What better day for the flurry of breathless announcements that Hillary and Donald are now in a Dead Heat? They're allegedly in as tight of a race as the sales of their Halloween costumes. Oh, the Humanthony.
For purposes of oligarchy and wage-suppressing globalism, that overpriced and suffocating Clinton or Trump mask you might be wearing to scare the crap out of your friends and neighbors tonight was manufactured in China for mere pennies. Because USA! USA! USA!
The bummer of a plot twist in this year's contrived suspense is that since fully one-fourth of battleground state voters, and 21 million nationwide, have already cast their ballots, nothing that either candidate can do at this point will make a lick of difference. Even the final tranche of WikiLeaks emails expected to come out this week has the aura of anticlimax.
But it's a contest! Trump is gaining momentum! A professor who has correctly predicted presidential outcomes for the past three decades says so! It ain't over until CNN finally goes off the air on a cold day in hell and all the talking heads repair to their dusty, formaldehyde-filled jars for a long winter's nap.
Happy Halloween, everybody!
Although the official narrative has Omar Mateen, the Orlando mass shooter, acting out of Isis-instigated terrorism, there's mounting evidence that religious extremism was more of an excuse for him than an inspiration. This guy wanted to create as much mayhem as inhumanly possible, and one way to ensure that he got the undivided attention he craved was to calmly call 911 to tell the media-political complex exactly what it wanted to hear.
The hawkish neocon players of the ruling establishment don't want a homegrown hate crime on steroids. They want a terrorist attack from afar, the better to give them an excuse to drop more bombs, wage more wars, spy on more innocent citizens, manufacture even more of the weapons that the liberals among them claim to abhor every time there's another "tragedy."
The neoliberal players of the ruling establishment forge ahead with their manufactured identitarian presidential campaign in the Age of the Tweeted Insult. They want to pit gays against Muslims against Mexicans against Republicans against Democrats against Trump against Obama and Clinton. They want us to forget all about the lousy economy and the class war of the feral rich against the 99%, the crumbling roads and schools and bridges, the wage stagnation, the rising death rate from suicides and drugs and untreated diseases, the child poverty, the hunger, the despair.
They don't seem to want to talk much about reports of Mateen being a closeted gay or bisexual man. They don't discuss the reality that right-wing religious fundamentalism abides within more than one belief system. Had Mateen tried all his life to "pray away the gay," to no avail? Did he try to overcome his sexual identity by donning a macho uniform and wearing NYPD regalia during his selfie poses? When nothing worked to change who he was, did he instead decide to shoot away the gay?
No matter. Fifty people, including Mateen, are dead and several more are maimed for life. But let's not waste any more time -- there's a nonstop presidential campaign on! So let's turn on the TV and vicariously revel in a bunch of millionaires (and an alleged billionaire) hurling invective at one another.
Trump: (breathing heavily and stumbling over someone else's TelePromptered words and sounding more like a cartoon villain every day) Since Obama won't use the words "radical Islam," then it just naturally follows that he supports terrorism. I know stuff. It's all part of a plot. America is so weak. We have to keep Muslims from other countries out. But nobody is more solid with the gays than I am. And Obama hates me more bigly than he hates the terrorists. I scare him more than Isis. Wahhhh.
Obama: (the centerpiece of a Deep State tableau vivant of the financialized plutonomy, the surveillance state, the trillion-dollar war machine and justice-for-some, he is showing some rare anger at Trump's ad hominem attacks against his own personal patriotism.) Let's not get bogged down in the semantics of dangerous cartoon characters. His words don't matter as much as my deeds. Hundreds of bombings and drones and and unlimited wars against global terror matter. America is not only strong, it is exceptional. We protect our people. Rah, rah. Oh, and we love everybody. We don't spy on Muslims unless we're caught spying on Muslims like that time in New York City a few short years ago. But look over there, it's Trump!
Hillary: (reading off a TelePrompter and nodding with grim disgusted satisfaction at frequent applause-ready intervals) Yeah! I'll go Obama one better, though. With me, it's words and deeds. I'm not afraid to say Radical Islam. I'm both a neocon and a neoliberal. So don't ever forget that you're not only electing a Pragmatic Progressive who can get 'things' done, you're also electing a Commander in Chief. Military Maxi-Me. Only I can bring America back to the good old days of Nine-Twelve, that great shining disaster-capitalism moment when we used the deaths of 3,000 people as an excuse to kill millions more and make defense contractors and oil companies and bankers and consolidated media propagandists richer beyond their wildest dreams. But let's 'do' gun control as a wedge issue anyway. Oh, and we love the gays more than Trump pretends to love the gays. And we welcome Muslims and war refugees, too: the rare few who can survive our sadistic, draconian, two-year-long vetting process, that is.
