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.

Salongate Threatens To Overshadow Russiagate

You know what really blew my mind about Nancy Pelosi's illegal blowout? The surveillance video proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that she does indeed have her own hair. And here I'd been laboring under the petty impression that she wears a wig. She is, after all, 80 years old, and only half of all women still have a full head of hair by the time they reach 65. 

So instead of using her outdoor San Francisco press conference to bitch about being "set up" to break the law, she should have bragged about having the tresses of a woman half her age. She could also have mentioned that the combover of her frenemy and legislative dance partner Donald Trump hides such an unsightly bald spot that it's exposed with every gust of wind. She certainly took full advantage of the strong Pacific breezes blowing out her own blowout for that natural tousled look. The sad upshot was, she didn't look half as bad as she sounded. Blaming others for one's own bad behavior is something that Trump does. Maybe it was Salongate coming the same day that the Kennedy she'd endorsed for the Senate was so badly beaten. 

 She should probably just stick to the expert finger-wagging, laconic speech-ripping and grimacing Kente cloth-kneeling that she is so good at from now on, or at least until that magical day when she is beaten in a primary, and/or quits Congress forever to spend more time with her designer ice cream stash.

Trump, of course, will never keep his mouth shut or quit the presidency, even if Joe Biden squeaks through. I don't think, as others do, that he'll refuse to physically leave the premises on Inauguration Day. I think they'll still be counting the votes and litigating the results well into 2021. The interregnum between Trump I and Trump II, or worse, between Trump I and Biden I, will be toxic no matter how you slice it.

But back to the important stuff. Pelosi also could have claimed that the grainy footage of the black-robed woman with the slicked-back  hair was either Judge Judy Sheindlin or Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, both of whom have forsworn the high maintenance carefree blowout for the more severe kind of 'do that doesn't require constant attention from the concierge glam squad that's usually at Pelosi's beck and call whenever one of her servants picks up the phone to order a session.

The Speaker Sneaks (Pelosi)

Justice Ginsburg

Judge Judy

Naturally, the New York Times and Washington Post are barely covering the frippery of Salongate - not when there's the outright flummery of the continuing Russiagate saga with which to send chills and thrills down the spines of the American electorate.

The latest episode has our old indicted (Mueller Theatre charges since dismissed) friend, the Internet Research Agency, allegedly setting up a website with which to attack Joe Biden from the left. Using such well-known and trustworthy sources as "The Authorities" and "Officials"  the establishment media are again gaslighting the public and sowing doubt about all the information that we do not read in the Times and the Post, or watch on CNN and MSNBC.

Unless I'd had the Times to fill me in, I never would have known that an obscure site called Peacedata.net even existed, and that it not only "tricked" real American independent journalists into writing for them, it actually paid them for writing for them. This practice of paying real money for freelance content is actually becoming quite rare in the Land of the Free.

Intrepid Times reporter Sheera Frenkel tracked down one of these American writers, who admitted by email that the editor of Peacedata not only is not a Real American, but that he also (suspiciously) wasn't as obsessively interested in criticism of Trump as more trustworthy media outlets must be in order to rake in millions of new subscribers. This freelancer further said that he's turned down payments of between $75 and $200 per article, claiming that he preferred to provide copy for free. And that kind of leads me to believe that the Times source may himself not be a Real Struggling Freelancer at all. The doubt is being sown so hard that I can almost feel the furrows deepening in my brain.

Oh well, I'm probably just jealous that Peacedata never noticed Sardonicky, or solicited any of my articles in its terrifying Internet search for lefty dupes who'll stoop to writing for money.

 So I think I'll just call it a day and go wash my hair with my cheap Suave shampoo and then it let it air-dry into silky flatness the way I always do.

Democrats Boldly Pivot To Secret Wall Street Power Point Presentation

Maybe it's just a coincidence. But only hours after The Intercept published an interview with Ralph Nader, revealing that he'd personally telephoned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to urge her to concentrate on "kitchen table issues," the New York Times up and announces that she will indeed be doing a complete 180 from her impeachment catastrophe to concentrate on kitchen table issues.

Without crediting Nader or mentioning his name, the Times puff piece attempts to rehabilitate Pelosi's tattered reputation and to convince its readers that her new Kitchen Table Initiative is both original and sincere.

But the attempt fails miserably. Maybe it's the subhead acknowledging that the Pelosi pivot is nothing but a gimmick to lure disaffected voters into the rapidly disintegrating centrist Democratic orbit. It's all talk and all strategy and no action whatsoever to make people's lives better.

As if to emphasize this cynical point, Pelosi brought in Wall Street mogul Steve Rattner to give a Power Point presentation to House members on how best to placate their constituents about an economy that serves Wall Street and punishes Main Street. This is according to "a person" who attended the secret session and shared the secret strategy with the Times. Since Rattner is also a regular columnist for the Times, let the guessing games begin.

 I'd call him a "disgraced Wall Street mogul" were it not for the fact that not only was he technically exonerated in 2010 for his financial malfeasance in a pay-to-play kickback scheme that stole from New York public employees -  he was handsomely rewarded for it. His Obama administration-assigned task of rescuing General Motors was accomplished by eviscerating its labor union and implementing a lower wage package for newer, non-unionized workers. And he got a lucrative book deal and the Times gave him his own column, which frequently harps upon the deficit and the need to cut social programs benefiting regular people while not taxing the uber-wealthy out of a couple of bucks.

His settlement with the government included a small fine and only a two-year ban from securities trading. It wasn't a slap on the wrist, it was a kiss on the hand.

Despite the top-secrecy of both Rattner's and Pelosi's private pep talks on strategy with congressional Dems, reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg magically manages to quote Madam Speaker directly:

“Health care, health care, health care,” the speaker said, describing the party’s message during a recent closed-door meeting, according to a person in the room who insisted on anonymity to reveal private conversations. She said they had to be laser-focused on getting re-elected: “When you make a decision to win, then you have to make every decision in favor of winning.”

If I were Pelosi, I think I'd insist on anonymity too. Those inanely quotable quotes make even Platitude Pete Buttigieg sound like Cicero by comparison. . She might have opted for "winners never quit and quitters never win, but that neoliberal aphorism would have failed to capture her far more sinister intent. That intent is to cruelly pretend to care about the voters for the duration of the campaign season, for the sole purpose of winning power and holding on to power. I'm not the one saying that. Pelosi is saying that through the ruling establishment organ known as the Paper of Record. It's as though she doesn't realize that ordinary people who read are thus also rendered cognizant of her machinations.

Pelosi has belatedly come to the realization that since her failed impeachment spectacle has only served to strengthen Donald Trump and to increase his popularity, it's time to change strategy and go through the neglected motions of serving constituents. There will be no further feeble or grandstanding efforts, other than from within individual committees, to rein Trump in.

But rather than, say, bowing to overwhelming popular demand and allowing Medicare For All legislation to advance from the limbo of its various subcommittees to a full floor debate,Pelosi distributed a "For the People recess packet" to her members,instructing them to visit food pantries, after-school programs and senior centers to prove to the voters that they really, really care.  These photo-ops would serve to "highlight" Trump's planned cuts to social welfare programs rather than to introduce concrete legislative plans to strengthen them as the final year of his first term plays out.

It's like the corporate "raising awareness" celebrity campaigns to combat various diseases like cancer while simultaneously fighting tooth and nail against taxing the rich to help pay for the universal guaranteed care of sick people

It's only toward the end of Stolberg's article that the real impetus for Pelosi's Racket Packet is revealed: the palpable plutocratic paranoia over Bernie Sanders. His rise in the polls, implies the Times, is every bit as bad as Trump's acquittal and the Iowa caucus debacle:

The move to put impeachment in the rearview mirror comes after a dismal two weeks for Democrats. First, the Iowa caucuses turned into an electoral debacle, with no clear winner. Then a triumphant Mr. Trump arrived at the Capitol on the eve of his acquittal to deliver his State of the Union address, which ended with a seething Ms. Pelosi ripping up the speech for all to see.The Senate acquitted Mr. Trump the next day. Then Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, won the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, jangling the nerves of moderate lawmakers who fear that having a self-described democratic socialist at the top of their party’s ticket will cost them their seats.

 Pelosi consigliere and fourth ranking House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries of New York is quoted as saying that since impeachment over one bribery scheme involving the withholding of high-tech missiles to Ukraine and possible subsequent financial harm to the weapons industry failed, we should just let Trump be Trump for the duration.

"His erratic, corrupt, unconstitutional behavior speaks for itself," shrugged Jeffries.

Although he has not yet joined with other members of the Congressional Black Caucus in formally endorsing that other oligarch, Michael Bloomberg, Jeffries is decidedly softening his once-strident criticism of the Stop and Frisk mayor. In a separate interview last week with GQ, Jeffries said he believes that Bloomberg's belated pandering apology for racial profiling was "heartfelt" because as a data geek, the former mayor finally looked at all the long-available data revealing that crime continued to go down after the courts finally put the kibosh on Bloomberg.

And just a few months ago, Jeffries very publicly welcomed Bloomberg to his "more the merrier" Democratic Party as a potential "change candidate" who can "get things done."

Letting Trump convict himself in the court of public opinion even as he ravages the public with renewed intensity with every passing day, and substituting pandering talk for even mild progressive action, is the exact opposite of Ralph Nader's prescription for Nancy Pelosi and her party.

He didn't suggest that her members simply drop by community centers and food banks to meaninglessly commiserate with people.He called on Pelosi to convene public hearings to which these ordinary people would be invited to testify and tell their own stories of life under Trump.

Such testimony, Nader said, would have far greater impact than the stories of a handful of State Department bureaucrats abused by Trump in the Ukrainegate scandal. But since such testimony would also implicate the Democratic side of the corporate duopoly, it's not going to happen.

"And what's really important here," Nader told The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill,  "is that she (Pelosi) wanted to tie up the Republicans in knots in the Senate and she only used one knot. She used one finger out of ten that could have been curled into a tough fist with very perceived abuses of the Constitution, of protective statutes, of income preservation and of turning over by Trump, turning over the U.S. government to Wall Street."

Of course, government by Wall Street was not only a done deal by the time Trump was elected, it was one of the main reasons why Trump was elected in the first place, chosen by millions of disgruntled victims of Wall Street over the corrupt tool of Wall Street known as Hillary Clinton.

The very fact that Pelosi actually took a phone call from Ralph Nader, whose stream of advisory letters to Obama and Bush in the past decade all went unanswered, is testament to her own mounting desperation. Nader readily admits that she simply wanted to pick his brain a little before she dispensed with his advice to hold public hearings.

She simply stole his idea for a Kitchen Table Initiative and turned it into a cynical propaganda campaign. And then she secretly called in Wall Street, in the person of of Steve Rattner, to give the Democratic majority their marching orders in a Power Point presentation.

Besides his regular gigs at the Times and on MSNBC's Morning Joe show,  Steve Rattner now primarily works for Michael Bloomberg, managing both his personal and philanthropic fortunes.

Way to pivot, Nancy! You're spinning your way right into a deep dark hole of your own corrupt making.

Whatever, Pelosi

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi became deservedly notorious this summer for coldly dismissing negative reactions to her complicity with Donald Trump's vicious border policies. Topping the list of atrocities are the abduction and imprisonment of thousands of migrant and refugee children. In disdaining the votes of "the Squad" of four progressive congresswomen against the appropriation of billions of dollars to pay for Trump's campaign of xenophobic sadism, Pelosi effectively tried to silence the voices of both the victims and the many people protesting these government-sanctioned crimes. She did so by very publicly calling them "the public whatever."

In Pelosi's shuttered view, the fact that only four Democrats out of 435 elected representatives in the lower House had chosen to honor the interests of immigrants, human rights activists and the liberal left in opposition to her "go along to get along" edict made them personae non gratae.

"If the left doesn't think I'm left enough, so be it," she griped to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in July, over an intimate San Francisco brunch.

Fast forward nearly four months, though, and Pelosi has done a complete about-face regarding the value of actual people and the wants and needs of the actual public.

Summoning a gaggle of elite columnists to her inner sanctum on Monday, Pelosi carefully positioned herself right beneath the bust of Abraham Lincoln in order to solemnly announce that "public sentiment is everything."

Corny Propaganda Or Whatever (staged photo credit, NY Times)

"With it, you can accomplish almost everything. Without it, you can accomplish almost nothing," was her echo of a truism beloved by calculating oligarchs from at least the days of the Roman emperors whenever they needed public backing and warm new recruits for their latest military incursions.

With no apparent self-reflection and without any sense of irony, Pelosi was almost plagiarizing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had responded to Madam Speaker's belittling July Maureen Dowd column by retorting in a tweet: "The public 'whatever' is called public sentiment. And wielding the power to shift it is how we actually achieve change in this country." 

 But Nancy Pelosi wasn't talking about the traumatized caged and abducted children to her elite press couriers on Monday. She apparently ignored a shocking new report by the American Civil Liberties Union, which now places the total number of migrant children victimized by Trump at over 5,400 and still counting. This is about five times the tally admitted to by the Trump administration, which continued its family separation policy even after a federal court ordered it stopped, and even after he flourished his own executive pen to pretend to stop it. The photo-op of a Trumpian antic was completely due to the widespread public backlash that Pelosi later derided as the "public whatever."

Nor did Pelosi react (on the record at least) at her closed press gathering on Monday to the Trump administration's own admission last week, after the release of the ACLU report, that Homeland Security and ICE cops had started caging kids - including 207 under the age of five - even before issuing his "zero tolerance" policy, in which anyone crossing the border without authorization would face prosecution.

Public sentiment about the plight of powerless kids and refugees doesn't count. But public sentiment about the plight of the National Security State does count. And it is for Trump's egregious attempt to abuse the national security apparatus for his own political gain and to damage a Democratic rival (Joe Biden) in the process that public sentiment must be aroused, by any artificial means necessary. 

It must not be aroused to achieve the meaningful structural change that AOC and Bernie Sanders call for, but aroused simply to give legitimacy to elite efforts to remove the current oligarchic placeholder known as the president of the United States.

As New York Times columnist and Pelosi invitee David Leonhardt (who just last week did the party's bidding through his column about "taking to the streets" to demand Trump's impeachment over UkraineGate) writes:  

Public sentiment is going to determine the outcome of the impeachment inquiry. If Democrats can persuade even a small share of President Trump’s supporters that he shouldn’t be president, he will almost certainly lose the 2020 election. If Democrats can persuade a modest share of those supporters, he will be at risk of losing the support of congressional Republicans and being removed from office by the Senate.

It's the same old story. It's all about the liberal political and consultant class winning power and keeping power. Trump must be brought down, not only because it is the morally right thing to do, but because it is the politically expedient thing to do.

Amazingly enough, though, the usually compliant Leonhardt has a tiny little bone to pick with Pelosi:

 The battle for public sentiment explains why Pelosi and other House Democrats changed course yesterday and announced that they would hold a vote on Thursday to “affirm” their impeachment inquiry.The language of the resolution is a bit too clever for my tastes: The Democrats insist that this is not a vote to authorize an inquiry. And, legally, they don’t need to take any vote. The Constitution doesn’t require a vote to open an inquiry, and a federal judge recently upheld the legality of the inquiry.
But Trump and congressional Republicans were winning the public debate over the lack of a vote. It made Democrats seem sheepish about the inquiry. So I think they’re right to hold a vote of some kind, in which each House member will go on record as supporting or opposing the inquiry.

It's the same old story. Democrats find it more expedient to be perceived as doing the right thing rather than be caught doing the right thing. This "vote to affirm" is a staged gambit to fool the public into believing that Pelosi's meaningless, superfluous gesture is tantamount to doing the right thing and allowing the public to finally get a glimpse into the still-secret impeachment "inquiry" - which, for now, is restricted to a closed room.

 Pelosi was meeting with us columnists, from several publications, to explain her thinking on impeachment. I asked her how she planned to make the case that this Trump scandal was different from all of the others that have failed to move public opinion; she said she would have an answer when the inquiry was complete. She promised that it would revolve around “simple and repetitive clarity about the Constitution of the United States.”

And complicit stenographer that he is, Leonhardt left it at that. There was no follow-up, no push-back from him against Pelosi's deflective non-answer to his very simple question. There were no questions at all, apparently, about the plight of the tens of millions of "lesser people" suffering in media-imposed silence through the Trump regime. He dishonestly claims that "public opinion" has not been moved by such things as pediatric concentration camps. I guess he wasn't paying attention to all the ad hoc protests by regular citizens at the concentration camps, or to the occupation of Pelosi's office a year ago by the independent Sunrise Movement agitating for a Green New Deal to combat the climate crisis. (which Pelosi later derided as the "green dream or whatever." The woman not only can't seem to keep her disdain for people to herself, she also has a very limited vocabulary.) 

Nancy Pelosi and her crew of media stenographers are living proof of what French political philosopher Simone Weil described as the main function of any political party: to generate "collective passions" and to indoctrinate voters on just what these collective passions should be limited to. That's because the ultimate goal of any political party is not to protect the public good, but to achieve growth of itself without limit. Political parties are thus microcosms of capitalism itself.

This not only explains Pelosi's non-answer to the complicit David Leonhardt's procedural question, it explains why Trump's impeachment will likely not center around his institutional child abuse, his racist incitements to violence, his misogyny and reputed history of serial sexual predation, his cruelty to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Ricans, his planned cuts to food stamps and government health insurance, or his deadly assaults on the environment. 

As Simone Weil wrote, amidst the last outbreak of global fascism, in "On the Abolition of All Political Parties":

  "In principle, a party is an instrument to serve a certain conception of the public interest. This is true even for parties which represent the interests of one particular social group, for there is always a conception of the public interest according to which the public interest and these particular interests should coincide. Yet this conception is extremely vague.... No man, even if he had conducted advanced research in political studies, would ever be able to provide a clear and precise description of the doctrine of any party, including (should he himself belong to one) his own.... A doctrine cannot be a collective product."

There's the public (non-elite) sentiment and the private (elite) sentiment. Or, as the possible 2020 Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton once assured Goldman Sachs bankers in a paid speech, there is a "public position and a private position."

Pelosi's task, and that of her media couriers, is to meld the public with the private just long enough to gain back the power they crave. And then it's back to The Same Old Story. 

So wouldn't it be great if people took the streets and expanded the elites' astroturfed movement for Trump's impeachment into a general strike to stop capitalism right in its tracks, even if for only a day or a week? 

They're doing it in Hong Kong, Haiti, Chile, Bolivia, France. They're doing it all over the world. So how about we give non-sanctioned political protest a chance here as well? It seems like it should only be a matter of time before most of the people here in the USA get miserable most of the time, with no longer even a moldy old couch to be a potato on, or a smart TV to absorb claptrap from. Suddenly and magically they will discover that not only do they have feet, they still have brains that function independently.

Maureen Dowd Versus The Mob

In the third installment of her summer series "Confessions of the Designated Nancy Pelosi Whisperer," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd abandons channeling Madam Speaker's now-backfired attacks on the Squad of four progressive congresswomen of color, and unsheathes her worthy literary claws on the Vast Twittering Left.

The hook for this week's attack was a tweet by NBC News personality Howard Fineman, who boasted about his attendance at one of Dowd's apparently famous Georgetown parties. He affixed a photo of Dowd greeting honored guest Nancy Pelosi and her date for the evening, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Outrage then ensued from all across the political spectrum. Poor Howard Fineman was forced to delete his tweet, in utter shock that his "benign big shot brag" had elicited such "vicious" reactions from the hoi polloi. In the olden days, he implied, people would have been more duly awed by the doings of the high and mighty. The twitter taunts thus only gained in intensity. He and his hostess Maureen Dowd both interpret these negative reactions as pure class envy rather than as legitimate criticism of the cozy, incestuous relationship between government officials and the journalists who are supposed to be holding them to account.

As I mentioned above, it is no longer feasible for Dowd to directly attack the Squad, given that the first two installments of the Pelosi Whisperer franchise had only served to raise their public profiles and elevate their progressive agendas - and worst of all, had provided the perfect opening for Donald Trump to launch his own vicious triangulated racist attacks on them. Poor Maureen was temporarily reduced to dishing out sloppy seconds, such as a statement she retweeted from media mogul David Israel calling the four women "the Squad of Vuvuzelas."

Vuvuzelas are the extremely loud, even deafening, monotonal horns invented and used by the Zulus of southern Africa to summon distant community members, and are now widely used at soccer games and other sporting events. Given the ethnicities of the Squad and the fact that one of them, Ilhan Omar, is a refugee from Somalia, it's an interesting choice of metaphor. 

But back to Maureen Dowd's latest column, in which she expresses wonder that her vivid description of Speaker of the People's House Pelosi wearing $995 pumps, munching on bonbons, and relaxing at her Napa Valley vineyard evoked such sour grapes of wrath from people:

After I interviewed Nancy Pelosi a few weeks ago, The HuffPost huffed that we were Dreaded Elites because we were eating chocolates and — horror of horrors — the speaker had on some good pumps.

 Then this week, lefty Twitter erected a digital guillotine because I had a book party for my friend Carl Hulse, The Times’s authority on Capitol Hill for decades, attended by family, journalists, Hill denizens and a smattering of lawmakers, including Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Susan Collins.

I, the daughter of a D.C. cop, and Carl, the son of an Illinois plumber, were hilariously painted as decadent aristocrats reveling like Marie Antoinette when we should have been knitting like Madame Defarge.
Yo, proletariat: If the Democratic Party is going to be against chocolate, high heels, parties and fun, you’ve lost me. And I’ve got some bad news for you about 2020.

The actual bad news is that Dowd has erected a straw man. This version is comprised of the latest group-think narrative trope that progressives are a monolithic bloc whose constant harping on impeachment rather than on Party Unity will only serve to give us another term of Trump. 

They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough while placing all their hopes in a color-inside-the-lines lifelong Republican prosecutor appointed by Ronald Reagan.
The politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty.

Dowd carefully names no names within her horde of stupid puritans. Nor does she mention that the loudest voices for impeachment have not been those of ordinary people, more of whom are leaning toward some form of socialism to solve our problems, but rather the corporate class of journalists on MSNBC and CNN and her own colleagues at the Times. But since the much-ballyhooed testimony of Robert Mueller turned out to be such a dud, scapegoats must be devised by these discredited corporate journalists so fixated on #Russiagate, and they must be devised in a hurry. The corporatists of the incestuous media-political complex are not our natural allies. In fact, they're the exact opposite. 

Hippie-punching and voter shaming are the standard tactics of last resort for these amoral establishment fools, and Dowd is only too happy to join the fray and deflect the blame. When Trump wins another term due to the lack of a populist agenda from the centrist Democrat whom they hope to undemocratically nominate, they will then refrain from blaming themselves and as usual, blame people with no power and no money.

My published comment on Dowd's column: 

The tweet by pundit Howard Fineman bragging about canoodling at Dowd's digs with the very same officials that journalists are supposed to afflict was what roused the ire of both left and right. It had nothing to do with "progressives'" disappointment over Mueller's overhyped (by corporate journalists like Fineman) performance.

This may come as a shock to the Beltway Bubble, but opinions on impeachment vary among progressives. Some are for, some against. But I suppose it's easier for Maureen to call them nasty purists than it is for her to address such core progressive policy proposals as single payer health care or to write about epidemic student debt, the growing climate catastrophe, the unaffordability of housing, the caging of refugees, and the fact that Flint, Michigan still has no clean water.

Nobody out here in Lower Slobovia cares about your Georgetown shindigs or your angst about peevish purists who do not show proper deference to the Knowledge Class and its insulated meritocrats.. Most of us are too worried about paying the bills and what kind of future our children and grandchildren face in a country where representative democracy has devolved into winner take all predatory capitalism.

But keep writing columns like this one, because the more you scold the have-nothings the less they will heed your infinite wisdom, and the more they will spare themselves the tedium of reading the next self-pitying installment.

The Turn of the Pelosi Screw

Much like the paranoid governess in the Henry James novella, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to be melting down faster with every passing summer day.

I probably shouldn't even delicately ascribe her recent bizarre verbal attacks upon "The Squad" of four newly elected progressive women to run-of-the-mill derangement. Because since reading the Maureen Dowd column in Sunday's New York Times and other accounts, in which Pelosi characterizes both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump as harmless "glasses of water" I keep getting a mental picture of Pelosi as the Wicked Witch of the West, melting down into a sorry puddle after getting deservedly doused with that same glass of water.

Actually, the putrid puddle image that I can't get out of my head vies with the equally ugly picture that the Dowd column conjured up: the stiletto heel of Pelosi's expensively shod (Manolo purple pump, retail $995) right foot stomping on and grinding progressive policies into a pulp, while her weaker left appendage flirtatiously but ineffectually plays footsie with Donald Trump and the Republicans under the table.

That Pelosi is more attuned to the Republican side of the Duopoly, and that she despises progressive Democrats with every fiber of her being is also becoming more painfully obvious by the day. In fact, she is beginning to sound a lot like the authoritarian Trump himself, with her strident demands to her caucus for loyalty to party over loyalty to constituents and country.

As a carefully leaked, anonymously sourced piece in Politico described it,

Speaker Nancy Pelosi chided progressives in a closed-door meeting Wednesday, calling on them to address their intraparty grievances privately rather than blasting their centrist colleagues on Twitter. Pelos's comments, which were described as stern, came during the first full caucus meeting since a major blowup over emergency border funding last month between progressive and moderate lawmakers as well as a recent spat with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her freshman allies.
"So, again, you got a complaint? You come and talk to me about it," Pelosi told Democrats, according to a source in the room. "But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just OK."

Harrumph. This from the same politician who went to the New York Times and complained so peevishly and publicly about The Squad, and thought it would be O.K. and that her progressive targets would not in their own turn react publicly and very negatively to her clumsy gaslighting attempt.

Of course, this whole "Ballad of the Cat-fight Cafe" narrative was from the very beginning the joint project of the corporate Democratic Party and the Times. All Dowd had to do was pick up and expand upon the contrived propaganda narrative ("The Mighty Moderates Vs. AOC")  written the previous week by her colleague Julie Hirschfeld Davis, a piece which I critiqued here. This anti-progressive narrative was in its own turn a companion piece to the longer-running blockbuster series called "The Ruling Class Vs. Bernie Sanders," which is now on temporary hiatus thanks to his slight fall in the polls. But as soon as he becomes a clear threat or when he openly attacks Joe Biden, the Times will be back on the offensive. For the time being, it's the dangerously popular AOC who serves as the convenient proxy in the Class War of the rich vs. the rest of us.

But now there's a glitch in their offensive. AOC noticed and vocalized the inconvenient fact that the "Squad" which Pelosi denigrates is all comprised of women of color, and they have received death threats. The "race card" is being played in the Mighty Moderates vs. AOC game, and the Democrats and the corporate media are beginning to panic. There is a clear and present danger that the identity politics which the liberal class has long used as a diversionary tactic is in danger of collapse from the now racially charged intraparty angst. Without identity politics to divert attention from the corporate Democrats' lack of attention to the economic woes of the electorate, they have nothing.

It looks even worse for Madam Speaker and her "lieutenants." To prove his own devotion to the Game of Bipartisan Footsie in service to the rich, Donald Trump himself has gallantly come to Nancy Pelosi's defense in a cynical attempt to justify the GOP's own racist attacks on AOC and the other three women. "I'll tell you something about Nancy Pelosi that you know better than I do. She is not a racist!" he told the media as he made preparations to rip apart up to 2,000 more immigrant families via ICE deportation raids this weekend.

So the personality politics-driven Family Feud Franchise which the Times itself instigated at the behest of Pelosi and the Democratic leadership is backfiring right in their faces. But rather than admit their own complicity, the same media outlets that over-hyped the Narrative all week are now criticizing their own story without taking responsibility for it. It apparently sprang fully formed from the ether without any assistance from them at all. 

The TrumPelosi Minuet

As the Atlantic now reports, the whole Pelosi-AOC Catfight Narrative was pretty much a fraud from the get-go, because the Democrats have always been united, and so enough with the Narrative already. It is certainly not the Media's fault, writes David A. Graham:

There’s no reason to blame the media for simply reporting shots that the two sides are taking at each other. Insofar as there’s a “Democrats in disarray” narrative in place, it’s because the Democrats are shouting at one another from the rooftops.
Yet the rhetorical sparring does obscure a broader Democratic unity. The border-funding vote aside, there’s barely any daylight between Democrats on matters actually before the House. The Squad has broken with Pelosi on just two votes so far, according to ProPublica’s tracker. The gap between the party’s moderate and left wings is relatively small, too. Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, have parted ways on just 13 percent of votes; Omar and Representative Max Rose, who’s more pragmatic than ideological, on 7 percent of votes.

They're trying to put the toothpaste that they themselves just squeezed out in big fat globs back into the tube.

They're trying to mop up the toxic Pelosi puddle and and wring it back into the glass and call it pure sparkling water.

But it's still sludge. And there's still a sharp, mean, nasty designer stiletto heel lurking just beneath the surface, ready to stomp and screw even mildly progressive policy ideas at a moment's notice.

Meanwhile, all that Nancy Pelosi can tell the two thousand terrorized immigrant families who are the targets of Trump's upcoming deportation sweep is to simply not answer their doors when the ICE troops come politely knocking, crowbars and guns at the ready.

She sounds like Nancy Reagan telling people to Just Say No to drugs at the very same time that her husband's CIA was filling poor neighborhoods with crack cocaine and millions of people started getting swept up and jailed in the Duopoly's racist war on drugs.

Meanwhile, the corporate media mostly ignored the large immigrant protest at Joe Biden's Philadelphia campaign headquarters on Wednesday, the very same day Pelosi was warning her caucus to shut up. Six people were arrested for staging a sit-in and demanding that the former vice president apologize for the Obama administration's record deportations of 3 million immigrants. Biden has thus far preferred not to, remaining behind locked doors at some undisclosed location.

How does the screw turn? Let us count the ways.

So forget about locking our doors. We need to show up at their doors, right where they hide and they cower, starting in the hallowed halls of Congress, and wherever centrist candidates set up shop.

**Update, 7/13: The protesters caught up with Biden in New Hampshire on Friday afternoon, when he discovered to his great chagrin that uttering the word "Barack" doesn't necessarily elicit cheers of adulation and/or moans of nostalgia. Literally stuck between the protesters and a river (also containing kayaking protesters) Biden had no choice but to mutter sorry for deporting millions of innocent people, not sorry for deporting a relative handful of people with felony records. The confrontation pointed to one of the few positive aspects of this interminable campaign season - it has greatly extended the period of time in which regular people are allowed to afflict the office-seeking powerful and comfortable.

Pelosi Says Trump Steals Attention From Her Dead Billionaire Hero

Every spring since 2010, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been an honored guest speaker at the annual Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit. Every year, she has put the essential liberal gloss on the inherently cruel deficit hawk propaganda underwritten by late Wall Street ultra-right billionaire Pete Peterson. Every year, she has helped to spread the mendacious message that it's not oligarchs like the Petersons who are impoverishing the population. It's selfish retirees and poor people who are gorging themselves on all those precious Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare benefits, and who are thereby ruining the lives of entire future generations.

The Democrats want to snip a bit here, slash a little there, while the boisterous Republicans want to go wild with machetes. This makes Pelosi one of the good guys. She knows how to cut deals about what to cut, and when, and make it all seem so reasonable and therapeutic.

She didn't get away with her sweetened snake oil this year, however.

This year, Pelosi's carefully scripted diverting of public attention from the actual class war to some utterly non-existent generational battle over meager health and retirement benefits was rudely hijacked by Donald Trump.

No, the president didn't storm the stage. He wasn't even a guest. But he might as well have been, given that CNN news personality Manu Raju acted as Trump's virtual conduit, repeating his recent insults to Pelosi verbatim, ("You're a nasty, vindictive, horrible person!")  and semi-successfully goading her into reacting.

Pelosi did not take at all kindly to Trump's oblique hijacking of CNN, which is usually such a reliable deficit hawk co-propagandist. In fact, she was so ticked off by Manu Raju's relentless refusal to stay on the austerity topic and to help her fear-monger about the alleged government debt crisis, at times she almost sounded like that recent notorious doctored stammering and slurring Facebook video of herself. 

But this clip of her Peterson Summit interview is no doubt authentic, given that it was directly uploaded by CNN, the most trusted name in news. She does seem to garble and skip over and truncate her words at times. You be the judge:

"I don't care what you ask me. I'm not going to talk about him any more!" she seethes to Raju, before proceeding to talk about Trump some more, before going on to blather about "the future" and immigrant Dreamers who are here through no fault of their own and who often fight rich men's wars. (thereby implying that the desperate relatives who brought them here are not also human beings deserving of safety and security.) Plus, she added, "we have to protect our democracy from The Russians."

Pelosi did not explain what The Russians have to do with dishonest centrist scare-mongering about the deficit while Congress has cruelly implemented budget austerity for regular people and corporate welfare for billionaires. But as long as the whole performance already had been hijacked anyway, why not throw The Russians in for good measure? Anything to divert the attention from Trump's diversion of the attention.

"If I had been invited here to talk about the president, I would have found better things to do at home," she fumed, to enthusiastic applause from the fiscally responsible attendees.

In case you have never heard of Pete Peterson, he was Richard Nixon's commerce secretary before going on to lead Lehman Brothers and then to make billions as co-founder, and later seller, of the Blackstone private equity group. He might be personally deceased, but his thriving dynasty ranks right up there with the Koch Brothers as one of the most powerful oligarchic influences on national policy that this country has ever seen.

Peterson used a now-debunked 2010 study by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, purporting to show that austerity stimulates economic growth, to justify his demands for cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

As the Center for the Media and Democracy reports:

The economists both have ties to Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson. As the Center for Media and Democracy detailed in the online report, "The Peterson Pyramid," the Blackstone billionaire turned philanthropist has spent half a billion dollars to promote this chorus of calamity.

Through the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Peterson has funded practically every think tank and non-profit that works on deficit- and debt-related issues, including his latest 2012 astroturf supergroup, "Fix the Debt.”

Reinhart, described glowingly by the New York Times as "the most influential female economist in the world," was a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics founded, chaired, and funded by Peterson. Reinhart is listed as participating in many Peterson Institute events, such as their 2012 fiscal summit along with Paul Ryan, Alan Simpson, and Tim Geithner, and numerous other Peterson lectures and events available on YouTube. She is married to economist and author Vincent Reinhart, who does similar work for the American Enterprise Institute, also funded by the Peterson Foundation.

Kenneth Rogoff is listed on the Advisory Board of the Peterson Institute. The Peterson Institute bankrolled and published a 2011 Rogoff-Reinhart book-length collaboration, "A Decade of Debt," where the authors apparently used the same flawed data to reach many of the same conclusions and warn ominously of a "debt burden" stretching into 2017 that "will weigh heavily on the public policy agenda of numerous advanced economies and global financial markets for some time to come."

But nonetheless, here's what Nancy Pelosi gushed at the fiscal confab this week as she compared Peterson to the dishonest and dastardly Donald Trump, implying that Trump was deliberately stomping on his grave:

 "Pete Peterson was a national hero. He was the personification of the American Dream. I loved him dearly. He cared deeply about working people. He knew that the national debt was a tax on our children. He always said to me, 'Nancy, always keep your eye on the budget!"

And boy, has she ever kept her gimlet eye on the budget! From convincing her Democratic majority to end long-term unemployment insurance in 2013 during the height of the financial crisis (just as impeaching Trump is "not worth it" now, holding up a budget deal just out of silly concern for the needs of millions of desperate people was "not worth it" then), to this year insisting on a Pay-Go rule as a means of killing Medicare For All before it ever comes out of committee, Nancy Pelosi, a multimillionaire in her own right, has always been a true servant of the Richest of the Rich. 

Naturally, the funding and terrible human costs of our trillion-dollar wars never come up for discussion, neither at Fiscal Summits nor in Congress. War is way too profitable. And the poor, the old, the sick, the precarious and the desperate are not profitable - as much as the oligarchy strives mightily to suck every last drop of sweat and blood from them. And, never once did Pelosi suggest that Trump's grotesque tax giveaway to the wealthy be reversed should Democrats regain power, massive deficit-creator that it is.

 For, as Pelosi lectured to an indebted socialist-leaning college student at a televised town hall in 2017, barely one month after Trump took office: "I have to say, we're capitalists. That's just how it is." 

And as much as she pretends to loathe Donald Trump, she also joined in the raucous bipartisan applause at this year's State of the Union speech when he vowed that socialism will never, ever come to the United States of America.

We'll just have to see about that. Pete Peterson is dead, and Nancy Pelosi has promised to retire by 2022, at the very latest. 

Still, the zombie austerians are not going down without a fight. 

Ever so coincidentally, just as the Fiscal Summit was wrapping up, the New York Times has published its latest scare-mongering piece about Social Security facing an insolvency crisis. The article is heavy on the need for retirees to tighten their belts and live on less, and totally lacking in the suggestion that the cap on FICA taxes be raised or even outright abolished. In other words, it's light on the idea that the Peterson Dynasty might have to fork over any of their excess cash to help their fellow human beings.

The Only Thing Between Trump and the Golden Pitchforks

After two years of urging Democrats to patiently await the results of the Mueller investigation before even thinking about impeachment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved the goalposts on Monday.

As she sees it, the report is only a prelude. It is merely a template, or book of clues which Congress must carefully examine in order to finally arrive at The Truth. So much for Robert Mueller III being the avenger and final arbiter of the fate of Donald Trump.

It's almost as though Pelosi is pulling an Obama, who back in 2009 told a group of nervous Wall Street bankers that "I am the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks," tacitly assuring them that they would not face criminal prosecution under his benevolent watch.

Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in the land, is the only thing standing between a blustery and very paranoid Trump and the golden pitchforks of the liberal pundit and political class, more and more of whom are demanding that impeachment proceedings begin. This is especially true of those running for president and who are in dire need of fuel to fire up the voters. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have yet to catch fire in the polls, and are among the impeachment advocates. Of course, since they sit in the Senate, and it's the House that has to get the ball rolling, their calls for impeachment require no further effort or political capital on their part.

As for Pelosi, her neoliberal bipartisan agenda trumps bringing Trump to any form of justice. For starters, she is anxious to get the Trump-backed corporations and the Democratic Party-backed corporations together in a closed room to arbitrate drug prices without any input from the actual House of Representatives. A drawn-out impeachment process would just take all the energy away from enriching the oligarchy in the bipartisan manner to which it has become accustomed.

And since Pelosi had also refused to bring George W. Bush to justice for his illegal torture and surveillance programs, and for lying us into a war that killed, maimed or displaced millions of people, bringing Trump to justice for playing a mob boss and thwarting the Mueller investigation would seem kind of petty, wouldn't it? This is especially true since Pelosi herself was secretly briefed on Bush's torture program in 2003, and did nothing to expose or stop it.

And that would make her seem kind of complicit in war crimes, wouldn't it?

Well, not according to Pelosi. She said she was only following the secrecy rules. She is no Chelsea Manning-style whistleblower. The fact that Republicans attacked her on the torture issue did the bipartisan trick, too: it brought loyal Democrats to her immediate defense, just as the Democratic "witch-hunt" against Trump brings the GOP to his immediate defense.

Unaccountability is built right into the permanent American power structure. The rulers rely on the Constitution and other arcane rules whenever it's convenient, not because it's right. When it's not convenient, then they don't. That is the main function of the Duopoly: theatrics and grandstanding in public, and disdaining the public good and the public's wishes in private.

Fast-forward to 2019.

Politico reports:

"We can investigate Trump without drafting articles," she said during a call with House Democrats.... We aren't going to go faster, we are going to go as fast as the facts take us."

"It is also important to know that the facts regarding holding the President accountable can be gained outside of impeachment hearings," she wrote earlier Monday afternoon in a letter to House Democrats.

This should throw cold water on the continuing hysterical insistence by the Golden Pitchforks crowd that Donald Trump is a secret Russian agent and guilty of treason. I don't think that even Nancy Pelosi has reached the level of corruption that would allow her to desultorily hunt for facts about how, exactly, Vladimir Putin is actively ruling our country and ruining our democracy.

Her inaction should be all the proof the Russophobes need to relinquish their fantasies once and for all. But now that they've created their own alternate reality, inconsistencies and plot-holes are so easy to ignore. The play is the thing, as Shakespeare once observed.

Therefore, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, typical of the Golden Pitchforkers of the Plutocracy, writes:

So all the “fake news” was true. A hostile foreign power intervened in the presidential election, hoping to install Donald Trump in the White House. The Trump campaign was aware of this intervention and welcomed it. And once in power, Trump tried to block any inquiry into what happened.
Never mind attempts to spin this story as somehow not meeting some definitions of collusion or obstruction of justice. The fact is that the occupant of the White House betrayed his country. And the question everyone is asking is, what will Democrats do about it?
But notice that the question is only about Democrats. Everyone (correctly) takes it as a given that Republicans will do nothing. Why?

Translation: We will keep spinning the Russiagate fairy tale and foist all the blame for the Democrats' failure to hold Trump accountable for "treason" on the usual GOP suspects, who do not believe in "American Values." This is like a prosecutor who refuses to indict a suspect because he doesn't have an ironclad guarantee of a conviction. It's akin to the Obama administration refusing to prosecute Wall Street bankers because it is too complicated and institutions must never be allowed to fail. 

It is cowardice and complicity,and yes, it is obstruction of justice in its own right. It is so much easier to accuse one side of the Duopoly of not adhering to "American values." It saves the corporate Resistance the trouble of examining their own consciences and acknowledging their own roles (2016 Bernie Buzzkill) in enabling the election of Trump.

These Democratic pitchforks come custom-equipped with nice, soft protective cushions over their shiny, well-oiled tines. Liberals come to scare and enrage Trump, and to be ostentatiously disgusted by him. They don't want to really hurt him. He is too valuable a commodity and diverting media personality.

My comment on Krugman (held by the newspaper's censors for 10 hours prior to publication):

If Speaker Pelosi believed that Trump is a traitor to his country, she'd be pushing impeachment. She's averse to it because she knows Trump is just your ordinary homegrown mobster who's "not worth it."

 She thinks it's safer to run out the clock till Election Day. as we're regaled with a steady procession of piecemeal investigations and subpoenas that Trump will (true to form) obstruct every step of the way.

Enough of Russiagate. It feeds his paranoia. He used his campaign as a marketing opportunity, and dealing with the Russian mob was just one of his many scams.

 Where's the corporate media outrage over his veto of the congressional bill to stop the US-enabled genocide in Yemen? Where's the angst over the US meddling and attempted coup in Venezuela, or his economic assault on Iran, or his continued caging of refugee children at the border?

As for the GOP, when did they ever "believe in" anything, except serving their paymasters? They're not scared of the corporate Dems, who serve their own paymasters. They fear only true progressives like Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren - who, to her great credit, was the first liberal senator to utter the "I" word.

 Republicans win because they co-opt populism in the service of elitism. Trump's way too skilled a comic diversion to relinquish. Add to him the hucksters of the Evangelical "Greed is God" cult, and they haven't got a qualm in the world. Ethics? What ethics?

Speaking of ethics, lack of same is very much a bipartisan affair. 

Pelosi used the same language of collegiality and cooperation in 2006, when widespread public antiwar sentiment cost Bush the lower House. She grotesquely equated justice with pettiness. In her world, it's always better to ostentatiously extend olive branches to war criminals and forget about the war dead and the trillions of wasted dollars.

As the New York Times reported, 

She said the GOP, which frequently excluded Democrats from conference committee hearings and often blocked attempts to introduce amendments, would not suffer similar treatment.
“Democrats pledge civility and bipartisanship in the conduct of the work here and we pledge partnerships with Congress and the Republicans in Congress, and the president — not partisanship.”
She also extended an olive branch to Bush on the war in Iraq, saying she plans to work with him on a new plan but will not support the current strategy and supports beginning redeployment of troops by the end of the year.
Pelosi also said she supports the idea of a bipartisan summit on the war.
“We know, ‘stay the course,’ is not the way,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi said she received a brief, early-morning call from Bush, who invited her to lunch on Thursday.
“We both expressed our wish to work in a bipartisan way for the benefit of the American people.”

She mildly scolded Bush for his authoritarian language the same way that she now mildly scolds Trump for his. It's not even Nerf-brand toy pitchforks that Nancy Pelosi wields. It's a few slimy strands of overcooked spaghetti.  

When she keeps repeating that her goal is to benefit "the American People," her definition of people is the United States Corporate Empire, limited to the very rich, the very militaristic and the very interconnected.

Here's another response to Krugman's claim that Republicans have no American values. This one was written by my alter ego, "Nicky Sardo," and also held overnight by censors: (many "regular" commenters besides me have been similarly and regularly exiled. In keeping with the Unaccountability Code of Values adopted by the American ruling class and their media propagandists, the Times ascribes its censorship practices to the vagaries of a top-secret algorithm.)

There is at least one American Value that the Republicans sincerely believe in. And that is the value of the almighty dollar. Billions and billions of them, to be precise, all parked tax-free in the pockets of a few tycoons who own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population combined.

 They also believe in vote suppression, particularly in Southern states with majority Black populations. They accomplish this with their Unholy Trinity dogma: voter ID laws; incarcerating record numbers of Black people and then denying them suffrage based upon their convictions; and gerrymandering.

  They also believe in denying poor white and black and brown people a decent education. Trump himself once boasted that he "loves the uneducated." Because if you keep people down long enough, they'll vote for Republicans out of ignorance, fear, desperation, resentment of "the other" - or they'll be too broke, apathetic, sick or disgusted to even bother to vote at all. And failure to vote is usually a default vote for a Republican, unfortunately.

 Whether Trump is an actual traitor is beside the point at this point, because Americans have been shafted by unfettered neoliberal capitalism for decades now. Forget about Putin and the Russians. We have the Kochs, the Adelsons, the Mercers, the Wall Street banks, the consolidated media spewing corporate propaganda and rich men's wars at us 24/7. The fact that they still invite us, even beg us, to vote is proof that democracy is pretty much a delusion.