The Narrative Souffle Is Overbeaten and Collapsing

"Sir, there is something on your chin," read the aide's discreet note, whereupon President Biden swiped something yellow off his face with his finger, peered closely at the little blob of goo, and then proceeded to nonchalantly pop it into his mouth.

I guess it could have been worse. Biden could have been choking on his own word salad again, and the aide, perhaps privy to a recent top-secret PET scan, could have discreetly written "Sir, you have swiss cheese for a brain. When you refer to the talking points that we so carefully write down for you on your cue card,  could you just for once also please remember to keep it out of camera range?"

Luckily for Biden, neither the gross food/bodily secretion recycling incident nor any other "gaffes" are receiving any coverage at all in establishment liberal media. You just have to grit your teeth and hold your nose and gingerly descend into the deepest depths of right-wing and click-bait media like Yahoo!, Fox, and the The Daily Mail to see either the above clip or the recent suggestion by former White House physician and current congress-critter Ronny Jackson that Biden should be subject to emergency cognitive testing. Of course, given that Jackson had also once opined that the overweight and hypertensive Donald Trump would live to be a hundred, you can pretty much rest assured that his concern about what could be early signs of dementia in Biden are not altruistically medical, but crassly political. 

On the other hand, you can also rest assured that if it had been Trump oafishly wolfing down a glob of mystery goo that he'd just picked off his face, it would have been trending at Number One on CNN, the most trusted name in nooze. That's why it's always a good idea to get your nooze from the entire duopolistic spectrum of A to B, the better to bypass all the censorship by omission while at the same time using your own critical thinking skills to sidestep all the virtual La Brea tarpits bubbling over with gooey propaganda. Swallowing whole, no matter how outrage-inducing or delectable that any given nooze-morsel might seem at first glance, is not only a choking hazard, it can wreak havoc with your overloaded information digestive system.

 That's a daunting prospect for sure, especially given that most of us are too beaten down by neoliberalism and too worried about our own precarious lives to indulge in media criticism as yet another side-gig. But here's where we might finally be getting lucky ourselves.

On the surface, it might seem lucky for Biden that he is still being treated with kid gloves by the liberal establishment media. But anybody with a functioning brain can also plainly see that their myriad official narratives have so many holes in them that they're collapsing faster than an overbeaten swiss cheese souffle. When powerful establishment figures start turning on each other, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now turning on the White House for not extending the national eviction moratorium, that leaves a fleeting power vacuum that the rest of us can and must fill.

When progressive "squad" maven Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is so cowed by Medicare For All agitators that she has to close her district office, she has received the message that her pithy tweets against Republicans don't cut it any more. She should be smart enough to realize that unless the "progressive" wing of the House of "Representatives" uses its very real leverage in the here and now, she might even lose her seat.

Notwithstanding the establishment media's tacit agreement to ignore Biden's cognitive issues, the role of the establishment media as a government mouthpiece is beginning to wobble. There is widespread agreement that both the White House and its private corporate partners jumped the gun in declaring victory over the pandemic early this summer, as they made a euphoric return to "normal" their highest priority. Watching the poobahs undercut each other on mask-wearing, eviction moratoriums and the spread of the virus even among the vaccinated is a sign that the ruling class is weakening, at least insofar as their propaganda narratives are concerned. They all look bad, because they're all, in fact, guilty of putting profits over people. Nothing points to their cynical self-dealing more than the current eviction crisis.

Take the White House's pathetic rationale for not extending the eviction moratorium. Since Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a majority opinion upholding the moratorium that any further extension would require an act of Congress, Biden's flouting of this judicial opinion could, his legal minions claim, lead to the Court overthrowing further executive public health actions, possibly even declaring that in the future, no president can ever again declare a public health emergency for any reason whatsoever. The Black Plague could make a comeback and wipe out half the population, and the US president still would be powerless to order a mass lockdown. Therefore, Biden claims he has no other choice but to let millions of people lose the roofs over their heads during the current pandemic. It's a flimsy claim at best.

Now, if Biden were really proactive, he would have attempted to overhaul the court by now, so that reactionary ideologues like Brett Kavanaugh would not have such outsize power to effectively dictate public policy. 

Instead, Status Quo Joe did the cynical thing. He appointed a commission to study Supreme Court reform, and he even appointed a stalwart Brett Kavanaugh defender to sit on it, all but ensuring that, once again, "nothing will fundamentally change."

Just as Biden punted tenant protections to Congress just as they were leaving for their summer vacation, he is now using the Supreme Court as another excuse to do nothing. As The Nation's Elie Mystal writes,

Perhaps even more troubling, instead of balancing some of the center-left people on the commission with more, or any, outspoken advocates of court reform, Biden went the other way and put Federalist Society scholars and judges in there to drag the whole thing to the right. I cannot recall the last time a Republican president bothered even to consult a Democratic voice, never mind a genuinely left voice, on how to proceed with a matter related to the Supreme Court. But Democrats continue to act like they need a hall pass from Republicans before they take any action.

If Biden didn't have the Court as his partner in crime, he can always fall back on such useful idiots as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, not to mention Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough, all but designated by Biden as America's official Pope-Queen for her power to impede Democratic reconciliation bills. This is legislation introduced by the ultra-slim liberal majority to great fanfare, great grandstanding, and most important of all, great re-election fundraising campaigns to show how much they care and how hard they are fighting for us.

But, gosh darn it, their poor grasping hands are tied. They like to say they're being thwarted by those nasty old Republicans. But let's get real. It is more obvious with every passing day that these supposed handcuffs are nothing but cheap canned silly string.

They all have egg on their faces, not to mention the ice water mush flowing sluggishly through their tortuous veins.

Impeachment In a Can

For one brief shining moment on Saturday, the Trump show trial actually threatened to turn into the real deal, with testimony from real human witnesses to enhance the speeches. The disturbing film footage of the Capitol riot, complemented by Trump's own spittle-inflected incitement voiceover, should have been a prima facie case for unanimous conviction. But that would have meant that the acquitting GOP senators' own lust for power and fear of Trump took second place to meting out justice.

Then, just as suddenly as the Democratic impeachment managers moved to extend Impeachment 2.0 into a case that even the most hardened Republican would be forced to squirm through, they folded. It seems that the Senators of both sides of the Duopoly have so much love in their hearts that they simply could not bear to miss Valentine's Day at home. Also, with such a prolonged exercise in justice that human witnesses and other supplementary evidence would entail, Joe Biden would be thwarted from his sublime reaching across the aisle and making friendly deals with some of the same 47 GOP senators who had just voted to acquit Donald Trump, giving their tacit stamp of approval to an attempted coup.

