With God On Their Side

Has anything ever encapsulated US history better than the sight of Donald Trump fomenting violence while holding an upside-down Bible against a backdrop of flash grenades and assault troops?

The Bible, which had been carefully nestled within Ivanka Trump's $1500 designer handbag for the fascistic fashion parade from the Rose Garden to St. John's Episcopal Church on Monday night, amazingly did not erupt into flames once it became weaponized in Trump's hammy fist.

Nor did Washington's Pius XII shrine spontaneously combust in outrage when Trump desecrated that site the following day in an oafish appeal to the Opus Dei Catholic side of his reactionary base. Perhaps it's because, as just-released Vatican documents disclose, the pope was both aware of and complicit in Hitler's extermination of the Jews. The pope learned of the Holocaust fully three years before the rest of the world, but kept silent.

Not to be outdone by Trump in the great American tradition of complicity and the co-optation of religion to hide the Seven Deadly Sins that define our brutal and oligarchic form of government, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wielded her own Bible in response to the president's serial heresies, lamely chiding him to start acting out the traditional presidential role of Healer in Chief.

Seeming to channel children's author and fellow San Franciscan Lemony Snicket, Pelosi bemoaned the series of unfortunate events which, for her, culminated in the atrocity of Trump holding a Bible. She advised him to tone down the divisive rhetoric. But she herself was as silent as a Pope in World War Two about the ongoing protests and police brutality in the streets of America. She would not be cowed into finally advocating Medicare for All and a universal basic income as a way of quelling the near-universal public anger against the establishment of which she is an all-powerful part.

She noted, quoting Ecclesiastes, that there is a time to love and a time to heal. You could almost hear the refrains of Turn, Turn, Turn wafting in the air. But combined with her utter lack of response to the economic and social pain of the protesters themselves, it was just more of the same Turn of the Screw.

Not to be outdone in the religious co-optation department, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden followed up his own churchy advice that rioting, stressed-out cops should aim to shoot those hordes of mythical knife-branding criminals in the legs rather than the hearts. He virtuously suggested that next time, Trump should actually open the Bible and learn something. He did not suggest that US police departments open up the Bill of Rights for their own refresher courses in law and morality.

That's because Joe Biden, author of the 1994 Crime Bill, has always been totally copacetic with cops. Barack Obama himself gushed on more than one occasion that Cop-dom has never had a better or truer friend than Joe Biden. It was Biden who restored billions of dollars of funding to the federal COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) program as part of the 2009 stimulus package - at the very same time that the administration was helping Wall Street to throw five million citizens out of their homes. It was Biden who spearheaded the 2012 policy requiring that grants must be used by police departments to hire military veterans - to give them a chance to continue "serving our country" - rather than, say, to protect the citizenry - once they're done fighting "over there."

The COPS legislation, written by Biden in tandem with the crime bill, began funneling billions of dollars to police departments to hire more cops under the rubric of "community policing" and "proactive community engagement."  But as Radley Balko writes in Rise of the Warrior Cop:

"The problem was that there was no universal definition of community policing.... Street sweeps, occupation-like control of neighborhoods, SWAT raids and aggressive anti-gang policies. These police activities are aggressive, often violent, and usually a net loss for civil liberties, but they are proactive.

When (President) Clinton, Biden and other politicians touted the COPs program, they did so with language that evoked the Peace Corps (though both Clinton and Biden supported policies that promoted militarization.) Although Clinton described the goal of COPS as '(building) bonds of trust and understanding, it wasn't clear if he or any other politician really believed this. The majority of the COPS grants was given to simply hire more  police officers. The program said little about how those officers would be used, or what sort of attitude they should bring to the job....

"And so as the COPS program threw billions at police departments under the pretense of hiring whistling, baton-twirling Officer Friendlies to walk neighborhood beats, rescue kittens, and maybe guest-umpire the occasional Little League game, many police agencies were actually using the money to militarize."

The difference between Democrats and Republicans is largely one of style over substance, The George W. Bush administration drastically cut funding to the COPS program, because its language wasn't as tough and brutal as they liked. When Obama came into office, the funding was duly restored. When Trump came into the office, the funding was duly slashed once again. If Biden comes into office in 2021, watch for the language of touchy-feely community to gloss over more cop killings of minorities, more deadly no-knock raids, more hiring of PTSD-riddled veterans of our endless wars. He'll sell it as a vast improvement over Trump's calling out the troops before they even get a chance to jump seamlessly from the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines to trade their fatigues for a blue uniform and a badge.

