats put faith in prosecutors, agents and the system.

Where do I sign up for my admission ticket to the Big Tent? Do I interpret the light at the end of the tunnel hopefully, pragmatically or despairingly?

My (Times censor-proof) published response to Bruni: 

Moving the Democratic Party further right and claiming the moral high ground won't win elections. The dubious virtue of austerity for Main Street helped lose them a thousand seats in the past decade - a decade that saw the largest transfer of household wealth to the top 1% in our country's history.

Sure, blame gerrymandering. But Trump and the GOP will never be defeated if all that Dems can offer is "Incrementalism We Can Believe In." Trillion-dollar wars and world supremacy don't make up for the lack of universal health care and stagnating wages at home.

Even before Trump came along with his reckless tweets, America's "standing" was on the wane. Corporation-friendly trade deals and the global economic crisis caused by finance capital gone wild have destroyed millions of lives and livelihoods besides ours.

A new report co-authored by Thomas Piketty shows that the US is now the most unequal of all Western nations. This deliberately manufactured wealth gap will only intensify, as social and natural and political catastrophes become the new normal.

Our incarceration nation now imprisons one-third of all black men at some point in their lives, and on average, three US citizens are killed by law enforcement every 24 hours. Do you really think glorifying the FBI and the CIA, and scarifying about Russia, will fire up millions of oppressed people to come out and vote Democrat?

The Democrats don't need to be more like Republicans. They need to be more like New Deal Democrats.

The Trump of Doom

If the polls are correct, Hillary Clinton has this election in the bag. And so, as the quadrennial travesty draws to a close, the media are now entering their own final phase of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching. They've converged into an elitist mob intent upon stomping Trump's political corpse into an unrecognizable blob so that they can all move on and forget they ever had a hand in creating the monster in the first place.

To cover their sensitive asses, they're supplementing their contrived agony with an exercise in soul-searching. Their self-defined insular dilemma is this: how do they treat Donald Trump on the day after he loses and on all the post-loser days and months to come? Do they continue covering him, or do they just ignore him?

Frank Bruni of the New York Times has nobly volunteered his own therapeutic services to his peers. As a pundit who has made Trump the centerpiece of his jeering, shocked and outraged biweekly columns for well over a year now, he now strokes his chin and ponders how on God's lush green earth he and his colleagues can rid themselves of their Trump addiction in a proper and seemly manner:

We need rules for quitting him, guidelines for the circumstances in which coverage of him is legitimate and those in which it isn’t. That distinction is all the more crucial because he seems poised to undermine important institutions and the democratic process itself. We can lend that effort more credibility or less by paying rapt attention to it or not.

 He’s already teeing up a stunt: his possible rejection of the election returns. How much should we indulge this tantrum, and for how long? If Trump actually marshals the necessary strategy and resources for legal challenges in states where the results allow them — if he hires lawyers and files paperwork — that’s an indisputably newsworthy development. If he simply rages? That’s not.

But like many an addict before him, Bruni ditches rehab in favor of scapegoating his co-dependent enablers: the rapt audience. Were it not for the hordes of shallow, celebrity-obsessed consumers of journalistic content, pundits like Bruni never would have been tempted to indulge themselves with the Trump drug.

 The greatest power resides with the audience — which bears much of the culpability, too. Never before have news organizations been able to judge so quickly and accurately what our consumers respond to. If those consumers hadn’t demonstrated such intense interest in Trump, we probably wouldn’t have, either. And if they turn from Trump, they can be sure that most of us will, too, without much equivocation or delay.

You really have to hand it to Bruni. First, he foists upon the electorate the magical ability to have learned about Trump by pure osmosis, without the aid of mass media. And at the same time he demotes them from citizens to consumers. Maybe, without their knowledge, they learned about Trump from searching for bargains in Walmart. Who knew that millions of people had so much power? And the mouth-breathers then had the nerve to hook the hapless mass media with their disgusting addicting drugs. Shame on them! They should have flushed Bruni's stash down the toilet at the same time they flushed their own.

But Bruni vows to show "courage and restraint" in his Trump coverage in the future. The goal of post-Trump punditry is to improve upon style, not substance. He concludes it's all about "the tone."

My published response:

It's not whether the media can overcome the Trump habit, it's whether they're willing to explore and help wipe out the root causes of Trumpism.

Don't just quit cold turkey. Because where he came from, there's plenty more cheap demagogic crack just waiting to be smoked. He may disappear, but the rage and precarity he feeds upon will not.

If Hillary is elected as expected, and especially if Democrats win back the Senate and many House seats, the extreme centrists of the media-political complex must also resist the temptation to sniff any more of that lethal GOP glue in the name of "bipartisanship."

On your road back to health, stop treating Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan with such ridiculous respect. His ability to string together sentences into complete paragraphs shouldn't be confused with governing in the public interest. So quit smoking his high-grade hashish, too.

 Now that you're getting sober, demand single payer health care. Who knows? Starting from such a "radical" position might end up getting us the public option as a compromise, rather than as a weak negotiating starting point designed to fail from the get-go.

Other antidotes to Trumpism: a guaranteed living wage and jobs for the millions who are justifiably outraged by the "free trade" deals and outsourcing and privatization scams that have destroyed lives and livelihoods. Scrap the cap on FICA taxes, and make Social Security solvent into perpetuity.

And overturn Citizens United.

Help America breathe again.

Thanks to the WikiLeaks theft/dump of Clinton campaign director John Podesta's emails, we've learned that the Democratic Party, with the aid of the vulnerable media, deliberately set Trump up as a "Pied Piper candidate" to destroy more threatening and substantive run-of-the-mill GOP sadists like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. The objective was to pit the unpopular Hillary Clinton against an opponent so scary that even the Republican establishment would disown him and flee to her own outstretched arms. There was a method to the madness of holding interminable staged "debates" in sporting arenas, with Trump the last showman standing.

From a DNC strategy document dated April 7, 2015:  

The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream Republican Party. Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
Ted Cruz
Donald Trump
Ben Carson
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.

The press was more than happy to comply. They gave Trump more than a billion dollars' worth of free air time and newspaper website space, and in his turn Trump brought them about an equal amount of rewards in terms of viewership, readership and ad revenue. He brought them the drug of clicks and eyeballs.

The only trouble is, the Trump profiteers will now have to pay the Piper. The candidate fulfilled his part of the bargain by ridding the field of the more dangerous rats. But in the process, he has captured the imagination of  multitudes of the aggrieved in numbers that the Establishment never saw coming.

 The Pied Piper legend itself is based on an actual event that transpired in medieval Germany, possibly during an outbreak of the Plague. The town fathers of Hamelin refused to pay him for his services, and he obliged by "throwing a tantrum" and leading all the children to an undisclosed location, far away from elite establishment control.

Trump even made an early appearance in Victorian poet Robert Browning's version of the tale:

“Come in!”--the Mayor cried, looking bigger: 
And in did come the strangest figure! 
His queer long coat from heel to head 
Was half of yellow and half of red 
And he himself was tall and thin, 
With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin, 
And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin, 
No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin, 
But lips where smiles went out and in--
There was no guessing his kith and kin!
And nobody could enough admire 
The tall man and his quaint attire. 
Quoth one:  “It’s as if my great-grandsire, 
Starting up at the Trump of Doom’s tone, 
Had walked this way from his painted tombstone!”

There goes that irritating "tone" again. It's been the bane of the elites since time immemorial.

***

Speaking of the WikiLeaks, I was 'umbly proud to discover that an unflattering 2014 article I wrote about Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan is buried deep within the purloined Podesta email cache. Apparently, Hillary's campaign manager is a subscriber to Truthout, which had reprinted my piece. Whether Podesta actually read it, or whether Vladimir Putin actually read it before he allegedly stole it for Julian Assange and Donald Trump, is still as much a mystery as the whereabouts of the Pied Piper's abductees.