Banality and Bile At the Democratic Debate

Like Dante's fifth circle of hell, the fifth in an endless series of Democratic Party debates was an infernal three-hour mix of anger and sullen resentment. If you made it through all three hours,  you deserve more than a medal for valor. You rate an upgrade to Purgatory. That's because ABC-Disney didn't stop at torturing you with too many candidates and not enough substantive questions. The network actually chose to air a graphic ad showing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez melting down in flames - ostensibly to get Trump's base all fired up and ready to go.

The first part of the epic featured Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders furiously arguing health care at center stage, just above the River Styx. Once the TV moderators managed to get the requisite neoliberal talking points about "how you gonna pay for that?!?" out of the way, it was on to the supporting cast, who in a true democracy would have been left sullenly gurgling just beneath the surface.

But the theme of the evening had been decreed as "The Reanimation of the Moribund Centrists" in keeping with Dante's Fifth Circle actually being the middle portion of hell. Therefore, candidates polling in the low single digits got as much, if not more, speaking time than the lead actors. Except for Joe Biden, of course, uncomfortably sandwiched as he was as he was between Warren and Sanders. He talked up a word-salad tempest.

But in their homages to Droner and Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama, their loyalty to the world's biggest military machine, their waffling on immigration, their jingoistic approval of American exceptionalism, their naming of Donald Trump as the source of all evil without criticizing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's own shamefully complicit role in preventing passage another assault weapons ban, the 10 candidates admirably proved that they are, indeed, simply different sides of the same coin. As centrist Amy Klobuchar so brilliantly posited, a  Democratic Party divided against itself cannot stand. She didn't add that this is especially true when it's stuffed to the rafters with tons of foundation-busting filthy lucre. She also didn't add that the collapse of shoddy buildings is not only inevitable, it is desirable once the area has been safely evacuated.

But if we ourselves just couldn't stand listening to that litany of feel-good claptrap for three tortuous hours, and collapsed or tuned out from sheer disgust or just plain boredom, then we're probably too extremist for them to even bother with.

Not that the heavily coined candidates are all equally tarnished, of course. At least two of them are actually counterfeit. Kamala Harris, with her sordid "progressive" history of jailing poor mothers of truant kids, is one. Pete "Medicare For All Who Want It" Buttigieg is another. 

Joe Biden, though, is the real deal. Besides constantly hectoring suffering people to "get real, man!" while flouting his obvious senility, Biden also proved that he is as much a biliously burbling unabashed racist as ever:

Linsey Davis: Mr. Vice President, I want to talk to you about inequality in schools and race. In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter, “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” You said that some 40 years ago, but as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?

Biden: Well, they have to deal with the … Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure that we are in a position where—

Look, we talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal of … A raise of getting out of the $60,000 level.
No. 2, make sure that we bring in to the help with the stud—the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need… We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are required—I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them.
Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have three, four, and five-year-olds go to school. School! Not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t know what— They don’t know what quite what to do. Play the radio. Make sure the television—excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night. The phone—make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school—er, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

Somewhere in the murky pit that passes for his brain, Biden thinks that black and brown parents, well-meaning though they may be, are too ignorant to take care of their own children without a lot of outside professional help. He also seems to think these poor parents should playing LPs on their vintage phonographs in order to boost their children's vocabulary. It is essential that every single child develops the skills to make three, four and five-year-olds go to school.  Because their poor incapable parents never did. They might even be as befuddled as Uncle Joe himself.

Of course, besides being an unrepentant racist, Biden is also still an unrepentant plagiarist. His prescription for vocabulary therapy (in lieu of living wages, food aid, housing aid, etc) for black and brown people was stolen from Chelsea Clinton and her campaign for books in the laundromats frequented by black and brown mothers. If there's one thing that earnest bigots without a racist bone in their bodies sincerely believe, it's that black and brown mothers would never talk to or read to their children on their own initiative.

Biden made his remarks at a historically black college in Houston. It's too bad that Julian Castro didn't slam him over them like he did when, earlier in the debate, he accused Biden of senilely forgetting what he'd just said five minutes ago about healthcare.

The other candidates were not much better. Even Bernie Sanders obligingly described Nicolas Maduro, the brown Venezuela president, as a "vicious tyrant" - in an apparent effort to defend himself from comparisons to Venezuela-style socialism. He also didn't redeem himself in the post-debate spin cycle when he called the unabashedly racist Biden a decent human being and "a friend of mine."

I guess it was a blessing in disguise that the moderators kind of forgot that Bernie was even on the stage, because he'd appeared to be losing his voice. Croaking dissonant outrage combined with the cracked Biden-style long-playing record is not the kind of smooth, relaxing,"electable" sound that ABC-Disney obviously wanted to sedate its audience with.

Maybe if Biden and Bernie and Liz are the last candidates standing many months from now, they'll finally lose all the friendly pretense and the slick collegiality that reminds the rest of us that we're not in their club, and we never will be.

But How You Gonna Pay For That?

