Off With Their Heads

 What is the country for, but to support its prince in his enterprise?

-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

While the American punditocracy is busy deciding which insipid courtier won the vice presidential debate  - was the "pivotal moment" the fly resting on Mike Pence's stiff white coif, or was it Kamala Harris bragging about all the generals and reactionary Republicans who are backing Joe Biden? - the rest of the country is wondering when the hell they'll be getting more Covid-19 relief.

As aristocratic scolds like Michelle Obama love to remind us all day and every day, our job as citizens is not to make strident demands for guaranteed health care, housing and food. It is to Vote for a more "soothing" Joe Biden as if our lives depended on it, even more than we depend on food, health and shelter. Because choosing a third party candidate, such as a Green, who supports universal health coverage and a pro-environment, antiwar agenda would just be, Mrs. Obama chided this week, simply "throwing away your vote."

That statement pretty much tells you what the country is really for. And it ain't for you. What is an election for, after all, but for the lesser people to give the quadrennial stamp of legitimacy to a cabal of princes and wolves?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also made it absolutely and chillingly plain this week that her priority is not restoring the nation's actual people to health, but to restore her exiled Democratic Party to power. Sending those $1200 relief checks to people struggling to pay their bills would only make Donald the Usurper look good, the same way that Henry VIII tried to make himself look good 500 years ago by handing out baskets of leftover food to the poor at Christmastime.

That was a monarchy and this is a democracy, by golly, so Madam Speaker is not about to stoop to Noblesse Oblige - not when she views the deliberate withholding of direct cash aid to hundreds of millions of people as just the right hook to get them out there to vote. And they say King Donald is the demented one, the way he cut off the desultory-at-best negotiations on pandemic relief between her and Treasury Chancellor Steve Mnuchin in a fit of steroid-enhanced pique.

But since wealthy people still have to get around their playground of an exploited planet, Pelosi and Mnuchin were reported to be feverishly working on a stand-alone bailout of the polluting airline industry. Airline stocks soared anew as these two courtier/oligarchs renewed their negotiations. This was despite the fact that Pelosi had previously denounced negotiating Covid relief in such separate, limited packages, because "they (the party currently in power) don’t want to put food on the table and rent in the pockets of the American people, crush the virus, support our heroes, and the rest.”

Because here's the thing. Stand-alone stimulus checks sent out to needy Americans would bear Donald Trump's name on them, and could conceivably garner him extra votes. It's much better, Pelosi insinuated, to draw out the mass hardship for several more weeks or months to achieve the noble goal of Joe Biden winning the election.  If Nancy Pelosi can make enough people too hungry, homeless, terrified, desperate or disgusted to follow Michelle Obama's hectoring advice to get out there and vote, then at least they won't be voting for Donald Trump.

(Update: As I was writing this article, Pelosi had flip-flopped - once again - to calling for a broader stimulus package, including checks. I believe that this topsy-turvy negotiation process is mainly theater, to keep us properly gaslit as we wait in suspense for the barest kind of relief, and then both sides can declare victory.)

 When you hear them warn that "everything is at stake" in this election, maybe they can make you forget about the big juicy steak you can't afford.

What Pelosi and the Democrats are essentially saying is that American children going to bed hungry or families getting evicted for just a little teensy while longer is certainly better than having Trump in the White House for another four whole horrible years. Let them eat Biden, who promised his Wall Street donors that under his rule, "nothing would fundamentally change." 

This is being sold as a choice that we can all believe in.

 As the Red Queen lectured Alice in Through the Looking Glass: "You may call it nonsense if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared to which that would be as sensible as a dictionary."

Vote for the Lesser Greater Nonsense!

Because the United States, ranking first or near-first in the world in Covid cases, despite having the most expensive health care system in the world, is not the "slow country" which the Red Queen scoffed at, nor is it even (not quite yet anyway) among the "shithole countries" that King Donald sneered it.

"Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place," she lectured to the panting, befuddled Alice."If you want to get somewhere else, you have to run twice as fast." 

 

And political courtiers talking fast and folksily (yet wolfishly) out of both sides of their mouths is also an absolute must if the princely enterprise that is America can continue to thrive, and so that the political courtiers can fulfill the great American meritocratic dream of one day becoming full-fledged princes and media moguls themselves.

True Confessions, TrumPelosi-Style

Donnie just stole all the thunder from the Democratic Party's Ukraine-gate impeachment case. He entered a shock pre-emptive guilty plea right on the White House Lawn before heading off to Florida to sign an executive order allowing private insurance predators to profit even more blatantly from government-funded Medicare than they already do.