As a senator, Biden was actually to the right of the Bush administration, never resting from his one-man crusade for COPS. From a 2007 press release from his Senate office:

My colleagues on the Judiciary Committee have unanimously approved this bill. Recently, the Brookings Institution strongly advocated for a reauthorization of the COPS program, calling it one of the most cost-effective options available for fighting crime. They can see what is plainly obvious crime is like cutting grass and if you stop mowing the lawn, one day you'll look outside and see a jungle. We're seeing very tall grass in our communities now, and we need to move this bill to the full Senate quickly, so can get local police agencies the help they so desperately need.

Biden effectively compared poor minority communities to wild overgrown jungles needing a severe mow-down. It is a prime example of the racist dog-whistle.

Not to be outdone, his Democratic primary challenger at the time, Barack Obama, traveled to New Orleans to advocate for his own "Katrina COPS" program to "empower" poor black residents of that destroyed city to install more police to occupy their neighborhoods. Not for nothing did he eventually choose Biden to be his vice president, a dog-whistle of reassurance to paranoid white voters in its own right. Like any other liberal God-sider worth his salt, Obama preached from within the sanctuary of a church for the hiring more cops to "restore the bonds of trust" between an occupying force and its targets.

More blatantly militant language and practice did eventually find their way into the COPS program, particularly the 2012 directive mandating that departments use the grant money to hire military veterans over even graduates with criminal justice degrees from four year universities. 

By the time Donald Trump assumed control of the government, one out of every five American cops was a true warrior, a veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan and any number of other battlefields and occupation zones both acknowledged and secret.

So even as a "bipartisan" Congress is currently going through the motions of taking away some of the tanks and grenade launchers and other surplus military hardware from the nations's police departments, they are not addressing the proliferation of trained killers in these departments.

A 2017 investigation by the Marshall Project revealed that veterans who work as police officers are more vulnerable to self-destructive behavior, including using alcohol and drugs, and attempting suicide.

Nearly all of the 33 police departments contacted by The Marshall Project declined to provide a list of officers who had served in the military, citing laws protecting personnel records, or saying the information was not stored in any central place. The Justice Department office that dispenses grants to hire cops and study policing said it has no interest in funding research into how military experience might influence police behavior.

 “I reject the notion that a returning veteran, who has seen combat, should cause concern for a police chief,” said Ronald L. Davis, who headed that office in the Obama administration. “I would even hire more if I could.”

Take a look out on the streets of America. It's a Hieronymus Bosch mural of a uniformed, untreated culture of PTSD sufferers with clubs on steroids in military Humvees.

And all our esteemed alleged leaders can do is praise the lord and pass the ammunition and place trillions of public dollars into the collection baskets of their oligarchic friends and donors.

Trump is far from the only miscreant who, wrapped in the flag and thumping a Bible, is bringing fascism to America. That process started a long time ago. 

Untruths and Consequences

Give Donald Trump a little credit. He is succeeding where Barack Obama failed: he has single-handedly reanimated this country's moribund antiwar movement, inspiring spontaneous weekend street protests against imminent war in at least 80 American cities.

Thanks to Trump, the assassinated Quassam Soleimani is now a household name. Tbanks to Trump, politicians on both sides of the War Party aisle are scrambling to either defend the indefensible drone attack against a foreign leader visiting another foreign country (Iraq) at the express invitation of that country, or to complain they weren't properly kept in the assassination loop as is their god-given right as co-equal warmongers.

Besides joining the anti-war protest or strike nearest you, now is also the perfect time  to dust off your copy of George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"to help you parse both the pro-war propaganda and the pretend anti-war propaganda.

The pro-war propaganda is especially prevalent in the reactionary tabloid press. The New York Post, for example, published a graphic photo of Soleimani's severed hand on its front page with the descriptor "Dead Ringer" to explain how his ring helped identify him. Whether this kind of coverage unites Trump's fan base into the desired frenzy of Islamaphobic solidarity remains to be seen - especially given that it's the children of his fan base who will be importuned into fighting Trump's war.

The more staid establishment media are much more nuanced and subtle, or at least they're making a half-hearted attempt at nuance and subtlety. It must be really hard out there for the liberal interventionists and pundits who previously had never met a war they didn't like. They find themselves in the unaccustomed position of suddenly hating United States-sponsored murder and terrorism only because they hate Trump so much. If only he weren't our current murderer and terrorist-in-chief! War was so much easier to sell when the discreet and eloquent Barack Obama and the genial, goofy, dry-drunk George Bush were in nominal charge.

Obama, especially, was able to project a modicum of sanity and balance in public as he acted out his inner Trump, holding his weekly Terror Tuesday assassination club meetings and dropping his bombs on eight different countries throughout his "no drama" presidency. He played by the rules. He adhered to the norms. The media rarely challenged him. He mastered the fine art of political-speak to defend the indefensible. Per George Orwell:

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

And as Janet Malcolm more recently explained this delicate deadly rhetorical balance in her critique of the access-hungry complicit media, "The Journalist and the Murderer":

Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way.

