A President Pardons Himself

I'm not talking about Donald Trump's latest tweet.

I'm talking about Bill Clinton's latest interview, which aired on NBC Monday morning.

He was on TV to plug his new book, a "thriller" co-written with James Patterson, when the questions veered off into the Me Too movement and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Needless to say, Clinton was not too thrilled when past episodes of his sexual predations came back to haunt him.

Borrowing a page from the playbook of long-suffering wife Hillary, who once complained that she and Bill were "dead broke" from legal bills by the time they left the White House, necessitating a new career of extreme money-grubbing just to make ends meet, the former president portrayed himself as the real victim of his tryst with a White House intern.

As such, he's never felt the need to apologize to Lewinsky, whose own public profile and "wokeness" to the lopsided power dynamics of the affair has risen as much as Clinton's has fallen in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein crime spree and other revelations of bad behavior in the highest places. His relationship with Monica Lewinsky, plus the accusations of outright sexual assault have, as Hillary parsed it during her latest political campaign, already been "litigated" and are therefore not open to further serious discussion -- MeToo movement, or no MeToo movement.

Even if he were president today, Clinton insisted, the movement would do nothing to change how he viewed the Lewinsky episode.

“I don’t think it would be an issue because people would be using the facts instead of the imagined facts,” he whined in his best legal parsing fashion, bringing back memories of "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is" and "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." (So much for his jab at Trump and the previously unheard-of phenomenon of "fake news" emanating from the mouths of government officials.)

He said he has never spoken to her let alone apologized to her in the decades following. Why should he? He already took the initiative, made his generic proxy apology once to the whole globe, for crying out loud. This unforced apology apparently inspired him so much that he then went on to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars from the Clinton Global Initiative branch of his family foundation. 

In exonerating himself yet again on Monday, Clinton gave the feeblest possible compliment to the MeToo movement, parsing his approval with the disclaimer that he "disagree(s) with some of the decisions that have been made." He didn't say if he was referring to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's belated decision to charge Democratic mega-donor Harvey Weinstein even after Vance had accepted campaign donations from him, albeit carefully and legally funneled through the disgraced mogul's lawyer.

Vance said he has since returned Weinstein's cash. The Clintons, though, carefully parsing to the end, dodged the issue by claiming all Weinstein's donations to their Initiative and Foundation had already been given away to charity anyway, so they cannot possibly return the money. As far as her political campaign chest goes, since Weinstein was largely a "bundler" of millions of dollars from his fellow oligarchs, she won't be returning that money, either. Her running mate, Tim Kaine, has falsely claimed that since the campaign was over anyway, they couldn't possibly even return Weinstein's own personal donation. (The campaign is over, of course, but as FactCheck.org notes, the excess cash was deftly funneled right into her super-pac, Onward Together.)


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Meanwhile, Barack Obama has apparently pardoned himself for his own role in giving us Donald Trump by promoting Hillary Clinton, not to mention rewarding Wall Street over Main Street during his eight-year tenure, ensuring that the richest  Americans clawed back 94% of all the trillions of household wealth "lost" in the wake of the 2007-08 financial meltdown.

 The D.C. Bubble is full to bursting about of the latest blame-game book, this one from one of his former flacks, one-time aspirational novelist and national security adviser Benjamin Rhodes. Since I don't have my barf bucket close to hand at the moment, I'll just refer you to one nauseating positive review from the New York Times's resident palace stenographer, and to another much more palatable one from the New York Times's resident style maven.

Long story short: Obama was shaken, if not stirred, by Trump's victory. He confided to his flacks that the ingrates of America were just not ready for his awesomeness. The legend in his own time turns out to have been about ten or twenty years ahead of his time. So it's our bad, Bottom 90% of America.

But just in case you're concerned that Obama is wallowing in a dysfunctional depression like tens of millions of bad and unready Americans, you'll be happy to learn that fresh off inking his reputed $50 million production deal with Netflix, he'll be the headline act at a major Hollywood bash later this month. He will sell intimate access to his cool self for a cool $100,000 a pop. (the flashbulb kind, not the unwanted and odious Clinton/Weinstein kind.)

 “I am very excited to announce that President Barack Obama will be joining DNC Chair Tom Perez in Los Angeles on Thursday, June 28 to headline his first fundraising event for the DNC on the West Coast this year,” said the invite to the $2,700 to $100,000 priced event. “This will be a rare opportunity to spend an evening with President Obama,” the pitch added. “While at the event, President Obama and Chair Perez will discuss the strategy of the Democratic Party for winning elections in 2018 and beyond.”

And the Democratic functionaries still wonder why the party lost a thousand seats during the Obama years, not to mention a huge hunk of the working class vote to Donald Trump's paranoid-style populism. 

Meanwhile, former President Jimmy Carter took a much-needed break from building Habitat for Humanity houses last week, and visited a North Carolina McDonald's restaurant for an egg biscuit and a "senior" cup of coffee with his wife Rosalynn. And he isn't even running for anything.

He also isn't getting invited to headline Hollywood fundraisers or to appear on the Today show.

Fraudulence of the Democrats

In the interests of my mental health, I've taken a break from the Nooze and the Internet and blogging for the past several days.

So I have nothing to write about the media feud between Donald Trump and James Comey, because spats between plutocrats have no bearing on how the bottom 90 percent of the American population struggles to survive day to day. I also skipped the over-hyped interview on ABC Sunday night, and I don't plan to waste my time slogging through Comey's self-serving book, let alone perusing the morning-after annotated transcripts of the George Stephanopoulos gab-fest being served up by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Comments sections are limited to readers picking a side and rooting for their favorite rich guy. Thanks, but no thanks.