Unlike most guilty pleas, though, Trump's admission that he did ask the president of Ukraine get dirt on the Bidens was not entered in the spirit of contrition or with the abject aim of getting off with probation or a plea deal. It was entered in the spirit of Bite Me.

From the gobsmacked Guardian newspaper report:

Trump was asked what he thought Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy – who Trump was recorded pressuring to investigate the Bidens – should do.

“If they were honest about it, they would start a major investigation into the Bidens,” Trump said when asked what he wanted Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to do.

“I would say President Zelenskiy, if it was me, I would start an investigation into the Bidens.”

Trump then discussed his trade war with China, before adding:

“China should start an investigation into the Bidens because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened in Ukraine.”

He and his minions will keep asking foreign governments to investigate the political origins of the Russiagate story, and to get the Bidens while they're at it.  Trump will continue acting with impunity, triple dog-daring the other side of the Duopoly to just try and stop him. All on national TV. So much for the "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up of the crime" trope. 

It's the exact opposite of Nixon's "I am not a crook" ploy. Trump is boasting "I am a crook. Whaddaya gonna do about, my fellow American crooks, chumps, and swamp creatures?"

Meanwhile, not even his administration's boastful fascistic announcement that it will forcibly take DNA samples from imprisoned migrants and refugees for inclusion in a racist data base is distracting the Democrats from their Sublime Message. Nor is the simultaneous blockbuster report that Trump had ordered refugees and migrants to be shot in the legs if they try to swim alligator and snake-infested moats or to scale electrified razor-topped walls painted just the right dystopian shade of black. 

To show just how solemn she is and how seriously she takes her sworn constitutional duty to consider to impeach Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared on ABC-Disney's Good Morning America on Thursday to trade impeachment quips with the hosts and to inform the TV audience that "we have some serious repair and healing to do in our country for what he's done so far."

Just the day before, she'd insisted that she is still eager to chat with the world's most dangerously unhinged criminal leader on long-overdue repairs to the nation's crumbling infrastructure. She's also pushing prescription drug price-tweaking as a feeble substitute for the single payer health care system demanded by the vast majority of Americans. It behooves both right wings of the Duopoly to go through the motions, if for no other purpose than to keep the rabble in line.

Pelosi carefully made no mention of any serious repair or healing for what 40 years of neoliberal austerity, coupled with the record enrichment of the Military-Carceral-Surveillance Complex, have done to our country. To confess this would be to implicate herself. Boasting of criminality is not her style. The closest she comes is her frequent praise for the vicious Ronald Reagan and her appearances at Pete Peterson austerity conferences for the punishment of the poor and the self-glorification of the plutocracy.

But like Trump, Pelosi was also making a bee-line to "battleground state" Florida on Thursday. He was pandering to well-heeled retirees in The Villages, a kind of Disneyland for the right-wing geriatric set.  She was attempting to seriously heal an elite group of well-heeled Venezuelan exiles, and to show continuing support for the cruel economic sanctions leveled (beginning under Obama) against the less well-off citizens of Venezuela. She was and she is fully on board with the Trump administration's attempted overthrow of the socialist Maduro government. As such, she planned to huddle with high-ranking representatives of Juan Guiado's US-backed right-wing opposition to plot their next moves. The violent US-backed coup attempt is hideously euphemized by Florida Rep. Donna Shalala as "a peaceful return to democracy."

A discussion forum for "invited guests only" was to include such elite Cold War 2.0 concerns as "Russia’s growing military presence in Venezuela" and the spread of uninvited (or bottom-up) citizen protests against US-backed political corruption in Haiti. As reported by Jacobin, 

 Last January at the Organization of American States, Haiti voted with the United States against its longtime former benefactor, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. The resolution said the body did not recognize the Maduro government, noting it was concerned “about the worsening political, economic, social and humanitarian crisis” and “the breakdown of democratic order and serious human rights violations.” It was part of a gambit to legitimize opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s claim to power.The vote was a quid pro quo, according to Gilles.
“The US is supporting Moïse because of the vote against Venezuela,” she noted.
Whether or not the vote is a main reason, it is clear to any Haiti observer that Moïse — who came to power in races where only about 21 percent of the population even bothered voting — has remained in office only because of the support of Washington and its partners.