Just because Trump is a bombastic liar doesn't mean that his phony anti-war concern-troll critics are telling the truth themselves.

Take Susan Rice, national security maven in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, and now a Netflix board member and contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times. After helping to orchestrate the ill-planned, disastrous regime-change war in Libya highlighted by the gruesome murder of Moammar Qadaffi, Rice now has the chutzpah to chide Trump for his own recklessness.

The Big Lie in Rice's sanctimonious Times column is that longstanding US-sponsored Middle East chaos didn't start until Trump came along to ruin all their hard diplomatic work:

How did we get here? What are the consequences of these targeted killings? Can we avoid a worse-case scenario?

 The escalatory cycle began in May 2018, when President Trump recklessly ignored the advice of his national security team and the opposition of our allies in unilaterally withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal- despite Iran's full adherence to its terms and its efficacy in rolling back from a nuclear program. Since then, the Trump administration has had no coherent strategy to constrain Iran's nuclear program or to counter other aspects of its nefarious behavior.

After getting the obligatory Orwellian rhetorical question-begging out of the way, Rice doesn't even call war with Iran a potential worldwide disaster, but only a "worse-case" scenario. She does, however, add the common, group-thinking, passive-aggressive caveat that Suleimani was a "terrorist" because he led the military of another country that is not allied with or beholden to the United States. 

In deciding to eliminate General Suleimani, Mr. Trump and his team argue they were acting in self-defense to thwart imminent attacks on Americans in Iraq and the region. That may be true, as General Suleimani was a ruthless murderer and terrorist with much American blood on his hands. Unfortunately, it's hard to place confidence in the representations of an administration that lies almost daily about matters large and small and even, in this critical instance, failed to brief, much less consult, bipartisan leaders in Congress.

In other words, if you're going to assassinate somebody, you must have a proven track rcord of skillful, confidence-inspiring obfuscation. After all, it has taken two whole decades and three whole administrations for the serial lies about the Afghanistan war to finally come to public light.

Meanwhile, Rice doesn't bother explaining whose blood Suleimani had on his hands, other than it was pure red-blooded American blood. It would never do to admit that the ruthless killing was done to ruthless killers and/or invading armies and/or corporate colonizers.

Trump not only lies in real time and is caught lying in real time, he avoids the usual platitudes about spreading democracy and human rights throughout the world by way of massive death and destruction. He brays the truth about the real purpose of these wars: land-grabbing for oligarchic fun and profit.

And he is so nasty and humorless about it. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at least, was gracious enough to laugh and lighten things up a bit with a friendly complicit network TV reporter after Qaddafi was sodomized to death by a bayonet:

Meanwhile, the Media-Political Complex wrings its hands over Iran's resulting threats to the thousands of aggressive land-grabbers and mercenaries ("American interests") who will now be less safe in the vast, resource-rich geographical spaces which they have so nobly invaded and colonized in the name of free market capitalism.

The literal ring of military bases surrounding Iran actually might get a dent or two put into it!

My published response to Susan Rice's arrogant little New York Times sermon:

The stage for catastrophe was set nearly two decades ago with the invasion of Iraq, a war which the author of this op-ed did not oppose. She joined in the fear mongering propaganda over the non-existent WMDs, even joining with the Bushies in claiming that the invasion did not need permission of the U.N. Security Council.

And then there was Ms. Rice's pivotal role, with Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, in the Obama administration's ill-fated Libya "humanitarian" intervention - which remains to this day a humanitarian catastrophe.

 Those in power never learn that America's aggressive meddling has never had one single happy ending. If Trump is reckless and acts with impunity, it is through the unitary executive powers bequeathed to him by his predecessors. And absent a few principled representatives like Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders, Congress has oceans of blood on its hands for just having gifted Trump more billions for war. They even awarded him his very own Space Force, even as the House voted to impeach him over his sleazy Ukraine extortion scheme. Given his insane attempt to start World War III with the assassination of one of Iran's highest ranking officials, that incident now seems rather pathetic.

Presidents under siege and/or facing re-election have a tendency to start wars and drop bombs as diversionary tactics. That Trump would react to impeachment like a cornered senile wolverine is no big shock to anybody - except to the experts who never seem to learn.

Headfake Follies

I'm trying to get the gory details about the latest palace intrigue straight.

My take: Our A.D.D. president breaches national security by dishing to the Russians about some top secret classified intel involving yet another laptop terror plot. And then the media-political complex clutches their pearls and shrieks that Trump has endangered an "ally" even as they themselves dish to the whole entire world about the alleged plot which Trump dished to the Russians. It is not a breach of national security or a betrayal of secrets, apparently, when the right politicians and the approved media outlets dish out state secrets for all the right and high-falutin' reasons.