As for the bombing of Syria, it is really quite amazing that the mass media aren't falling in line this time around, and calling Trump "presidential." As a matter of fact, the president has fallen so far within the approved line of expressing venom toward Russia that their whole #Russiagate narrative would be falling apart were it not for Comey keeping it on life support. (Yes, even though I boycotted the Nooze, it was impossible to completely avoid the multiple teasers of Comey saying it was "possible" that prostitutes were peeing all over each other, if not upon Trump directly.)

So at least they're finally making a stab at going after Trump's sleazy business empire by way of his "fixer," Michael Cohen. This is decades after they gave him a free pass over his sleazy gambling empire in New Jersey, for the mere fact that even in bankruptcy, he was deemed too big and newsworthy to fail on the public stage. Plus, too many corrupt Jersey politicians (in both parties) and law enforcement officials had been in cahoots with him.

 Meanwhile, centrist Democrats, through one of their favorite media spokespeople, are still doubling down on running as the true party of fiscal responsibility and thinking that they can win the midterms on the same wonkish pragmatism that cost Hillary Clinton the presidency. More likely, they're not really interested in regaining the majority at all, because raising money off the largely astroturfed #Resistance and keeping Trump and the GOP right where they can self-righteously flail at them in outrage is really their endgame. What would they possibly do without Trump to kick around? People might start realizing they're still the liberal wing of that Bird of Prey that Upton Sinclair wrote about a century or so ago.

So the gist of David Leonhardt's New York Times column is not that deficits shouldn't matter when people are needlessly suffering and dying and struggling in the richest country on earth. What he finds outrageous is that the Republicans are fake deficit hawks, and the Democrats are the true deficit hawks.  Pundits have finally - finally - realized that media darling Paul Ryan was a con artist and a phony hawk this whole time, what with those humongous  tax cuts for the rich and all. A phony epiphany is apparently better than no epiphany at all.

Still, Leonhardt thinks the Dems aren't getting the credit they deserve for being the more honest Social Darwinists. Whenever they give crumbs to one group of vulnerable people, they always neuter themselves by taking from another vulnerable community. It's what Barack Obama often insipidly called his "balanced approach." (Too bad, according to Leonhardt, that the media also refuse to acknowledge that Obama's great failure as president was his refusal to carpet-bomb Syria's chemical weapons arsenals when he had the chance. Letting Trump claim that glorious victory is almost too much for the liberal class to bear, apparently.)

But back to the main Dollars Over the Demos theme, as Leonhardt writes:

Ever so slowly, conventional wisdom has started to recognize this reality. After Ryan’s retirement announcement last week, only a few headlines called him a deficit hawk. People are catching on to the con. But there is still a major way that the conventional wisdom is wrong: It doesn’t give the Democratic Party enough credit for its actual fiscal conservatism. Over the last few decades, Democrats have repeatedly reduced the deficit. They have raised taxes. They have cut military spending and corporate welfare. Some of them have even tried to hold down the cost of cherished social programs. Obamacare, for example, included enough cost controls and tax increases that it’s cut the deficit on net....

 So it would certainly be false to claim that Democrats are perfect fiscal stewards and that Republicans are all profligates. Yet it’s just as false to claim that the parties aren’t fundamentally different. One party has now spent almost 40 years cutting taxes and expanding government programs without paying for them. The other party has raised taxes and usually been careful to pay for its new programs.

The Dems' claim to having cut military spending on paper (due to the bipartisan Sequestration fraud of an excuse to punish regular people in the name of fiscal responsibility) was more than offset by a sleight-of-hand maneuver, appropriating billions of dollars in unaccountable "contingency" funding to the Pentagon during Barack Obama's presidency. This included half a billion dollars in 2016 alone for more of the Predator drones used in Obama's secretive and unaccountable assassination program, as well as $8 billion for the military's slush fund for miscellaneous secret programs that year.

My published comment on Leonhardt's deeply dishonest piece:

Nowhere in this column is there any mention of the bipartisan profligacy of the permanent war/surveillance state. Congress traditionally has given the Pentagon and the "intelligence" community carte blanche to do their violent unaccountable things with only the slightest levels of token oversight.

Yes, Democrats are more "fiscally responsible" regarding taxes. But during the cycles that they're in power, they're very willing to wheel and deal with the GOP on cuts to the social safety net. It was only due to the recalcitrance of the Tea Party that President Obama was unable to achieve his own "Grand Bargain" with House Speaker John Boehner, after the so-called Cat Food Commission for Fiscal Responsibility had also failed to make "sensible" cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The Democratic Party abandoned the poor and working class decades ago in the name of this "fiscal responsibility." And they wonder why millions of financially strapped people turned to the fake populism of Donald Trump in the last cycle.

Desperate people don't vote for wonks, pragmatists, fiscal hawks and a better life for themselves someday, but just not right now. If you don't believe me, look at what's happening to Gov. Cuomo in New York State. The Working Families Party abandoned him for the sole reason that he has stiffed working families in the interests of his oligarchic backers.

It's a testament to its hard-centrist ideology that the Times dismissively characterized this rather bland offshoot of the Democratic Party (they ditched Zephyr Teachout for the thuggish Andrew Cuomo in his second campaign) as "progressive die-hards." It's also a testament to the corporate capture of labor unions that several of them ditched the Working Families Party over the weekend in order to display their own slavish Trump-like loyalty to Andrew Cuomo.

