Adventures in New York Times Commenting

It's time once again for another semi-regular dump of my New York Times comments.

Because of the corporate media's steady diet of "all Trump all the time", I'd been somewhat constipated of late as far as my commenting contributions to the Gray Lady are concerned.  It's hard to comment on articles in a paper which I sometimes go entire days without reading. The virtue and sanctimony on offer is often just too rich for my squeamish digestion. Even cutting the cord on the empty calories provided by CNN and MSDNC did not entirely rid me of the nausea and bloat engendered by the Trump overload, because pearl-clutching and virtue-signalling supplements are baked into every fake resistance "news analysis" article and opinion piece in the Times. 

The Times dishes out Trump in abundance, and at much profit to itself. Its latest earnings report just set another new record.

But recovering news junkie and elitism-gawker that I am, I just can't quit the Gray Lady entirely. And I do confess that when I fall off the wagon, I fall off the wagon bigly.

So, on to the dump of those comments which I can actually remember pecking out in a dazed binge-and-purge orgy of news and elite opinion-consuming gluttony. 

First up is Frank Bruni's actually pretty insightful column, titled Donald Trump's Phony America: Land of the Fraud and Home of the Knave.

Comparing Trump's rise to that of Theranos grifter Elizabeth Holmes, chronicled in the bestseller Bad Blood by John Carryerou, Bruni writes:

There are several kinds of success stories. We emphasize the ones starring brilliant inventors and earnest toilers. We celebrate sweat and stamina. We downplay the schemers, the short cuts and the subterfuge. But for every ambitious person who has the goods and is prepared to pay his or her dues, there’s another who doesn’t and is content to play the con. In the Trump era and the Trump orbit, these ambassadors of a darker side of the American dream have come to the fore.

He concludes: 

 Trump’s amorality play contradicts our paeans to the Puritan work ethic. It’s not the script that we teach our children. But with Trump in the White House, validated by tens of millions of votes, it may well be what some of them are learning.

My published response: 

The Puritan work ethic is the lodestone of our nation's Calvinistic "Discovery Doctrine," holding that plunder is fine as long as it's done in the name of a "higher power."

 Think Mike Pence and the attempted coup in Venezuela.

We're taught that certain people are just so special that they were chosen from on high to be The Elect. Salvation is guaranteed to the materially successful, while the poor and unlucky probably deserve damnation.

 Trump is just the most blatant symbol of this perverse, consumerist, inhumane value system. He's gotten away with his crimes for decades because America loves a grifter and a showman. His fans, 40% of the country, cling to him as they waste their energy resenting their fellow human beings who don't look or talk just like they do. So what if the Trumps and the Holmeses of this world bamboozle their way to the top? The ends - wealth and power - always justify the means. Rarely are they held to account.

So if there's one good thing that Trump has done, it's been forcing more people to wake up to the reality that the American Dream has always been a scam. Working and studying hard, waving the flag and supporting the troops lose their luster when you look at all the bumbling hypocritical pathocrats in our midst with the gall to keep preaching their sick prosperity gospel to us.

It's no shock that Exceptional USA now ranks 35th out of 50 other advanced nations in measurements of health.

 So down with Trumpism. Up with the Green New Deal.

******************** 

It's all Michael "The Rat" Cohen all the time at the Times, and Maureen Dowd gives readers her acerbic take on the saga in a column slugged The Sycophant and the Sociopath:

Trump, who once bleated “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” in his anger about Jeff Sessions recusing himself, wanted a lawyer who was whip-smart, amoral, ruthless and predatory. Cohen was merely Renfield to Trump’s Dracula, gratefully eating insects and doing the fiend’s bidding.
With a few exceptions in his inner circle and with family, Trump doesn’t give loyalty or deserve it. That’s why Republicans on the Hill who so obsequiously stand by him will eventually learn it wasn’t worth it, just as Cohen warned them.....

Loyalty is a rare commodity in Washington. And Cohen is not the most wretched sycophant in political history. That honor goes to Andrew Young, a slavishly devoted aide to John Edwards during the 2008 campaign who served as a driver, personal shopper, handyman and butler to the North Carolina senator.

Ouch. I had almost forgotten about the "Breck Girl" as Dowd once dubbed Edwards after he was photographed on the campaign trail getting a $400 haircut while marketing his Two Americas anti-poverty fakery.

So while Dowd, along with Bruni, wrote a pretty insightful column this weekend, my biggest ongoing complaint about her work is that she never lets readers forget what a Washington insider she is herself. Famous people are always confiding to her at one elite Beltway or Hollywood cocktail party or another. There's a certain knowing smugness to her columns that makes me feel slightly nauseous when I read them.

My published comment to her latest: 

It's hard to know how much of Cohen's mea culpa was original, and how much of it was scripted by Lanny Davis, his own fixer of a lawyer.

But here's the part of his testimony that really chilled me:

“Indeed, given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power, and this is why I agreed to appear before you today.”

Trump's approval rating now scarily hovers around the 40% mark. Too many people are treating this as a reality show. And despite all its pearl-clutching, that especially goes for the Media-Political Complex.

The consolidated media is flush with record subscription cash, ad revenue, readership and viewership. Trump is a blockbuster hit series which the movers and shakers don't want to cancel any time soon. Impeachment is "off the table" while the various actors vie for campaign donations and their own starring roles on cable news show panels.

No matter how they purport to "resist" Trump and how fast they race to fact-check his every mendacious utterance, they love him and they serve him every bit as slavishly as Michael Cohen.

To expand upon the infamous quip by the disgraced ex-CEO of CBS, Trump may be bad for ordinary people, but he's been damned good for the oligarchy and the media it controls. The movers and shakers aren't exactly champing at the bit to relinquish their monster tax breaks, or agitating to stop Trump's regime-change coups and wars, are they?

****

Speaking of Dowd's insider status, I had also commented on her previous column ( Feb. 23)  which launched yet another trial balloon for Joe Biden. She brought up his family history of what she curiously calls a "web" of tragedies and intrigues, apparently designed to both pre-empt criticism of sleaze over which he has no personal control (Clinton, Obama, borderline incestuous affairs involving sons and daughters-in-law) and to soften our hearts and minds for his umpteenth entry into the presidential sweepstakes.

My comment:

I'd barely heard of Biden's "web" of pseudo-scandals until Ms. Dowd saw fit to bring it up to refresh all our memories.

