When All Else Fails, Shame the Voters

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is blaming the unappreciative audience for their tepid response to the latest episode of the House's January Sixth Extravaganza. Given the fawning media reviews of her own bravura performance, the low ratings are such a downer, especially after all the trouble that she went to in keeping it entertaining. She'd even arranged for her videographer daughter to be on-set to film her up close and personal, vowing to punch Donald Trump in the face and then "go to jail" for doing so. If we couldn't even share her outrage over the "poo on the floors" of the sacred Capitol, or think about the custodians who had to clean the mess up, then there must be something horribly wrong with us.

So to remind us of what we missed, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell lackadaisically wound up her corporate game-arm and pitched her softball to Pelosi last week:

  In one new poll, again, 39 percent of voters say that they would vote for an election denier – and this included some Democrats and independents – if they liked their stance on other issues. How do you explain that?

Pelosi: I don't – can't explain it.  I think it's a tragedy for our country that people don't value the vision that our Founders had about a democracy, what our men and women in uniform fight for, about freedom and our democracy, here and other places in the world and, again, what that means to our children.  We have to give them – many children born now will live into the next century.  We have to make sure they have a planet that is safe, that – a democracy that is strong and values that are respected and agreed upon.  That's not what – the path that the Republicans are on.

Pelosi did depart from her voter-shaming exercise at least long enough to admit that her own particular version of "democracy" is strictly confined to people voting on Election Day, and that their votes then be accurately counted. Whether or not they will eventually count in the halls of poweris left studiously unmentioned. The tragedy for Pelosi is that people who've had it drummed into them for most of their lives that "there is no alternative," and that they have no real power, still cannot just pull themselves out of their doldrums long enough to cast a ballot for someone else to "represent" them. For pre-selected politicians to win and to keep power, voters must persist in believing that they can't manage either their own lives or the problems of society as a whole. They need some sort of savior or expert or Mother Superior to do it for them.

The tragedy for Nancy Pelosi is that too many people are getting too wise to the con to even bother participating in the holy sacrament of voting booth communion. Or else they're just flat-out heretics, opting for devil-worshiping the corpus of Donald Trump and his imitators.

After all, our assigned role as US citizens is to be consumers in the marketplace and attendees at the spectacle - not activists in direct politics or actors in improvisational, experimental theater. 

 It has been drummed into us by a consolidated media that only a select category of people are fit to act and to govern.  Since "representative democracy" has devolved into professionalized politics coupled with public apathy, the real tragedy is that Nancy Pelosi thinks that the same old drugs and cattle prods will continue to hook and lull and scare people, getting them alternately high on proxy wars and anesthetized by the Broadway version of Hamilton and scared witless by Trump. 

She is essentially blaming the oppressed and exploited and disheartened for their own inability to thrill to the spectacle, whether it be of the high priests and priestesses huddling behind their poop-spattered walls, or soldiers and civilians spattered by the blood of the US Imperium's perpetual global wars for "freedom."  

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders reprised his own role as relief pitcher for the Dems, appearing on CNN to warn that young people and working class people won't turn out to vote unless the party starts concentrating on economic issues to supplement their promise to "fight for" abortion rights:

I think what the Democrats have got to say is we are going to stand with working people, we’re prepared to take on the drug companies, we’re prepared to take on the insurance companies and create an economy that works for all of us.

 Well, as long as they "stand with" their constituents and "prepare to" devise an appealing agenda with just a few short weeks to go before the curtain rises on Election Spectacular '22, it seems like it's a little late to be learning new lines, let alone rewriting the whole plot. And these are the alleged professionals with the experience that you, supposedly, so sorely lack.

Midterminal Blues

There's already enough churnalism on the midterm elections without my adding to the glut. 

I spent most of the weekend not answering the insistent pounding on my door from unpaid campaign volunteers and ignoring the incessant reverberations on my cellphone from racist robocallers. I wasted precious minutes of my life relegating to the trash folder the never-ending demands for cash flooding my email in-box.