Six Ways From Sunday

Senate Minority Weasel Leader Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) warned Donald Trump more than a year ago that the US intelligence agencies have "six ways from Sunday" of eliciting his respect and making him believe that Russia interfered in the elections. Schumer told Rachel Maddow that even a savvy businessman like Trump was being "really dumb" for comparing the meddling claims to the false intelligence on WMDs leading to the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

And of course he isn't behaving himself in office and believing what he has to believe. The last straw for the permanent political class came when Trump fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe two days before what was to have been a very lucrative, perk-heavy retirement at the ripe old age of 50. Former CIA Director and current NBC performer John Brennan blasted out this mighty Tweet to Trump on Saturday:

When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you. https://t.co/uKppoDbduj— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) 

 You know we've reached the point of no return when the architect of Barack Obama's drone assassination program, the burglar who ordered the hacking of Senate computers containing still-repressed torture documents, and the once-and-future champion of dirty tricks and torture, is lecturing Donald Trump on morals and corruption. That's the beautiful thing about Trump. He makes all kinds of scoundrels not only look like choirboys, he has actually promoted them to Cotton Mather status. And the corporate media are falling all over themselves to furnish this new breed of militaristic virtue signaler with their own bully pulpits.

Trump has effectively canonized the FBI, so maligned throughout its history for its own dirty tricks, ranging from the Palmer Raids, to spying on Martin Luther King Jr and later urging him to commit suicide, to infiltrating the anti-war and civil rights movements, to entrapping Muslims in manufactured terror plots, to breaking up the Occupy movement, to spying on American citizens on the Internet. And this is not even including its investigative failures, such as not heeding Russian warnings of the Boston Marathon bombing and most recently, its inaction on several tips related to the Florida school shooter. The FBI, the NSA and the CIA are now posing as moral bastions of democratic liberalism, which in turn has been newly and perversely defined as McCarthyism and Russophobia. And many Democrats are eagerly embracing thia authoritarian dogma, in a reactionary frenzy once thought to have been the sole purview of rightwing fanatics and Dick Nixon's Moral Majority.

Fired FBI Director James Comey even posed as liberal Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on Twitter for awhile before mistakenly outing himself and then going all preachy-moralizy under his own name. Virginia Heffernan wrote a scathing take-down of this sub-manic, golly gee willikers Tweeter for Politico last year. His folksy book is already a bestseller on Amazon and it hasn't even been released yet.

Trump has single-handedly made war criminal John Brennan into something of a Democratic Party folk hero - not to mention indirectly enriching him via his new high profile gig as NBC's #Resistance fighter. Ironically, Brennan's platform is the very same behemoth media corporation which made Trump himself into the postmodern folk hero of cruel capitalism, rich and famous beyond his own wildest dreams. 

in what now seems like the distant past, liberals were actually so outraged about Brennan's defense of torture - he'd Trumpily and falsely claimed that it saved American lives - that he was forced to withdraw his name when Barack Obama first nominated him to head the CIA in 2008.

But by 2013, as Glenn Greenwald observed in a New York Times op-ed, Obama was so popular that his fans willingly followed his lead in embracing Brennan as the country's top spook. Nobody cared that Obama was killing hundreds or thousands of Muslims from a Kill List devised by Brennan. Regarding the former president's refusal to prosecute Bush-era CIA torturers, Greenwald wrote, "Obama's Orwellian decree that we must 'look forward, not backward' has convinced huge numbers of citizens to sweep this all under the rug and pretend it never happened. That is what explains how Brennan went from radioactive and unconfirmable in 2008 to uncontroversial in 2013."

Long before Trump won his own nomination and the election, the abnormal was becoming the new normal. Brennan was actually being lauded by officials and pundits and politicians for pivoting from the gruesome torture and imprisonment of Muslims to humanely droning them to death. Even U.N. drone watchdog Ben Emmerson praised the Brennan appointment, saying that he would be a "moderating influence" on the CIA's expansion of drone assassinations in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"By putting Brennan in direct control of the CIA's policy [of targeted killings], the president has placed this mediating legal presence in direct control of the positions that the CIA will adopt and advance, so as to bring the CIA much more closely under direct presidential and democratic control," Emmerson told Wired.
"It's right to view this as a recognition of the repository of trust that Obama places in Brennan to put him in control of the organization that poses the greatest threat to international legal consensus and recognition of the lawfulness of the drone programme."

Orwellianism knows no bounds. Kinder, gentler - and most of all lighting-quick - murder by Predator missile is fine, as long as it is committed in the name of democracy. Who cares if a rogue organization poses a great international threat, as long as it is controlled by a law-loving, moralistic man like John Brennan?

Lambert Strether of Naked Capitalism has done yeoman's work constructing a valuable spreadsheet which documents the creepy prevalence in the 2018 mid-terms of the MILO (military, intelligence, law enforcement) candidates actively recruited to run by the Democratic Party establishment.

 So what's to stop the party from recruiting Brennan or Comey to run at the top of the ticket in 2020?

Stranger things have happened, including the Democrats seriously courting Oprah to run for president. America truly is the land of opportunity for the permanent ruling establishment. If John Brennan can go from despised to tolerated to admired in the space of a few short years, anything is possible. They aim high while Trump goes low. He is the gift that keeps on giving to the oligarchs who would, as Obama once said, really just like to play nicely together within the 40-yard line.