It's not as though, before Trump's faux pas, we proles couldn't connect the dots and figure out the reason that the airlines were suddenly banning laptops from international flights. It's not as though the media didn't report, all day and every day, the geographical locales where ISIS has set up shop. (Trump apparently let slip the geographical source of the "intel," thus endangering our foreign spy friends.)

The sources for the latest White House leak to the Washington Post, the New York Times and other major media outlets are an anonymous current official and an anonymous past official. We can thus surmise that the current official dished state secrets to the past official, in order that the media could confirm the story and responsibly dish it out to the rest of us in one unified, neat, prepackaged, journalistically "ethical" narrative.

To make the intrigue even more fun, Trump's top security advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, immediately denied that Donald had dished. And then this morning Donald promptly threw McMaster under the bus by tweeting, that yes, he had indeed dished to the Russians. Because as president, he can say whatever he wants to whomever he wants. He broke no laws.

That might be true, say the Miss Mannerses of the Deep State. But what an egregious breach of spying etiquette. We the consuming audience are given   only two choices: Trump is either a clueless oaf, or he is a deliberate traitor. From the New York Times:

 It was not clear whether Mr. Trump wittingly disclosed such highly classified information. He — and possibly other Americans in the room — may have not been aware of the sensitivity of what he was sharing. It was only after the meeting, when notes on the discussion were circulated among National Security Council officials, that it was flagged as too sensitive to be shared, even among many American officials, the former official said.

Hmm. Sounds a lot like those Hillary Clinton emails, which were only deemed "classified" after she unwittingly pushed Send. Sounds a lot like Obama's head of Intel, James Clapper, when he falsely told Congress that the NSA does not "wittingly" collect the private communications of every man, woman and child in America. Clapper is now esconced in his new gig as a latter-day John Dean, telling the Sunday shows that there is not only a cancer on the presidency, but that Trump himself is the core disease.

It should be obvious by now that Trump enjoys chaos for the sake of chaos. He keeps even his most powerful advisers and his most intimate confidantes on their toes at all times. If nobody tries to sabotage him on any given day, then he's always happy to do the honors himself. It's the ratings, baby!

There is no such thing as bad publicity when it concerns Donald J. Trump. And the more he appears to be persecuted by the Washington establishment, the more his fans come to his defense.

And while the media-political complex tries to foment ever more Russophobic outrage among the citizenry, Congressional impeachment still appears to be off the table. In a CNN Town Hall appearance on Monday night, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi admitted that there is no proof - yet - that Trump has committed an offense egregious enough or sufficiently outside the norms of the usual political graft and corruption to justify any official attempt to remove him from office:

 If you're talking about impeachment, you're talking about, what are the facts? Not, I don't like him and I don't like his hair and -- you know, I think, what are the facts? I don't like what he said about this. What are the facts that you would make a case on? What are the rules that he may have violated? If you don't have that case, you're just participating in more hearsay.

If Pelosi refused to consider impeaching George W. Bush for the illegal invasion of Iraq, for torture, and for other war crimes when her party still enjoyed a majority, the chances of them going after Trump are slim to none. As I mentioned the other day, he is a very useful idiot. Every time he says or does something outrageous, the Democrats and their veal pen offshoots go into fund-raising overdrive. Where, for example, would Hillary Clinton's new dark money anti-Trump SuperPac be without Donald to kick around all day and every day? And as far as the Republicans are concerned, the more that Trump can distract the country, the more secretly they can go about ripping up the social contract behind their closed doors.

If the media spent even a tenth of their energy on exploring the root cause of terrorism - unfettered American militarism for the benefit of a reckless oligarchy - they probably wouldn't be wasting so much of their time and ours trying to convince us that Donald Trump is some sort of anomaly. 

All they know how to do is gaslight us to death. If we are made to fear Trump all day and every day, perhaps we'll forget all about the rest of our workaday problems.

Not likely. And their desperation is definitely showing, all day and every day.

Hypocrisy and History in the Age of Trump

To hear the establishment media tell it, you'd think that Donald Trump was the only president in American history ever to have extended a friendly hand to a murderous foreign autocrat.

According to the critics, Trump relies upon his primitive reptile brain rather than upon his cerebral cortex whenever he performs foreign policy. When Trump reaches out to The Philippines' dastardly Rodrigo Duterte, he's being stupid and naive. When, on the other hand, Barack Obama sold Saudi autocrats billions of dollars in weapons with which to to kill innocent Yemenis, he was being coolly pragmatic. When Obama played a genial round of golf in Hawaii with Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak, and later whitewashed that strongman's abysmal record of graft and human trafficking, he did so for the intelligent altruistic purpose of raking in more profits for multinational corporations via the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He didn't do it to build a hotel with his name on it.