Now, to be fair, an extension of the trial would also have opened the door for Republicans to call their own witnesses. Nancy Pelosi, for example, would have been raked over the coals, forced to answer why she didn't request beefed up police protection for her members on that fateful day, despite plenty of warnings of mob violence. It also would have opened up the dreaded Hunter Biden can of worms.

Therefore, the public is being asked to empathize with the Democrats' political dilemma and to actually believe that justice will eventually prevail once the Dems get around to congressional investigations into the insurrection - after of course, they pass Covid relief, accomplish immigration reform, address the climate catastrophe and "do" health care.

In other words, politicians on both sides of the aisle will give each other cover as they try keep their respective rancid cans of worms glued firmly shut until they finally rust and crumble into the memory hole of nothingness.

 And meanwhile, the media will do its own part of making the story about all the "breakout stars" of Impeachment Theater, and how the show trial was, at its very essence, their audition for higher office.

"Though impeachment is an inherently political process," as Politico dishes in a piece about the latest manufactured group of rising stars to entertain and seduce and distract the viewing public,"elected officials typically don't like to admit that working as a manager can come with electoral benefits. They were required to walk a careful line when making the case that Trump incited a mob at the U.S. Capitol. Still, strategists from both sides of the aisle acknowledged their roles likely furthered their careers."

Not that the legacy stars didn't also have their moment in the sun. Nancy Pelosi theatrically "crashed" the post-acquittal press conference of Democratic impeachment managers to deliver yet another bravura performance of a "scathing" indictment of Republican cowards, while demurring that "it had not been my intention to come for this press availability."

Since the show must always go on, the national corporate media are either already camped out at Mar-a-Lago or en route in order to cover the widely anticipated opening act of Donald Trump's Revenge Tour  Refusing to cover him is not an option for the press, because their clicks and ratings have dropped so precipitously since he left office. Film of an empty podium at his gilded Florida palace is bound to attract more eyeballs than the latest White House press briefing, Since Biden Spin Doctor Jen Psaki has asked that reporters submit their questions in advance, the better for her to answer them truthily and transparently, there is no longer even that element of unscripted surprise and comedic improv so essential for the maintenance of good ratings.

While the corporate media performers are attempting to stave off the boredom and tedium of not having Trump fill their empty spaces, they're promoting daughter in law Lara Trump's quest for a North Carolina senate seat and drumming up publicity for daughter Ivanka's own moves to oust Marco Rubio in the Florida senatorial primary. Because no matter how tainted, political dynasties must never be allowed to die. 

In other news, a study by the esteemed British journal Lancet reveals that fully 40 percent of all Covid deaths in the US could have been prevented. These deaths are not only attributable to the incompetence and corruption of the Trump administration, they are the direct result of the free-market neoliberalism of the last 40 years, not to mention the colonial and imperialistic roots of American society itself.

One of the Lancet group's prescriptions, sensibly enough, is the implementation of single payer health care in the United States. But it can't even get a theatrical floor vote in the Democratic-controlled House. And Biden has infamously vowed to veto such a measure, commonly known as Medicare For All, should it ever reach his desk.

There are too many rusted cans in the landfill known as American democracy to count. And don't even get me started on the worms.

Methods To the Political Madness

The blockbuster story of the week (in my opinion) is that Rhode Island students have filed a federal lawsuit charging that their public school system's failure to provide them with basic instruction in government and civics is a direct violation of their Constitutional rights as American citizens. 

Donald Trump certainly isn't the only overlord who "loves the poorly educated," and who has a vested interest in keeping the population dumbed down and perpetually ignorant and apathetic, and even beginning to die off at an alarming new rate.

Indeed, you have to search very hard to find the New York Times article on this important legal challenge to our two-tiered, class and race-based education system. The legal relief sought by the plaintiffs is simply acknowledgment that a liberal education is a basic human right.  It is probably no accident that the story is buried under the usual avalanche of All Trump Scandals, All the Time, alongside the usual near-hysterical demands for social media censorship of freelance political discourse, and the drumbeats for war on Russia and China.

As a matter of fact, one of the plaintiffs in the Rhode Island lawsuit complains that of the two "social studies" courses she did take during high school, the only things she remembers learning about were America's relentless wars. She didn't learn about the three branches of government, or about how to judge political candidates. She simply wants to "know what I don't know."

The case is riding a wave of bipartisan anxiety about a national lack of civic engagement and knowledge, from voter participation rates that are among the lowest in the developed world to pervasive disinformation on social media.Fewer than half the states hold schools accountable for teaching civics, according to a review in 2016 by the Education Commission of the States. Only 23 percent of American eighth graders were proficient in civics on the 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test that included questions on the Constitution and the roles of the various branches of government.Rhode Island does not require schools to offer courses in government or civics, does not require standardized tests in those subjects or in history, and does not provide training for teachers in civics, the lawsuit says.

When our "bipartisan" politicians can't even agree to pass gun control legislation to keep weapons out of schools, can we really expect these oligarchy-beholden lawmakers to mandate the teaching of civics and critical thinking skills in the nation's public school classrooms? Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, for one, would rather arm teachers with guns than arm them with the resources and training to turn America's youth into thinking adults with the basic skills to detect political fraudulence and double-talk whenever they hear it. 

The Rhode Island lawsuit faces a tough road, especially if the case ends up in the arch-conservative Supreme Court. Ironically, as the Times reports, it was an opinion written by Justice Lewis Powell, of infamous "corporate memo" fame, that may provide the opening for a positive decision. He sided with the dissenting Justice Thurgood Marshall in writing that "educational inequality might rise to the level of a constitutional violation if it prevented students from exercising their right to speak and to vote.'"

Ironically (or not) the Times and the consolidated corporate media at large themselves make it hard, if not impossible, for the educated and non-educated alike to exercise their rights to stay informed and educated. Even if poor students are gifted with free copies of the Paper of Record as part of a new civics lexicon, their learning will be largely be limited to what Trump is tweeting about today, or what new scandal has embroiled him and his gene pool.

There is a method to the madness of the Trump era.

In the latest psychotic episode, students of all ages and backgrounds learned that Trump's lawyer pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about a caper involving a new Trump luxury tower in Moscow, a doomed real estate/attempted bribery deal that was in the works at the same time that Trump was an active presidential candidate.

We learned that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is nevertheless persisting in his own real estate negotiations with Trump for a big beautiful bipartisan wall to keep immigrants out.

Just because Trump is a dangerous xenophobe doesn't mean that xenophobia doesn't still deserve its proper place in the cruel Neoliberal World Order. Hillary Clinton delivered her own psychotic civics lecture to Europe recently, warning them to keep out the refugees from the wars that she herself had  voted for or even directly instigated -- lest more Trump-like demagogues rear their ugly racist heads in response to those utterly deplorable racist populations.