Everything was so mellow for the ruling class back in 2013, as Brennan was preparing to finally take the helm of the CIA. From a video interview:

BARACK OBAMA: In my conversations with Republicans, I actually think the divide is not that wide. So what we just have to do is find a pathway where Republicans in the House in particular feel comfortable enough about process that they can go ahead and meet us.
This, by the way, Gerry (sp), I think is a good example of something that’s been striking me about our politics for a while. When you go to other countries, the political divisions are so much more stark and wider; here in America, the difference between Democrats and Republicans — we’re fighting inside the 40-yard line, maybe –
SEIB: You fooled most people on that in the last few months, I’d say.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: No, but — but — (laughter) — well, no, no, the — I — I would — I would distinguish between the — the rhetoric and the tactics, versus the ideological differences.
I mean, in most countries, you’ve got — you know, people call me a socialist sometimes, but, no, you’ve got to me real socialists. You’ll have a sense of what a — what a socialist is. (Laughter.) You know, the — I mean, I’m talking about lowering the corporate tax rate. My health care reform is based on the private marketplace. Stock market’s looking pretty good last time I checked, and, you know, it is true that I’m concerned about growing inequality in our system, but nobody questions the efficacy of market economies in terms of producing wealth and innovation and keeping us competitive.

Still wondering why nearly 10 percent of Obama voters later abandoned the Democrats and voted for Trump? The Orange Menace is not the disease; he is merely the latest, most glaring symptom of the disease.

So when Brennan tweetily bellows to Trump that "America will triumph over you," he simply means that the military/surveillance/oligarchic coup, disguised as liberal democracy, is well-nigh complete.

Jill Abramson's Little Plastic Obama

Former New York Times executive editor and current Guardian columnist Jill Abramson obviously didn't catch Barack Obama's recent verbal trashing of the poor, elderly and disabled in Chicago. But that ignorance seems the least of her problems, judging from her latest opinion piece blathering on about the Democratic Party giving her such renewed hope: 

 It’s easy to look at what’s happening in Washington DC and despair. That’s why I carry a little plastic Obama doll in my purse. I pull him out every now and then to remind myself that the United States had a progressive, African American president until very recently. Some people find this strange, but you have to take comfort where you can find it in Donald Trump’s America.

 Well, I suppose it could always be worse. In clinging to a true-to-life tiny plastic Obama, at least she isn't the type of deplorable magical thinker who carries around a soft cuddly cloth Obama and a box of hat pins. Better a plastic talisman who oversaw the loss of a thousand Democratic seats in his eight years in power than no plastic talisman at all.

And at least Jill's plastic Obama doesn't have one of those pull-strings activating all the mealy-mouthed hippie-punching soundbites we miss so much.  Such mechanisms in dolls have been rightly criticized for the damage they do to the creative imaginations of the children who play with them. It's so much more fun for kids to put words into their dolls' mouths and transfer all their own hopes, dreams, love and humanity to a cold inanimate object. It's certainly a mature step up from clinging to a moldy old security blanket.

As an antidote to the tons and tons of plastic goo that will never degrade in a million years in America's toxic landfills, here's the indispensable Jimmy Dore caustically deconstructing the life-size Obama's icy lecture to the poor, elderly and disabled people of Chicago. The bankers are definitely still pulling all of Plastic Barry's strings.

Neoliberal New Year: Goody Bags For the Homeless

The best part of the New Year for me so far is that the flood of fundraising appeals from political organizations and parties and charities has suddenly dried right up, virtually overnight. Especially annoying were those hysterical come-ons promising that my monetary gift would be triple-matched by some mystery mogul. If I didn't give, the implication was, this pathocratic jerk would just keep hoarding his excess cash out of pure, miserable spite.

Even more annoying than the year-end money grubs were the false pretenses under which the money was being grubbed. And out of the hundreds of appeals I've received over the past few weeks, none was more disgusting than the mawkish missive I received from former president Barack Obama.

In this cruel winter of brutal cold, with homelessness and opioid addiction reaching record levels, Obama took some time out from his umpteenth tropical vacation to thaw out the hearts of his donors with his own award-winning brand of contagious inspiration.

If you ever listened to his insipid weekly addresses to the nation during his  eight-year tenure, you should know the formula by now.  It always starts out with the obligatory gushy gaslighting - since life is so good and optimistic for him, then it naturally follows that it has to be good for you, too. If you're not solidly in the middle class, then at least you can aspire to membership by dint of hard work and magical thinking. Pay no attention to the harsh realities surrounding you, lest you become jaded. The dismal results of austerity for the masses and riches for the rich are mere "challenges" to be confronted with the same old piecemeal solutions contained in shiny new gift-wrap.

There will apparently never be an end to his victim-shaming, financialized way of seeing things, aptly described by Adolph Reed, Jr. as a "vacuous-to-repressive" worldview. Obama writes in his latest email to potential donors:

I know optimism isn't always fashionable. Certainly not when we're fed a steady stream of cynicism on television and an on social media. We face some extraordinary challenges, but consider the long view. If you think about it, by almost every measure, America and the world are better off than they were fifty, twenty, even ten years ago.

(And they still wonder why Hillary "America Is Good Because America is Great" Clinton lost to the cruel but occasionally brutally honest Donald Trump?  Of course, in politician-speak, "America" is code for the Plutonomy, which is indeed better off than ever before, at the expense of the rest of us.)