So the Washington Post approvingly gushed about Obama's Christmas golf course diplomacy with the corrupt Malaysian leader in 2014,

Obama has established perhaps a better working relationship with Najib, after making the first visit by a sitting U.S. president to Malaysia in nearly half a century last spring. It was unlikely they had an in-depth discussion of their foreign policy agendas on the course, however, but perhaps focusing instead on trying to avoid the sand traps.
In a statement, the White House said: "The two leaders took the opportunity to discuss the growing and warming relationship between the United States and Malaysia.  The president said he looked forward to working with Prime Minister Najib in 2015, during Malaysia's chair year of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations."

 Obama's hypocrisy (in removing Malaysia from the list of the world's worst human traffickers based solely on Razak's shallow promise to try to cut back on all those shallow graves) bothered Democratic Party officials only insofar as the "optics" of it might endanger their future electoral prospects.

According to a 2015 leaked email sent to Hillary Clinton's campaign director by one of her operatives, it wasn't the fate of hundreds of Malaysian sex trafficking victims that bothered them. It was the possible "backlash" from labor groups. Or, so their cerebral cortices alerted them.

Of course, now that Donald Trump is himself calling Najib Razak "one of my favorite prime ministers," the righteous critics are getting very worried about the relationship. Trump even had the temerity to partner with Najib in a game at his New Jersey golf course several years ago.

There's plenty to criticize Trump for, of course, but the growing hysteria over his diplomatic efforts fairly reeks of hypocrisy on steroids. Methinks that those gleefully mocking Trump's ignorance of American history should probably take a refresher course in that subject themselves.

"Trump's 'Very Friendly' Talk With Duterte Stuns Aides and Critics Alike," blares the New York Times headline. As Mark Landler explains:

During their “very friendly conversation,” the administration said in a late-night statement, Mr. Trump invited Mr. Duterte, an authoritarian leader accused of ordering extrajudicial killings of drug suspects in the Philippines, to visit him at the White House.

Now, the administration is bracing for an avalanche of criticism from human rights groups. Two senior officials said they expected the State Department and the National Security Council, both of which were caught off guard by the invitation, to raise objections internally.

It's a good thing the bureaucrats aren't raising objections over the United States' own policy of extrajudicial drone killings conducted under the last three presidents. It might make them seem  ignorant of history and hypocritical at the same time. 

“By essentially endorsing Duterte’s murderous war on drugs, Trump is now morally complicit in future killings,” said John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. “Although the traits of his personality likely make it impossible, Trump should be ashamed of himself.”

Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Twitter, “We are watching in real time as the American human rights bully pulpit disintegrates into ash.”

Trump has a personality disorder, whereas Barack Obama and George W. Bush were both perfectly sane as they not only bombed thousands of innocent people to death, but perpetuated America's own murderous war on "drugs" -- meaning, of course, the war on drug-takers. This includes using the CIA to funnel weapons to drug cartels as well as ensuring that poor people became addicted to drugs, the better to criminalize them and to imprison them.

And Senator Murphy should definitely read Stephen Kinzer's excellent new book about the birth of American imperialism (The True Flag) before he bloviates about human rights. It was Theodore Roosevelt, the inventor of the term "bully pulpit," who after the illegal US attack on The Philippines in 1898, subsequently oversaw the massacre of more than two thousand innocent Filipinos just for the sheer jingoistic enjoyment of it. And it was President Bill Clinton who, selectively forgetting history himself, posthumously awarded Roosevelt the Medal of Freedom.

But never mind all that, because the Times is not done ginning up its selective outrage quite yet:

It is not even clear, given the accusations of human rights abuses against him, that Mr. Duterte would be granted a visa to the United States were he not a head of state, according to human rights advocates.

Still, Mr. Trump’s affinity for Mr. Duterte, and other strongmen as well, is firmly established. Both presidents are populist insurgent leaders with a penchant for making inflammatory statements. Both ran for office calling for a wholesale crackdown on Islamist militancy and the drug trade. And both display impatience with the courts.

So I guess that means that no more Saudi kings and other autocrats will ever be welcome upon our exceptional shores in the future, right?  Of course that's not what the Times is getting at, not at all. Their beef is that past presidents and their chosen (subservient and cooperative) global buddies are more proficient at protocol and politesse. Normal presidents never make inflammatory statements as they go about their killing sprees. They are very careful to manipulate their silverware correctly at state dinners, and to blandly use all the proper nouns and verbs when making public statements. When American presidents want to ignore the Constitution, they're not supposed to say so right out loud. Instead, they have their lawyers draft secret memos and opinions which allow the extrajudicial atrocities. Or, they go very circumspectly to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get the necessary rubber stamps for whatever they want to get away with... far away from public scrutiny and accountability.

 The Times article persistently plods ahead:

Mr. Trump has drawn the line with one autocrat: President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose chemical weapons strike on his own people prompted the American president to order a Tomahawk missile strike on a Syrian airfield.