Trump, meanwhile, is calling the Mueller investigation a "fake witch hunt."

  This is an example of the chronic double-think strategy beloved of authoritarian leaders. If he really thought the probe was unfair, he would not have inserted the word "fake" before witch hunt. Taken literally, the phrase would mean that it is not a true witch hunt at all, but a legitimate investigation. Trump's own definition of witch hunt is any normal criminal investigation against him, his family and associates. It lays bare his belief that criminal investigations of criminals are bogus on their face and that habitual criminals like him should be immune from the penal code. He thinks that double negatives are a net positive for him.

Besides, "fake" is one of the most overused words in his limited vocabulary. All news which paints him in a bad light - and that is at least 99% of all news about Donald Trump - is fake by definition. But, using classic double-think strategy, he isn't complaining too much. He still craves the media and makes himself regularly and enthusiastically available for interviews and press conferences. 

Of course, this does not mean that all bad news about Trump is itself honest and fact-based. The recent Guardian piece, for example, claiming that convicted fraudster and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met secretly in broad daylight with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange on several occasions is already falling apart at its anonymously-sourced seams. Therefore a former CIA operative who now writes satirical fiction published a bizarre piece in Politico defending the Guardian journalists who wrote the story. These reporters are such great professionals, the former CIA spook writes, that they were obviously just the latest hapless victims of Russian disinformation fraud.

So you can see that the current epidemic of Doublethink is not just limited to Trump. The message of the Politico article is similarly self-contradictory. The reporters are both smart and incredibly stupid at the exact same time. How were they to know that Trump himself could very well be the planter of the hit piece, or at least the co-planter, along with Putin? 

And it's a fake-real war. It allows Donald Trump to control every news cycle, and it allows lazy corporate journalists to grandstand and showboat as martyrs and resistance fighters.

Linguist Ruth Wodak, who has written extensively about the rhetoric of ultra-right authoritarianism in Europe, exposes the traditional collusion between outright fascism and its collaborator, neoliberalism, which Bertram Gross has called "friendly fascism" - or corporatism attempting to disguise itself with a democratic mask. 

Trump and the media are fake enemies who feed off one another and become richer through the construction of their never-ending political soap opera. Each dances to the same tune. Trump is alternately predator and victim, and the corporate media, themselves sponsored by the predatory lords of unfettered capitalism and unlimited war, can posture as victims while the Oligarchy as a whole gets a free pass. The new role of the media is not afflicting the comfortable, but afflicting Trump.

It allows them to spread his toxic message of xenophobia while pretending to wash their hands of their own complicity and collusion. It allows right-wing liberals like Hillary Clinton to sell xenophobia within a kinder, gentler "friendly fascism" discourse and cast blame upon both the refugees of her wars and the ordinary people who have been taught to be frightened of the "Other" who subsequently flee those wars. Trump allows people like her to appear calm and reasonable as they spread much the same kind of propaganda.

Whether it's the latest in a long series of personal scandals or crimes, or whether it's just the latest ignorant, racist tweet, there is a method to the Trump-Media madness and collusion.

Ruth Wodak described how this formula operates within Austria's right-wing Freedom Party, originally made up of both former Nazis and liberals and formed with the direct help of occupying American forces after World War II as a counterweight against - you guessed it - Russia.

The dynamic consists of several stages: the scandal is first denied; then, once some evidence is produced, the scandal is redefined and equated with entirely different phenomena. Predictably, the provocateurs then claim the right to freedom of speech for themselves, as a justificatory strategy. Such utterances immediately trigger another debate - unrelated to the original scandal - about freedom of speech and political correctness. Simultaneously, victimhood is claimed by the original provocateur and the event is dramatized and exaggerated. This leads to the construction of a conspiracy - somebody must be 'pulling the strings' against the original producer of the scandal and scapegoats...  are quickly discovered." Eventually and possibly a 'quasi-apology' might follow to straighten out the 'misunderstanding'... and the entire process starts all over again."

We can cite example after example of how Trump faithfully follows the fascistic playbook.

Perhaps most memorable is the scandal of Trump pronouncing that "there are good people on both sides" after the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. When an uproar ensued, he offered a canned quasi-apology condemning ultra-right violence. He quickly followed that up with his own outrage when people began calling for the removal of Confederate statues, leading to further inflammatory rhetoric by Trump against "socialist Democrats."

Just like the abusive husband who tells his wife that she "made him do it, " Trump is a master of reversing the dichotomy between victim and perpetrator. He has made turning the tables on his accusers something of an art form. Confronted about white nationalism by a Black reporter, Yamiche Alcindor, at a recent news conference, he attacked her personally and called her question "racist." 

From the transcript:

Alcindor: “On the campaign trail, you called yourself a ‘nationalist.’ Some people saw that as emboldening white nationalists. Now people are also saying…”
Trump: “I don’t know why you say that, that is such a racist question.”
Alcindor: “There are some people who are saying that the Republican Party is now supporting white nationalists because of your rhetoric.”
Trump: “Oh, I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that. Why do I have my highest poll numbers ever with African-Americans? Why do I have among the highest poll numbers with African-Americans? That’s such a racist question.”
[Alcindor tries to speak.]
Trump: “Honestly, I know you have it written down and everything. Let me tell you, that is a racist question.”

This is the classic ultra-right technique of transforming those who have traditionally been targets of oppression into oppressors themselves. His behavior at the press conference was a not-so-subtle dog-whistle to his base of supporters, who have been programmed into diverting their own very real anxieties and victimization at the hands of neoliberalism onto their own fellow human beings.

His skilled victim-perpetrator reversal technique extends to what J.E. Richardson calls "calculated ambivalence." His fans receive the message that violence against the Other is O.K. and he is still able to wash his hands of culpability when someone takes matters into his own hands, and shoots Black people in a grocery store or slaughters Jews as they worship in their synagogue. He rails against "Mexican rapists," firing up the crowd at one of his campaign rallies and in the same breath "assumes that some of them are very good people." This strategy of self-contradiction is nothing new under the ultra-right rhetorical sun.

It works both for him and for the #Resistance, Inc. Duopolists who jointly serve the oligarchs. The constant lathering, rinsing and repeating of Trumpian scandals and utterances leaves the media with no time and little space to cover issues of immediate concern to ordinary people and increasing popular demands for policies like debt-free college and universal single payer health care coverage. It allows a lawsuit by students demanding a basic education to fall through the cracks.

The inspiring story of one group of students and teachers fighting back against the ignorance imposed upon regular people by the ruling class is all too easily ignored. The fewer people who are able to read about it and hear about it, the less is the likelihood that they will ever be inspired by it and urged to emulate it with their own lawsuits and protests and sit-down strikes and boycotts.

We have met the enemy, and it is them... the oligarchy and its political and media lackeys. The common wisdom that most people are willfully and deplorably ignorant is itself fake news. Being scared stupid is not the same thing as being stupid. 

Meanwhile, for your civic educational pleasure, here's a detailed analysis of Trumpian language courtesy of Ruth Wodak.  

The Great White Rant, Revisited

Just as Donald Trump regularly dehumanizes dark-skinned people, incurring the requisite (and much-desired) outrage from all who claim to be decent,  so too is he uncannily proficient at then turning the tables upon the decently outraged.

In typical gaslighting fashion, Trump is calling the outraged media and citizens to account for their coverage of and reaction to his latest "animals" remark aimed at undocumented immigrants. He lambasted the outraged, saying that if they'd been paying close enough attention to his well-known nuanced verbal skills, they would have noticed he was again only talking about the notorious MS-13 gang.

He's technically right about that to a minor degree, but very wrong about it to a truly major degree.. His incendiary comment was, in fact, a response to a complaint by the Fresno County (California) sheriff that state law precludes her from reporting to federal immigration authorities information about undocumented migrants, including MS-13 gang members, being held in her county jail.

"We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country,” Trump responded without referring to MS-13. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.”

He was perfectly OK to let the conventional interpretation of his remarks about "these people" stand for more than 24 hours - more than enough time to rebroadcast his bullhorn of a message that all Latino migrants are animals and criminals  - before complaining that he'd been deliberately misunderstood... again.

This has caused a minor corporate media and political frenzy, with some hastily cobbled-together retractions and corrections about the "misunderstanding." So score a win for Trump among his base and his enablers from the Duopoly, and a loss for the coastal elites who pay lip service to the rights of migrants and refugees when it suits their political agendas and party prospects to do so. 

And most of all, score more terror and angst for Latinos and other immigrants, who are being torn from their families by the abusive Trump administration.

For the most part, the corporate media are acting like a bunch of wimps in the face of Trump's critique. They should neither have retracted their stories and tweets, like the A.P. did, nor issued even the flimsiest of apologies to the Trump administration for appearing to "coddle" the MS-13 gang the way that they did, nor even "declined to comment" on the issue, as the New York Times safely did.

 The media were certainly co-opted by Trump in getting the xenophobic message out to the base, loud and clear, before many outlets took the easy way out and decided that yes, they had indeed misinterpreted Trump's "true" message. The lone exception, strange as it may seem, was the Washington Post, which stands by its factual headline "Trump Refers To Some Undocumented Immigrants As Animals."

CNN, long the profitable subject of Trump's "fake news" wrath, took the low road and sided with Trump, accusing and naming the major outlets which took his "animals" comments out of context. The cable network posted its screed, aptly enough, on its "Money Blog."

Heaven forbid that CNN personalities lose their credentials or "access" to the presidential seat of malevolent power as their bosses and corporate sponsors rake in record revenues by selectively #resisting Trump.

  Meanwhile,Trump is having his cake and eating it too, gleefully tweeting today: 

"Fake News Media had me calling Immigrants, or Illegal Immigrants, ‘Animals.’ Wrong! They were begrudgingly forced to withdraw their stories.. I referred to MS 13 Gang Members as “Animals,” a big difference — and so true. Fake News got it purposely wrong, as usual!”

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders went even further. At Thursday's daily White House briefing, she read from a prepared statement:  “The president was very clearly referring to MS-13 gang members who enter the country illegally and whose deportations are hamstrung by our laws. If the media and liberals want to defend MS-13, they’re more than welcome to. Frankly, I don’t think the term that the president used was strong enough.”

She then went on to gleefully and graphically imagine the press corps getting their jollies over the gang cutting off heads and ripping out hearts.

There were no follow-up questions from the cowed assembled court stenographers.

The Cult of Diminished Mental Capacity

It seems like it was only yesterday when your refusal to pledge allegiance to the cult of Russophobia got you branded as, if not downright unpatriotic, then at least the naive tool of Vladimir Putin.

Now that year-long investigations have turned up zero evidence that Russia "hacked" the 2016 presidential elections or that Donald Trump "colluded" with Putin rather than maybe just launder money with the help of the Russian oligarchy, the newest cult revolves around the 25th amendment and the juicy revelations contained in the hastily written and hastily released Fire and Fury.

If you express any doubt that Donald Trump is in the early-to-middle stages of Alzheimer's disease or another form of progressive dementia, then you are a naive fool who refuses to honor the long-distance diagnoses of mental health professionals who possess some sort of remote control PET scanner that sees directly into Trump's Swiss Cheese of a brain. 

Before the new cult of Oprah Winfrey came along the other day to take a little of the psychiatric heat off Trump, his melting brain and deteriorating personality were all that the pundits of CNN and MSNBC could talk about since the book came out last week. Finally, the "open secret" of the president's worsening dementia could be talked about in polite company!  And not just talked about, but weaponized. Knowing full well that Trump watches a lot of TV, they embarked on nothing less than a round-the-clock propaganda campaign to not only convince the public of his incapacity, but to convince Trump himself. He must have felt like Ingrid Bergman to dozens of cable news Charles Boyers. Don't ever dare to defend your sanity, my dear, because it only proves how insane you are. 

"Trump's 'Very Stable Genius' Tweet Proves He Isn't" is the expert opinion of CNN's Chris "Sigmund" Cilizza, with Meta-Narrative Disability as his differential diagnosis:

Trump's lack of strategy is, in an odd sort of way, the most consistent thing about him. Any look at his life tells you that he is someone who just, well, does stuff.

Why has it taken the political world so long to wake up to that fact? Because we tend to view presidents -- and presidencies -- as tied together by some sort of narrative arc. That each statement, each policy decision, each tweet is somehow in support of a broader agenda. That the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That theirs is a story being told to us by the White House -- and it's our job to sniff it out.

Trump's presidency is abnormal in all sorts of ways. But perhaps the most important to understand is that it lacks any sort of meta-narrative. There are just his reactions to things. That's it.

And that, whether you like Trump or hate him, is not the hallmark of a three-dimensional chess-playing super genius.

This is quite a different tune than the one CNN was playing last year at this time. Back before he became so incapacitated, Trump apparently was a master gaslighter in his own right. He was making reality itself become hazy for a whole nation full of Ingrid Bergmans. But of course, it was really Putin who was pulling the gaslighting strings of his Trump puppet:

Russia even tried to gaslight US voters, as intelligence agencies concluded, trying to undermine their faith in the democratic process. And when Moscow thought Trump would lose, it planned to promote the view that the election was stolen, under the #DemocracyRIP banner, a plan whose seeds Trump had already planted.

The challenge will be a steep one for journalists and for all Americans, when so much of what comes from the next president has to be checked and double-checked. The first step is to establish when there is a gaslighting operation in progress.

The media's counter-gaslighting strategy has had an effect all right, but probably not what the pundits had in mind. Instead of reduction, via media torture, to even more of a quivering mess of an old man eating cheeseburgers in his locked bedroom while tweeting increasingly maniacal threats and complaints, the president strategized and decided to go on a full-on mental health campaign of his own. Since, like probably every president before him he is a textbook narcissist, he selfishly made the mental health all about him. He started to ever so carefully over-enunciate his words in public appearances. On Tuesday, he opened to TV cameras what would normally have been a private negotiating session on immigration reform. Not only did his mouth form complete sentences, not once did it hang open or even so much as dribble. Trump performed without incident for over an hour. He even uncharacteristally offered to "take the heat" from critics of his pro-DACA concessions rather than lash out as expected.  He simply was his usual un-meta self, with the Queens accent which makes the fluent media-political complex cringe so self-righteously.

What's more, the Democratic bigwigs in the room actually groveled and laughed and joked and preened and expressed great enthusiasm about working with this supposedly deranged man about his cruel plan to build a wall against immigrants. Once they got their seat at the lime-lit table, they couldn't help themselves.

 "Democrats are for security at the border,” Democratic House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer assured Trump during the meeting. “There are obviously differences, however, Mr. President, on how you affect that.” 

Richard Durbin, the Senate minority whip, likewise couldn't contain himself at the utter fascistic sanity of it all, gushing to Trump: "We’re all honored to be part of this conversation.There are elements you’re going to find Democrats support when it comes to border security. We want a safe border in America, period, both when it comes to the issues of illegal migration, but also when it comes to drugs and all these other areas.”

He later schmoozed to the TV cameras that "my head was spinning" over the 90-minute jam session with Trump. Political dementia is, like, so contagious.

As even the New York Times approvingly wrote, the collaborative aura and appearance of civility "were a remarkable break with the divisive messaging that propelled Mr. Trump to the White House and the harsh policies that have defined his first year in office, marked by efforts to demonize and deport immigrants who have entered the country illegally."

I guess you just can't gaslight a gaslighter after all.

It's preferable to the ruling class that cruel policies such as the mass expulsions of human beings be done as quietly and secretly as possible, as was the case under the Obama administration. Despite all his xenophobic rhetoric, Trump is not anywhere close to beating the discreet and intelligent Obama, who deported more people during his tenure than any other president.


***


I usually profoundly disagree with everything that conservative New York Times pundit Ross Douthat writes. But as he insightfully opined in his Sunday column (days before the Democrats engaged with Trump in that bipartisan matter so beloved of the establishment press): 

But op-ed provocations notwithstanding, the 25th Amendment option isn’t happening — not without some major presidential deterioration in the midst of a major crisis, and probably not even then. And while I blame Republicans for a thousand things that brought us to this pass, it’s too extreme to blame them for not pursuing an option that’s never been tried before, against a president who was recently and (yes) legitimately elected, especially when that option requires extraordinary coordination across the legislative and executive branches and could easily fail … with God-only-knows what kind of consequences. So unless Robert Mueller has more goods than I expect, we are going to live for the next few years in the way that America lived during the waning days of Nixon, the end of the Wilson administration, and perhaps at other moments known only to presidential inner circles — with our own equivalent of the petticoat government, which in this case includes military uniforms, dress suits and whatever outfits Ivanka and Kellyanne Conway favor (but not, any longer, the layering of collared shirts perfected by Steve Bannon).

My published response:

The more the media rails about Trump's mental status, the more the third of the electorate which supports him will feel the vicarious paranoia and outrage against the "elites" who, they feel with some justification, are trying to gaslight him out of office sooner rather than later.

There's cunning method to Trump's madness. After all, it does take a special kind of malevolent brain to be able to con and market your way into the ranks of the Forbes 400. The real scandal is not that he "colluded" with Russia to deny Hillary her coronation, it's that his corrupt way of doing business over the decades has been so rewarded by the very Establishment now seeking his ouster.

As long as the stock market keeps booming and the rich keep growing richer, the #Resistance will continue playing out as a soap opera for our aghast entertainment. Were it not for the fact that Congress has done zilch to take away Trump's capacity to blow us all to smithereens at any time, this whole show would be a work of, like, great comic genius.

The media had their chance to destroy Trump's candidacy. Instead they nourished it with $5 billion worth of free advertising. His TV rallies and debates were ratings bonanzas. Media mogul Les Moonves even gloated that Trump "may not be good for America, but he's damned good for CBS!"

Meanwhile the "demented" Trump is completing plans to destroy Medicaid and snatch health care away from millions of poor people. Where's the media shock and outrage over that?

"We Want Information"

Despite what they claim, the congressional inquisitors who browbeat Silicon Valley executives this week are not particularly interested in suppressing those amateur-hour political ads coming out of "troll farms" with easily manipulated Russian I.P. addresses. Haven't any of them ever heard of proxy servers?

Their real goal seems to be gaslighting the American public into wondering whether that next protest march they join, or the next independent news site they click on is "legitimate" -- or as even the Democratic inquisitors put it, "real American."  And to make sure that the US public is getting the stern message, the committees are demanding that the tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter willingly hand over information about their posters and users to Congress and, by implied extension, to the CIA and the FBI. And that is so weird. Because their demand simply reveals that the NSA, which was outed by Edward Snowden as the collector of every bit of Internet info on every man, woman and child in the world, is apparently not too adept at actually filtering out the mounds and mounds of cyber-information they continue to vacuum up, willy-nilly, for storage in a massive facility out in the Utah desert.

Watching Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) machine-gun out his accusatory questions at the bemused-looking tech lawyers and executives unpleasantly reminded me of the opening scene of the surreal British TV series called The Prisoner.

The co-equal partners of Congress and the "intelligence community" desperately want the private information on social media users which the tech giants have scooped up for their own purposes of advertising and endless profits. Reactionary politicians are using the contrived RussiaGate scare and "national security" concerns as the pretext to get what they want out of the sub-nation of Silicon Valley. "You have transformed the way we do everything from shopping for groceries to growing our small businesses," Warner, who made his own millions in tech and private equity, railed in righteous fury. "But Russia’s actions are further exposing the dark underbelly of the ecosystem you have created!"

Pop Quiz: Find the Dark Underbelly For Extra Points

"And if you won't do it, we will," vowed Dianne Feinstein (D-CIA), with the requisite scare-mongering about "us" being at war with Russia, and accusing the Kremlin of being the major sower of social divisions in the United States, simply by pasting up a bunch of truly cheesy-looking ads on the Internet.

This One Swayed Bernie-Supporting Atheists & Convinced Ted Cruz True Believers 

The aim of the congress-critters could not be any more transparent. By accusing a foreign power of creating social unrest in the most unequal advanced country on earth, they save themselves the trouble of exploring the true, historical roots of these social problems, not to mention doing anything about them. It all boils down to government of, by, and for an oligarchy which has replaced representative democracy.

It's easier for them to crazily claim that 10 million American citizens, or roughly one-thirtieth of the entire population, have been hypnotized into eyeballing an estimated 3,000 ads emanating from Petersburg. Even crazier is the claim by Facebook that more than 100 million - meaning one out of three Americans - viewed the ads. This exposure allegedly has caused people to start hating individuals and groups they would not otherwise have hated, and voting for a reality show huckster they would not otherwise have even noticed outside the $5 billion worth wall-to-wall free coverage of his hate-speech granted him by the domestic mainstream media. These claims simply beggar belief.  

  Despite carefully labeling their witch-hunt a patriotic effort to weed out Putinesque propaganda, committee members did slip up a few times during their series of hearings, admitting that they're also trying to suppress or weed out left-leaning domestic news sites and blogs and social justice organizations. During the House's own separate fishing expedition, Intelligence Committee Co-Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) groused that search engine algorithms don't do enough to cull any kind of content that is "fear-based, or anger-based." In other words, this is any content not sponsored by corporations, such as on the fear-mongering terror channel, CNN, or the anger-spreading, lie-spreading Fox News.

Why doesn't Schiff just cut to the chase and add some more oomph to the Congress-enabled opioid epidemic by giving every American a lifetime prescription for Xanax or Valium? We simply can't have the poor, the overworked, the underpaid, the jobless and the uninsured getting so damned mad all the time about their all-American allotted stations in life.

On the one hand, elected officials bitch and moan that people are too dumb to figure out that a primitive cartoon ad which casts Hillary Clinton as the devil attacking Jesus isn't really Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, they bitch and moan that people are too smart for their own good, and know only too well how badly their leaders are screwing them over. 

Congress wants to have it both ways. They want a populace smart enough to track down approved sources of information, and then limit their consumption to six major media conglomerates. They also want a populace dumb enough to actually believe what these six major conglomerates spoon out to them.

Meanwhile, they act out their drama of disingenuous confusion over this whole contrived chicken and egg dilemma. Which came first: the social unrest fueling the inflammatory content, or the inflammatory content fueling the social unrest? They might as well ask which came first: the pamphlets of the Sans-Culottes inflaming hatred for the French monarchy, or the French monarchy inflaming the hatred of the revolutionary masses? Congress is suddenly pretending that this question is not as old as humankind itself. Maybe they've been spending too much time watching and appearing on corporate propaganda-cum-news shows.

This latest inquisition might look like a mere fishing expedition for a relative handful of Russian trolls. What it is in reality is a shot across the bow against the First Amendment itself.

"We're just getting started," huffs Adam Schiff.  He's gung-ho for a brand new piece of legislation, oxymoronically called the "Honest Ads Act," or HAA. 

The Don Drapers of Madison Avenue must be laughing their asses off on that one, as they market the painkillers along with the drugs to counter opioid constipation. Be very afraid of cartoon Trumps and Clintons and pay proper attention to the diet scams, the local dark money political attacks, the banks, the airlines, the luxury cars, and the military recruitment come-ons produced for your viewing and reading pleasure by the six major media conglomerates. Join the defense of capitalism on steroids. It may not be truthful or just, but it's definitely the all-American way.

It's Not Terror If An Old White Guy Does It

Just because it's the worst (nonmilitary or state-sanctioned) gun massacre in modern American history, and thousands of people were terrified by it, doesn't mean you get to call it a terror attack.

A quick Google search of headlines on the Las Vegas atrocity reveals that media outlets are mostly going with "mass shooting" to describe the carnage. Not only was the gunman apparently not a Muslim or an ISIS sympathizer. He was an older white professional with no criminal record who lived in a $400,000 house. Talk about an atrocity not being media-ready, or especially Trump-ready! The most that the bombastic president could glumly tweet out was hs "deepest condolences" minus the usual dog-whistling outrage at which he is so adept.

There was no way CNN could cue the canned Doomsday soundtrack for this one, and absolutely no way that weapons manufacturers could immediately book and run the usual ads which both fund and ramp up the War On Terror. National security actors were left twiddling their thumbs by the phone. For one thing, the shooter himself was at one point in his life an auditor for the mega-weapons, fighter jet, bomb and drone manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Talk about not fitting the standard narrative!

So all CNN could come up with as of this morning was Suspect Killed 50+ People and Had 10 Rifles.

NBC was similarly bland, but went even further and put its own headline in the passive mood: More Than 50 Killed and 406 Hurt Near Mandalay Bay. They did not mention that concert-goers were "terrified" until the second paragraph. The suspect is not an assassin, he is a "gunman."

CBS managed to bypass human agency entirely in its headline: Las Vegas Shooting Leaves At Least 50 Dead.

It's not until the second page of the morning's Google results that we venture across the pond and get the name of the domestic terrorist right in the headline. The BBC bluntly announces: Las Vegas Shooting: Steven Paddock Kills Over 50 People.

But wait, stop the presses! The Independent, also based in the UK, announced that Isis was claiming responsibility after all!* Adjust the Google algorithm, pronto, as the corporate media outlets cue the Doomsday soundtracks and enlarge the headline fonts to full capacity for the global terrorized viewing pleasure of millions.

If this claim of Isis involvement is true, watch as Paddock magically metamorphose from a respectable guy who just "snapped" to a stark raving mad evil jihadist in the space of a minute.

Celebrities and politicians will adjust their own settings and change the tune of their Tweets asap, vying for the chance to be first to blame it all on either Trump (if they're Democrats) or the vast Muslim conspiracy (if they're Republicans) to supplement the hash-tagged thoughts and prayers to the victims of the inevitable #VegasStrong.

As ever, all talk of gun control legislation has been declared "too soon" out of solemn respect for the dead. If they couldn't get it done after the Sandy Hook massacre, they certainly won't get in done for a few hundred country music fans. What happened in Vegas will, sadly, probably stay in Vegas.

Of course, when a right-wing white supremacist congressman named Steve Scalise is the victim of a would-be assassin, the media will fawn all over him and his miraculous, well-insured recovery, while he solemnly hopes that his shining courageous example will break the "gridlock" and inspire a whole new wave of bipartisanship. (as in tax cuts for the wealthy, and social program-slashing for the rest of us.)

Country music star Jason Aldean, one of the Vegas performers, was certainly right when he observed that "this world is sick."

*Update: The FBI said there is no evidence of Isis involvement in the Vegas terror attack. So let our rulers put this terrible tragedy behind us as they get on with the important work of terrorizing the public with the narrative of Russian meddling in American politics, a/k/a the war on democracy itself. The Kremlin agitprop on Facebook has gotten so bad that even Fido isn't safe.

Be properly afraid and patriotically believe everything the "intelligence community" tells you through its Mighty Wurlitzer house organs, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Anesthetizing Outrage

It was shocking enough that he accused a female colleague in the NBC infotainment family of copiously bleeding from a face-lift. But not content with that gleeful provocation, Donald Trump has finally gone over the edge in what's being ballyhooed as the ultimate faux pas of his entire presidency. Trump actually sent out a video of himself mock-pummeling a WWE star whose face was replaced with the sacred CNN logo.

How dare he terrorize the Terror Channel, whose patriotic neoliberal purpose is to sell endless bloody war and domestic paranoia on behalf of the Military-Industrial Complex? And only two days before the birthday of Our Great Nation!

Trump's CNN spoof is all the proof you apparently need that our president is inciting violence against all actual human journalists. It's the umpteenth coup de grace for this misbegotten presidency. 

Like Pavlovian dogs, Big Media stars are falling all over themselves to win the prize for outstanding performance by an actor or actress in a supporting role in the Trump broadcast franchise. Ingenue Mika appeared to be a shoo-in only yesterday. But by Sunday, it was CNN's Jim Acosta, who obligingly played straight man to Trump's comic evil genius by pointing out that the professional wrestling video is a refaked fake. He eagerly left himself wide open to Trump's riposte that CNN is fake news. It was as tightly scripted as anything ever read from a TelePrompTer.

And round and round they go, to the cheers and jeers and yawns and snickers and gasps of a TV-addicted America.

Trump, far from attempting to repress free speech and civil dissent, relies on it and thrives upon it. The more he can control the news cycle with his outlandish performances, the more that he can render coverage on issues relevant to the public both meaningless and boring. He makes the pundits targeted by his insults look ridiculous and powerless. Just witness Mika's response to Trump's face-lift insult. To avoid the stress of coming up with an original statement, she simply appended the corporate "little hands" Cheerios cereal advertisement to her counter-Tweet. That taught him, all right.

The "discourse" has devolved into a Battle of the Brands. Celebrities are lining up, jostling to get maximum saturation news coverage of their regular microbursts of anti-Trump outrage. Maybe one of their Tweets will get a personal insult from the Big Guy himself and their online profile will be boosted to Number One on the Yahoo trending list. One can only hope.

Every time Donald Trump violates taboos and political norms, eliciting knee-jerk responses on demand, the more powerful he becomes. And while he so effortlessly riles up what political theorist Bifo Berardi calls "the custodians of severity" with his systematic repertoire of antics, he is also entertaining and gratifying his base of fans.  Who knew that a president of the United States could be such a zany stand-up comic who exposes establishment hypocrisy at every turn!

Trump had apparently lifted the doctored wrestling video from a fan site, making said fans duly ecstatic that their idol is also a fan of theirs. From the New York Times:

Mr. Trump’s fans on Reddit were exuberant about what they viewed as validation from the country’s most powerful man. “I love this,” wrote a user identified as American_Crusader. “You know he saw it, chuckled, and knew he could control the media narrative for days by hitting the ‘post’ button. So he did.”

The president’s allies say that his attacks on the news media are justified, arguing that the president is merely defending himself from coverage that his supporters view as biased. Mr. Trump’s war of words with CNN is especially popular with his voter base.

Trump absolutely requires what Berardi calls "the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and making thought, dissent and critique banal and ridiculous."

What's really scary is the way Trump's cruel theater of the absurd - a literal information-overloaded "siege of our attention" - enables his fellow oligarchs to conduct the real work behind the curtains. How do they blow up the planet and all the living things on it in the name of profits for the very few? Let us count the ways. Or not, because Trump just Tweeted out another insult to another very important serious person or organization.

He has the media stars who pose as journalists way too busy defending their personal brands, pleasing their corporate paymasters, taking personal umbrage, and collating daily lists of Trump's lies and spelling mistakes to pay sufficient attention to the real oligarchic agenda. Not that they ever paid much attention to the agenda before, seeing as how the oligarchic agenda-setters are the sponsors who pay them their salaries.

With the TV and Internet-addicted public so distracted by all this carefully scripted Trumpian dramedy, it's much easier for "politically correct" villains to meet behind closed doors to destroy health coverage for millions of people. It's so much easier for Congress to pass xenophobic anti-immigrant laws just slightly less inhumane that Trump's. It's so much easier for the Supreme Court to give at least a preliminary carte blanche to Trump's Muslim travel ban. It's so much easier for Democrats to priggishly protest Trump's boorishness and to fund-raise off fear and loathing than it is to introduce any progressive legislation as a counterweight.

If we find it hard to forget the carefully manufactured images of a woman's bleeding face - and a corporate media logo getting punched in the face by the president of the United States -  that leaves us with an even more severely reduced mental capacity to visualize the actual bleeding bodies of the thousands of people getting bombed and droned to death in out-of-sight, out-of-mind Yemen and Syria and Iraq.

In end-stage capitalism, nothing succeeds like excess, whether it be the Mother of All Bombs, draconian social welfare cuts, or Trump himself. Made-for-TV catalyst for mass indignation and outrage that he is, he knows full well that his words need contain neither meaning, nor truth, nor consistency in order to be effective. He owns his words and he controls his message. As he brayed in yet another speech castigating the media on Saturday night, "I'm president, and they're not."

And so far, they haven't shamed him, let alone stopped him. Not that they really want to. He is very good for business. His brand elevates their brands, and vice versa. They're mutual parasites who nibble off one other like expensive hors d'oeuvre before really gorging themselves on the main course: you, and me, and the wealth of our entire endangered planet. Capitalism can never be sated in a system where ruthless competition takes precedence over decency and competence.

So God bless Donald Trump as well as damn him. For all his alleged ignorance, he is a master at revealing the hypocrisy of political language every single time  he opens his mouth. To paraphrase Berardi, Trump has shown the whole world that the emperor has no clothes - while paradoxically wearing the emperor's clothes himself.

The Trump World We Live In

The New York Times came in for some much-deserved criticism this week over its coverage of the latest episode in the tawdry life of Anthony Weiner. But far from being chastened, the paper is staunchly defending its own tawdry descent into National Enquirer territory.

 I am certainly no fan of Hillary Clinton, but here's the part of the controversial article that made me cringe:

Now, Mr. Weiner’s tawdry activities may have claimed his marriage — Ms. Abedin told him that she wanted to separate — and have cast another shadow on the adviser and confidante who has been by Mrs. Clinton’s side for the past two decades. Ms. Abedin was already a major figure this summer in controversies over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information as secretary of state and over ties between the Clinton family foundation and Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.

Mr. Weiner’s extramarital behavior also threatens to remind voters about the troubles in the Clintons’ own marriage over the decades, including Mrs. Clinton’s much-debated decision to remain with then-President Bill Clinton after revelations of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Ms. Abedin’s choice to separate from her husband evokes the debates that erupted over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of the Lewinsky affair, a scandal her campaign wants left in the past.

 When contacted for comment by the Times public editor, one of the writers (Amy Chozick) of the piece said:“I completely understand why people have a reaction to a story like this, and question what it has to do with Clinton or politics, or don’t understand why it should. But that’s not the world we live in.”

Readers had reacted so negatively to her article because not only did the story insinuate that Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin are themselves partially culpable for the actions of this troubled, creepy little man, it received pride of place on the top of the front page. It was sexist guilt-by-association with a vengeance.

 Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy then had to add gasoline to the fire by seeking out Donald Trump for his own expert comments. Needless to say, Trump added his own high octane to the gasoline by stating that Clinton's very association with Weiner is a matter of grave national security.

As is its wont, the Times is now doubling down and staunchly defending itself against criticism of its tabloid-style innuendo-rich coverage. Public Editor Liz Spayd herself added gasoline to the fire on Thursday by characterizing the paper's treatment of Weiner's compulsive sexting habit - which now even extends into the realm of child endangerment - as a "hot story."

She writes:

It seems to me this story falls into a realm of news coverage that invariably has the media tripping over itself. There’s a sex scandal, politics and questions about how much one has to do with the other. And contrary to public suspicion, mainstream newsrooms of the type I’ve worked in don’t particularly enjoy these kinds of stories. It’s easy to get ensnared in them and hard to get them right.

I don’t think The Times in this case was wildly off the mark. But it was not precise enough in what it was and wasn’t trying to say. Unfortunately, too many unforced errors can sometimes cost you the game.

Spayd as much as admits that journalism is a sport, with newsroom winners and losers and unforced errors and scorecards. Pretty flippant.

And since I just couldn't get over Amy Chozicks's own flippant retort - that disgusted readers should simply get used to it - I submitted my own two cents:

“I completely understand why people have a reaction to a story like this, and question what it has to do with Clinton or politics, or don’t understand why it should,” she (Amy Chozick) said. “But that’s not the world we live in.”

Ms. Chozick has just obliquely admitted that the mainstream media lives in a world all its own. It's a cocooned, careerist world dominated by horse race politics, clickbait, getting on the Most Popular and Trending lists, and beating the competition on the latest sleaze. It has little to nothing to do with journalism in the public interest.

Forgive me if I don't care to dwell in the world "we" live in, Ms. Chozick.

Hopefully the Times will get back to real reporting on the issues, once this hell of an election season is over. But I'm not counting on it. Coverage of scandals and palace intrigues and petty backbiting and ego-stroking among the elites of the incestuous political-media complex seems to be what passes for journalism these days.

 Coverage of existential issues affecting everyday people apparently just doesn't sell papers or attract enough ad revenue.

Much to my surprise, Amy Chozick responded to me - with a little more gasoline. It's not the media world, folks. It's the "political landscape". (And she seems to assume that since I was critical of her reportage, it naturally follows that I am a biased Clinton supporter) --

 Hi Karen, My comment wasn't about the world "we" (the media) live in, but about the political landscape that we cover. While Clinton supporters would like this to not be an issue, Donald Trump immediately made it one, and thus we have to cover it as such.

I'd also direct you to the numerous stories I've written about Clinton's policy plans, from taxes to criminal justice reform. Those far outweigh anything we've written about Anthony Weiner.

Thanks for writing.
Best,

 Amy

My response:

 Hi Amy,

Thanks for responding and clarifying your statement.

Yes, I have read and admired your many informative pieces on policy. Unfortunately, these are rarely placed above the fold where they belong (that valuable real estate seems to be Donald Trump's exclusive squatting domain lately.)

I look forward to reading your or another reporter's analysis of the very detailed mental health plan which Hillary Clinton unveiled just the other day. If there's already been coverage of it in the Times, and I missed it in trying to navigate the Trump landscape, I do apologize.

Cheers,

Karen

I loved "Tinmanic's" response to Amy:

"While Clinton supporters would like this to not be an issue, Donald Trump immediately made it one, and thus we have to cover it as such."

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Ms. Chozick. I'm flabbergasted at this statement.

Trump said it was an issue, and therefore it's an issue?

Problem number one: if the issue was because of Trump, why is Trump hardly mentioned in the article?

Problem number two: since when did New York Times reporters become mere stenographers for the Trump campaign?

You are letting yourselves be manipulated.

Having worked as a newspaper reporter myself in a previous life, I can only imagine the pressure that Amy Chozick must be under, what with Hillary Clinton being her sole defined beat for the last several years. Boredom must be her constant companion. And Hillary is certainly not known for being "accessible" and for treating the press graciously.

Amy Chozick's rationalizations remind me of the time I was assigned by my male editor to confront the wife of a U.S. Congressman about revelations that he had fathered a child with one of his staffers. (My boss opined that it's always more gently effective for a woman reporter to rub a scorned woman's nose in it.) I telephoned, and immediately informed the wife that I was making the call under duress. When she said she didn't want to air her family's dirty laundry in public, I totally agreed with her, murmured apologies, and quickly ended the call. My editor, who'd been hovering nearby, was furious with me at having wasted such a golden journalistic opportunity and for not being sufficiently cutthroat.

 That was the business I had chosen to be in, but I always exercised my option not to obey all the rules of the game. (I refused, for example, to rush to the scenes of bridge-jumpers and landscapes of human beings mangled up in highway accidents). Such sporadic recalcitrance didn't make me many friends in all-male management. But, as has happened so often in the news biz over the past several decades, the paper was sold and folded before I actually got the chance to be fired.

It's the capitalistic, cutthroat world of creative destruction that we live in.