But because Obama was the first cosmetically Black person to be elected president, it just naturally follows that all Black people are better off as a result, despite the fact that they became much worse off during his tenure. Still, he blithely reassures his wealthy potential donors that because they elevated the first technically Black person to the presidency, there's no need to worry their coddled little heads about the rest of the Black population. He avoids the obvious truth: that the Owner Class has always allowed a few women and people of color to advance as a way of keeping white supremacy and wealth inequality alive and well and immune from liberal criticism:

I was born at a time when women and people of color were systematically, routinely excluded from huge portions of American (read: plutocracy) life.. Today women and minorities are rising up in the ranks of business, politics and everywhere else. That's just one of the significant shifts we've seen And when you measure it against the scope of human history - it happened in an instant!

Since Gilens and Page established that the wealthy donor class, as a group, are adamantly opposed to government spending on social programs, health care, and public education, Obama willingly feeds this gilded age pathology by denying reality every bit as viciously as his faux-nemesis, Donald J. Trump. In a time of rising death rates in this country, deaths due to outright despair and rank poverty, Obama actually schmoozes:

Around the world, we live at a time when fewer people are dying young and more people are not only living longer, but better.

Remember that Obama is talking to the wealthy donor class. I doubt that many of the world's poor people got to read his Happy New Year telegram. They not only don't have the Internet, they often don't even have electricity (like half of Puerto Rico), or are otherwise occupied fleeing violence or scavenging for food. But maybe they will rise up eventually, though not in the mawkish way that Obama pretends to envision.

The fact is that more people are living short, nasty, brutish lives. Obama seems to be cherry-picking his happy statistics in order to make his donors feel better about their own unfair share of the pie. To make a terrible situation look good, corporation-beholden entities like the World Bank measure income inequality when they should be measuring wealth inequality. Also, the very definition of poverty has been diluted down to make things seem rosier than they really are. Even though poverty has been steadily increasing over the last several decades, the actual number of poor people is artificially decreasing, thanks to capitalistic measurement tools based upon bullshit rather than upon math. The United Nations' Millennium Campaign, for example, currently defines extreme poverty as living on a dollar a day. In actuality, though, in such rich countries as the US, people who scrape by on $2 cash a day are correctly defined as being extremely poor. As a matter of fact, the US government itself calculated more than a decade ago that people needed at least $4.50 a day to meet even basic minimum nutrition requirements.

Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics calls the baseline poverty definition used by Obama and his neoliberal cohort absurdly unrealistic. If Obama used honest parameters, though, he'd have have to admit that at least 80 percent of the world's population now lives in abject poverty. And that might make the rich greedsters feel very poorly about themselves. So poorly, in fact, that they might not give their unearned and untaxed wealth to the tax-exempt Obama Foundation for Oligarchic Feel-Goodery.

Family-Friendly Brutalism

So to prove that this is the best of all possible worlds, Obama offers three anecdotes about the sunny side of Dystopia. Two of his stories involve the oppressed helping the oppressed in order to achieve the desired inspiring level of Bootstrapping Nirvana. And, because tax-dodging philanthrocapitalism is the solution of last resort as social programs get cut and slashed by the oligarch-run government, Obama also gushes over a multimillionaire sports star who is donating his paychecks to fund scholarships for a whole new generation of Baracks and Michelles.

Concerned about the epidemic of homelessness? Don't be. Who needs a roof over one's head when one can be blessed with goody bags? Obama writes:

At five years old, Jahkil Jackson had witnessed the struggles of Chicago's homeless when his aunt took him to Lower Wacker Drive to hand out food to those camped there. He found himself restless, wanting to do more. With a spark of inspiration and the help of his family, Jahkil created Blessing Bags - kits full of socks, toiletries and snacks that he could offer to those in need.

"Let them eat goody bags" is so much more heartwarming than Trump's heartless "let them eat paper towels" response to the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, is it not?

Now, to be fair to Obama, he is just echoing the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless's own piecemeal solutions to the lack of permanent affordable housing for poor people. Perhaps (I think cynically to myself) with the windfall profits from their new permanent tax breaks, such corporate sponsors as JP Morgan Chase can build some actual houses for the homeless, rather than continuing to corner the market on the same homes they foreclosed (often illegally) during Obama's tenure.

If you happen to be among the millions of people devastated by last year's record storms and fires, Obama doesn't want you to complain about how slow and meager the response from Trump's government has been.  Instead, we must follow the example of the Houston wedding planner who, rather than waste a whole banquet, helped the bride to distribute all that excess food around the neighborhood. Why hector your congress critters for actual monetary aid and government help when you can augment your wedding planning business by starting your own Facebook page to organize debris-clearing parties, and then dub it "Recovery Houston?" It certainly gets FEMA off the hook.

Are you a rich athlete who's making out like a bandit from Trump's tax cuts?  Then aspire to be like Philadelphia linebacker Chris Long, and donate some of your paychecks to fund a few scholarships, and thereby tamp down both racist hate and all that unicorny talk of free college from the likes of Bernie Sanders.

Barack Obama, that glib and glittering neoliberal tool of Wall Street, is retooling himself as an international goodwill ambassador of continuing austerity for the many and prosperity for the few. Rather than demand more generous government disaster aid, construction of public housing, and an end to lifetimes full of crushing student debt, he's simply continuing to do what what he did as president. He is calling for tiny symbolic gestures and using his own celebrity persona as a beacon of hope and inspiration. He is continuing his career as a consummate bullshitter.