 At least, since I no longer pay for the torture that is cable TV, I was spared the misery of watching what are alleged by cable victims to be some the nastiest political ads in recent memory. 

Nor will I add to the chorus of "voter-shaming" being brayed from political operatives and pundits from far-right, center-right and center-pseudo-left, who chide us that our failure (or more aptly, our refusal) to vote for the pre-vetted candidates of the oligarchy will endanger our very existence as human beings.

Me? I already voted early by mail, as I always do. I chose Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins for governor of New York over the terminally corrupt Democrat Andrew Cuomo. Hawkins has never won an election in his whole life, but he actually garners a respectable percentage every time he runs. He even got a fairly friendly write-up in the New York Times. The establishment paper of record usually gives friendly write-ups to politicians it doesn't consider much of a threat to the status quo. That way, they can appear to be fair and balanced to the despised left among their readership.

 Since Democrat Antonio Delgado and Republican John Faso are in a dead heat in my district, I am sad to report that I held my nose and voted for Delgado.... but on the Working Families Party line, not the D line. This is the very first time I have ever voted "strategically," because although I have absolutely no expectation that Delgado would actually do much of anything for "working" (what about the single, the retired, the unemployed and those still in school?) people if he wins, at least he would presumably not fall into the Trump tank and cheer for refugees to get shot or imprisoned at the border. Plus, he only has two years in which to do the bidding of Wall Street. Besides, the next two years in a Democratic majority House of Reps look to to be nothing but non-stop theater and grandstanding about neoliberal values vs fascist values, with a host of Trump cabinet officials getting hauled before committees. The shaming will have the main, if not sole, purpose of embarrassing Trump and boosting Democratic fortunes for the interminable presidential sweepstakes, which begin at precisely midnight tonight.

And that's all I have to say for now about the Midterminals.

Apocalypse Casts Shadow Over Midterms

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Just when the whole country should be uniting and going happily to the polls to democratically choose between right-wing fascists and neoliberal corporatists, the damned freelance violence has to rear its ugly head and dampen the great American spirit that has always made this country so exceptional. 

And it's not just the typical shadow-casting like, say, the FBI director calling Hillary Clinton "reckless" about her private email account right before the presidential election in 2016. This time, according to The Hill online newspaper, a veritable cloud of doom is hovering over us.

There's still more than a week to go before November Sixth, so give them time to conjure up some actual thunder, lightning and rain. If we can just get past this manufactured debris-festooned buildup to our great manufactured ritual, we 'll soon safely return to our more normal violent programming of shootings, religious and ethnic intolerance, and mindless sunny entertainment.

 Marc Hetherington, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, expressed skepticism that the rhetoric will cool in the last full week of the campaign, even as the country remains on edge. 

I don’t think anything’s going to cool tensions,” he said in an interview with The Hill. “This, on both sides, has the feel of the apocalypse if they lose.”

Mere days after a steroid-pumped dude living out of a van decorated with Trump wallpaper was arrested in Florida and charged with mailing pipe bombs to the security personnel and other underlings employed by wealthy Trump critics, another loser emerged from his seedy apartment in Pittsburgh and shot up a synagogue, killing several congregants and wounding others before getting shot himself by responding SWAT police.

In a country riven by a record number of mass shootings in just the past year, you might simply be inclined to think that this has just been another typical psychotic week in America. But coming as close as these incidents do to the only democratic ritual we still have left, they become prime apocalyptic fodder for the pundit class.

Not only that: the two latest Travis Bickle imitators to crawl out of the zeitgeist are portrayed by the media as little hunks of lumpen clay ripped off from the main supply for the express pre-election kneading and molding pleasure of Trump, the whole Trump, and nothing but the Trump. No matter that only the pipe-bomb guy was the true Trumpie, and that the synagogue shooter didn't much like Trump because he isn't enough of an outspoken anti-Semitic fascist for his taste - these two men will go down in history, as told by establishment media, as brothers joined at the hip of hate. And it's all because of Trump, and not because of such things as evictions, bankruptcies, untreated mental illness, drug addiction, lack of a job.... or just because they've been evil nasty characters their whole miserable lives.