Since one of this week's favorite parlor games is comparing Omar Mateen to other Great Monsters in American history, my own nomination for his pathological twin would be George Zimmerman. Both, wannabe cops and gun fetishists from the Sunshine State. Both racists. Both perpetrators of domestic violence. Both also probably victims of parental and peer abuse. Both with huge boulders on their shoulders.
Mateen is dead. Zimmerman is still alive, still armed, still causing trouble, still abusive, and as far as I know, he graces no FBI terrorism watch list. He should.
Because he is still one scary sociopath, who only has to snap his trigger-happy fingers to get all the media attention he wants. He's achieved minor celebrity status. Every time he's beaten up or threatened a woman or, most recently, auctioned off the same gun he used to murder Trayvon Martin, he gets headlines.
He's not done yet.
Both Zimmerman and Mateen likely got their initial investigatory passes because they were both quasi-law enforcement types; they knew the cop lingo, the cop culture. They were deemed harmless, nasty, good ole redneck boys.
Guns are biological appendages to these types of men. Therefore, they're in dire need of emergency therapeutic amputations. Perhaps Congress could appropriate a ton of money to pay huge cash premiums or guaranteed incomes to people who voluntarily turn in their weapons of mass destruction. The relinquishers would then be placed on a list preventing them from using their bounty to purchase more weaponry. Such a program would save lives and might even stimulate the moribund economy at the same time.
Just one day before the Orlando massacre, a disturbed man walked into a ShopRite close to where I live and calmly slashed the throat of a complete stranger as he browsed in the produce section. He then blended right in with the other Saturday morning shoppers. The store was placed on lockdown while police hunted for the killer, who not having an assault rifle, was unable to cause any further human damage before he was arrested.
People with assault rifles can kill a whole bunch of human beings all at the same time. People armed with box-cutters are a lot more limited when acting out their deranged fantasies.
The failure of American politicians to ban assault weapons is tied directly to the fact that the United States is the largest arms manufacturer and dealer and exporter on the face of the earth. The same politicians who cry that the "wrong people" are getting hold of weapons don't bat an eye when it comes to selling billions of dollars' worth directly to such brutal, terrorist-enabling governments as Saudi Arabia.
As Patrick Cockburn writes in The Independent, the fact that the Orlando shooting is raising the global profile of Isis plays right into its propaganda script. Neither the Democratic nor Republican Party is willing to directly confront the underlying ideology of the group. Our leaders aren't willing to admit that Saudi Arabia is the funder and enabler of Islamic State extremism. To do so would be to cut off billions in profits for themselves. To do so would force them to plead guilty to their own complicit role and gruesome partnership with the very enemies they are creating.
Yes, Trump is a dangerous demagogue. But where were Obama and Clinton, asks Cockburn, when their good xenophobic pal David Cameron hurled similar treacherous anti-immigrant invective against the leftist Jeremy Corbyn?
Gun control talk is cheap, given how regularly it gets squelched by the symphony of big money and the chorus of pathocratic greed.
As expected and as preordained, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have "won" the closed primary election in New York State. The marathon presidential horse race is now entering its final lap.
But even with the long shots now painfully limping up the backstretch as Donald and Hillary stampede toward the finish line, the profiteers of the game are suddenly bellowing "Whoa, Nelly!"
Not so fast.
The show must go on. If they call the race too soon, the rubes will stop placing their bets. The crowds will dwindle, the cameras and the bookies will disappear. The cable channels will have nothing to yammer about while they're sitting around hoping for the next big terror attack or mass shooting. So, the media and the partisans are all getting together today and urging Bernie Sanders and John Kasich to stay in the race till the last advertising dollar rolls in. Those two candidates might be nags compared to the thoroughbred front-runners, but they're still worth mega media bucks right up to the day when the glue factory guy finally shows up.
Even though the contest is fixed and the challengers hobbled before they even got started, this is still the best democracy money can buy in the best of all possible countries. The New York Times, which helped to fix the race in the first place with all that free advertising for Hillary and Donald, has decreed it.
After months of alternately castigating and ignoring Sanders, the Times editorial board has come out with a sanctimonious screed urging him not to quit the race just yet. Since all that Hillary has got going for her is the victim card, she still needs grumpy Bernie to pester her in order to get more sympathy votes from people for whom identity trumps policy. Without the mythical Bernie Bro terriers nipping at her heels as she canters around the track toward the finish line, where would she be? Alone on the trail, that's where, in all her empty pantsuit glory, without so much as a single pearl to clutch. But with Bernie occasionally getting a second wind and threatening to overtake her, she can keep up appearances as Fighter For You with even odds in her run for the poses.