Taking this inspirational bullshitting journey with Barack Obama will cost a lot of money. Therefore, rather than direct private or public cash aid to the poor and vulnerable, Barack Obama wants the money to be sent directly to him, to fund his continued lecturing to the poor and minorities, but mainly for the construction a $500 million shrine to himself in Chicago, complete with golf course. "Transaction fees" to cover your digital donations will be extra. Besides boring old cash and checks, wire transfers will also be cheerfully accepted - not least because, just like Obama's fantastical list of global recovery improvements, they "happen in an instant." Especially during this latest stock market bubble, there's no need to even redeem any your marketable securities. For your full tax-deductible convenience, just have your broker or your private wealth manager fill out the paperwork so that both you and Obama can get the most bang for your charity buck.

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My own New Year's resolution, as I enter my eighth year of blogging, is to do my best to keep exposing neoliberalism as the deadly germ warfare of rich versus poor that it truly is.

So... here's to a realistically hopeful and happy 2018 to everybody except the billionaires, the Trumps, the Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex, and most members of Congress.

Pity the Poor Deep State

If Donald Trump hates Big Brother, and reasonable people hate Donald Trump, then it naturally follows that reasonable people should love Big Brother:

 Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California, wrote on Twitter: “We are whistle-blowers, press, judges, legislators, cooks, teachers. We are #DeepState. We are the American people.”

That tongue-in-cheek message is the centerpiece of a New York Times "interpreter" article which solemnly tells us that although there is no such thing as the Deep State, it is getting a bad rap. The horrible stuff you're hearing about spies hacking into your iPhones and TVs is naught but a paranoid delusion of conspiracy buffs. So our convoluted duties as loyal citizen-consumers are, first, to deny that the deep state exists, and second, to co-opt its meaning. We must bowdlerize it and render it harmless and huggable.

Democratic Party Bumper Sticker

 The Times piece, written by Max Fisher, employs the usual experts to create a field of straw men and sophistry. The talking points:

--America is not Egypt or Pakistan. We are a democracy, and the good folks at the CIA, the FBI and the NSA are getting a totally bad rap from the new nutty president and his alt-right minions. The dedicated bureaucrats who listen in to the world's conversations and collect all your emails are people, just like you. If it weren't for Donald Trump crazily tweeting that he's been wiretapped, the spy agencies could continue doing their unaccountable thing in the dark. Because this is a democracy.

--American spies and the secret police are like climate scientists. They are united in professional victimhood. Just as the right-wingers have politicized researchers by forcing them out of their laboratories to defend the science, so too are the spooks being forced into the glare of sunlight. And it's all because of Trump's crazy allegations. We can thus deduce from the article that climate change research is very similar to spying on people and fomenting coups in foreign countries. CIA agents who torture Muslims in black site prisons and FBI agents working undercover to undermine protest movements deserve the same level of privacy as climate investigators who study receding polar ice caps and rising methane levels in the atmosphere.

--Look what's happened in Turkey. Its authoritarian president also used the Deep State paranoia method to destroy democratic institutions and kill a whole bunch of innocent people. You don't want that to happen here too, do you? You want to live, don't you?  So please, people, let the Intelligence Community carry on with its secret work in order to save democracy from people. Trade your privacy for an illusion of security.

Max Fisher is an alumnus of the corporate-funded "explainer" website known as Vox (the populi part has been left off for very good reason, since the writing is mostly done by self-described wonks tasked with pushing the neoliberal Clinton/Obama narrative to the ignorant populace.)  You might remember Max Fisher from a previous Times "interpreter" piece in which he explained why we should all hate and fear Russia, and love the secretive R.A.N.D. Corporation.

Thus does Fisher continue his strange love for our unaccountable and money-bloated "intelligence community":

Mr. Trump has put institutions under enormous stress. He has attacked them publicly, implied he would reject intelligence findings that cast his election in a poor light, hobbled agencies by failing to fill critical positions and cut off bodies like the National Security Council from shaping policy.

That has forced civil servants into an impossible dilemma: acquiesce, allowing their institution to be sidelined, or mount a defense, for example through leaks that counter Mr. Trump’s accusations or pressure him into restoring normal policy-maker practices.

There's nothing worse than forcing Top Secret America to endure the agony of the leak. After all, the Obama administration has just got done prosecuting more government whistleblowers than in all previous administrations combined. It even instituted a program called Insider Threat, which mandated that even non-IC government bureaucrats must report one another's reading material and marital infidelities on pain of getting fired for failure to snoop on the job. But that was all being done in-house. And now Trump, taunting bully that he is, is forcing them to take the fight to the public playground. 

Max Fisher writes:

When, for example, Mr. Trump accused former President Barack Obama of tapping his phones, he forced the F.B.I. into an unappealing choice: Let the accusation slide, though it implies the bureau broke the law, or rebuke the president and risk the appearance of playing politics.

Either way, the bureau loses some of its internal influence, public stature or, quite possibly, both. Losing stature can be especially dangerous, as the bureau needs public trust to effectively operate.

A reputation is a terrible thing to lose, especially since Americans have so long admired the FBI for wiretapping and smearing Martin Luther King Jr and writing him a vicious anonymous letter which urged him to commit suicide. 

When the Church Commission concluded in the 1970s that the FBI was a perfectly willing partner in all manner of political slime and democratic abuses, the police state might have gotten knocked down, but it quickly got up again.  Because as we all know, 9/11 Changed Everything.

We now have the Patriot Act, which has raised the stature of the FBI to such pristine heights that it can now secretly demand your personal information on the slightest whim or pretext. Congress has granted the agency the most unchecked authority it's enjoyed since Theodore Roosevelt secretly formed it more than a century ago as his own private spy detail, with neither the input nor the authorization of Congress.