But Mr. Trump’s affinity for strongmen is instinctive and longstanding. He recently called to congratulate President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on his victory in a much-disputed referendum expanding his powers, which some critics painted as a death knell for Turkish democracy.

Never mind that there is as yet no concrete evidence that Assad ever ordered a chemical weapons strike. All that matters is that deep within the reptilian part of his primitive brain, Trump has an instinctive love for strongmen. Every democracy he touches turns into lead.

The affinity of American presidents for foreign strongmen is nothing new. Franklin Roosevelt, a president who also occasionally acted on instinct, was a big fan of Benito Mussolini before World War II spoiled the camaraderie. Il Duce congratulated FDR on his 1932 victory. And,Historian Mark Weber writes,

President Franklin Roosevelt expressed admiration for the Italian leader, and sent him cordial letters. In June 1933, Roosevelt praised Mussolini in a letter to an American envoy: “... I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble.” In another letter a few weeks later, the President wrote: “I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with the admirable Italian gentleman.”
Mussolini's regime received particularly warm praise from America's business leaders. In his 1972 work, Prof. Diggins writes (pp. 146-47): "With few exceptions, the dominant voices of business responded to Fascism with a hearty enthusiasm. Favorable editorials, could be read in publications such as Barron's, Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin, Commerce and Finance, Nation's Business (the official organ of the US Chamber of Commerce), and the reputable Wall Street Journal. Aside from the press, the list of outspoken business admirers reads like a Wall Street 'Who's Who'."

Some things never change. Hypocrisy is as wholesome and normal as apple pie, Mom, and the true flag. And, of course, golf.

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The Trumps: Neoliberalism's Perfect Distraction

Stop the presses. Donald Trump had the unprecedented gall this week to hang up on the Australian prime minister, right after rudely reneging on Barack Obama's noble promise to accept a token number of people who fled U.S. invasions and bombings only to find themselves imprisoned in a privatized Down Under gulag.

To hear the ruling establishment whine about this Major Incident in the Oval Office, the refugee prisoners might as well not even exist. The big hang-up is all about a shocking breach of etiquette at the heretofore pristine pinnacle of world power. And so begins the daunting task of scapegoating a scapegoating old goat.

By concentrating on the disastrous manners of Donald Trump and his entire clan, the mainstream media deflects attention from the ravages of Disaster Capitalism itself. It's more convenient to instill hate and fear of the new president than it is to examine the forces that produced him and other right-wing populist demagogues like him.

Entirely lost in the conversation about Trump's serial breaches of protocol is the long-standing breach of the social contract. The media, far from being the champions of social and economic justice, are falling all over themselves to scoop each other in the etiquette sweepstakes.

Establishment mouthpiece The Washington Post leads the Miss Manners pack by informing us that Trump is not only rude, he is unnecessarily rude. After all, the new president should be joyfully reveling in his new power, if not metaphorically chain smoking the post-orgasmic cigarettes of the traditional media honeymoon period.

It should have been one of the most congenial calls for the new commander in chief — a conversation with the leader of Australia, one of America’s staunchest allies, at the end of a triumphant week.

 Instead, President Trump blasted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refu­gee agreement and boasted about the magnitude of his electoral college win, according to senior U.S. officials briefed on the Saturday exchange. Then, 25 minutes into what was expected to be an hour-long call, Trump abruptly ended it.

The Post doesn't bother to inform its readers why the refugee crisis has become such a hot-potato issue among staunch and congenial democratic countries. Better for the newspaper and its billionaire owner not to mention that it is the global banking cartel and multinational corporations which have caused so much unprecedented death and injury and disease and famine and infrastructure collapse and despair through endless wars and cruel austerity policies. Millions of people have literally nowhere to go and nowhere to hide because of just one thing: violent American imperialism.

The borderless military-industrial complex, when not letting migrants drown in the oceans or starve to death in flight from their war-torn homes, has been warehousing them in private prisons in such out-of-the-way places as islands off the Australian coast. And the Australian P.M. is in as much of a pickle as Donald Trump, because of all the bad publicity surrounding the subhuman treatment of refugee prisoners by some of the same multinational corporations profiting from wars and austerity and plunder. He wants to play Musical Refugees, offshore some of the human detritus so he won't look so bad to his electorate. His country's cruel private refugee prison system is actually run by Serco, the same multi-tentacled British conglomerate that was awarded $1.25 billion by the Obama administration for the disastrous roll-out of its health insurance marketplace. The company got the contract despite its long history of fraud and incompetence.

But never mind all that pre-Trumpian crony disaster capitalism. Step right up and gaze over here, all you Washington Post consumers - it's Trump, the Rude and Unready!