Unlike Trump, the last thing Pelosi wants is to be seen actually meddling in foreign countries for crass political gain right in the middle of a virtue-signalling impeachment gambit. Ergo, she was barring the media and the public from important parts of her taxpayer-financed junket to Florida. Otherwise, the Quid Pro Quo accusation that the Democrats are hurling at Trump might boomerang right back at them as pertains to the Haiti-Venezuela connection. Ironically, Trump fans were planning to protest her visit on the silly grounds that she is a pro-Maduro democratic socialist rather than the exact opposite.

That's how the two right wings of one bird of prey envisioned by Upton Sinclair stay aloft. For all the mutual ruffling of their feathers, they always give each other protective cover where it counts the most: the talons and the beak. 

Trump brags about his corruption and skips the platitudes. Pelosi embraces the platitudes and hides her corruption.

And both of them paste on the obligatory grotesque grimace whenever the spirit of bellicose bipartisanship in service of Oligarchy demands it.

Democracy, CIA-Style

By artificially narrowing the Trump impeachment inquiry to "Ukraine-gate" under the auspices of the House Intelligence Committee, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has all but assured that this constitutional remedy for removing a criminal president from office will proceed largely in secret, away from the public eye and away from public accountability.

At the very least, much if not most of the star witness testimony of the unnamed CIA official, who is rather ridiculously being marketed as a "whistle-blower," will not be held in a public forum. This is for the ostensible reason of protecting him from the nefarious machinations of Doctor Evil, a/k/a Donald Trump.

To help effect public compliance with this essential secrecy, the ubiquitous Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff is waxing breathless to the point of asphyxia on the corporate cable shows about all the complicated security protections needed to be put in place in order to keep the Informer's identity anonymous and his physical well-being assured.

Once the script of the CIA official's testimony has been honed and edited to self-serving perfection, this individual may finally make his debut before the cameras incognito, probably with a hood over his head and his voice disguised by some of the cool technology that we so admire in the Hollywood movies about our sexy, daring, cool and selfless Intelligence Community. Whatever props can elicit the maximum cloak-and-dagger excitement for the TV audience, the better that the producers of the Democratic Party-Security State-Media Complex, or Impeachment, Inc. will look.

Meanwhile, we'll have to be satisfied with such tawdry episodes as The Rudy Giuliani Story. In perhaps the most extreme role reversal and plot twist in modern political theater history, the once-lauded Mayor of Nine Eleven has morphed from prosecuting mob bosses to defending them. 

Lest the Impeachers come across as too James Bond-ish, Nancy Pelosi has carefully leaked her own secret list of solemn Impeachment Talking Points for use by the supporting congressional cast as they head for their home districts for a two-week recess to try and convince their constituents that the national security of the elites should be of grave concern to one and all.

Forget hassling your elected representatives about health care and the climate catastrophe and your crushing college debt and your unaffordable housing costs. Because the fates of certain centrist Democrats are more important than your lives. Pelosi and her henchmen are thus embarking on an unabashed Psy-Ops campaign of the type first devised by the CIA itself some 75 years ago in order to convince the world that they were not safe from Russian aggression in the aftermath of World War II. 

And make no mistake: "Ukraine-gate" is not only about impeachment, it's about the reanimated Cold War against Russia waged by an ever more militarized United States. With 800 to perhaps one thousand global bases under dire threat by Putin's grand total of nine, the USA is obviously in profound danger from "the Russians" - not least because they posted a few thousand cheesy Facebook ads to swing the election to Donald Trump and to sow domestic discord in the Happiest Place on Earth. That's right: America was a consumer paradise, a virtual Disneyland on steroids before Trump came along to spoil the mood and make American consumerism look bad to the whole free world. If we can only get rid of him and go back to the Status Quo, all will be well.

As it is, Trump is such a profound threat to the world order that even his imposition of more economic sanctions on Russia and his trashing of a nuclear arms accord were not enough for the order-mongers. The fact that he withheld, or is accused of withholding, a fortune in deadly weapons from the US-sponsored Ukrainian fighting forces was the last straw. It was more than the American Security State can be expected to bear.

So think of this artificially narrow impeachment inquiry as a proxy battle in the larger US-backed Ukraine vs. Russia war. The CIA has always acted in behalf of US multinational corporations anxious to plunder the wealth and natural resources of other countries and anxious to overthrow "corrupt" socialist-leaning or worker-friendly regimes. The CIA has always partnered with or installed US-friendly right wing puppets, arming them and training their death squads.

 They view Donald Trump as the Putin surrogate who has had the absolute chutzpah to denigrate corporation-serving NATO forces even as he caved to their Russophobic demands in a futile attempt to show that he can be just as vicious a team player as the rest of the elite American establishment. 

It hasn't worked. He just can't keep his big oafish mouth shut, and his clumsy paranoid tweeting thumbs still, and his self-dealing and corruption under as good control as his fellow elite leaders have historically done. He totally lacks the charm offensive skills so necessary in any chief executive, whether it be of a corporation or of the One Exceptional Nation itself. 

Donald Trump has got to go. He is not a good marketing or propaganda tool for our weaponized Democracy, neither the domestic variety nor the deadlier exported variety.

The Democrats and their "deep state" partners don't want to delve too deeply in Trump's long history of financial chicanery, however. Because as the Mueller investigation so painfully showed, some of their own respectable colleagues also run the risk of becoming collateral damage in such open-ended investigations. Witness the downfall of super-lobbyist Tony Podesta and the criminal trial of former White House attorney Greg Craig, who served under Obama and who was just acquitted of charges stemming from his own self-dealing in behalf of Ukrainian oligarchs.

But lest the corporate Democrats look even more like the hypocrites they are, they're claiming that a handful of valiant "front-line" representatives are in danger of losing their seats and the House of losing its majority if impeachment proceedings are not severely truncated and limited in scope.

"Front-line" is a telling bellicose adjective, describing a cadre of conservative congress critters who supposedly are just as endangered as the anonymous CIA "whistle-blower" due to their wins in solid GOP districts. Two of the most prominent Front-liners are Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin, who themselves are high-ranking (allegedly former) CIA officials.

Thanks to a highly coordinated week-long corporate media blitz calling for Trump's impeachment,"the polls have changed drastically on this," Pelosi said in a carefully-leaked "private" conference with her members on Sunday. In so saying, she used another common information warfare ploy: transforming a desire of the elite class into a desire of the non-elite class through the magic of propaganda and the measuring of its effectiveness through skewed, selective polling.

But lest the Party appear too gleeful and vindictive, she added:

“Our tone must be prayerful, respectful, solemn, worthy of the Constitution.”

As far as we know, she didn't suggest that congress critters appear at their constituent town halls decked out in religious garb and swinging incense-wafting chasubles, the better to awe-strike people who already are feeling mightily struck down by the worst income inequality of modern times. 

But as the New York Times reports, they will be "clutching talking points cards headlined 'No One is Above the Law.'"

These index cards contain a Holy Trinity of classic psy-ops techniques for the lawmaking preachers to inculcate into their congregations: (my interpretations in parentheses)

• that Trump “engaged in serious wrongdoing betrayed his oath of office and undermined national security;” (security for the ruling establishment and the maintenance of elite rule)

• that the president “pressured a foreign government to target a political opponent,” and what’s more, “tried to cover it up;” (instill fear in the populace by the "othering" technique, or xenophobia.)

• and that Democrats are planning to stick to just the facts in the inquiry as it moves forward. (the facts which fit the desired narrative, but which do not necessarily include facts which don't adhere to the narrowly defined narrative.)

It is an easy-to-understand, digestible narrative, unlike the other inquiries Democrats have been pursuing, including the Russia investigation, hush money payments and Mr. Trump’s business dealings.
“I still believe in story,” said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California and a close ally of Ms. Pelosi. “There’s clarity to this Ukraine story.”

Centrist Democrats must think that their constituents are real dolts, unable to understand even basic cheating or bribery, yet easily swayed by Cold War rhetoric and the fear and xenophobia that it instills. All people need in lieu of guaranteed health care and food on the table is a good story, especially if it has echoes of James Bond or Austin Powers to keep them diverted and entertained. 

The coincidental fact that the CIA whistle-blower law was just quietly changed to allow reports to be based on second-hand complaints and information should alert us to the inconvenient truth that this secretive, unaccountable "government within a government" has also arrogated to itself the power to remove, in collusion with our elected representatives, any elected representative that the ruling elites of Empire don't like - in this case, Donald Trump.

 Trump is the most criminal person ever elected to our nation's highest office, so you may ask why it should even matter if the CIA is coordinating his removal.

But it does matter, because a disturbing precedent is being set, one that is actually antithetical to the Constitution that Nancy Pelosi claims to so revere. 

What if by some miracle Bernie Sanders overcomes the Democratic Party's meddling and undemocratic machinations and does indeed become our next president?

The CIA, promoted and even initially staffed by some of this country's most eminent intellectual and financial elites from the cosseted world of the Ivy League, the landed aristocracy,Wall Street and prominent mainstream media outlets, will no doubt perform its sworn duty and do everything in its power to remove him from office, on any pretext whatsoever. A coordinated, relentless, disempowering stealth campaign of red-baiting to prevent any resurgence of the New Deal would probably begin within a day of his election.

And it would all be perfectly legal. It was during Christmas week 2016, when nobody was paying much attention, that Barack Obama very modestly, quietly, and un-Trumpily signed into law the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which allows the State Department to coordinate its own domestic propaganda programs with other agencies and mainstream media outlets in order to battle so-called foreign disinformation. Such domestic propaganda from government agencies, specifically aimed at US citizens, had previously been banned. 

As Mint Press News reported,

Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”

 “As Russia continues to spew its disinformation and false narratives, they undermine the United States and its interests in places like Ukraine, while also breeding further instability in these countries,” Kinzinger explained in a statement. “The United States has a role in countering these destabilizing acts of propaganda, which is why I’m proud to introduce [the aforementioned bill]. This important legislation develops a comprehensive U.S. strategy to counter disinformation campaigns through interagency cooperation and on-the-ground partnerships with outside organizations that have experience in countering foreign propaganda.”

Make no mistake — this legislation isn’t proposing some team of noble fact-finders, chiseling away to free the truth from the façades of various foreign governmental narratives for the betterment of American and allied populations. If passed, this legislation will allow cumbrously pro-‘American’ propaganda to infiltrate cable, online, and mainstream news organizations wherever the government deems necessary.

Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, hails from the US Air Force's elite Special Ops division. A veteran of the war on Iraq, he is a currently-serving member of the Air National Guard and was recently deployed to the militarized Texas border "to oversee security." 

California Democrat Lieu, an early proponent of Trump impeachment, also hails from the Air Force, with a current rank of colonel in the Air Force Reserve Command. Pelosi appointed him her assistant whip in 2017

It's no big surprise that Nancy Pelosi and Impeachment, Inc. are limiting the scope of their investigations. They don't want to expose themselves as the loyal anti-social and anti-socialist servants of the oligarchy and the Military-Industrial Complex that they always have been.

They are just as much the enemies of democracy as the more boorish Trump.

Pelosi the Appeaser

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tells the New York Times that the way to beat Trump is not through impeachment or championing progressive causes. To win, Democrats have to be more friendly to "centrists" - which is neoliberal-speak for the donor and corporate class which owns her organization.

If you cower, they (the mythical center of the electorate) will come.

Remember how well that smarmy strategy worked out when Neville Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler by granting him permission to invade neighboring countries in the belief the rest of Europe (and capitalist interests) would be spared?  Even more recently, remember how well that worked out when Pelosi's party thought it would be a great idea to run Hillary Clinton in 2016 and destroy Bernie Sanders at the same time? The polls and the pundits certainly thought she'd be a shoo-in to beat Trump.

So let's double down on that winning strategy. If it doesn't work out, it will all be the fault of the Deplorables, again. If it doesn't work out, Nancy Pelosi personally will never have to suffer. Nor will the Democratic donor class, who are flusher with cash than ever thanks to Trump's tax cuts and their investments in his military machine and prison-industrial complex.

It's a toss-up as to whether Pelosi's main problem is corruption or senility, or a combination of the two, when she posits that only a boring centrist can win in 2020. This boring individual will win by such a stupendous margin that Trump will never be able to challenge the results. 

On the other hand, the results of a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren victory could not possibly be stupendous enough to physically scare Trump out of the White House. Only a Biden or a Buttigieg or maybe a Harris would triumph in a landslide, which would bury Trump forever and ever.

Glenn Thrush reports:

Sitting in her office with its panoramic view of the National Mall, Ms. Pelosi — the de facto head of the Democratic Party until a presidential nominee is selected in 2020 — offered Democrats her “coldblooded” plan for decisively ridding themselves of Mr. Trump: Do not get dragged into a protracted impeachment bid that will ultimately get crushed in the Republican-controlled Senate, and do not risk alienating the moderate voters who flocked to the party in 2018 by drifting too far to the left.
“Own the center left, own the mainstream,” Ms. Pelosi, 79, said.

Of course, Pelosi's version of center left actually skews more toward right of center. She neglects to mention that the "moderates" who did win their mid-term races were heavily bankrolled by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which refused financial aid to what she dismisses as the "exuberances"- including the victorious Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She also neglects to mention that such right-wing Democratic senators as Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp lost badly in their own bids for re-election, despite their soulless valiant efforts to appeal to the Mythical Center.  

The tacit message of the Times article is that if Sanders or Warren win, Trump will not go quietly. But he magically will go quietly if Biden wins. 

If you really want to dig right down to the center of the centrist Id, Pelosi doesn't even want a Democrat in the White House. She'd rather dance the triangulation tango with Trump for four more years. 

Pelosi is trying to gaslight the electorate at the same time she dog-whistles her reassurances to nervous Democratic Party donors, who have made no secret of the fact that they dread Sanders or Warren in the White House, because both these candidates threaten to unconscionably use their power to serve people who don't have has much money as the big donors and the corporate lobbyists do.

She claims that if Democrats would just cringe pragmatically and appease Trump now, he will be less nasty and dangerous, less likely to irrevocably poison the minds of the malleable against the Democrats during the primaries and the general election. She bizarrely calls this her "cold-blooded plan" for victory. I'll grant her the cold-blooded part. And I'll even compliment her for having one hell of an overdeveloped lizard brain to go along with all that ice in her veins.

Her strategy amounts to pretending to be scared and disgusted by the Trump administration in public, but being complicit with, and accommodating to, the Trump administration in private. Pelosi seems confident that the actual public is not reading about this cynical strategy in the Times, mostly because they probably can't afford the subscription, despite working several jobs. And if the bottom 80 percent or so of the reading public are perusing the Times, maybe Pelosi can instill the requisite doubt and fear into their psyches.  I doubt that she cares about anybody but her donors. The underlying message to her real constituents is that she's got their backs. She's cold-bloodedly pushing the scales. Hers and theirs.

One thing to keep in mind about many Times articles and op-eds is that they are essentially telegraphed messages from the rich to the rich. But in a show of egalitarianism, they are happy to offer the lesser people a tiny box with which to share their expertise (1500 characters or less) with their peers. If you are very lucky, your comment will be accepted by some mystery algorithm and make it into print. If you write from a centrist, pragmatic  point of view, a human moderator is very likely to award you a coveted golden "Times Pick" icon. This digital badge of honor is the equivalent of a jolt of dopamine, and will encourage you to write more centrist - and influential! - comments in the future.

The Appeasement Not Impeachment For Our Time Tango. 

*Update, 5/5: Boy, do I ever feel dope-amined. After suppressing my submitted comment on a Maureen Dowd column for about five hours last night, the moderators not only finally published it, they awarded it a coveted Times Pick! I must have subconsciously inserted some pragmatism in there - but more likely, they viewed it as a hook for all the self-avowed "centrists" in Timesland to digitally venture forth to set me straight, to insist that yes, they really do exist, and that befuddled old me must not let the Perfect be the Enemy of the Good. 

I have a bone to pick with Dowd's odd, but typically "insidery" characterization of Atty. Gen. Barr as a heretofore revered elder statesman in Washington, before Trump ruined his stellar reputation. How soon she and her corporate media cohort forget that it was Barr who orchestrated a pardon for (among others in the Iran-Contra scandal) Elliot Abrams - who has returned bigger and meaner than ever to spread more mayhem in Latin America via the ongoing US-led Venezuela coup attempt.

My comment is basically a rehash of the stuff I've been writing recently at Sardonicky, but I'll repost it here anyway:

No shock that D.C. insiders saw Barr as an upright member of the legal establishment, despite his crafting of pardons for war criminals under Bush Sr. In an ethical system, he would have been divested of the respectability badge decades ago.

  He served corrupt power then, and he serves corrupt power now. Yet somehow, Trump has suddenly and single-handedly corrupted an honorable man. This narrative speaks to the rot in the entire political establishment and the media's complicity in it.The media who so slavishly treated Mueller as a virtual Father of Our Country are now dissing him as a Deadbeat Dad for not sending Barr to the rhetorical naughty chair sooner. Why would he, when "tradition"  also dictates that no sitting president, not even Trump, can ever be taken to the legal woodshed and indicted?

Nancy Pelosi herself says impeachment is off the table, claiming that this Constitutional remedy would only embolden Trump to act brattier. In effect, she's the parent who yells a lot and threatens her kid with punishment but never follows through, which only emboldens the kid and his feral gang to act more brazen by the day.Meanwhile, in a Times interview, she says that only a mild centrist (not Sanders or Warren) can attract enough mythical centrist voters to beat Trump into enough of a quivering pulp to actually agree to vacate the White House when the time comes.

 It's Neville Chamberlain deja vu all over again.

"Appeasement Not Impeachment For Our Time." 

Blasphemy In the Church of Nine-Eleven

Nancy Pelosi‏Verified account @SpeakerPelosi

The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must be done with reverence. The President shouldn’t use the painful images of 9/11 for a political attack.

4:20 AM - 13 Apr 2019

• 13,147 Retweets
• 65,771 Likes
• 

20,228 replies13,147 retweets65,771 likes

 

 

1. 1. Nancy Pelosi‏Verified account @SpeakerPelosi Apr 13
      

      As we visit our troops in Stuttgart to thank them and be briefed by them, we honor our first responsibility as leaders to protect and defend the American people. It is wrong for the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to fan the flames to make anyone less safe.

The target of much criticism from the left for her bland scolding of Donald Trump over his own incendiary Tweet against Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Pelosi has since announced she will ask for another security review by the FBI and Capitol Police to determine how Omar, her family and her staff can be best protected from a sitting president of the United States. She has also belatedly suggested that his original offensive tweet, with a photo of Omar interposed with a graphic of the flaming World Trade Center, "be taken down."

Omar's remarks about Islamophobia at a conference last month were recently ripped out of context by a right-wing agitator, then enhanced by Rupert Murdoch's tabloid New York Post, and finally grotesquely inflamed by Provocateur-in-Chief Donald Trump. What Trump actually presides over is not so much the government as it is the xenophobia and racism which has always been an integral, albeit usually verbally suppressed, part of the American ruling class agenda.

 And that very much includes the United States military, whose Civil War army was reconstituted and professionalized for the express purpose of enforcing the mass expulsions and exterminations of native American populations. To this day, military weapons and other hardware, such as the Apache helicopter, are named after Indian tribes. Osama bin Laden was code-named Geronimo prior to his extrajudicial sneak execution as Barack Obama began preparations for his re-election campaign.

 So Trump just happens to be the most vocal and vicious (and for the more discreet ruling elite, the most embarrassing) spokesman for this dark part of the American psyche, not arriving on the scene until some some 300 years after the Puritans first erected their own model shining City on the Hill off a foundation of corpses of the native populations of New England, whom they exterminated both through their diseases and their wars.

So the cowardly and tepid response of Pelosi and Democratic Party leadership to Trump's not-so-veiled incitements to racist violence against Omar in particular and Muslims in general, should thus be put into historical context.

Pelosi in her Tweet avoided directly addressing his threats against Ilhan Omar by diverting the issue into a bizarre sermon whose theme is that any discussion  of the Sept. 11th attacks should be akin to prayer - a "sacred memory" - to be chanted only with the approved words and contained within the walls of the established cathedral. This deflection is nothing new. The horrific act of mass murder began its transformation into a cult, founded and led by the political-media complex, almost from the day it happened. The attacks had to be fetishized in order to avoid discussions of its root cause, which was blowback by former CIA asset Osama bin Laden, revenge against the US militaristic/capitalistic meddling and plunder in the entire Middle Eastern world and the militarization of Israel by its US partner, funder and enabler.

 The physical site of the lower Manhattan attack has been transformed into a national shrine and museum. The 2,753 victims have been canonized as martyrs.

The attacks became the impetus for even more US meddling, with the ensuing full scale military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and still-ongoing bombings of at least seven other majority-Muslim countries, including Ilhan Omar's native Somalia. More than a million people have died, been maimed or displaced by this overkill. The 9/11 attacks also became the perfect excuse to criminalize dissent and whittle away the civil rights of both US and global populations. They spawned a whole new Department of Homeland Security and transformed the  country into what journalist Todd Miller aptly calls Border Patrol Nation. This year, the United States Congress has allocated more money to the permanent war machine than it did during the bloodiest year of the Iraq War.

Long before the September day in 2001 "when everything changed," of course, Islam was being demonized by Western leaders, and their corporate news media and Hollywood propagandists. Islam has regularly been equated with fundamentalism, extremism and terrorism for decades. As the late Palestinian author Edward Said explained in the introduction of the 1997 edition of his book "Covering Islam," Muslims became especially convenient scapegoats after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the wake of the bombing by Libyan terrorists of the Pan Am flight above Lockerbie, Scotland, and the first bombing of the World Trade Center and other attacks, the simple utterance of the word "Islam" in the West became a means of attacking Islam. 

This, in turn, has "provoked more hostility between self-appointed Muslim and Western spokespersons. 'Islam' defines a relatively small proportion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world, which numbers a billion people, and includes dozens of countries, societies, traditions, languages, and of course an infinite number of different experiences."

This is exactly what Ilhan Omar was talking about in her speech last month,  correctly observing that the actions of "some people" on 9/11 paved the way for the perpetual criminalization of an entire religion as practiced in myriad ways by over a billion people worldwide.

As for Donald Trump, inveterate entertainment consumer and purveyor that he is, his own personal xenophobia did not sprout full-fledged from the murky depths of his personality disorder. He probably, for example, saw the 1994 Hollywood blockbuster, True Lies. Its star villains, notes author Zachary Karabell, are stereotypical Arabs "complete with glinty eyes and a passionate desire to kill Americans" who must, in turn, be killed by the sexy intrepid American hero, played by future GOP California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

As Edward Said observed, "Covering Islam is a one-sided activity that obscures what 'we' do, and highlights instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are."

Ilhan Omar was initially celebrated by the Democratic Party because she so perfectly fit its identity politics agenda as a cosmetic antithesis of Trump: she is a woman, she is Black, she is an immigrant, and she is a Muslim. If only she could have stayed in her appointed place as an exotic statue instead of criticizing the right-wing government of Israel - on top of having the effrontery to be one of the most progressive members of Congress. As such, she puts lie to the propaganda that Muslims live in a medieval, anti-feminist world. The corporate wing of the party, led by Pelosi, is not progressive and it fully supports the right-wing government of Israel. While pretending to be all-inclusive and anti-bigotry, this corporate wing has fully colluded in waging the forever wars on Muslim-majority countries. Pelosi never blinked an eye at Barack Obama's drone assassination program, which specifically targeted Muslim civilians as incipient terrorists simply by virtue of who they are and where they live (unprotected "tribal areas").

Pelosi therefore must have found it easier to castigate Trump for blaspheming  the "sacred memory" of 9/11 than to castigate him for implicitly threatening Ilhan Omar's life. It took her three whole days to even factor Omar's well-being into her narrative. Her main gripe was that Trump abused the sacred memory by making it all about himself and his political future. 

Although she didn't spell it out, Pelosi also implied in her April 13th tweet that the carefully unmentioned Omar had also abused the sacred memory by juxtaposing her own religion next to the US Imperium's virtual state religion and holy day of obligation, which became the very basis for attacking Omar's religion and its various adherents, the vast majority of whom are peace-loving people.

The Church of Nine-Eleven was constructed by the war-mongering capitalist elites for the sole propaganda purpose of ramping up war and plunder, cynically repurposing the victims and first responders into patriotic martyrs and human shields, even as some of these same first responders went to war to die for the sole profit of corporations. And, even as sections of the 9/11 Commission report implicating the Saudi government were kept secret for many years. The volunteer troops fighting the oligarchs' wars were then used by the Obamas and other politicians to shame the economically struggling population at home into "sharing the sacrifice" as jobs were lost and punishing austerity was imposed after the 2008 financial collapse. 

 Pelosi's tepid tweet sends the hysterical message that it is reckless, rank heresy for Trump to openly and verbally admit that he hates Muslims, Mexicans and all dark-skinned people.

Her sub-Tweet, gushing about her own visit to a US military base in Germany,  which is still semi-occupied 75 years after the end of World War II, says it all. When she writes that the military protection of "the American people" is her first priority, keep in mind that the de facto definition of "the people" and their national security is the corporate state, which armed forces must protect around the clock and around the globe if their plunder is to proceed apace.

As Edward Said wrote:

"The tendency to consider the whole world as one country's imperium is very much in the ascendancy in today's United States, the last remaining superpower.... Such an idea of rightful Western dominance is in reality an uncritical idolization of Western power. "

Keep in mind that Said penned those words in 1997, before 9/11 "changed everything." The ascendancy has already reached its peak and it has nowhere else to go but down.

Thus, for Pelosi and for her fellow imperialists, it is likewise heresy for a progressive elected representative like Ilhan Omar to bring too much attention to herself, to her maligned religion and her war-torn native country, to her fellow immigrants and refugees, and to bipartisan hypocrisy. The ruling class does not want the American public to get the idea that the United States kills and expels and robs people for any reason other than humanitarianism, or that other countries hate us not for our "freedoms", but for our crimes.

Pelosi might be getting this year's Profiles in Courage award from the Kennedy dynasty, but it's really Omar who deserves an award for her serene courage under immense, unrelenting pressure. In the days since Trump's incendiary tweet, she has received even more death threats, and Trump himself has escalated his Twitter attacks on her.

Even so, her mind is on the plight of others:

Ilhan Omar‏Verified account @IlhanMN

This country was founded on the ideas of justice, of liberty, of the pursuit of happiness. But these core beliefs are under threat. Each and every day. We are under threat by an administration that would rather cage children than pass comprehensive immigration reform.

11:18 AM - 13 Apr 2019