The owners and the trainers and the groomers desperately need Bernie to stick around and eventually morph from gelding into sheepdog, the better to herd the millions of young people so energized by his message into the strict confines of the Democratic veal pen. The guy already is an underdog as well as a nag, but people do love their underdogs. And the profiteers love the people who love their underdogs, because the people have parted with millions of their dollars to keep this whole underdog thing going. Every time Bernie loses, he makes money! Just think of where all that money could eventually wind up. Ka-ching goes the beat of the DNC's alleged heart.
Therefore in the interest of big money, the Times must now pretend to love an underdog, too. Run, Bernie, Run! they screech in their most liberal, D-Flat Minor tones:
Mr. Sanders has always stood more for a vision than for reality, especially with a Republican-led Congress. As he and Mrs. Clinton tore into each other in last week’s debate
in Brooklyn, some Democrats worried that the nasty fracas would hurt
the party. Others want Mr. Sanders to get out and let Mrs. Clinton focus
on the Trump threat.
Mr. Sanders’s presence has made this an immeasurably more substantive
race, in which both candidates’ policies have been better vetted, and as
a result, better delineated. That’s the best preparation for the
general election. Yes, Mrs. Clinton’s lead is nearly insurmountable, but
it should be voters who erase the “nearly.”
Are they magnanimous, or what?
My published response:
The Times gives the game away with its admonition that Sanders has always been more about "vision" than about "reality."
Whose reality?
The
"reality" of which the Times speaks is a manufactured set of rules
designed to enrich only the already obscenely wealthy. What the Sanders
campaign has revealed to millions of people is the power of the
Possible. Possibility can forge its own reality. The terms are not
mutually exclusive.
Who, besides the plutocracy, says that we
cannot have free public college tuition and government-run single payer
health care? As democracy has been whittled away by the malign forces of
neoliberalism, too many of us have been cowed into believing that there
is no other way but the rule of the market god. We are so alienated
that we haven't realized how alienated we have become.
Don't tell us that it's only the nasty old Republicans preventing the
humanitarian Democrats from forging a better life for millions of
disenfranchised, dispossessed Americans. The whole rotten system has
been exposed for all to see, even those who've been willfully blinded.
I
don't know if Bernie has a chance of winning the White House or not.
What matters is that the consciousness of a nation has been raised, a
solidarity is being forged, and we will refuse to be atomized into a
state of helplessness any longer. Just as the Clintons gave birth to
neoliberalism, so too may the Clintons officiate over its funeral.
Long live possibility.
Whose reality? Our reality.
If you want a blow-by-blow account of last night's GOP whatever-it-was, you have come to the wrong place. Yes, I kept the TV tuned in to all five-plus hours of it, even the Pee Wee wrestling match intro featuring canned survival food-seller Rick Santorum and a few others whose names escape me at the moment.
But I took readers' advice and read a book about how we can't afford rich people at the same time as I semi-watched the debate. I also played a few games of Bejewelled on the iPad and mentally interposed the exploding gems with the heads on the stage in a futile effort to stay riveted.
I knew that I had to indulge in a couple of survival skills when CNN commentator Brooke Baldwin referred to the Reagan Library as "hallowed ground," and Wolf Blitzer rudely interrupted a relatively intelligent point Anderson Cooper was trying to make to announce that Donald Trump had just exited his limo and was entering the building.
There's got to be a morning after, and truth be told, only a few memories remain. (If you thought I'd be taking notes on the show, think again.)
Some highlights:
Jeb Bush thinks brother George kept us safe. He also wants to put Margaret Thatcher's mug on the $10 bill. Donald Trump did not make any disparaging remarks about Maggie's mug, nor that of any other female for that matter.
Carly Fiorina makes Hillary Clinton actually look like the Mother Teresa her campaign team is trying to market to the voters. Fiorina never smiles. She looks directly at the camera as she calls for mass killings of people for the sake of her personal friend, Bibi.
Although Donald Trump didn't make fun of the looks of any female, it sure looks like the GOP cohort still stands united in its hatred of all women and its fetishistic defense of fetal parts, which apparently are being sold on the open market right next to the breakfast cereal.
As one of the few people on the stage who don't have blood on their hands due to the wars they voted for, Donald Trump may still have effectively condemned thousands or even millions of people to death with his off-the-cuff remark that the baby of one of his employees developed autism overnight after receiving vaccinations.
Ben Carson, M.D., allowed that Trump might have a point about getting too many vaccines at once, but advised him to do further reading. Carson sounded like he whiffed a huge dollop of ether before coming onstage.
Jeb Bush admits that he smoked dope while a preppie and apologized to Mom Babs for his perfidy. He didn't apologize to his mom for not nominating her mug for the $10 bill. Ben Carson nominated his mom, and so did a few others whose names escape me. A few even went totally socialistic and nominated Rosa Parks.
Mike Huckabee, whose only platforms are anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage, praised the polio vaccine. He was apparently unaware that the first polio vaccine was developed with the help of fetal tissue research.