Trump’s behavior suggests that he is capable of subjecting world leaders, including close allies, to a version of the vitriol he frequently employs against political adversaries and news organizations in speeches and on Twitter.

“This is the worst deal ever,” Trump fumed as Turnbull attempted to confirm that the United States would honor its pledge to take in 1,250 refugees from an Australian detention center.

Forget the substandard inhumane living conditions endured by Disaster Capitalism's millions of victims. Because the Neoliberal Thought Collective has made them so easy to forget as they concentrate our collective wrath on such a limited man in such an artificially limited fashion.

But just in case you can't forget, please now direct your attention to the Old Goat's wife. Because Melania Trump is committing her own unprecedented breach of etiquette by refusing to move to Washington and play her assigned role as The Good Wife. As New York Times White House correspondent Julie Hirschfeld Davis tells it, things have gotten so bad that thousands of requests for private tours of the People's House have gone ignored. And worst of all etiquette breaches, they haven't even begun planning for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll yet! Professional concern-trollers are extremely concerned. Those dreaded passive-voice "questions are being raised."

 “She is far behind the curve compared to where modern first ladies have been by the time their husbands are inaugurated, in a quite unprecedented way,” said Myra Gutin, a professor at Rider University who specializes in first ladies. “We are in uncharted territory here.”

No mention of the uncharted territory that so many millions of migrants and refugees and myriad other victims of neoliberal policies are finding themselves trapped in all around this burning, drowning planet. (And just as an aside, the whereabouts of Melania Trump immediately pale in comparison to the revelation that First Ladies Studies seems to be an actual academic discipline.)

If you're not sufficiently incensed at Mrs. Old Goat's ineptitude and selfishness, let's move on to First Daughter Ivanka Trump. She is taking a ton of liberal heat for advertising her brand last weekend at the exact same moment that hundreds of refugees were being detained at the nation's airports.

  USA Today sniffed,

Timing is everything in politics, as French Queen Marie Antoinette learned two centuries ago, and Ivanka Trump was reminded of over the weekend.
"Let them eat cake!" mocked the tweets and Instagram comments on Trump's accounts, after she posted pictures of herself and husband Jared Kushner dressed to the nines — she in a $5,000 silvery gown by Carolina Herrera — just as chaos and protests erupted at international airports over President Trump's just-signed order barring refugees and travelers from some Muslim countries.

It's gotten so bad that Nordstrom's was even forced to discontinue Ivanka's clothing line.

Frank Bruni of the New York Times was especially miffed because Ivanka let her husband Jared Kushner fondle her butt during the photo shoot. "He (adviser Steve Bannon) has a seat on the National Security Council. Kushner has his hand on Ivanka Trump’s seat," Bruni quipped while urging his readership to go ogle the picture.

Last month, feminist writer Jill Filopovic opined in a Times op-ed that Ivanka is practically alone among her wealthy peers and friends (including Chelsea Clinton) for not only being a totally fake feminist, but also a totally dangerous fake feminist. Filopovic, while decrying Ivanka's privilege and her ghost-written parenting advice book for career women, and her disturbing attachment to the Old Goat, also takes a gratuitous neoliberal dig at poorer women, who seem to be reproducing like rabbits without benefit of wedlock:

Unlike in past generations when educated women had a harder time finding partners, today, college-educated women like Ms. Trump are more likely than their working-class counterparts to wed, and also like Ms. Trump, usually delay childbirth until after the wedding. With the fewer financial stressors that come with dual incomes or a single extremely high one these educated couples divorce less often than those with fewer financial resources, despite other findings that both groups have comparable dedication to the marital ideal.

Filopovic of course has no problem with the trickle-down feminism of other neoliberal wives and spawn of wealthy men -- such as Hillary Clinton and Chelsea. So I left a published comment on her annoying and hypocritical screed:

This piece could just have easily been written about Ivanka's friend Chelsea Clinton, had her Mom won.

Chelsea wrote a book too, hers aimed at young people. She urges them to travel the world and and take some time out to get to know the poor. Like Ivanka advising women of her own class, or those aspiring to her heights, Chelsea was addressing versions of herself. She lives in as much of a mirror-bubble as Ivanka and other meritocrats with a conscience.

No wonder that even during the height of the nasty bickering between their parents, both women pledged undying friendship to one other. Class transcends the Duopoly.

There are plenty of highly educated young society matrons in New York and Washington and the West Coast, spewing the same neoliberal hucksterism (Be your own Mommy brand! Be your own entrepreneur! Lean In! Sleep Revolution!) as Ivanka Trump -- who, let's remember, couldn't even vote for Daddy in the New York primary because she'd forgotten to divest from her Democratic party affiliation by the deadline.

 So it's convenient that Ivanka suddenly becomes just the right hook upon which to hang this critique of "fake feminism." Since her father is such a big creep, she's fair game. If she were a real feminist, she would have disowned him years ago. Right?