As reported by Kevin Gosztola, since 2010 the bullied FBI has gotten virtually all its secret FISA Court bugging requests granted. It's enhanced its stellar public reputation by obtaining "national security letters" which have allowed it to nobly force companies to relinquish the credit card bills, phone records, and Internet search histories of more than 14,000 of their "terroristic" customers.

 For the most part, Barack Obama was able to effectively tamp down liberal resistance to the totally nonexistent Deep State through the magic of his charm offensive, even to the point of placating German Chancellor Angela Merkel when word leaked out that the American surveillance state had eavesdropped on her cell phone calls.

Now, Donald Trump is stirring up the whole can of worms. He is picking on poor lovable Big Brother, all for his own paranoid and selfish reasons. Trump must be stopped. 

It's getting so bad that IC flacks are being forced, all over again, to Tweet or go on the Sunday shows to flail against the cold hard truth that the NSA does, in fact, spy on Americans without a warrant by way of a loophole in the law allowing it to freely listen in to foreign phone calls with an American at one end. Or, if that won't work, the US can always farm out its domestic spying to other friendly countries, like Great Britain and Israel, in its surveillance-sharing network.

 Of course, this need not worry you, especially when you have an establishment organ like the New York Times to obfuscate and interpret and explain it so that may recover from any lingering ignorance and be #StrongerDeepStateTogether.

We are all Winston Smith now. So take a tip from his creator, the late great George Orwell, and come in from out of the cold:

 O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Deep State R Us: Love it, or leave it. Or talk back to your TV if you have nowhere else to go. You won't even need your tinfoil hat to know that it's listening. Your concerns and your complete satisfaction are very important to it.

The Man Who Cried U.N.C.L.E.

The psychological warfare against Donald Trump has reached such a fever pitch of intensity that it's impossible to avoid the media spectacle of a paranoid president dissolving into a quivering puddle of terminal helplessness right before our very eyes.

Please, mainstream news-consumers: do not let the distraction of Trump's Twitter claim that Obama tapped his phone distract you from the real and true distraction, which is Vladimir Putin's reputed stealth takeover of our great American democracy. 

So admonishes "Career U.S. Intelligence Officer" Malcolm Nance, who has lately pivoted from decades of fighting in Middle East wars to becoming a self-proclaimed expert on the horrifying Russian invasion of the United States within the Trojan horse of one Donald J. Trump. Nance should know. He's such a conspiracy buff that long before Trump's political ascent, he hosted a screening and discussion of The Manchurian Candidate.

In an op-ed published in The Guardian, Nance has decreed that "the story of the week is Trump, Russia and the FBI. Everything else is a distraction."

 Narrative switching. That is what the Trump administration is desperately trying to do around Russia right now. The White House reportedly interfered with the FBI in the middle of an active investigation involving counter-intelligence. This was not only foolhardy but also suspicious, as it directly undermined their apparent objective: distracting us.

So pay no attention to the continued water crises in Flint, Michigan and in Standing Rock, North Dakota. It's a distraction. Ignore the huge crack in the Antarctic ice shelf and the spawning of the biggest, ocean level-disrupting and potentially climate-changing iceberg in all of recorded history. It's a distraction. Hide from the terrible reality that most people don't have enough money in the bank to pay for an emergency car repair, and are just one paycheck away from eviction. It's a distraction.

The only thing that you have to fear is TrumPutin itself. No matter where you come from, no matter what you look like, no matter who you love, no matter how precarious your socioeconomic status, we shall all be Stronger Together for patriotically uniting with the Deep State on the front lines of #Resistance, Inc.

Just in case you've been sensibly averting your eyes from the true mainstream news narrative these past couple of days, here's the scoop on the latest Trump distraction from the Official Washington Distraction. Donald Trump said he found out (he doesn't say how or where) that Barack Obama had tapped his phones during the campaign. Donald Trump called Obama a sick and evil guy for messing with our "sacred" electoral process. Donald Trump wants a full and thorough investigation into the transformation of Obama from glamorous president into glamorous super-spy.

Naturally, the Russophobic purveyors of the Official Distraction Narrative are having a field day with Trump's profound ignorance of how our spy agencies work, what with his preposterous supposition that Obama himself could ever have personally and single-handedly bugged all his phones. It's so darned silly that even the Master of the Macabre himself, Stephen King, was inspired to write a satirical short story about a nefarious scissor-wielding Obama skulking in Trump's closet, having only pretended to canoodle on a private island with billionaire playboy Richard Branson in the first leg of his post-presidency journey.

Real, Fake, Distraction, or Counter-Distraction? You Decide

Naturally, the Official Distraction-mongers are disingenuously interpreting Trump in their usual literal fashion. It seems never to have occurred to them that Trump is averse to context. When he says that Obama wiretapped him, he likely means that the Obama administration's intelligence agencies wiretapped him. At least I would hope that's what he means. But it's so much more fun to believe that a deluded Trump imagines that Obama personally ordered the mission instead of going through all the usual plausible deniability channels designed to keep presidential hands squeaky clean.

So when Obama spokesmen and former NSA Director James Clapper and FBI Director James Comey all splutter in unison that of course Obama never ordered any bugs in Trump Tower, they are technically being truthful.

Much of the mainstream punditocracy also pretends to assume that Trump got his info on the wiretapping from the "alt-right" Breitbart website, rather than reading about it in the alt-establishment New York Times like the rest of the sanity-based, content-consuming world.