That's the narrative, and the media mavens are sticking to it. The first order of business, therefore, is to absolve both right wings of the Duopoly of the violent results of their anti-social, pro-corporate policies of the last 50 years. 

The Hill thus dutifully continues:

The chairmen of both parties' campaign arms in the House appeared jointly on a pair of Sunday talk shows, where they delivered a message of unity.
“We should come together as a country. This should not be a political response, but rather a response at how we can further bring us together,” Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) said on “Fox News Sunday.”
His Republican counterpart, Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), expressed confidence that the midterms would not prove to be an obstacle in efforts to unify the country.

And then they departed from their own platitudinous narratives and accused one another's campaigns of being "sleazy" and "racist," which casts even more shadows of doom over Doomsday. Why oh why can't our ruling class racketeers just all get along for the next week or so as our whole country explodes around us? 

We really shouldn't fret. This staged hand-wringing feeds the suspense factor so necessary to keep us hooked and riveted in an orgy of binge-watching. Because the ruling class racketeers actually do get along most of the time. They only pretend to hate each other so as to foment more hate among various factions of the US electorate and encourage us to channel our hate at the voting booth. People are encouraged to vote against someone or something, not for someone or something. Fear and loathing are the only emotions that our corrupt finance-capitalized political system are willing to market to the vast majority of the have-nots. And that's true not just in the US, but throughout Europe, and most recently, in desperate austerity-torn Brazilians' "choice" of a right-wing strongman to lead them. 

Once our homegrown American candidates are safely re-elected (or win office for the first time), they can buckle down to the onerous task of fulfilling the needs of the bribing billionaires and corporations and weapons manufacturers and private prison investors. There will be no more shadows or clouds, only friendly smoke-filled rooms.  

Maybe Donald Trump can even take a break from his frenzied Nuremberg-style rallies and 3 a.m. tweets long enough to rehabilitate his own image by starting another war and thereby develop some real presidential cred among the movers and shakers of this very violent country. If you're disturbed about the relative lack of coverage in the mainstream media about his abandonment of the nuclear treaty with Russia, wait till after November Sixth. Right now, the manufactured apocalypse of electoral politics must take precedence.

Maybe regular people, stoked up on their free-floating anger, despair and apathy, will finally see through the toxic smoke and go on a general strike against the oligarchy and its political lackeys and censorious propagandists. All it takes is a spark, or a tipping point. And there are already enough of those to cause massive forest fires and avalanches.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, it's always deju vu all over again. This, from 60 years ago:

Peak Voting Hysteria

If you're getting too enthused about Halloween, the World Series, or any other of life's little pleasures and diversions, the Duopoly is making sure that your mind remains stuck firmly on one track and one track only: the most important elections ever in the history of humanity.

The Republicans are spreading the ridiculous message that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are rabid socialists who want to give your health care away to the "illegals" who are marching up from Honduras to invade all our homes and steal all our wonderful jobs. The Democrats tell you that unless you vote for them, or more accurately, against Trump's GOP, then democracy and liberty are doomed. Specifically, they say that "American values" are doomed. Whatever that even means. They are but the blank slates upon which to pin all your hopes and dreams of status quo maintenance.

The cell phones of America have been hijacked in a frenzied series of robocalls and text messages from candidates in dire need of both your dollars and your votes. If you thought that Donald Trump's "presidential alert" message a few weeks ago was annoying, then you were not sufficiently prepared for the Duopolistic Deluge and the ensuing logjam on your thought processes and even on your sanity.

They don't seem to realize or care that their own intrusive political campaigning is what is really invading us and making a mockery of our "values, which include our rights to privacy and peace within our own homes.

In my own congressional district (New York 19) there's some particularly vile racist campaign rhetoric coming from GOP Rep. John Faso against his Democratic challenger, Antonio Delgado. Faso is telling voters that Delgado is "not one of us" -- not because he recently moved to the district from New Jersey and immediately announced his candidacy, but because he was a rap musician before going on to Harvard, Oxford, and Wall Street. Delgado is black.

Faso's racist campaign ironically seems to be working in the favor of Delgado, who is rising in the polls and even surpassing Faso in some of them. Voters who might have been suspicious of his carpetbagging status and his employment at one of the country's biggest political lobbying law firms are now tending to support him, despite his neoliberal policy proposals. He does not, for example, favor single payer health care. merely vowing to protect Obamacare and his constituents' "access" to medical services.

To make the situation even more fraught, there are several independent and progressive candidates running who might act as "spoilers" and swing the election to Faso. So if you vote for the Green candidate, or for the actress who used to play the D.A. on "Law and Order SVU" then you will allegedly be responsible if Faso wins another term.

To which I say - B.S.! If the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had not worked so diligently to bankroll an out-of-state neoliberal to run in what used to be one of the most progressive districts in the country before gerrymandering, we would't be facing this dilemma. The upshot is that in the grand scheme of things, the corporate Democrats probably wouldn't mind so terribly if Faso were re-elected. It would give them even more impetus to virtue-signal about their diversity and the racism of the Deplorables.

A somewhat similar situation is happening in Florida, where popular progressive gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum is getting hit from both sides of the Duopoly. First, there's the racist campaign against him by Republicans. Second, there's the threat from Hillary Clinton to come to Florida, where she lost to Donald Trump, to campaign for him. As one of the most unpopular politicians in the country today, Clinton has effectively attempted to give Gillum the kiss of death.

And as reported by the Sun-Sentinel, Gillum himself has sent out nearly a million text messages to Floridians to urge them to sign up for early voting. Meanwhile, cell phone owners have been indundated by messages from his opponent, Ron de Santis, informing them that Gillum "may be" under investigation by the FBI.* Of course, you and I also "may be" under FBI investigation, but the chances of that are probably about a billion to one.

There are no specific laws which bar candidates and their operatives from harassing the citizenry - not, of course, that any such law would even be enforceable by the grossly understaffed and underfunded Federal Trade and Election Commissions. 

And good luck trying to find the source of the unwanted robocalls to demand they leave you alone. Google the number they called from, and you will be directed to myriad organizations and apps which promise to block the calls, either for a fee or for your willing relinquishment of your personal information, likely leading to even more marketing spam.

My own particular Luddite solution is never answering a call from someone I don't know, or at least blocking the number in case I do mistakenly pick up, and simply ignoring the text messages as best I can. 

Wouldn't it be something if the recipients of all this invasive messaging got so disgusted that they decided to (gasp!) sit out these midterms as a form of mass protest?

Not that such aggressive apathy will discourage the candidates in our fine, free and fair elections by any means. Because as soon as the Midterms are over, the Presidential Sweepstakes gets underway with an interminable vengeance. 

*Update: We now learn that Gillum has indeed been caught up in an FBI sting operation and apparently accepted pricey tickets to "Hamilton" on Broadway from an FBI agent posing as a property developer. So much for his flaunted progressive cred, accepting tickets to a neoliberal musical which glorifies bankers and capitalists in the spirit of "diversity." Whoever said irony is dead is crazy.

Commentariat Central: Fear and Despair Edition

The closer we get to the Most Important Elections Ever in History, the more the Duopoly is ramping up the fear factor. The end of the world is nigh, not so much because of the ongoing climate catastrophe, but because neither of the two corporate political parties we're stuck with thinks that more than a billion dollars in campaign contributions is enough.

A glance through your inbox gives you the impression that every day is a deadline of doom. The money-raking professionals are getting more brazen, going from begging to demanding, informing you that your payment is past due and that you only have until midnight tonight to fork it over.

And what if you don't? I really hate to tell them this, but the democracy repo man came and went decades ago.

So they'll try to scare you silly anyway. Always near the top of their bag of tricks to get you to fork over the cash before voting is the warning that "they're coming after your Social Security and Medicare!"  

Democrats say this of Republicans, and Republicans say this of Democrats (and also about "illegals" and welfare cheats.)

