Like neglected children, congressional Democrats are once again pinning all their hopes on Deadbeat Dad Robert Mueller III. The chief Russiagate investigator had come under liberal fire in recent weeks not only for failing to make the facts fit MSNBC's conspiracy theories, but for not immediately disowning Attorney General William Barr's semi-accurate spin on the long-awaited report.
Therefore, the Desperate Dems hope to haul Mueller in the actual flesh before their committees to try and elicit the secret inner workings of his mind. If he gives them what they want, who knows? He might even be re-elevated to the Father of Our Country status he had enjoyed for the past couple of years. As long as they could count on getting their child support payments, with interest, in the not-too-distant future, they were quite content these past few years to subsist on their own speculative hot air as the official gourmet feast was being quietly and painstakingly prepared for them.
It's safe to say that the Democrats are now officially in the bargaining phase of their Five Stages of Russiagate Grief. Still awaiting salvation and sustenance from Mueller, whose public testimony is still far from a done deal, they've had to satisfy themselves this week with another marathon reading, this time with a cameo by John Cusack, of the entire redacted Mueller report. Unlike the usual grandstanding Congressional theatrics, though, the ensemble cast's bravura performance was conducted in a private room and live-streamed on C-Span for viewing by anybody with 12 masochistic hours to kill.
House Judiciary Chair Adam Schiff was certainly not sated by the performance, demanding to hear from Mueller himself, because "seeing is believing, hearing is believing." In other words, if only Mueller can channel his inner Rachel Maddow, all might be forgiven.
Unless and until it is proven otherwise by the special counsel himself, the suspicion lingers that Mueller could have written his report under the influence. He might not have written or redacted the report himself. He could even be a Russian asset. The revered elder statesman that everybody assumed was Mueller could even be an alien pod person who took over Mueller's body when we weren't looking. This is far more plausible than it sounds, given that Mueller has rarely been seen and virtually never heard in public during the years that everybody naively assumed he was carefully plodding through his investigation and discovering the desired facts.
So if Mueller finally does appear before Congress and he does stick to his findings, the next step of the Desperate Dems might include using advanced technology to discern whether his eyes turn into red pulsating pinwheels while he stands firmly by his written words. At the very least, they can produce body language experts to interpret the testimony, and cable talking heads can count how many times Mueller blinks every time he persists in alleging that there was no grand conspiracy between Trump and Putin.
The New York Times cuts right to the chase and reports that the Democrats' biggest fear is that they are not keeping the manufactured public fear of TrumPutin and Russia sufficiently alive. People might actually be losing interest in the Mueller Report, which had immediately shot to the top of the bestseller lists when it was hastily printed, redactions and all, in book form last month. Things are now getting so fraught that Michelle Obama's memoir even threatens to reclaim its rightful place at Number One.
From the Times:
Any appearance by Mr. Mueller, however noncommittal or boring it turns out to be, is one of the only means to snap the issue of Mr. Trump’s actions back to center stage, they said, along with testimony from someone like Mr. (former White House chief counsel Don) McGahn.
Shakespeare was only partly right. All the world's a stage, for sure. But it's really not the play that's the thing when it comes to Washington theatrics. It's the relentless hyping of the play. It's the production of constant cliff-hangers to keep us binge-watching and riveted on anything except the myriad existential crises that the political class is doing nothing to address or remedy.
With that truism in mind, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally allowed on Thursday that while she is still averse to bringing impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, she is now a little more open to talking about impeachment. And who knows, she added, given that Trump is providing them new grounds for impeachment every single day with his obstructions of House subpoenas, he could even end up impeaching his own self with no effort even needed by the Democrats!
Impeachment doesn't necessarily mean a definite move to remove Trump from office, it means constructing a legal path to arrive at the facts, she cogently explained. Courts are also more likely to take Trump's obstruction seriously if the I word is tacked on to the Democrats' legal challenges to his recalcitrance.
"You never say, blanketly, I'm not answering any subpoenas," Pelosi chided Trump at a different appearance Thursday at Georgetown University.
Blanketly? I checked, and it's a real adverb, meaning that one approach should never be applied to too many disparate things. Now, I may be too much of a literal thinker, but when I first read that statement, it immediately conjured up a mental picture of Linus stubbornly and blissfully clutching his security blanket despite Lucy's hectoring.
Marx was right about tragedy and farce. Not only does history keep repeating itself, the repetitions are now coming so close together that the genres seamlessly merge and become indistinguishable from one another. The messages become mixed and the actors all mixed up as the whole facade crumbles around them, and the curtain falls.
Until next time. Stayed tuned for another exciting episode. True, it may turn out to be as boring as the last one, but the anticipation alone is guaranteed to keep our eyes glued to the ubiquitous screens that, like Linus's lovey, have become virtual and indispensable parts of our physical and mental selves.
Lose our gadgets blanketly? Shut the blankety-blank up!
After two years of urging Democrats to patiently await the results of the Mueller investigation before even thinking about impeachment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved the goalposts on Monday.
As she sees it, the report is only a prelude. It is merely a template, or book of clues which Congress must carefully examine in order to finally arrive at The Truth. So much for Robert Mueller III being the avenger and final arbiter of the fate of Donald Trump.
It's almost as though Pelosi is pulling an Obama, who back in 2009 told a group of nervous Wall Street bankers that "I am the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks," tacitly assuring them that they would not face criminal prosecution under his benevolent watch.
Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in the land, is the only thing standing between a blustery and very paranoid Trump and the golden pitchforks of the liberal pundit and political class, more and more of whom are demanding that impeachment proceedings begin. This is especially true of those running for president and who are in dire need of fuel to fire up the voters. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have yet to catch fire in the polls, and are among the impeachment advocates. Of course, since they sit in the Senate, and it's the House that has to get the ball rolling, their calls for impeachment require no further effort or political capital on their part.
As for Pelosi, her neoliberal bipartisan agenda trumps bringing Trump to any form of justice. For starters, she is anxious to get the Trump-backed corporations and the Democratic Party-backed corporations together in a closed room to arbitrate drug prices without any input from the actual House of Representatives. A drawn-out impeachment process would just take all the energy away from enriching the oligarchy in the bipartisan manner to which it has become accustomed.
And since Pelosi had also refused to bring George W. Bush to justice for his illegal torture and surveillance programs, and for lying us into a war that killed, maimed or displaced millions of people, bringing Trump to justice for playing a mob boss and thwarting the Mueller investigation would seem kind of petty, wouldn't it? This is especially true since Pelosi herself was secretly briefed on Bush's torture program in 2003, and did nothing to expose or stop it.
And that would make her seem kind of complicit in war crimes, wouldn't it?
Well, not according to Pelosi. She said she was only following the secrecy rules. She is no Chelsea Manning-style whistleblower. The fact that Republicans attacked her on the torture issue did the bipartisan trick, too: it brought loyal Democrats to her immediate defense, just as the Democratic "witch-hunt" against Trump brings the GOP to his immediate defense.
Unaccountability is built right into the permanent American power structure. The rulers rely on the Constitution and other arcane rules whenever it's convenient, not because it's right. When it's not convenient, then they don't. That is the main function of the Duopoly: theatrics and grandstanding in public, and disdaining the public good and the public's wishes in private.
Fast-forward to 2019.
Politico reports:
"We can investigate Trump without drafting articles," she said during a call with House Democrats.... We aren't going to go faster, we are going to go as fast as the facts take us."
"It is also important to know that the facts regarding holding the President accountable can be gained outside of impeachment hearings," she wrote earlier Monday afternoon in a letter to House Democrats.
This should throw cold water on the continuing hysterical insistence by the Golden Pitchforks crowd that Donald Trump is a secret Russian agent and guilty of treason. I don't think that even Nancy Pelosi has reached the level of corruption that would allow her to desultorily hunt for facts about how, exactly, Vladimir Putin is actively ruling our country and ruining our democracy.
Her inaction should be all the proof the Russophobes need to relinquish their fantasies once and for all. But now that they've created their own alternate reality, inconsistencies and plot-holes are so easy to ignore. The play is the thing, as Shakespeare once observed.
Therefore, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, typical of the Golden Pitchforkers of the Plutocracy, writes:
So all the “fake news” was true. A hostile foreign power intervened in the presidential election, hoping to install Donald Trump in the White House. The Trump campaign was aware of this intervention and welcomed it. And once in power, Trump tried to block any inquiry into what happened.
Never mind attempts to spin this story as somehow not meeting some definitions of collusion or obstruction of justice. The fact is that the occupant of the White House betrayed his country. And the question everyone is asking is, what will Democrats do about it?
But notice that the question is only about Democrats. Everyone (correctly) takes it as a given that Republicans will do nothing. Why?
Translation: We will keep spinning the Russiagate fairy tale and foist all the blame for the Democrats' failure to hold Trump accountable for "treason" on the usual GOP suspects, who do not believe in "American Values." This is like a prosecutor who refuses to indict a suspect because he doesn't have an ironclad guarantee of a conviction. It's akin to the Obama administration refusing to prosecute Wall Street bankers because it is too complicated and institutions must never be allowed to fail.
It is cowardice and complicity,and yes, it is obstruction of justice in its own right. It is so much easier to accuse one side of the Duopoly of not adhering to "American values." It saves the corporate Resistance the trouble of examining their own consciences and acknowledging their own roles (2016 Bernie Buzzkill) in enabling the election of Trump.
These Democratic pitchforks come custom-equipped with nice, soft protective cushions over their shiny, well-oiled tines. Liberals come to scare and enrage Trump, and to be ostentatiously disgusted by him. They don't want to really hurt him. He is too valuable a commodity and diverting media personality.
My comment on Krugman (held by the newspaper's censors for 10 hours prior to publication):
If Speaker Pelosi believed that Trump is a traitor to his country, she'd be pushing impeachment. She's averse to it because she knows Trump is just your ordinary homegrown mobster who's "not worth it."
She thinks it's safer to run out the clock till Election Day. as we're regaled with a steady procession of piecemeal investigations and subpoenas that Trump will (true to form) obstruct every step of the way.
Enough of Russiagate. It feeds his paranoia. He used his campaign as a marketing opportunity, and dealing with the Russian mob was just one of his many scams.
Where's the corporate media outrage over his veto of the congressional bill to stop the US-enabled genocide in Yemen? Where's the angst over the US meddling and attempted coup in Venezuela, or his economic assault on Iran, or his continued caging of refugee children at the border?
As for the GOP, when did they ever "believe in" anything, except serving their paymasters? They're not scared of the corporate Dems, who serve their own paymasters. They fear only true progressives like Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren - who, to her great credit, was the first liberal senator to utter the "I" word.
Republicans win because they co-opt populism in the service of elitism. Trump's way too skilled a comic diversion to relinquish. Add to him the hucksters of the Evangelical "Greed is God" cult, and they haven't got a qualm in the world. Ethics? What ethics?
Speaking of ethics, lack of same is very much a bipartisan affair.
Pelosi used the same language of collegiality and cooperation in 2006, when widespread public antiwar sentiment cost Bush the lower House. She grotesquely equated justice with pettiness. In her world, it's always better to ostentatiously extend olive branches to war criminals and forget about the war dead and the trillions of wasted dollars.
As the New York Times reported,
She said the GOP, which frequently excluded Democrats from conference committee hearings and often blocked attempts to introduce amendments, would not suffer similar treatment.
“Democrats pledge civility and bipartisanship in the conduct of the work here and we pledge partnerships with Congress and the Republicans in Congress, and the president — not partisanship.”
She also extended an olive branch to Bush on the war in Iraq, saying she plans to work with him on a new plan but will not support the current strategy and supports beginning redeployment of troops by the end of the year.
Pelosi also said she supports the idea of a bipartisan summit on the war.
“We know, ‘stay the course,’ is not the way,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi said she received a brief, early-morning call from Bush, who invited her to lunch on Thursday.
“We both expressed our wish to work in a bipartisan way for the benefit of the American people.”
She mildly scolded Bush for his authoritarian language the same way that she now mildly scolds Trump for his. It's not even Nerf-brand toy pitchforks that Nancy Pelosi wields. It's a few slimy strands of overcooked spaghetti.
When she keeps repeating that her goal is to benefit "the American People," her definition of people is the United States Corporate Empire, limited to the very rich, the very militaristic and the very interconnected.
Here's another response to Krugman's claim that Republicans have no American values. This one was written by my alter ego, "Nicky Sardo," and also held overnight by censors: (many "regular" commenters besides me have been similarly and regularly exiled. In keeping with the Unaccountability Code of Values adopted by the American ruling class and their media propagandists, the Times ascribes its censorship practices to the vagaries of a top-secret algorithm.)
There is at least one American Value that the Republicans sincerely believe in. And that is the value of the almighty dollar. Billions and billions of them, to be precise, all parked tax-free in the pockets of a few tycoons who own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population combined.
They also believe in vote suppression, particularly in Southern states with majority Black populations. They accomplish this with their Unholy Trinity dogma: voter ID laws; incarcerating record numbers of Black people and then denying them suffrage based upon their convictions; and gerrymandering.
They also believe in denying poor white and black and brown people a decent education. Trump himself once boasted that he "loves the uneducated." Because if you keep people down long enough, they'll vote for Republicans out of ignorance, fear, desperation, resentment of "the other" - or they'll be too broke, apathetic, sick or disgusted to even bother to vote at all. And failure to vote is usually a default vote for a Republican, unfortunately.
Whether Trump is an actual traitor is beside the point at this point, because Americans have been shafted by unfettered neoliberal capitalism for decades now. Forget about Putin and the Russians. We have the Kochs, the Adelsons, the Mercers, the Wall Street banks, the consolidated media spewing corporate propaganda and rich men's wars at us 24/7. The fact that they still invite us, even beg us, to vote is proof that democracy is pretty much a delusion.