Even Anti-Distraction Terror Expert Malcolm Nance repeats the salient paragraph from last month's unsourced Times blockbuster in his own Guardian op-ed, thus perhaps unwittingly giving credence and helpful context to Trump's buggy claim:

On 14 February, the New York Times reported that advisers and associates of Donald Trump may have been in direct and continuous contact with officers of the Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, during a tumultuous election campaign in which the American democracy itself was hacked. A major party – now in opposition – was the victim of an unprecedented cyber-attack.
According to the Times, intercepted telephone calls and phone records indicated to American counter-intelligence officers direct contact with the Russians.

Making his counter-distraction efforts all the more scary and bizarre, Trump is said to have thrown a massive hissy fit right in the White House on Friday, unthinkably abandoning even his top aides as he and his short nuclear-itchy fingers fled to Mar-a-Lago for yet another demented overnight Tweet frenzy. The proximate cause of his wrath reportedly is Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recusal of himself as lead investigator into his own alleged ties with the Russkies. The president doesn't like being blindsided.

It's reached the point, says the ever-helpful Washington Post, that even his own aides are no longer defending him.

Here's the Sunday exchange, with bold type provided by the Post for purposes of emphasizing the doubts of the Trump staff, between ABC's Martha Raddatz and Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders (really)

RADDATZ: Was the principal source the Breitbart story, which links to the New York Times? But the New York Times doesn't say anything definitive. Donald Trump does. There is nothing equivocating about what he says. “I just found out that Obama had my wires tapped.” That's not “look into something.” He says it happened.

 HUCKABEE SANDERS: Look, I think the bigger thing is you guys are always telling us to take the media seriously. Well, we are today. We're taking the reports that places like the New York Times, Fox News, BBC, multiple outlets have reported this. All we're saying is, let's take a closer look. Let's look into this. If this happened, if this is accurate, this is the biggest overreach and the biggest scandal.

RADDATZ: The president of the United States is accusing the former president of wiretapping him.

 HUCKABEE SANDERS: I think that this is, again, something that if this happened, Martha …

RADDATZ: “If,” “if,” “if,” “if.”

 HUCKABEE SANDERS: I agree.

RADDATZ: Why is the president saying it did happen?

 HUCKABEE SANDERS: Look, I think he's going off of information that he's seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential. And if it is, this is the greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power that, I think, we have ever seen and a huge attack on democracy itself. And the American people have a right to know if this took place.

…RADDATZ: Okay. Let me just say one more time. The president said, “I bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October.” So the president believes it is true?

 HUCKABEE SANDERS: I would say that his tweet speaks for itself there.

Cry Uncle, Trump! You are toast. You are destined for permanent commitment to an asylum for lunatics with a lot of bread. You are not only a textbook case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, you are hereby officially diagnosed with a galloping case of paranoid psychosis.

I'm actually surprised that the Anti-Distraction shrinks have not yet written a story about how Trump believes that the crazy dude who climbed halfway up Trump Tower last summer with suction cups attached to his hands and feet was actually Barack Obama playing Napoleon Solo, wiretapping gizmos secreted in his backpack.

Who's That Tapping On My Chamber Door?

Don't laugh. If Ronald Reagan believed that The Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV series was real, why cannot the Reality Show President believe that Obama tapped phones in his spare time? Not for nothing does the Reagan Library contain a whole interactive section on Spies and Counterspies - complete with distracting and fun U.N.C.L.E. memorabilia. And since it was all put together with the help of the C.I.A., who's to say what's fake and what's not?

Meanwhile, Malcolm Nance wants you to believe that the Trump distraction from the Russian distraction is an earth-shattering pastiche of Spy Vs. Spy, the Civil War, and Watergate. Did I mention that Nance also runs his own anti-terror security agency and is trying to sell a book called The Plot to Hack America? It has real potential, given how Nance is feverishly making the rounds of the cable outlets and op-ed pages to plug it.

Like most mainstream Distractionists and Counter-Distractionists, however, Nance walks a very fine line between fiction and nonfiction. From a July 2015 Gawker piece:

Join us at the screening of The Manchurian Candidate (the original, obviously) on July 14, 7:30 pm, at the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn, for the third installment in our It’s A Conspiracy series. We’re thrilled that Malcolm Nance, aka Kinja user kingpindaddyhoho (really), will be joining us for the panel following the movie. We plan on having alcoholic root beer floats and tater tots.
Nance is a 34-year veteran intelligence officer who has worked the Iraq mission since 1987, fighting in all of our Middle East wars since 1983. He has lived in and out of Iraq since 2003. Nance runs his own analytical organization, TAPSTRI, the Terror Asymmetrics Project and is author of, most recently, The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency, 2003-2014.

Here's Looking At You, Counter-Distraction Insurgents!

Georgetown law professor Jonathan Turley, whose sensible blog motto is, like Trump's Tweets, Res ipsa loquitur ("the thing itself speaks") suggests that if Trump Tower were indeed bugged, it was probably done "legally," through the Fisa Court. This does not, however, make such government eavesdropping on political campaigns morally right:

 Trump is correct that, if true, this should be a matter for investigation.  The government should show considerable restraint in targeting political opponents. The Trump Tower was well-known to be the nerve center of the Trump campaign.  However, we still do not know how the surveillance was tailored, if it was requested or granted.

My advice to Trump: declassify any pertinent documents, pronto. And release your tax returns while you're at it.

We're so sick and tired of these fake distractions from propaganda distractions from counter-distractions. It's extremely distracting.

And on that note, here's some distracting mood music to treat your distraction fatigue disorder: