Covid and Capitalism On Steroids

 Leave it to Donald Trump to equate his truncated hospital stay with a post-doc residency in infectious diseases. His malignant narcissism, turbocharged with a euphoric regimen of the powerful steroid Dexamethasone, led him to boast he'd learned so much about Covid that he discharged himself from the hospital after only four days. Armed with that false sense of well-being supplied by the drug, he is using his disease as germ warfare, infecting all who come into his path with his toxic spittle and "don't worry be happy" cant. And that includes his own teenage son, assuming that he is not already sick.

Trump was in full S.O.B. (shortness of breath) mode as he went huffing and puffing up to the White House balcony on Monday night for his Mussolini photo op and campaign ad.

 

 He is getting back to work even if it kills him and everybody around him, not to mention the legions of his mask-averse fans who worship him like a god. And not to mention the untold numbers of people who will continue to sicken and die of disease and despair, thanks to his continuing reign of ignorance and terror. 

The White House has been literally transformed into a pest-house.

The heavy-duty steroid that he's on is commonly reserved for those with severe symptoms of Covid-19. I suspect that his compliant physicians dosed him with it not so much for therapeutic purposes, but because it does such a good job of masking symptoms. I have witnessed just what this drug can do when my husband, suffering in the last stages of Multiple Myeloma, was prescribed it.  With only weeks left to live,  this normally responsible and sane man felt so good he decided it would be a great idea to use our house as collateral to purchase a BMW, which he would then race professionally on the world circuit. To say that this drug instills a false and even psychotic sense of well-being is a vast understatement. 

Trump was already psychologically damaged. And he has the nuclear codes. And nobody seems capable of saying No to him. Forget about him not being out of the woods for another week to ten days. The whole world is in more danger than ever with this steroid-addled, ratings-addicted tyrant on the loose.

One commentator compared his balcony scene to Michael Jackson dangling his infant son out of a hotel window. I had also been thinking of Michael Jackson, but more in relation to his likewise being so rich and powerful that he was able to hire a compliant doctor to administer anesthesia to help him sleep. That turned out to be the ultimate in insomnia cures.

Trump, who has reportedly never slept much thanks to imbibing a dozen Diet Cokes a day, just got his own compliant doctors to feed his permanent sub-manic state with a psychosis-inducing stimulant.

Meanwhile, as The Washington Post reported this week, more than $2.3 trillion allocated through the grotesquely named CARES Act was injected into the big bloated coffers of corporations and individual oligarchs that were never required to prove either immediate need or future adverse impact from the pandemic. Nor were they required to promise they would keep their workers on their payrolls.

Contrast this with the bargain Band-Aid and the crumbling tablet of expiring aspirin of the cruelly temporary unemployment supplements and one-time-only $1200 "stimulus" checks tossed out by a bipartisan Congress to the tens of millions of people who are suffering the most.

 It was a massive dose of financial steroids for the rich and the ethically unhealthy, allowing the pandemic itself to rage on and on, and get even worse. 

The Trump presidency is emblematic of our entire terminally diseased capitalistic system, which needs euthanasia much more than it requires any more of the wasted therapy that ends up hurting the whole world.

Don't just take my word for it. Pope Francis has issued a perfectly-timed encyclical, inspired by his namesake saint of Assisi, with the anti-capitalist and anti-war theme of Fraternity and Social Friendship. This paragraph takes direct aim at Trumpism:

The best way to dominate and gain control over people is to spread despair and discouragement, even under the guise of defending certain values. Today, in many countries, hyperbole, extremism and polarization have become political tools. Employing a strategy of ridicule, suspicion and relentless criticism, in a variety of ways one denies the right of others to exist or to have an opinion. Their share of the truth and their values are rejected and, as a result, the life of society is impoverished and subjected to the hubris of the powerful. Political life no longer has to do with healthy debates about long-term plans to improve people’s lives and to advance the common good, but only with slick marketing techniques primarily aimed at discrediting others. In this craven exchange of charges and counter-charges, debate degenerates into a permanent state of disagreement and confrontation.

But the Pope doesn't let the neoliberal system of government and the discourse-controlling corporate media which produced Trump off the hook either:

 The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of "spillover" or "trickle"-- without using the name-- as the only solution to societal problems. There is little appreciation of the fact that the alleged "spillover" does not resolve the inequality that gives rise to new forms of violence threatening the fabric of society. It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at "promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity" and makes it possible for jobs to be created and not cut. Financial speculation fundamentally aimed at quick profit continues to wreak havoc. Indeed, "without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function. And today this trust has ceased to exist." The story did not end the way it was meant to, and the dogmatic formulae of prevailing economic theory proved not to be infallible. The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom. It has also shown that, in addition to recovering a sound political life that is not subject to the dictates of finance, "we must put human dignity back at the centre and on that pillar build the alternative social structures we need."

The Pope and the Predators

My Pope balloon had already begun to deflate days before the news burst that Pope Francis (or his Vatican minions, or his Vatican enemies) sneaked homophobia poster girl Kim Davis across a phalanx of armed militia guarding his Washington embassy digs for a private, top-secret embrace with him.

At first it looked as though the story of the Pope's meeting with the Kentucky clerk who went to jail rather than issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples was either made up out of holy cloth, or wildly exaggerated by her own handlers. But then the Vatican grudgingly admitted that not only had a private meeting indeed taken place, but that the Pope himself had reached out to Kim Davis. And that everybody was sworn to secrecy until Francis was safely back home in Rome.

Holy Hypocrisy!

But what had really precipitated my own descent from the national Papal High was his meeting on Thursday with Stephen Schwarzman in a Harlem parochial school. This multibillionaire vulture capitalist -- whose own personal dogma is More Money, More Power, More-ality -- had awarded millions of dollars (chump change for him) in scholarships to students, and thus bought himself a post-modern plenary indulgence in the form of a greedwashing photo-op of himself being personally blessed by the People's Pope.

If Kim Davis is the poster girl for homophobes, Shwarzman is the poster boy for plutocratic supremacists. He's as much a self-dealing martyr as she is, whining regularly that billionaires like him are the real victims of the class war. He is infamous for having once compared tycoons too-mildly taxed by the government to Jews persecuted by the Nazis.

" Back in 2010," wrote Paul Krugman last year in a column called Paranoia of the Plutocrats, "Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, declared that proposals to eliminate tax loopholes for hedge fund and private-equity managers were 'like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939'".

And from a profile of Schwarzman in New York magazine:

Steve Schwarzman is a perfect poster boy for this age of greed, sharklike, perpetually grinning, a tiny Gordon Gekko without the hair product. In Palm Beach (where he bought a historic landmark house for $20.5 million and tore it down), he eats his three-course lunches (including $400 stone crabs) in less than fifteen minutes and complains about the squeaky rubber soles of a servant’s shoes. Once, in the presence of a Times reporter, he buzzed a man to bring coffee, then stalked off to dress down the servant—“I called you six times.”

The Pope and the Plute (Instagram Photo by #scentfully sue)

  As if pandering to and blessing a financial predator was not enough of a slap in the face of decency, Pope Francis then proceeded to inform the students that the biggest threat to their happiness is not the wealth inequality engendered by robber barons like Schwarzman -- but an invisible demon.

Mephistopheles Flying over Wittenberg (Delacroix)

From the translated transcript of his talk to the assembled poor students, parents, politicians, potentates and plutocrats:

 “Who is the one who sows sadness, who sows distrust, who sows envy, who sows evil desires? What is his name? The devil, the devil! The devil always sows sadness because he doesn't want us happy, he doesn't want us to dream."

Holy Hell!  It brings a whole new meaning to Feeling the Bern. Schwarzman must feel so happy to have been absolved, his guilt deflected to a make-believe boogeyman.

From my feeling of euphoria that this new Pope was someone refreshing and different, it was a jolting downer of a deja vu trip back to my days in Catholic school when Sister Mary Mean would regularly warn us that chewing the communion wafer instead of gagging it down whole was a mortal sin punishable by eternal damnation and third degree burns. Listening to the Pope's spiel at Our Lady Queen of Angels suddenly revived memories of all the hellish episodes that had caused me to become a born-again Lapsed Catholic in the first place.

So regardless of whether the Pope's meeting with Kim Davis turns out to have been a vast right wing media conspiracy, or a set-up job by conservative clerics designed to deliberately harsh his mellow among liberals, I am still sticking with secular humanism. Pope Francis knew full well that the well-dressed oligarchs sitting in the front rows at all his gigs were not ordinary folk.

I've since learned that besides rightly calling capitalism "the dung of the devil," Pope Francis is a die-hard believer in Satan as an actual, living being capable of physically possessing actual, living beings. (Right up there with the belief of the majority of the American people, I might add.) Even some Catholic scholars think that he goes a bit too far with the hell fetish, as he blames everything from the Mexican drug wars to the Middle East conflagrations on Old Nick instead of on Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry and the military-industrial complex. His ascension to the throne of Saint Peter has also sparked a steep rise during the past few years in the number of people seeking exorcisms.

The next thing you know, we'll hear that he had a secret meeting with Linda Blair while he was in town.

Meanwhile, the  establishment has seized upon the Pope's meeting with Kim Davis as the latest political chapter in the Culture Wars saga. New York Times editorialist Francis X. Clines writes,

 In his address to Congress, the pope was diplomatic in alluding to the church’s firm and well known opposition to same-sex marriage, maintaining, “fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family.” But in his decision to seek out Ms. Davis, Pope Francis seemed to suggest the Vatican was willing to get more involved in the politics of the issue. The papal invitation will hardly diminish Ms. Davis’s standing as a national celebrity and rallying figure for those opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage, including some Republican candidates for president who sought to share her spotlight. While in Washington, she confirmed that she had left the Democratic party and become a Republican. Her attorney said they eagerly awaited a photographic record of the papal meeting from the Vatican.

My published response:

 Not only did the Pope meet with Kim Davis, the Vatican decreed that the visit be kept secret until he was safely gone. The cover-up is just as bad as the meeting itself. It makes the Pope look like just another self-interested politician with a hidden agenda. It makes the Church look like just another corporation more concerned about forging a new public image than in rooting out its own greed and corruption and entrenched hypocrisy.

My Pope balloon had already begun to deflate when Francis visited a Harlem school and warned little children about "the devil" instead of warning them about the vulture capitalists and politicians standing right next to them in the room. Too many rich and influential people were able to buy themselves their own P.R. camera time and co-opt the same poor people they regularly ignore or blame in their capacity as power brokers. The Pope should have chased those money changers right out of that school and performed an exorcism of the real-life demon of Wall Street while he was in town. Instead, he sold medieval superstition to little kids. It was cringe-worthy, and anti-Enlightenment.

That being said, I do champion Kim Davis's right to stay strong and believe in whatever she wants. But instead of complaining and making a martyr out of herself, she should resign her public post and find a job where she doesn't have to be in contact with the good people she seems to find so distasteful. A cloister and a vow of silence might be just the ticket.

Thanks to the Pope, the miscreants of politics and finance and war can exorcise themselves of those tired old minima culpas known as "mistakes were made" and "nobody could ever have predicted."  

Now they can just shrug their shoulders, claim that the Devil made them do it, and condemn the rest of us to a living hell while they bribe and stampede their own way into Paradise.

Blessed Steve Schwarzman's $42 million estate (Mephistopheles-eye view)

What a Difference a Day Makes

Dorothy who? the pundits asked after Pope Francis included Dorothy Day in his most admired quartet of US citizens in his speech to Congress. (the others are Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr and Thomas Merton.)

Having just briefly mentioned Dorothy Day myself in the blog comments the other day, I was pleased, but not at all surprised, to learn that the radical Pope is also a huge fan of the radical social justice crusader.

 She started her professional life in the early 20th century as a novelist, Hollywood screenwriter, intellectual, anarchist, muckraking  journalist, and feminist. She underwent one abortion and also gave birth to an out-of-wedlock child whom she raised as a single mother among the destitute and anguished and sometimes dangerous in various makeshift "hospitality houses" in New York City after her conversion to Catholicism at the eve of the Great Depression. She combined a more than half-century career in direct social work and pacifism and labor organizing and communal farming with the founding of the Catholic Worker movement and running its newspaper. She was often out of favor with the Catholic Church hierarchy and the political establishment, particularly when she opposed the USA's entry into World War Two. She was arrested and jailed numerous times after such acts of civil disobedience as draft card burnings and blockades of Selective Service buildings during the Vietnam war.

The Catholic Worker, published to this very day, is still anti-war in the age of public acquiescence to perpetual war. It still sells for only one penny per copy plus postage, or 25 cents for a year's subscription.

A compilation of personal diaries spanning Dorothy Day's career during the Catholic Worker movement years was recently published, after having been kept under wraps, at her own request, for 25 years following her death in 1980. She was far from a perfect person, and was the first to admit that she often felt like a shrew and a slattern. She suffered from bouts of depression. She was totally human. She is still eminently "relatable".

To give you an idea of the woman, I've gathered together several particularly striking passages from her diary, the book version of which is called The Duty of Delight from a quote by the great British critic and humanist John Ruskin. Compare Dorothy Day's writings to those of MLK, Pope Francis, Gandhi and other great moral leaders of the modern world, and you will see a very common thread of humanity and empathy that transcends dogma and denomination. A fire and brimstone, holier-than-thou control freak she definitely was not.

Her off-the-cuff 1930s Great Depression jottings are particularly apt for our own times:

"As I came down the street afterward, (from visiting a friend in jail) a well dressed priest drove by in a big car. Then I passed another - also well dressed, comfortable.... Then still another out in front of most luxurious mansion, the parish house, playing with a dog on a leash. All of them well fed, well housed, comfortable, caring for the safe people like themselves. And where are the priests for the poor, the down and out, the sick in city hospitals, in jails. It is the little of God's children who do not get cared for. God help them and God help the priest who is caught in the bourgeois system and cannot get out."  

"In this groaning of spirit everything is irksome to me. The dirt, the garbage heaped in the gutters, the flies, the hopelessness of the human beings around me, all oppress me." 

"Toothaches, bruised faces even, received in street fighting, are ugly and grotesque. It is hard to heroically receive blows in the face from a policeman, for instance, and take it like a Christian, in the spirit of non-resistance. A spirit of hatred and a fierce desire for retaliation seems more manly, more human. Moral force being hard to see, is a thousand times harder than physical force. Strength of spirit is not so often felt to be apparent as strength of body. And we in our vanity wish this strength to be apparent. Human respect again. And yet moral force is always felt."

"I was thinking afterward how everyone dwells on our poverty. But we are not nearly poor enough. Read Steinbeck's article on squatters in California. It is not enough to present a picture of conditions. One must go there to share that poverty. Then others will help. Immediate works of mercy shows what can be done now, not waiting for the revolution or for the state. Strip oneself here first. We are going to the bean fields this summer."

"I sat up late reading a detective story. Rather depressed at first what with dirty dishes, children, Mrs. B (a complaining client) and general effusiveness.... The poor. To love to be with the poor is of course hard. There are not all poor among us, and only one poor family. Of course, dirt, inefficiency, dullness, lack of taste, beauty, culture - all these are a part of poverty. Are they poor because of this lack in them, or do these characteristics grow out of their poverty? Who can say? It will be hard to change them because we are poor now ourselves. Are we letting it get us? Are there those among us who are becoming dull, dirty, lethargic, listless, indolent, slothful?"

As Robert Ellsberg, the editor of her diaries, writes in the introduction,

Dorothy Day's life at the Catholic Worker was marked by a number of remarkable episodes, and she was a witness or participant in many of the most significant social movements of the 20th century. But by and large, her life was spent in very ordinary ways. Her sanctity -- if one wishes to call it that -- was expressed not just in heroic deeds but also in the mundane duties of everyday life. Her 'spirituality' was rooted in a constant effort to be more charitable toward those closest at hand.

A prisoner rights advocate and a staunch opponent of racism, Dorothy Day would have been right at home in today's social justice movements. She would also be against the man-made pollution causing climate change and the war on terror with its transformation of the world into a permanent battlefield. She would have been right up there with the only non-applause line in Pope Francis's speech to Congress:

Being at the service of dialogue and peace also means being truly determined to minimize and, in the long term, to end the many armed conflicts throughout our world. Here we have to ask ourselves: Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.

An Inconvenient Pope

Corporate media coverage of the Pope's visit to the USA is being framed around two main issues: how it will impact the artificial, wedge issue-based political gridlock in Washington, and how it will cause traffic gridlock in New York City.

News that the world's second largest car maker has engaged in an epic criminal conspiracy to bypass anti-pollution emissions laws is vying with news about how much cars themselves will be inconvenienced during this historic visit. For days on end, traffic and shopping will come to a screeching halt. The very atmosphere will be forced to take a breather. For one brief shining moment, the rights of humans to walk will take precedence over the rights of machines to drive.

I'm sure that all the rich irony surrounding his visit to El Norte is not being lost on Pope Francis.

His message that turbo-charged capitalism is destroying all living things on land, sea and air is being drowned in the American shallows of media spectacle for the sake of media spectacle. As he wrote in his recent encyclical:

The continued acceleration of changes affecting humanity and the planet is coupled today with a more intensified pace of life and work which might be called "rapidification." Although change is part of the working of complex systems, the speed with which human activity has developed contrasts with the naturally slow pace of biological evolution. Moreover, the goals of this rapid and constant change are not necessarily geared to the common good or to integral and sustainable human development. Change is something desirable, yet it becomes a source of anxiety when it causes harm to the world and to the quality of life of much of humanity.

So, who did Barack and Michelle invite to their White House reception? Who will she be wearing? Will she "stun" as she greets the Pope at the airport? Will LGBT  activists and right-to-die reformers be given front row seats on the South Lawn just so that President Peace Prize can one-up the Pope in progressive bona fides? How will stocks react as the Pope shuts down entire miles of Big Apple asphalt?  What's the price of a scalped ticket to get close to him as he parades through Central Park? How many scents of Pope Soap-on-a-Rope are available at Macy's? Is the Pope Catholic?

Even when more enlightened media outlets dare to "go there" and write in-depth pieces about the Pope's environmental and social justice messages, unbridled capitalism still gets in the way. When I went to read an online article about his exhortation Laudato Si': On Care of Our Common Home at the New York Review of Books, the very first thing confronting me was an ad exhorting me to purchase a custom-framed cartoon drawing of Pope Francis for $150.

The reviewer, Yale climate economist William D. Nordhaus, is not only disappointed that Francis's core message is being ignored by the media, he is disappointed that the Pope himself is against market-based "cap and trade" and other gimmicks to supplement his anti-consumerism message of environmental conservation and care for the poor. The Pope is not neoliberal enough, apparently. All that the climate needs, according to Nordhaus, is a more "moral market"  -- an oxymoron if there ever was one. He writes:

But the growing peril of climate change and many other environmental problems arises primarily not from unethical individual behavior such as consumerism or cowardice, bad conscience or excessive profiteering. Rather, environmental degradation is the result of distorted market signals that put too low a price on harmful environmental effects.

I guess that Nordhaus missed the news that Volkswagen's altruism and beneficence caused it to deliberately tinker with the pollution-detecting device in at least half a million 11 million of its cars. Those market distortion signals will get you every time. Mistakes get made, but crimes against the biosphere are never committed.

"We have totally screwed up," the aptly named Michael Horn, CEO of Volkswagen of America, humble-bragged at a lavish event this week to introduce the company's latest model. He offered the standard explanation given by the rich and powerful and unaccountable whenever they get caught doing the nasty. The crime "was not consistent with our core values," he abjectly schmoozed.

After all, it pales in comparison to Volkswagen admitting decades after the fact that it had used Nazi concentration camp slaves to manufacture its cars for the Folk. Luckily for them, no car officials went to jail for that one. All they had to do was to make some token reparations to their mainly Jewish victims. So they probably hope that this latest scandal will be swept under the rug just as efficiently.

The real test of our political class's seriousness about reducing global warming and combating climate change is how it will treat the Volkswagen crimes. If the company gets the usual financial slap on the wrist, as General Motors recently did despite their officials being, at the very least, accessories to murder, our government officials will have proven themselves irredeemable hypocrites, once and for all.

As the Pope's late, great fellow Latin American leftist Eduardo Galeano put it, the United States is the Vatican of the Church of the Sacred Car. And the depraved religion has spread all over the globe. "The imported faith in the four-wheeled god and the confusion of democracy with consumption have been more devastating than any bombing campaign. Never have so many suffered so much for so few," he wrote in Upside Down.
 
In Nordhaus's neoliberal view, meanwhile, the problem is not that water is scarce. It's that it is underpriced. The problem is not the number of polluting particulates in the air that we breathe and the ensuing damage to our lungs. It is that the poisons are underpriced. What this planet, and the people and animals and plants residing on it need is not health and conservation of resources and clean-up. What it needs are plutocrats making more money by finding more efficient ways to use their poisons.

Pope Francis has his work cut out for him with such thinking from the allegedly enlightened side of the climate "debate." (Yes, the media conglomerate is still framing the death of the earth as a debate instead of a reality.)

As he puts it in his encyclical, "Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation, or blind confidence in technical solutions. We need a new and universal solidarity." 

Meanwhile, even though Laudato Si' is readily available free of charge all over the Internet, billionaire Jeff Bezos is charging people $5.95 to download a Kindle copy from his own Amazon website marketplace. Because the rich rentiers will always parasitize the poor. Commodified humanity is their main course.

We all have got our work cut out for us.

That Uppity Pope

The oil and gas industry thinks that Pope Francis is getting too big for his cassock. The Kochs, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, BP and their whole coterie of climate change-denying think tanks are tightening their collective sphincter in anticipatory dread of the Pope's upcoming major encyclical on the environment. His global warning to mankind will be followed this fall by his address to a joint session of congress.

 I wonder if the neoliberal pols will dare pull a police state union stunt and turn their backs on the Pope as he calls them out on their selfishness and capitalistic greed. I wonder if John Boehner will turn a brighter shade of orange as he is forced to take a public back seat directly behind a religious leader who accepts science as fact.

Environmentalists, stung by the recent betrayals of Barack Obama, the self-described environmental president (Atlantic and Arctic oil drilling now, tepid pollution reductions way down the road), are all excited by both the encyclical and the Pope's upcoming visit to the United States.

Despite the propaganda of so-called militant atheists, organized religion does not have a built-in anti-science bias. There is an organization called the National Religious Partnership for the Environment  which draws its membership from across the denominational spectrum to spread the message that environmental justice, social justice and economic justice are inextricably intertwined. Evangelicals love clean water and hate methane emissions as much as secular humanists do. Rationality and religion are not mutually exclusive.

This is making the God-fearing climate denialists' heads explode in paroxysms of cognitive dissonance. Therefore, like any fringe cultists worth their salt, they are tweaking their doctrine just enough to adjust to the changing times and a Pope who doesn't hail from the same right wing universe as they do. The heartless Heartland Institute, for example, now claims that he is not scientific enough to know whereof he speaks. Oil and gas magnates sent a group of their scientists-for-hire  all the way to the Vatican last month to issue a prebuttal to the Pope. Their main beef, though, is that he is teaming up with their other nemesis, the United Nations, in order to spread the scientific gospel. They're sounding the alarm against climate alarmism, and spending millions of tax-exempt dollars to do it. They get their tax-exempt 501 (C)3 "charity" money from the billionaire Koch Brothers, among others. They were recently outed in what's become known as ClimateGate: a group of scientists were exposed as deliberately lying for cash money. They're a nasty bunch, even going so far as to threaten to sue those who dare publicize their chicanery.

So now they think they have the Pope on the ropes? This ought to be good, coming as it does when the GOP Clown Car (which, due to rapid overcrowding, should probably be upgraded to the GOP Clown Recreational Vehicle) will be in full, grinding, dissonant gear.

The Heartland Institute has put its own financial backing into the presidential campaign of college dropout Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. They're calling it Operation Angry Badger. But although they might get their sadistic kicks out of badgering people and popes,  they're really nothing but a bunch of wretched weasels.