Since it was Joe himself who reportedly was the source for the maudlin 2015 Dowd column that had the dying son begging Dad to seek the nomination, this sounds like another trial balloon to gauge whether the public even cares about the troubled family dynamics. Are Biden or his people also setting up this narrative, portraying him as a sympathetic victim of Trump to dilute, if not preempt, any potential backlash?

Ms. Dowd playfully warning Uncle Joe about his "Irish temper" getting the better of him is too cute by half. So's the insinuation that Trump is all Obama's fault.

 If people -- other than D.C.'s elite establishment, that is -- have a bone to pick with Biden, it won't be because of his family soap opera or his age. It will be because of his actual political history.

As one of the original conservatives of the Democratic Leadership Council, he was instrumental in passing the crime bill which incarcerated a record number of black people, as well as reforming bankruptcy laws which made it nearly impossible for families to make a fresh start from onerous, often usurious, credit card debt. And then there was his awful treatment of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas confirmation. hearings.

 It's the family-unfriendly web of neoliberal capitalism that Biden helped to spin that should encourage him to stay off the trail to spend time with his own clan.

*****

One aspect of Michael Cohen's testimony that the liberal media are gobbling up is his claim that besides being a cheat and a con man, Trump is also a racist.  The fact that the Republicans on the panel dutifully defended Trump from this charge is just more proof, according to columnist Michelle Goldberg, that the GOP is in "A Race to the Bottom."

I kind of suspect that Clinton advisor Lanny Davis, who is also Cohen's pro bono defense attorney, is the mastermind behind the racism addition to the corruption scandal, because it hews so perfectly to the Democratic Party's embrace of identity politics as a means of virtue-signalling and proving that they are not Trump. But I digress. 

Goldberg, recounting Rep. Mark Meadows's use of a black female Trump appointee as a human prop to "prove" that Trump is not a racist, writes:

The “fact that someone would actually use a prop, a black woman, in this chamber, in this committee, is alone racist in itself,” said (Rep. Rashida)Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American. Red-faced, indignant and seemingly on the verge of tears, Meadows demanded that Tlaib’s words be stricken from the record, turned the charge of racism back on her, and said that he has nieces and nephews who are people of color. In a stunning dramatization of how racial dynamics determine whose emotions are honored, the hearing momentarily came to a halt so that Tlaib could assure Meadows that she didn’t mean to call him a racist, and the committee chairman, Elijah Cummings, who is African-American, could comfort him. “I could see and feel your pain,” Cummings told him.

Amazingly (ahem) enough, Goldberg failed to examine why in hell a leading corporate resistance Democrat, an African-American no less, not only sided with a right-wing politician and threw Tlaib under the bus, but went on to insist that this right-wing racist is his very best friend in Congress. Cummings essentially announced his own corrupt priorities to the entire country, a shocking admission that must be ignored by the corporate media at all costs lest it interfere with Democratic virtue-signaling.

My published response: 

A common technique of right-wing authoritarians accused of racism is to boomerang their accusers.

Trump himself is a master of this kind of gaslighting. When, for example, Black NPR journalist Yamiche Alcindor asked him at a November press con about the white nationalism he inspires, he went ballistic, retorting "That is such a racist question.... Oh, I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that. Why do I have my highest poll numbers ever with African-Americans? Why do I have among the highest poll numbers with African-Americans? That’s such a racist question!"

 Mark Meadows similarly overreacted in outraged victim mode. And what a disappointment that Oversight Chair Cummings seemed to take his side and call him a friend, implicitly rebuking Rashida Tlaib. Apparently, she is supposed to stay in her assigned place as one of the new female symbols of diversity, and to keep her accurate assessments to herself.

It is testament to her own generous humanity and her courage that she was able to both embrace Meadows and still defend her absolute right to speak her mind and represent her constituents.

 This also goes to the real purpose of most over-hyped congressional hearings. Politicians commonly use them to grandstand and play to their base and donors, rather than to cross-examine witnesses to seek the truth.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is also to be commended for demanding documents and names, in lieu of showboating.

********

And last but least we come to two columns by Paul Krugman.

In his most recent offering, he claimed that he was so tired of bashing Donald Trump  that he might as well bash daughter Ivanka Trump for a change. Krugman is apparently miffed that she's going around lecturing the country about the evils of socialism, and the bliss of social mobility and waged work, topics about which he obviously knows a lot more than she does. As a matter of fact, inserted right smack in the middle of his column for no apparent reason is a self-promoting blurb bragging that [Paul Krugman did explanatory journalism before it was cool, moving from a career as a world-class economist to writing hard-hitting opinion columns. For an even deeper look at what’s on his mind, sign up for his weekly newsletter.] 

Since Krugman used his column to focus on Ivanka's ignorance rather than on her criminality, I addressed the latter in my own off-topic published comment:

Dotus (Daughter of the United States) was a lifelong registered Democrat who couldn't even vote for Doting Daddy in the New York primary because of that state's draconian law imposing a ridiculously long waiting time to change one's party affiliation.

So her current shtick using GOP talking points to poor-shame the very people Trump has made even poorer is simply re-branding her image. She thinks as long as she can use neoliberal code words like "empowerment" and "access," we'll forget all about her involvement in grossly overcharging Trump Hotel guests in town for Daddy's inauguration.

A Mueller indictment for that scam, as well as fraud charges stemming from her reputed involvement in Russian oligarch money-laundering schemes, can't come soon enough. She's already been close to indictment in Manhattan, until her attorney made a nice campaign donation to the district attorney. And as David Cay Johnston has outlined, she once bilked prospective buyers of a Baja California resort by falsely claiming not only to have purchased a unit herself, but that she would live there. She settled with prosecutors for an undisclosed sum in a sealed agreement.

 So let her lecture the working class all she wants. The more she whines about socialism, the more attractive it appears, even to doubters.

Keep it coming, Ivanka. Hope to see you modeling the latest Trump-branded orange jumpsuit at a Club Fed resort real soon. I hear they pay whole pennies an hour for the job of your dreams.

Krugman's previous column (2/25) addressed Trump's apparently discontinued trade war with China, because apparently, only "unlawful" autocrats can bribe Trump into immunizing themselves from protection racket protection scams. 

Now, since the Times is not only uncritically covering Trump's ongoing grossly illegal coup in Venezuela, and is in fact totally on board with it, I've been inserting this topic into my comments wherever I can. Especially given Krugman's allegations of shocking bribery in Trump Tower, it makes you wonder why, since Nicolas Maduro is painted as such a vicious dictator by the corporate media, Maduro isn't also on Trump's bribery payroll, or vice versa. In point of fact, it's the Koch Brothers and Big Oil bribing Trump, but that's a story for another day.

My published response:

The trade war with China that wasn't was always about Trump's own political fortunes. He no longer seems to care about pandering to the working class in general and the US steel industry in particular. Remember when he made it all about the unfairness of all that cheap Chinese steel invading our country and destroying our wonderful jobs?

He has now pivoted to Venezuela, where he is on record for wanting to invade just to get their oil. It won't do for him to bicker with China when Venezuela is ready, willing and able to accept Chinese goods and aid. China buys Venezuelan oil, or at least it did before the US imposed new sanctions and froze Venezuela's bank accounts and made the economy scream like Nixon did to Chile.

Trump might have the attention span of an ant, and his Art of the Deal was an artless piece of ghost-written junk, but his merry band of neocon gangsters are very well-versed in the dark art of global looting and war and bloodshed. They'll find a way to take their outsize cut of polluting, planet-destroying Venezuelan oil sales to the choking, smog-infested, car-happy Chinese population, should they achieve their goal of seizing the Venezuelan oil supply for humanitarian reasons.

Of course, this is all just total speculation on my part. Every time you think that the Trump regime couldn't possibly get more insanely, openly, pathologically greedy. they get more insanely, openly and pathologically greedy.

 And they don't care who knows it.

Commentariat Central: Premature Horse Race Edition

A couple of essays I've been working on are taking longer than expected, so in the meantime I'll repost a few of my recent New York Times comments on All Presidential Horse Race, All the Time. (And tonight's xenophobic "Nuremberg in the Oval" primetime special is Donald Trump's own opening gambit in Campaign 2020 in case you had any doubts. If you watch, try to imagine the allegedly fired Steve Bannon hissing through Trump's earpiece.) 

First, there's David Leonhardt's decibel-rise of a weekend column about the clear and present Trumpian danger, which makes it very clear that the love-hate relationship is here to stay until the experts decide it's safe and economically feasible for the oligarchy to kick him out:

 Achieving this outcome won’t be easy. It will require honorable people who have served in the Trump administration to share, publicly, what they have seen and what they believe. (At this point, anonymous leaks are not sufficient.) It will require congressional Republicans to acknowledge that they let a con man take over their party and then defended that con man. It will require Democrats and progressive activists to understand that a rushed impeachment may actually help Trump remain in office.

My response:

Via the government shutdown, Trump has effectively ordered the destruction of our democratic institutions. This is the definition of a fascist leader.

True, Trump commands the loyalty of only a third of the country. But the longer that Congress doesn't act on its "checks and balances" mandate, the more powerful he will become.

The new House majority will haul in various sycophants for a scolding as they wait for Robert Mueller to wrap things up. Meanwhile, the wannabe dictator is entrenched in the White House.

 It's a further sign of democratic collapse that even liberal pundits are dismayed that the military overseers of his regime are biting the dust. When a guy named "Mad Dog" Mattis, who before being relieved of command by Obama for his hawkishness and who once opined that "sometimes, killing people is fun", is now being mourned and celebrated as one of the last Adults in the Room, I think we have a lot more to worry about than just Trump.

So the onus is on Mueller, another unelected overseer of our putative democracy. My hope is that he will soon indict the Trump offspring and order their arrests complete with a handcuffed perp walk. That should rattle Trump enough to either quit or do something so reckless that even his GOP enablers can't ignore it. I look forward to the day when Mitch McConnell leads a contingent to the White House and makes him an offer even he can't refuse - like his own subsidized cable TV network.

Oh, wait. He already owns the lot of them.

(And  wouldn't you just know it, after much fake hand-wringing all the anti-Trump networks have "reluctantly" acceded to his demand for prime air time tonight, and will carry the "Nuremberg in the Oval" special in all its spittle-inflected insanity. The TV honchos were still mulling whether to give Nancy Pelosi or another designated performer have given equal time to the sensational ballroom duo fondly known as "Chuck and Nancy," who will perform a concern-trolling sedate box step in a non-twerking rebuttal to Trump. Sorry, Rashida Tlaib fans. She has been deemed not quite ready for prime time by the party elders.

***

Meanwhile, while the pundits and media moguls are debating whether to dump Trump or to keep him around for the fantastic ratings, the Times's gender editor Susan Chira and her colleague Lisa Lerer took the time to wonder whether A Woman would be able to beat him amidst all this alleged emotional upheaval.

“There’s a real tension,” said Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress and a former policy adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “On one hand, women are leading the resistance and deserve representation. But on the other side, there’s a fear that if misogyny beat Clinton, it can beat other women.”

....“It is very hard, when you only have that one woman who’s tread that ground,” said Ilyse Hogue, the president of the abortion-rights organization Naral. “Everything about that individual becomes conflated with being a woman.”

The rawness of the topic was evident in the furor that broke out this week over Ms. Warren’s relatively low likability ratings. Research has found that it is much harder for female candidates to be rated as “likable” than men — and that they are disproportionately punished for traits voters accept in male politicians, including ambition and aggression. “Likability is totally framed by gender,” said Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster and expert on women’s votes.

The subtext of this concern-trolling article is that centrist neoliberal Democrats do not want Warren to win the nomination, because too many deplorable people are sexist and therefore the corporate Dems will keep repeating the deplorable sexist tropes about her - purely out of altruistic concern for party interests, of course. Hillary lost only because she is a woman and not because she was one of the most unpopular candidates, based upon her policies and platform, in recent history. In other words, they want hunky Beto O'Rourke, who votes with Republicans a large percentage of the time.

My published response:

This presidential horse race speculation presupposes that Trump will even still be president a year from now. The prospect of any of the Democratic women mentioned facing Mike Pence in a nationally televised debate - or, even more effectively, in a marathon Twitter back and forth - is probably a major factor in the current GOP leadership's continuing to stand by Trump, regardless of the awful things he does, regardless of the damage he does to their own party and their own individual reputations and prospects. They're in it for the power and the bucks, period. And everybody knows it.

 Then there's the corporate media standing in the way of justice and democracy for all. A Warren vs. Pence race would not bring in the clicks and ad revenue for the corporate sponsors that Trump continues to engender. All the more reason for him to hang on by his fingernails through another election cycle, and all the more reason for the oligarchs to let him. He is a showman, and America does love its spectacular show. And the greedy ruling class racketeers love their money.

The other slim possibility is that both Trump and Pence will be impeached/indicted and convicted, and Nancy Pelosi will become our first woman president, temporary though her reign will be.

In effect, Trump himself will have inadvertently smashed open the proverbial glass ceiling. Talk about karma!

(I'll say it again. Heads they win, tails we lose.)

****

Last but least, Paul Krugman, fresh from his weekend pat on the head of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for proposing a 70% tax on the uber-wealthy, now pivots to patting Elizabeth Warren on the head. Not because he necessarily wants her to be president, mind you, but to distance himself from his fellow liberal pundits who keep harping on her looks, age, personality and genetics-testing gaffe. The main thing is that she is a serious policy wonk with impeccable academic cred. Unlike, he implies, the non-Ivy Leagued and therefore insufficiently serious or intellectual Bernie Sanders. This column appears to be Krugman's subtle concern-trolling way of diminishing Warren in the minds of much-stereotyped anti-elitist, anti-intellectual Heartlanders and Rust-Belters. He stresses her intellectual heft over her populist cred. It's like the kiss of death in distressed cities and towns which lost their jobs and livelihoods to "free trade" deals and those totally unplanned and uncontrollable pesky global headwinds and surging tides of change. 

At the same time, he makes the specious case that since Warren is a Democrat, it naturally follows that the party itself is suddenly progressive and full of wonderful, populist ideas. They'll bathe themselves with Warren bubbles while the water's warm.

Meanwhile, Democrats have experienced an intellectual renaissance. They have emerged from their 1990s cringe; they’re no longer afraid to challenge conservative pieties; and there’s a lot of serious, well-informed intraparty debate about issues from health care to climate change.

You don’t have to agree with any of the various Medicare for All plans, or proposals for a Green New Deal, to recognize that these are important ideas receiving serious discussion.

(All talk and no action - Generic Corporate Democrats in the service of the oligarchy will posture as Elizabeth Warren clones, even as they inwardly cringe at her anti-Wall Street rhetoric. They'll ride her populist coattails and share the hefty funds she raises all the way to the convention, where (after a second superdelegate-hefty ballot) they'll thank her, and probably Bernie too, for the loyal service and loyal support for Beto, Uncle Joe, Cory or Kamala.  Or so I cynically suspect and honestly fear.)

My published comment:

Elizabeth Warren has withstood marathon gaslighting attacks from both sides of the Uniparty ever since her entry into both public policy and politics.

It was Barack Obama, in one of a whole series of misguided austerian efforts to placate the Gruesome Old Patriarchy, who bypassed Warren to lead the very consumer agency she had birthed.

Later, as the corporate Dems colluded with the GOP to pass the secretive and anti-democratic Trans-Pacific Partnership, Warren was one of the few senators calling Obama out on it. She brought some much-needed public attention to the "investor state dispute tribunals" in the pact. These tribunals, in which multinational corporations act as judge, jury and executioner, have the effect of overriding sovereign laws if they dig into the profits of said corporations.

Obama, in turn, accused Warren of spreading "misinformation" to rile up the progressive base, as well as falsely denying the TPP was even a secret. To which Warren challenged him to make the whole thing public. Upon which he got very, very quiet. With the upshot being that the TPP didn't pass before he left office.

With Warren and AOC in the vanguard, radical neoliberal centrism might finally be on the way out. Of course, pundits also predicted its demise after the financial crash in 2008. Oligarchs do not give up, even with proof that hyper-capitalism is both causing and worsening our climate catastrophe.

Re Warren, no need to chant "I'm With Her."

Because "She's With Us."

And a follow-up comment to responding readers who were royally miffed about my nameless sexist Bernie-Bro-ish diss of Hillary and their false insistence that Obama's TPP was fully transparent:

Draft copies of the TPP first came to the public via Wikileaks, whose founder Julian Assange is currently under US indictment and whose plight is being all but ignored by the corporate media, the so-called champions of the First Amendment.

The TPP goes far beyond even the odious corporate tribunals superseding the laws of sovereign governments. It would force signatories to extend copyright to life plus 70 years and impose draconian penalties for what is now known as protected "Fair use" of such copyrighted materials. It also imposes top-down control of the Internet and limits the rights of individuals to shield their personal information from bad actors. (Read: Facebook.) Hollywood and Silicon Valley, big donors to the DNC, had a lot of input in the crafting of the TPP, whose full text was not even to be made public until five years after ratification. Before she was allegedly against it, Sec. of State Hillary Clinton described the TPP as "the gold standard of trade agreements." Ka-ching.

 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/final-leaked-tpp-text-all-we-feared

***

P.S. If you can't or won't watch the Nuremberg in the Oval special tonight, Boing-Boing has thoughtfully provided us with a combination preview-synopsis, at 50 percent speed so that we can't or won't miss even one precious single spittle-inflected word of it. (Sound editing credit, Rob Beschizza).

We Are Not Amused

 In the spirit of the establishment sourness I wrote about the other day, the New York Times Division of Standards and Practices has seen fit to axe two of my published comments in the past week. Since I only submitted three comments during this time frame, this amounts to a record 66% rejection rate.

My first censored comment was in response to a very bland editorial chiding Barack Obama for his unseemly demand for $400,000 per speech. I pointed out that the much more popular Michelle is only getting $200,000 for her gigs, a dismal half of what her husband earns. "What ever happened to equal pay for equal work?" I asked rhetorically. "We should all be out marching in the streets to protest this terrible inequity!"

The Gray Lady apparently does not like sarcasm and snark. If one cannot in good conscience rush to the defense of the greedy and the powerful, then one must be careful to vent one's criticism sincerely, respectfully and responsibly.

My second censored comment (to a Maureen Dowd column about Trump being a threat to public health) was very censorious of Donald Trump and the House GOP's vote to gut health care coverage. Although I never thought it was possible to be too rude to Donald Trump, especially in the liberal New York Times, it turns out I was very wrong. Just because one is upset that the cartoonish Donald Trump was gleefully celebrating the premature deaths of tens of millions of Americans is no reason to compare the shape of Trump's head to that of a cartoon character.

Oddly enough, though, my comment was allowed to stand for a full 24 hours and glean more than 1,000 reader recommendations before it was disappeared. So in this case, the removal could either be the result of the first three shifts of censors being asleep at the moderating switch, or too many sensitive readers signaling their displeasure too many times over the course of the day.

Here's what was deemed so offensive. (I thought to make a copy of it) -

That photo of Sponge Don Squarehead saluting his orchestra of smirking white male supremacists speaks a thousand ugly words. But it's concert master Paul Ryan who really takes the cake for one of the most comprehensively deadly eugenics initiatives in modern history. That he had the nerve to preen and simper before the cameras is terrifying evidence of a truly depraved mind.

Second only to Trump and Ryan in horrible optics was Ivanka, smiling banally as she and Prince Jared watched the final House vote on TV. She should write a sequel to her book, about how working moms can creatively scrimp by forgoing health insurance. She could include tips on the best name brand pliers for self-help dentistry, maybe even start her own line of suture threads in the latest fashionable colors to avoid those unnecessary ER trips with the kiddies.

But even if the Senate refuses to rubber-stamp the AHCA, that still leaves 30 million people without health insurance and tens of millions more saddled with unconscionably high premiums and deductibles. And since Trump is only interested in winning at all costs, he should put his presidential mouth where his private citizen mouth used to be. He should demand Medicare for All. Everybody covered from cradle to grave. No predatory private insurance middle men. No pre-existing conditions. It's all paid for with a progressive income tax and a tax on high speed Wall Street trades. It will make Americans feel great again and add years to our lives.

On second thought, maybe the Times censored me because I just won't shut up about Single Payer health care, which has been officially censored from the agenda of the corporate Democratic Party.

Adventures in Hillaryland

I wrote a critical response to a New York Times column (originally and grotesquely titled Hillary - Free At Last!)  by Nicholas Kristof, who recapped his softball interview with Clinton at last week's Women in the World Conference. 

After my comment about the ignored class war was published, myriad digital tongues emerged from the ethosphere to castigate me for my blasphemy, and for my failure to properly appreciate all the good things that Hillary, her ultra-rich friends and donors, and our great transnational corporations have been selflessly doing behind the scenes for me and for all the other bitter and jealous have-nots of America. One disgusted Times reader actually demanded to know if I am a Russian.

It's getting bad -- oops, I mean divisive -- out there, people. Being affluent and stuck in those stages (denial, depression, anger) of Hillary grief must be such a dreadful thing. I'll write more about the cult of MccCarthyite Mourners later in this post - but first, I'll let Summit Founder Tina Brown explain the purpose of the confab in question on its official website:

The three-day Women in the World Summit, held at New York City’s Lincoln Center, presents powerful new female role models whose personal stories illuminate the most pressing international issues. They range from CEOs and world leaders to artists, activists, peacemakers, and firebrand dissidents. The Summit’s vivid journalistic narratives, high-impact video, and fast-paced staging have made it the premier platform to showcase women of impact. Increasingly, Women in the World also includes the participation, onstage and in the audience, of men who champion women.
Past participants have included Hillary Clinton, Christine Lagarde, Angelina Jolie, Diane von Furstenberg, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, Tom Hanks, Malala Yousafzai, Oprah Winfrey, Barbra Streisand and many more amazing and inspiring women from all over the world.

A couple of truly memorable quotes from this year's "celebs and luminaries" page really stood out for me.

"None of us can do everything, but each of us can do something." -- Meryl Streep.

"There's a lot of estrogen in this room!" -- Katie Couric. 

Even though it's billed as a conference by, for and of females, the hosts always invite a few A-List men to the proceedings in order to prove that one can be male, hunky, powerful and feminist all in one package. This year's hotties were Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Kristof's fellow Times columnist and liberal interventionist Thomas Friedman.

Why not? The Times helped foot the bill for the show, after all, with other costs defrayed by the $350 price of admission along with generous donations from Toyota and a whole host of corporate sponsors. The luministas all dutifully posed on the red carpet in front of the car manufacturer's corporate logo: Let's Go Places!

So it was only natural that Kristof would be granted the first one-on-one interview with Hillary Clinton since the election, right? He begins his column with the requisite bathos:

 In the most wrenching, humiliating way possible, Hillary Clinton has been liberated. She is now out of the woods again, and speaking her mind.

As I noted, the original title of his piece was borrowed from the gospel song of enslaved people called Free At Last, which Martin Luther King also made the centerpiece of his iconic I Have a Dream speech. So in retrospect, it appears that wiser heads at the Gray Lady prevailed, and reslugged the Kristof column a more seemly Free to Speak Her Mind.

This was an apt choice, because there were relatively few women of color either on stage or in the audience of the Women in the World summit. As Antoinette Isama, a journalist who attended the event, writes:

As I walked in to receive my press pass, the production of event amplified the posh David H. Koch Theater with bright lights, a Women In The World Boutique, a lounge courtesy of Toyota and free refreshments and munchies courtesy of Pepsi (lol). It was a corporate company’s dream to rub elbows with an occasion such as this—because women rule the world, right?
Before the conversation between Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, with Katie Couric called “How To Raise A Feminist” began, there was an a cappella rendition of the unofficial theme song of the Women’s March accompanied by a montage of pink pussy hats. From the welcome speech by the Summit’s Founder and CEO, Tina Brown, it seems like the march, where millions of women gathered in D.C. and around the world in solidarity to stick the middle finger to patriarchy and Trump was the main theme to reflect on throughout the Summit.

Isama says that when she looked around the press section, she noticed that she was the only black reporter among a sea of white faces. Ditto for the wealthy attendees in the audience.

My experience at the Women In The World Summit pretty much confirmed why I don’t go out of my way to attend events like this. I don’t understand the point of having these grand and fancy events for [white] women to pat themselves on the back, singing several renditions of kumbaya through the tired tropes of heart wrenching and dramatic stories that come from women of color who participated. I would think, especially in our intense climate around the world, that it would be imperative to utilize this moment to drive folks to keep taking action and actually doing something instead of being reactionary.
Access was another huge issue for me. If I didn’t have the privilege of obtaining a press pass, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to attend. The first time I even heard this event was a thing was last year—and this has been a yearly event for 8 years now. There was a price range for tickets, where the highest priced at $350. So I had to ask myself—with the lack of people of color in the actual audience that I managed to see, who’s the intended audience for this? It may not be for people like me.

Oh, but despite all her own hardships and devastation, Hillary Clinton is finally free, people! Kristof quotes her as saying:

 "I just had to make up my mind that, yes, I was going to get out of bed, and, yes, I was going to go for a lot of long walks in the woods. And I was going to see my grandchildren a lot and spend time with my family and my friends. They have rallied around me in an amazing way.”

What - she thought Chelsea and the grandkids were going to snub her because she lost the election?

So now that she's finally out of her shell and free to speak "bluntly," Hillary Clinton's version of honesty is to continue blaming her loss on misogyny. The more successful a woman is, the more likely she is to be a victim of those who "unconsciously" resent people like her, she told Kristof. And she stayed stalwartly honest and true to the other official reasons that she lost: the Russian "plunder" of her campaign emails and the FBI investigation into her use of a private internet server.

Russia’s hacking of campaign emails “was a more effective theft even than Watergate,” she said, adding: “We aren’t going to let somebody sitting in the Kremlin, with 1,000 agents, with bots and trolls and everybody else, try to mix up in our election. We’ve got to end that, and we need to make sure that’s a bipartisan, American commitment.”

The most telling symbol of Hillary Clinton's freedom, according to Kristof, is that she is once again using "Rodham" as her middle name. Free at last, free at least, Great God almighty she's free at last.

Now, realizing that the New York Times reader commentariat is chock-full of Clinton supporters, I was as politely sarcastic, or sarcastically polite, as possible in my own published comment. which I think dovetails the classist aspect of the summit with Antoinette Isama's critique of its "colorblind" racist undertones. The current debate of classism v. racism is a false one, in my opinion, because neoliberalism relies on both for its continued survival. Plutocrats and philoanthrocapitalists love to showcase a certain select few black and brown people on the public stage, because it allows them to deny there is even such a thing as the class war. It shows citizen-consumers how liberal and magnanimous and socially responsible they are as they suck up even more of the globe's wealth for themselves.

The Women in the World summit series is nothing if not virtue-signalling writ large.

So here is my "controversial" comment (for once, mine was the first one submitted yesterday, so anyone interested in reading all the responses to it can easily find them lby selecting the "oldest" option.)

"Clinton acknowledged that Democrats need to do a better job reaching working-class Americans, but she added that part of her problem was that many voters were already struggling with tumult in their lives, 'and you layer on the first woman president over that, and I think some people, women included, had real problems.'”

Too bad that hardly any working class women were actually there to hear Mrs. Clinton's wise and heartfelt words. That's because  six out of every 10 American voters don't even have $500 in savings and thus couldn't afford the $350 cost of admission to the event, held in a glitzy venue which billionaire arch-conservative David H. Koch so humbly named after himself.

The millions of women working two or three part-time service sector jobs couldn't even get time off to be inspired long distance, via live-streaming, by Clinton and other media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley personalities.True, corporate sponsors including PepsiCo, P&G and AT&T did subsidize some tickets to the live event. But. like everything else in this Land of the Free, it was a high-odds lottery.

Yes, many Trump voters are misogynistic. Yes, Comey did Hillary wrong.

Still, to listen to her explain to a theater full of plutocrats that she lost struggling voters because of her "success" and gender feels only slightly less insulting than once again lumping them into her Basket of Deplorables.

But anyway, let us rejoice that she's out of her shell and free to finally be herself.

Several dozen readers reacted, some supportive and some critical. I'll only include the real doozies, just to show that liberalism does indeed seem to be inexorably moving to the right. And since comments were shut off before I could respond, I will include my reactions to these utterly enjoyable responses as well.

Ed Chang, NYC:  Wow, totally unfair. Just because you are unable to make it to the party doesn't mean that the guests are uncaring about your needs. I mean do you want Hillary to start touring Walmarts around the country? Is that really the best use of her time? Or, alternatively, speak to a high profile group of people who may be able to donate to her causes and at the same time get a high profile write-up in the Times, as well as a video archive of the entire event on YouTube? It's simply more efficient to do the latter.

Sadly this is more proof of the jealousy some women feel towards more successful women, hence the election loss.

(No, Ed, we wouldn't want Hillary to catch cooties from a Walmart greeter. Plus, I must compliment you on the nice use of one of my favorite neoliberal buzzwords: efficiency.)

Mary Ann Donahue, NYS:  To Karen Garcia ~ I am disappointed that you, you who are well informed and well spoken would reduce Hillary Clinton's basket of deplorables comment to the oft repeated damning sound bite. Taken out of context, it distorts the understanding and compassion that Clinton conveyed in the full text of her remarks.
Here is the last paragraph just to remind people who are so eager and willing to diminish her that she is a woman of rare intellect, insight and work ethic. We would be a better nation if she had been elected.
""But the other basket -- and I know this because I see friends from all over America here -- I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas -- as well as, you know, New York and California -- but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end.Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.""
Thank you Hillary.

(I know, I know, there's a special place in hell for me and all women who didn't support Hillary. It's sad but true that the "deplorables" part of her full remarks is the one that will go down as one of the of the more tone-deaf recorded remarks in all of political history. Just as Clinton professed concern for the downtrodden at the Koch Theater event, she  made her previous infamous remarks at another venue catering the extremely wealthy donor class. Additionally, she showed her true neoliberal hand when she asserted that struggling people only "feel" that they have been let down. They have been shafted, screwed and cheated in actual fact. They do not suffer from an emotional problem, they suffer from a poverty problem and hunger problem and a jobless problem.)

Stephanie Sommer, St. Paul: Ah, the politics of resentment roars its ugly head once again. Her success isn't the cause of others suffering. Its not a zero sum game. Moreover, her policies would have addressed so much of the suffering you mention, and that is exactly why conservatives hate her.

(Her policies did not include Medicare for All or a $15 minimum wage or world peace or restoration of Glass-Steagall. The suffering would have gone on, the neoliberal dream would be alive and kicking, whether she was president or not.)

arbitrot, Paris:  Methinks Ms. Garcia is projecting her own guilt from the campaign, when she regularly expressed her displeasure with Sec. Clinton as opposed to another authentic hero, Sen Bernie Sanders.

Not that Ms. Garcia voted for Donald Trump, or even Jill Stein. I assume she pulled the lever for Clinton if only faute de mieux.

But I'll bet even Maureen Dowd did that.

Clinton didn't lose the 2016 election. Just a few too many self-righteous, woolly-headed, and downright politically naive Democrats did by trying too hard to cut Clinton down to their size.

("arbitrot" must possess magical thinking skills way across the ocean, purporting to know how I voted. And this is not the first time that my critiques of Democrats automatically turn me into Maureen Dowd. I always have to chuckle when this happens, because it is so sexist. Ever notice how women who write opinion pieces are often characterized as shrill, catty and bitchy?  And what's with the woolly-headed insult? I assume and hope that"arbitrot" implies that I'm stupid, and not that other meaning of the pejorative.)

David L. Jr, Mississippi:  Until your ardent desire to help the poor is trumped by your understanding of how they benefit from a growing private sector, your analytical absurdities will persist. Also, because you and Bernie Sanders often talk up Scandinavia: Scandinavians had greater levels of equality BEFORE their social democracies were built. Doesn't this tell you that it likely has more to do with culture than economics? Indeed, Nordics living in America outperform Nordic citizens themselves!

And David Koch is hardly conservative, whatever the media claims. There's nothing conservative about the man at all. He supports conservative candidates and then funds groups that pressure them into taking extreme anti-government economic positions, which aren't really "conservative" so much as revolutionary. He loathes their social views. While I disagree with him, I refuse to permit your implication that socialists care more about paupers than libertarians, which is false.

You really despise incorporation, don't you? Corporations built the modern world. Without them, it wouldn't exist. They didn't develop in the Islamic world; or in China, where hereditary bureaucrats oversaw state monopolies -- the one place where private companies did take hold in Asia, Japan, was a smashing success. Stratification is a product of the difference in ability as well as circumstances. Trying to level society in the name of an abstract idea is a recipe for disaster. You'll derogate anyone who succeeds in life.

(I can't even.)

 Lisa, Charlotte: And when all is said and done, Karen, you and the rest of Bernie's crowd own Trump. I won't insult you by pointing out he silliness of arguing that she should not have been speaking in a venue founded by David Koch. Lots of people did not like Hillary for lots of reasons. But surely you can't argue that her candidacy was in any way equivalent to Trump's because reality does not agree with you. I'd argue that this should have been blindingly clear to a person of your knowledge and intellect.

(I was wondering when somebody would finally blame me and the Berniebros for Trump. It's one of their favorite tropes. Who knew we had so much power?)

JS: I've seen her speak, free, to huge audiences in the poorest venues. Here she speaks and is heard around the world. A leader needs to do both, and she has, but only a woman is criticized in this manner, and that has to stop.

(Several readers accused me of picking on Hillary's greed just because she's a woman, and neglecting to ever criticize other politicians, such as Barack Obama, for doing the exact same money-grubbing. They obviously have never read my blog or previous Times commentary. And I have to ask, would Lucrezia Borgia be getting this kind of defense from modern liberals, with her XX chromosomes also becoming a protective shield from accountability?)

Michael Joseph, NYC:  Karen, you seem almost to take it as a personal insult that there are different classes in America, that corporations target certain populations, and that affluent people also have certain rights. I find it insulting that you would castigate all middle-class supporters of Hillary as plutocrats, that you assume a single-minded fixation on class constitutes some kind of "vision" or gives you moral superiority, and that you dismiss with a condescending sniff any injustice or tyranny "Yes, many Trump voters are misogynistic" that isn't Marxist-based. You exhibit the same limiting "foundational certainties" about class that the Trump people do, only from the opposing perspective. Both belief sets seem mired in the same 19th century ideologies that proved so disastrous for the 20h century.

(OK, I'll try to stay in my assigned place from now on.)

njlea, Seattle:  How much do The Con Don and Robber Barons - and their arm candy - spend on clothes, McCarthy?

What an out-of-touch comment. She is the most admired woman in the United States and one of the most admired women in the world. Women like other women to dress well. She is actually very conservative.

Are you Russian?

(No, but my paternal ancestors were. Catherine the Great gave them political asylum after they were persecuted in their native Germany on the basis of their religion. The clan, mostly independent farmers, later went back to Germany after one of the later czars, I think it was Alexander, tried to draft them into the armed services. So I guess you'd better squeal me out to PropOrNot, or if that fails, maybe alert the ICE goon squad.)

Commentariat Central (continued)

Readers, thank you for all your excellent contributions to this weekend's open thread. Since the response was so good, I'll be making this a regular "thing" in the future.

As for me, I took some time off from my time off to write a few comments on a trio of New York Times op-eds.  Here they are, with synopses on/snippets from the columns preceding my reactions to them:

1. Nicholas Kristof, who just the other day begged liberals to stop being so mean to Trump voters, now takes his message directly to Trump voters. He paternally warns them that Donald is not only not their savior, he is betraying them. Kristof makes the startling observation that the president frequently lies, exaggerates and bloviates. So I am sure that the millions and millions of Trump voters who devoured this column are slapping their foreheads, Homer Simpson-style. A massive "D'oh!" is echoing throughout the heartland --  or what the pundits disdainfully call Flyover Country.

Kristof tells people something they didn't already know:

The biggest Trump bait-and-switch was visible Friday when he talked about giving Americans “access” to health care. That’s a scam his administration is moving toward, with millions of Americans likely to lose health insurance: Instead of promising insurance coverage, Trump now promises “access” — and if you can’t afford it, tough luck.

This promise of “access” is an echo of Marie Antoinette. In Trump’s worldview, starving French peasants wouldn’t have needed bread because they had “access” to cake.

Many of you voted for Trump because he campaigned as a populist. But instead of draining the swamp, he’s wallowing in it and monetizing the presidency. He retains his financial interests, refuses to release his taxes or explain what financial leverage Russia may have over him, and doubled the fee to join Mar-a-Lago to $200,000.

I won't go into a full discussion here of why high-deductible, high-premium Obamacare, too, is merely "access" to health care.  You can still go broke or bankrupt even with a shiny insurance card in your pocket. Moreover, even Barack Obama himself defined the Affordable Care Act as "access," frequently bloviating about the program and fudging the numbers freely. He just didn't do his bragging and his lying with a lowbrow Archie Bunker Queens accent. 

What also struck me so negatively about Kristof's smarmy advice column is his assumption that working class Trump voters even care about his taxes and the still-unproven claims by the Power Elite of his nefarious ties to Russia. I doubt that his fans are agonizing about him cheating other rich people by doubling their price of admission to his Florida club. If anything, they're cheering about it. Screw the rich!

Anyway. here's my published comment to Mister Ann Landers:

So what do you have to offer the Trump voter in lieu of Trump?

It's not enough to whine about what a lying jerk he is. Who, or what, will replace him? Another centrist Democrat who promises incrementalism we can believe in, as the jobs continue to be outsourced, the wages continue to plummet, the lives continue to be foreshortened?

If Trump is impeached or otherwise leaves office prematurely, his fans will cry foul. It'll get ugly, regardless.

There's more than a little truth to his charge of media bias. MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski annoyed a lot of people, and not just Trumpists, when she announced the other day that it's the media's job not only to inform us, but to control what we actually think. That's pretty rich, coming from one of the pundits  who worked so hard to elevate a proven crook during the grotesquely prolonged campaign season. It was (and is) a carnival reality show produced for the sole purpose of raking in record ad revenue for the six media conglomerates controlling 90% of everything we're allowed to see, hear, and read.

Yes, many Trump fans are deluded enough to deem this huckster their savior, yet others are just grimly satisfied watching him insult the same elite institutions that have deliberately helped stretch wealth inequality to record proportions. Trump is a charlatan, but even our "honest" leaders have deliberately ignored social and economic problems at home in the insane quest for profits for the few, penury for the many, and permanent war.

***

2. Maureen Dowd is still hung up on Trump's war with the corporate media, enmeshing it this week with literary and political figures as varied as King Lear, Batman, Rodney Dangerfield and William Jennings Bryan. (which she spelled "Bryant" before a copy editor corrected the error in the online addition.)  Like her corporate cohort, she accepts Vladimir Putin's takeover of the US Government as a given, a factless truth that is no longer even up for debate:

The White House has been trying to shape coverage by giving passes and questions at press conferences to Breitbart and other conservative outlets, including some fringe ones. And on Friday afternoon, the White House barred several news organizations from a Sean Spicer briefing. This included The New York Times and CNN, which angered the White House by reporting on links between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence officials.

This Russian-style domination of the press came only a few hours after the president told CPAC: “I love the First Amendment; nobody loves it better than me. Nobody.”

Fake news. Let’s just hope he doesn’t love the First Amendment to death.

My response (written before Trump wisely decided to skip this year's press dinner/aka Incest Fest:

Trump is 70 years old, and developmentally arrested as he is, he is sadly discovering that this is no country for old men who can't even tell the difference between the world and themselves.

We should have gotten the awful message when he let out this Freudian slip at a January press con (the one with the piles and piles of empty dossiers as a prop):

"As president, I could run the Trump organization, great, great company, and I could run the company—the country. I’d do a very good job [at both], but I don’t want to do that."

Meanwhile, the press is as hooked on Trump as he is hooked on them. I suspect he gets a rush out of even the negative stories, because his resentment needs stoking right along with the rest of his massive super-id. He might not want to share his actual wealth and that of the oligarchy with the rest of us, but he is more than eager to share his resentment with us. As a matter of fact, he wants to stuff it down our throats. He doesn't want us to gag, of course; he merely wants to gag the media.

So my 'umble advice to the press would be to stop whining, get into Trump rehab, pronto, and restrict your reporting to his many provable crimes. You might start with his mob connections and casino flim-flams and the associated New Jersey graft and corruption. Get hold of his tax returns and prove this alleged Russia connection once and for all.

Have your Correspondents' Dinner -- just don't invite him.

Let him wither away from sheer neglect.

*** 
3. Ross Douthat, the Times's young right-wing Catholic hypocrite, goes full extreme centrist this week and rehashes Barack Obama's own Trump-producing, neoliberal prescription for a sensible, balanced approach to rewarding the rich and urging the poor to show some grit and resilience in these tough times. He calls for some bipartisan legislation to help Republicans put themselves at a safe distance from the dastardly Trump, and humorlessly dubs his own suggestions an "immodest proposal." Thus he proactively (or so he seems to think) removes himself as one of those annoying postmodern reactionaries who'd be a prime target of Jonathan Swift's withering attack on selfish rich jerks. Douthat writes: 

Let’s start this week with what one might call an emergency response to the social crisis. That crisis is apparent in the data that Eberstadt and many others have collected, showing wage stagnation in an era of unprecedented wealth, a culture of male worklessness in which older men take disability and young men live with their parents and play video games, an epidemic of opioid abuse, a historically low birthrate, a withdrawal from marriage and civic engagement and religious practice, a decline in life expectancy and a rise in suicide, and so on through a depressing litany.

To get rid of the "gridlock" that only the Washington Consensuals actually care about, Douthat suggests the carrots of a larger child care tax credit, a payroll holiday, an infrastructure bill, expanding the military, and hiring more cops.  His sticks surprisingly include cuts in unemployment and disability and Medicaid benefits in order to encourage those lazy poors to throw away their Oxycontin and pick up their shovels.  

You'd be surprised at the number of reader-responders who actually think that Douthat's sense and sensibility approach is a yuuuge improvement over the enervating Trumpian insanity. Why, he sounds almost refreshingly Obaman! But here's my published response:

This might sound depraved, but offered two choices of entertainment in Dante's seventh circle of hell, I'd rather endure an eternity of Trump's rantings than be tortured by Ross's series of radical proposals to fix poor people. At least The Donald is funny about a hundredth of the time.

But the NYT's resident young Social Darwinist is apparently dead serious as he riffs on Jonathan Swift's satiric masterpiece.

Ross calls for a reduction in disability and unemployment benefits to offset infrastructure costs. But how newly immiserated poor, jobless and sick people are then supposed to navigate those wonderful new bridges and highways to their dream job is apparently their own problem. Maybe they can sign up for a stint in the armed forces to escape the hell that Ross's radical mind has devised for them. And if they misbehave as a symptom of their manufactured despair, let's hire a whole bunch of militarized cops to keep
the ingrates in line. There's got to something amiss when people can't envision some good old Trickle Down flowing downhill from the billionaires enjoying even more tax breaks and subsidies.

Given that 4.3 million children are recipients of the disability benefits Ross wants to cut, I'm surprised that he just doesn't go full Swift and suggest using poor children as food for the rich before they become a "burthen" to society. It's such a waste of time, trying to hide your sadism behind God.

As Pope Francis said, it's better to be an atheist than a hypocritical Catholic.

(credit: Simpsons Wiki)