As is his convenient wont, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman limits his own critique of the continuing attack on the New Deal and Great Society programs to the Republican Party and to the deplorable Republican voters who get all their information from Fox News. That he again fails to mention that it takes two corrupt bodies to tango comes as no surprise, although I do happen to agree with him that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blatantly announcing his attack plan before the midterms was pretty shocking.

My published comment:

The timing of McConnell's threat surprised me too. The only explanation is that he so secure in his iron grip on both Kentucky voters and the Senate that he's willing to play "bad cop" for the duration.

The first step in this stale old routine is to gaslight and terrorize the sick, the old, and the poor. Demonizing people and calling them fraudsters works wonders in the divide-and-conquer department.

The Dems, as they have done before, might react to his snarling cruelty by offering to snip and slash here and there to save what is little is still left of our social programs.

Trump might even achieve the "Grand Bargain" with Congress that Obama and Boehner could not, thanks to the Tea Party faction insisting that the cuts weren't cruel enough.

He could accept slightly less sadistic cuts in exchange for the building of his nasty wall. Who knows? I wouldn't put any subterfuge past any of them. This is, after all, government of, by and for the oligarchs, who really comprise one political party unto themselves, the Pathocratic Party. Their unbridled greed to possess everything and to control everybody has reached truly pathogenic proportions.

 They need to go, and we need to make them go.

So let's tell the Democrats in no uncertain terms that we will agree to no more of their "pay-go" rules, aka robbing from the poor and working class to keep our social insurance on life support.

Stop the trillion-dollar wars if you want to tame the deficit. And soak the rich.

Now we come to Times columnist Michelle Goldberg's piece addressing the despair of women in the Age of Trump.  Her solution?  Get involved working for the Democratic Party, and do it for free! Or at the very least, chat with some party activists to cheer yourselves up. (That this advice column is directed at affluent women not having to work at multiple low-paid gigs is punctuated by the accompanying feel-good photo showing a Democratic candidate hugging an unpaid campaign worker in a room full of white people.) 

Goldberg writes:

There is, I find, only one thing that soothes my galloping anxiety, and that is talking to women who are actually doing the work of campaigning. The people who are knocking on doors and organizing rallies tend to be much more cheerful and confident than those who spend too much time on Twitter obsessing over each new poll....

 Now, part of the job of a good politician is projecting optimism. But again and again over the horrible months of Trump’s reign, I’ve found that spending time with the women who are working their hearts out against him is at least a temporary cure for despair. So if you, too, are scared, or furious, or despondent, find a Democrat close to you and go canvass for her (or him). “It’s the best way to feel good about the world and connect with people,” (Michigan Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gretchen)Whitmer said.

Heaven forbid that you should storm your local social services office, go on a wildcat strike, or join Cindy Sheehan in the anti-war Women's March on the Pentagon on Oct.20-21!  If you're nervous or depressed from spending too much time stressing over Trump all by your lonesome, then put all your energies into joining others in fixating obsessively on Trump, and forgetting all about the toxic neoliberal system that created him. If you're affluent, you will benefit mentally under a more rhetorically tasteful Democratic majority and thereby save yourself all those trips to the therapist.

My comment, trying to gently change the subject from the "liberal women are emotional wrecks and victims of Trump" trope, with its artificially narrow emphasis on gender/reproductive rights, to the wider economic justice/class struggles that are so ignored by the liberal elites during this campaign season:  

The more that Donald Trump denigrates women, the more obvious it becomes that he is terrified of women the same way that a middle school pre-adolescent boy is afraid of girls. His rallies are fascist iterations of the Little Rascals' He-Man Woman-Haters Club.

We should treat Trump with all the derision we can muster. He is a weakling at his core.

We must treat the establishment which spawned him with equal derision as a balance to our well-placed fear. We should also recognize that this is essentially a class war. The Republicans under Mitch McConnell have made no secret of the fact that the next big item on their agenda is to slash Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and Social Security. The citizens who depend the most on these programs are women and children.

Trump's tweets calling women names might sting and cause outrage. But the economic attacks on women's pocketbooks and pantries literally endanger our lives, if we are not so lucky to reside in the top 10% of income earners.

Rather than merely demand protection for the increasingly whittled-down social insurance programs we contribute to all our working lives, we must insist upon their enhancement. The Democrats have to do more than pay lip service to diversity and gender rights. We have to ensure not only equality of opportunity, but basic fairness of economic outcomes.

Repeat after me, ladies: Conservative men are afraid of you. Use the power that has been within you all this time. Make them even more afraid of you.

Damaged Dem Dames Distract From Climate Change

Two of the corporate Democratic Party's campaign narratives against Donald Trump have boomeranged right back at them this week.

First, their virtue-signaling about inclusive diversity turns out not to be so virtuous after all. Presidential contender Elizabeth Warren, like Julia Alvarez before her, fell smack dab into the identity politics trap when she revealed in a slickly-produced video that she does indeed have some remote aboriginal ancestry, dating back at least 10 generations.

 So not only did she fall into Donald Trump's race-baiting trap, she is, according to many critics, displaying her own colorblind racism by "appropriating" native lineage without informing or asking permission of the Cherokee Nation. And if that weren't bad enough, she is doing it right before the Midterm Elections and messing with her party's chances to win more congressional seats!

Former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, who later did the same job for David Cameron's conservatives in Great Britain, tweeted out:

  Jim Messina‏Verified account @Messina2012

Argue the substance all you want, but why 22 days before a crucial election where we MUST win house and senate to save America, why did @SenWarren have to do her announcement now? Why can’t Dems ever stay focused???

 Democrats cannot disown Elizabeth Warren fast enough. It's not so much her falling for Trump's trolling, it's the inconvenient timing of it, right at the end of their record-breaking season of fundraising. No matter that Warren herself has been a prolific fundraiser for the party. She has been declared non-presidential material.

My view is that her big announcement about her DNA results is more than a little bit passive-aggressive. Warren has been under pressure for years to run for president and for years she has resisted, until very recently. So perhaps her ham-handed video is her way of either deliberately or unconsciously sabotaging her own chances to ensure that she is pre-emptively forced out of the race so as to avoid criticism from refusing to run in the first place. She will be way more effective going after the corrupt financial system in the Senate, in my view. That is, if she even cares to remain in the Senate.

I once half-jokingly predicted (see the Salazar link above) that the Democrats are so into ethnologies and family histories that before long, candidates will be producing their DNA results along with their tax returns. The flaunting of one's genetic biology for the sole purpose of gaining political power is a kind of inverted fascism and hearkens back to the US eugenics craze of the early 20th century, which became the direct inspiration for Nazi race policies.  

So much for the inherent shallowness and cynicism of the Democrats' identity politics. Now we come to the Democrats' shallow, cynical, corporate version of feminism.

We all know, of course, that Hillary Clinton used her own Senate seat as a stepping-stone to her first presidential run, and her first presidential run as a stepping-stone to the State Department, and the State Department as a stepping-stone to her second presidential run, and her second presidential run as a stepping-stone to permanent martyrdom, big bucks in the speakers' and memoir circuits - and who knows, maybe even a third presidential run. Just think of the ratings and the billions of dollars in bucks for everybody concerned: churnalists, strategists, cable TV networks and corporate advertisers with all that hoarded untaxed money to burn.

Although the Democratic Party faithful became incensed during the 2016 campaign whenever Donald Trump's sexual predations were compared to Bill Clinton's sexual predations, and whenever critics noted that Hillary had hypocritically trashed her husband's female conquests and victims while standing by her man, even her erstwhile supporters can no longer ignore or stomach her hypocrisy.

Correction: they could stomach her hypocrisy extremely well, provided it was not on full display only weeks away from The Midterm Elections. Her grousing on national TV that Monica Lewinsky was not the victim of her husband's abuse of power, but a fully consenting adult, would be fine with them were it not so allegedly endangering Democratic fortunes. It kind of exposes the party's cynical appropriation of the #MeToo movement, and the party's campaign platform of "Donald Trump is a sexist pig" in all its shallowness and hypocrisy.

Shockingly, the very same liberals who so recently have been bending over backward for Hillary Clinton, and propping up her endless blame-game tour, and making her loss to Trump the prime focus of the Women's March movement, are now telling her to shut up and go away so that the party can "focus."

She has been relegated to that dreaded category of "distraction." I could almost feel very slightly sorry for her.

But, as the New York Times's Michelle Cottle puts it,

In these furious, final days before the midterms, Democratic candidates need to be laser focused on their message to voters. They need to be talking health care and jobs and other issues of intense, personal concern to their electorate. They do not need to be talking about impeachment, or about the results of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s DNA testing. And they definitely do not need to get distracted by unnecessary drama generated by comments from one of the party’s most iconic, and most controversial, figures.

And yet, there was Mrs. Clinton, in an Oct. 9 interview with CNN, sharing her take on the need for Democrats to — as Michelle Obama might have put it — go low with today’s Republicans. As Mrs. Clinton sees it, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.”

She's a great woman and a great leader, says Cottle, but speaking her mind this close to Election Day is "problematic" for the party, which, she insinuates, would otherwise be dreaming up all kinds of wonderful new programs to benefit ordinary people. 

The Democratic Party sounds like it needs medication for its attention deficit disorder, which in my opinion is simply crass malingering to distract us from the fact that they are beholden to the oligarchy.  

My published response:

 "...this close to Election Day, discussing hot-button issues in national interviews is nothing but problematic for her party...."

Bingo! It's her party and she'll kvetch if she wants to. She has to go on TV to raise her visibility so she and Bill can sell lots of high-priced tickets for their tour. These TV spots, in their own turn, generate even more free press, as in this column. So what if it's bad press? It generates more publicity! And don't forget the ad revenue.

As far as Hillary's "distractions" from Democratic messaging are concerned, most of the campaign rhetoric I've been hearing is of the "we're not Trump" genre. A recent survey by "The Hill" of the ranking House Democrats reveals that their top priority, if they win, will be hauling cabinet officials before their committees. Then, they'll be "shoring up" Obamacare and protecting the weak Dodd-Frank bill. Not one potential committee chair voiced support for Medicare For All. Nor will House Dems put our endangered planet's climate emergency on their to-do list -- because, they say, why even try? "Resistance" has replaced a proactive progressive agenda.

The few times they do talk tough, they end up apologizing for giving the impression that they're inciting violence. Never underestimate their capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of their victories.

Maybe if we ever get the $$$ out of politics, the media- political-oligarchic complex will stop treating elections like soap opera ratings bonanzas.

The Warren/Clinton hand-wringing is, of course, the corporate Democrats' way of saying how much they care about you. This pearl-clutching is in fact a distraction from the real scandal: that the party will do nothing to address the climate change catastrophe should they win back some power.  

While busily distracting us with the Dem dame duo who are doing so much damage to diversity, they're also very quietly damping down hopes for a climate agenda in the upcoming session. They are being very honest about it in the sneakiest way possible so as not to be accused of making promises they can't keep once they're sworn in. Maybe they figure that our immersion in the double boiler of propaganda and planet-death will keep us properly and rigidly fixated on Trump's latest tweet calling another woman a nasty name.

As The Hill reports,

With President Trump in the White House and Republicans favored to keep the Senate next year, climate legislation would face stiff headwinds, and pushing it could spark backlash from the right — both now and after the Nov. 6 midterm elections.
Considering those “constraints,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), Democrats should “focus on the practical and the opportunistic” to make short-term progress while fighting for bolder measures — “the aspirational goals” — over the longer term. 
“It’s going to be, I think, more of an opportunistic strategy, where, in various pieces of legislation, across the board, we’re going to insert measures that address climate change,” said Connolly, a leader in the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition.

"Aspiration Not Inspiration" might make a catchy campaign slogan for the 2020 horse-race, don't you think? It sure beats "Expiration Not Aspiration," which would be a real downer. It might put a real damper on firing up voters if they honestly just announced that all living things are going to die premature deaths because of their failure to address the climate emergency, as both corporate parties continue raking in all those polluting Koch Brothers and Exxon-Mobil dollars and continue to exempt the trillion-dollar military machine from even the mild emissions rules that are attached like a flimsy bandage to a suppurating wound.

It's almost as bad as believing that Republican "headwinds" are more powerful that the Category Six hurricanes that climate scientists predict will blow the place apart and dampen the earth to epic flooding proportions sooner rather than later.

The World Series of American Endtimes

It's hard to decide what to blog about on any given day or even at any given hour. Trump's mushroom appendage? Brett Kavanaugh's drunken high school hi-jinks (ultra-right code word for sex crimes)? The midterm elections? The crumbling #RussiaGate franchise?

There's certainly a glut of simultaneously detailed and fuzzy Kavanaugh drama all over the nooze without my adding to it here. But to summarize - so far, his predatory escapades have taken us only up to his freshman year at Yale. So the next installment, if there is one, will probably progress to law school. What I'm really hoping for is his ignominious withdrawal from Supreme Court consideration before this Thursday's grilling of his chief accuser, in which Republicans plan to live up to their bullying reputation, and Democrats plan to live up to their grandstanding reputation. Two presidential contenders - Cory Booker and Kamala Harris - are on the inquisition squad, so look for lots of maudlin speechifying and little substantive information-gathering. Will the cam pan to Kam more than the story becoming all about Cory? Stay tuned, or not.

And then there's what increasingly looks like the latest chess move by the Democratic-Neocon-CIA coalition. They appear desperate to checkmate Trump once and for all: the "leakage" to the New York Times of Deputy Atty. Gen. and RussiaGate overseer Rod Rosenstein's suggestion, flippant or serious, that he wear a wire to catch Trump saying something 25th Amendment-worthy.

Here's my speculation: Robert Mueller has zero evidence of TrumPutin collusion, and any criminal evidence he does have on Trump would likely implicate other Ruling Class Racketeers who are too valuable to be sacrificed. Therefore, let's forget about the chess gambit. Maybe Rosenstein is the  designated pinch hitter to win the Series for the D team by a sacrifice high fly right into extreme centrist field. If the Dems can just get Trump to fire him and shut down the Mueller investigation in the process, the Mueller team will save face, and Trump can be declared guilty in the court of liberal public opinion. The RussiaGate plot will live on in American mythology as it becomes the campaign issue to end all other campaign issues. Couple it with the drip-drip-drip of the Kavanaugh allegations, and the donor dollars for #Resistance Dems will come flooding in.
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All this annoyingly progressive talk of Medicare for All, and debt-free college, and all this unwanted attention on the class war and record wealth inequality, and people realizing that this country is now ruled by an oligarchy, is just so damned divisive. If the Dems can only goad Trump into firing Rosenstein, Mueller, and Jeff Sessions, it will be a perfect trifecta, a manufactured victory to get the whole country united under one big mouldering gilded tent! (There I go again, mixing my sports metaphors.)

As of this writing, though, Trump has refused to play ball. Rosenstein was reported to be on his way to the White House for hours on end this morning, either to be fired or to resign. Word had it that his resignation, if any, was yet to be accepted. The high sacrifice fly has turned out to be nothing but a series of failed bunts.

So far.

But wait, there's an update! Rosenstein and Trump are now scheduled to meet Thursday to "discuss his future in the Justice Department." The timing is a pure coincidence and absolutely made for split-screen images of reporters staked out on the White House lawn to see whether Rosenstein sacrifices or Trump beans him with a wild pitch, juxtaposed with the Supreme Court/horserace spectacle over in the Senate.

The long series of propaganda distractions, produced by both right wings of the Uniparty, is designed to keep the public's eye off the real ball: that democracy is a sham, and so are the midterm elections, despite Michelle Obama's get-out-the-vote guilt-tripping tour, a sort of free admission pre-game teaser for her paid book tour, which gets underway only once we have freely cast our votes in dwindling hopes of finally settling the score.