Update From Hell

So today I got my marching orders to vacate the flooded, incipiently moldy premises as of 3 p.m. Sunday so that Servpro can get on with making it like it never even happened. 

Granted, this was pretty short notice on the part of the landlord, who had given me a date of a week from now to check into the hotel. But professionals that they hopefully are, Servpro found themselves unexpectedly ahead of schedule. 

So no blogging, except maybe posting a few links, for the next week or so. I am not lugging my heavy equipment into exile, because it will be hard enough lugging my self and my clothes, my meds and my toothbrush into exile.

  Before starting packing, though, I did comment tonight on Maureen Dowd's piece, which ever so originally compares Trump to a mob boss. Naturally, she just happened to run into Robert De Niro at a party a while ago, and whenever one has the opportunity to drop a famous name in one's New York Times column, one must never waste it. And one must also coyly hint while one is at it that one was the direct inspiration for DeNiro's F-bomb-laced diatribe at the Tony awards.

My published comment: 

 I found myself lately wishing that the Trump Show would end just like "The Sopranos" did: with an abrupt blackout and no chance of a revival or spinoff.

And then I realized that such a blackout might spell not only the end of his organized crime spree, but of all of us. This guy has already created whole hellscape of collateral damage and misery. Will there be any turning back?

He threatens to nuke countries he doesn't like. He quit the Paris Climate accords. His nominee to head the Superfund program has made a career out of getting the polluters and poisoners of the earth off the legal hook, at great public expense. His "health" consiglieres are already plotting a mob hit on single payer health care. The thug heading HUD wants to triple the rents of the poorest tenants, while Trump's slumlord son-in-law Jared sues them for every last dime. His moll Betsy DeVos came not to oversee public education, but to destroy it.

Trump brags about GDP growth without admitting that such growth is a cancer which kills all but the richest of the ethically challenged rich. Wages continue to stagnate even in this "booming" economy.

 His pathological lack of discipline and a business model built entirely of deceit are the mirror image of late-stage capitalism's pursuit of limitless wealth and power - planet and people be damned.

Not just Trump, but the whole crooked system must come down and be replaced by a moral system of government, aka democratic socialism. Our lives depend on it.

Not to brag or drop names or anything, but the president who first reminded me of a Tony Soprano-style mafioso godfather was none other than Barack Obama. There was that time, for example, when his Secret Service thugs kidnapped Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2012 for attending his debate with Mitt Romney. They literally handcuffed her to a metal folding chair at an undisclosed location before letting her off with a stern warning.

And who can forget Democratic Senator Dick Durbin deflecting blame from Mob Boss Obama of the Austerian Cartel right onto greedy senior citizens who, through their selfish desires for a barely bearable retirement via Social Security, are robbing those precious future generations of any future at all? "Social Security is gonna run out of money in 20 years," Durbin trumpily lied on corporate-sponsored TV in 2013.

"The Baby Boom generation is gonna blow away our future. We don't wanna see that happen," Dapper Dick declaimed demagogically in his best Don style.

And then there was the Trans-Pacific Partnership corporate crime cartel, whose dastardly plans for total world domination hinged entirely upon Obama-style secrecy, stealth and lies. You might remember those hellish times circa 2015-16 when even congress critters were not permitted to examine draft copies of this planned mega-hit on ordinary people without the presence of armed guards to make sure they didn't make or steal copies. 

It goes on and on. Just a cursory glance through my Obama-era blog-posts provides a smorgasbord of tasty reasons why Trump won and the Democrats lost - not just the presidency, of course, but about 1,000 federal and state seats.

Here, for example, are excerpts from one typical right-wing speech that Obama gave in 2013, doubtlessly inspiring legions of disgusted Democrats to stay the hell home the following mid-term election year, in what turned out to be the lowest voter turnout year in modern American history:

We’ll need Democrats to question old assumptions, be willing to redesign or get rid of programs that no longer work, and embrace changes to cherished priorities so that they work better in this new age.

(That was the standard, centrist, dog-whistled attack on Social Security and Medicare, in case you didn't know.) 

We’ve come a long way since I first took office. As a country, we’re older and we’re wiser. And as long as Congress doesn’t manufacture another crisis – as long as we don’t shut down the government just as the economy is getting traction, or risk a U.S. default over paying bills we’ve already racked up – we can probably muddle along without taking bold action. Our economy will grow, though slower than it should; new businesses will form, and unemployment will keep ticking down. Just by virtue of our size and our natural resources and the talent of our people, America will remain a world power, and the majority of us will figure out how to get by.

With $100 million in book, speech and media deals in just little over a year, I think it's safe to say that Obama has figured out how to get by as ably as the majority of One Percenters.... or is it the .001 Percenters? Math was never my strong suit.

I also think it's safe to say that the reason that millions of Obama voters either stayed home again in 2016, or voted for Donald Trump out of sheer disgust and desperation, was that not only had they not figured out how to get by, but they realized how royally they'd been screwed by The One.

Political pro though he may be, it's like his eight years of Hope and Change never even happened. Serving the bottom 90% was just never part of his deal.