Anyway, I guess it'll be fun in a gross kind of way watching her try to play Cordelia to Trump's King Lear. All the world's a political stage and we the audience are, as ever, merely being played.

Of course, the lifestyles and coutures and excesses of the Trumps are not that different from the lifestyles of the Clintons -- or the Obamas, who just moved into a mansion two blocks away from Ivanka and her family. The main difference is in the virtue-signalling.

If you must bomb many countries for many decades, and if you must reward yourself and your plutocratic friends and donors with record gains at the expense of the huddled masses who elected you, you also must maintain the proper decorum and use the proper platitudes. Instead of constantly boasting and consuming way too much way too conspicuously, you utter such phrases as "Women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights" and "When they go low, we go high" and "I am my brother's keeper.org."

When you go on your luxury vacations, you never, but never, post pictures on Instagram. While cavorting on a private island, for example, you discreetly allow the rare casual capture of your cool dad image, complete with flip-flops and a backwards baseball cap. And voila, you will fill the Internet with some of that much-needed joy so seriously lacking in the Trump gene pool. 

You have to combine the fakery with folksiness and flattery and finesse. And the Trumps will never in a million years be able to do folksiness and flattery and finesse. 

Half the country despises them because they're such rich oafs. The other half loves them, because the Trumps prove that if even clueless oafs like them can be successful, then anybody can be successful. Even you. Better an honest huckster than a phony huckster.

Dueling Duopolists

The botta-in-tempo between the two swaggerers of the One Percent continues unabated this week. Both presidential candidates continue to helplessly reveal themselves as the willing puppets of the aristocracy, even as they frantically try to shove their Louis Vuitton political baggage under their Aubusson carpets. They brazenly position themselves as champions of the middle class at the same time they grovel at the feet of hedge fund managers at $75,000-a-plate fundraisers, jetting hither and yon to the international playgrounds of the rich. 

Mitt partied in the Hamptons with the VIPs a few weekends ago, and will be feted by a panoply of Libor banksters in London later this month. George Clooney is hosting a fundraiser for Obama in Switzerland, that rarefied land of secret bank accounts. Meanwhile, Barry himself jetted down to Palm Beach today, greased palms at the ready.

And the spouses are no longer immune from the Marie Antoinette syndrome, either. As Michelle Obama was headed for the posh summer digs of the Massachusetts Governor/former board member of the subprime mortgage fraudster Ameriquest, Gov.Deval Patrick has ordered the road to his Berkshires mansion in a cash-strapped county freshly paved for the First Lady's motorcade. The Republicans are dubbing the $20,000-a-head fundraiser "The Princess and the Potholes."

Michelle's fundraising stump speech never fails to mention that she grew up in a cramped working class apartment in which her mother still lives. Even though her mother now resides on her own private floor in the White House. 

Ann Romney. who always reminds us she doesn't "feel rich", took some time out from her dueling Cadillac schedule today to lambast "you people" for daring to ask for more tax returns and more of their untaxable millions. The Democrats started running ads making fun of her dressage horse, until somebody mentioned M.S. Then they remembered the Hilary Rosen "never worked a day in her life" debacle and reined in that particular attack. For now.

This is all so silly. Why can't people listen when these women assure us they are just like everybody else?

As I wrote a few days ago, fully 90% of all the Rombama TV ads are negative. It's a nonstop bash-a-thon, and the cable giants are laughing all the way to the bank. In the latest round of "Who's the Biggest Hypocrite?", the Romney campaign asks whatever happened to Barry's White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness (which in reality is nothing more than an in-house deregulation lobby of big business leaders and one or two  trade unionists.) The group has not formally met since January, when the Obama re-election campaign officially got underway. The White House claims the president has just had way too much on his (fundraising) plate lately to schmooze with the likes of tax-evading G.E. honcho Jeff Immelt and union-busting hotel heiress Penny Pritzker.  According to Politico's Josh Gerstein,

To cap it all off, several of the companies whose CEOs serve on the panel are involved to some extent in outsourcing — a fact that could undercut the ferocious attack Obama and his campaign are mounting on Romney over his alleged ties to the practice.

One former administration official said the current political atmosphere could be prompting the CEOs and other business leaders to lie low.

“The thing is supposed to be bipartisan, so a lot of times they don’t want to get into things that could be used by either side in the election,” said the former aide, who asked not to be named. “The businesspeople, for the most part, don’t want to get into the middle of political fighting.”

The business people don't want to get their hands dirty, and the politicians can't wash the dirt from their own hands. 

Oh bountiful for specious smiles, for ample wads of green. For purple-wearing majesties, who fawn and bribe and preen. America, America. Who took our jobs from thee? They stole the goods, those Wall Street hoods! From sea to oil-sheened sea.