#Christmas planning has begun in the East Wing at the @WhiteHouse. I'm looking forward to sharing our final vision for this unique tradition in the coming months.
The ominous phrase "Final vision," juxtaposed as it is with Donald Trump's caging of thousands of migrants and refugees on the Southern border, certainly does bring back memories of past traditions. Just not the pleasant memories and traditions that Melania Trump's public relations shop wanted to distract us with.
But perhaps we should interpret her clumsy Tweet another way. Maybe she's getting started on Christmas way early because she doesn't plan on being in the White House very much longer. Maybe she got caught up in all the media hype telling us that Father of Our Country Robert Mueller's congressional testimony was going to be the final word, the real coup de grace,for her chubby hubby wubby. And then it turned out that not only is Mueller the Deadbeat Dad that so many feared that he was upon seeing his final tepid report. He's a Demented Deadbeat Dad on his last mental legs.
So call Melania delusional and lacking in good taste to your heart's content. Because anybody who still puts any credence in the #Russiagate franchise after Mueller's bumble-wumble testimony on Wednesday should probably also have his or her own head examined.
Was there anything more delusional and Kafkesque and surreal, for example, than the New York Times's headline that blared Mueller's claim that "the Russians" are in our country right now, interfering in our elections, placed right next to a sidebar analysis bemoaning how confused the aging prosecutor has been acting lately?
A Russophobe in good standing might be "halting and hesitant" about remembering what is in his own report, but when it comes to meddling he miraculously recovers from the muddling. He regains Father of Our Country status and mental sharpness as long as he sticks to the corporate propaganda that Hillary Clinton lost the last election not because of her own ineptitude and corruption, but because of a group of underpaid Kremlin Internet trolls.
So I say let Melania have her own visionary deluded fun as we anxiously await the grand final vision of the Trump family leaving the White House forever. It's a big asylum, and thank goodness we ain't in it.
I wish I could say that the long-awaited Meh Report, in which Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no conspiracy and no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, spells the beginning of the end of the corporate Neocon wing of the Democratic Party and all its associates in the zombie establishment media. But I'd be fooling myself. Elite failures rarely go away. They simply fail upward. At the very worst, they temporarily disappear or go into propaganda rehab until such time that the public has moved on to the next new narrative or scandal. The more blatant cases will simply double down on their delusions for the foreseeable future. Since Donald Trump is nothing if not a gleeful scandal of his own making, he will very likely make it ridiculously easy for the liberal failure class not only to survive, but thrive. He will scream "total exoneration!" and "witch hunt!" so many times that his words will lose their impact. Meanwhile, the primary media stakeholders of the #Russiagate franchise - MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post - are all churning violently in their various Five Stages of Grief whirlpools. As students of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross should know, the duration and the order of these stages are not set in psychological stone. They vary from person to person. They often overlap each other. And oftentimes, just when sufferers think they're finally cured, they revert back to the earlier stages. This whole "closure" thing is a lot of malarkey. Therefore, just because Robert Mueller has gone from revered Father of Our Country to Deadbeat Dad who couldn't or wouldn't bring home the Siberian bacon doesn't mean that "the Russians" aren't still out to get us. After all, we have thus far only seen a synopsis of the report written by Trump-friendly Attorney General William Barr. There could be enough hidden nuanced nuggets lurking in the actual report to at least partially satisfy hungry true believers. As the editorial board of the Times, wallowing in its own initial denial phase of #Russiagate grief, plaintively insisted:
We know that the Russian government interfered repeatedly in the 2016 presidential election, by hacking into computer servers of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. We know that it did this with the goals of dividing Americans and helping Donald Trump win the presidency. We know that when top members of the Trump campaign learned about this interference, they didn’t just fail to report it to the F.B.I. They welcomed it. They encouraged it. They made jokes about it. On the same day that Mr. Trump publicly urged the Russians to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails, they began to do just that. And we know that when questioned by federal authorities, many of Mr. Trump’s top associates lied, sometimes repeatedly, about their communications with Russians. None of this is in dispute.
The Times continues to parrot the conventional wisdom that it was "the Russians" who hacked the Clinton emails, even though the Democratic Party relied on its own investigators to reach this conclusion and refused FBI access to its computer servers to prove the Russian connection one way or another. The newspaper still refuses to believe that there was no collusion, even though Trump was more of a passive partner than they originally claimed. He may have been the bottom half of the missionary position, but he still had relations with those Russians. At the very least, he lusts after Putin in his heart, and therefore he is still guilty as sin. The second traditional stage of grief - Anger - is not yet the overwhelming symptom evident in the Media-Political Complex. #Russiagate grievers were still too shell-shocked on the morning after Mueller's death-knell to get overtly mad at him personally. Mueller has been too elevated to mythological, godlike status for too long for people to immediately turn against him. On the contrary, many are making excuses for him. As valiantly as he strove to cure the Trump cancer, the disease was too far advanced for even a prosecutorial Marcus Welby to tackle. This is especially true given that the body politic under attack by the Trump malignancy was in such horrible shape to begin with. Former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer pleads that Mueller couldn't indict Trump on obstruction of justice for the simple fact that the president has been acting out in full public view. The tumor was just too large and too slippery to excise:
This was apparently a significant consideration in the decision by Mr. Barr and Mr. Rosenstein not to prosecute (along with the determination that there was no underlying “collusion” legal offense). Here, once again, the president who is a demagogue — who is fully prepared to flout well-established, vitally important expectations about how American presidents faithfully execute the laws — can safely bring self-interested, self-protective pressure on the Department of Justice and undermine its public standing and authority.
In other words, Trump wasn't sneaky and occult enough. This is like claiming that it's easier to catch an embezzler than it is to nab an armed robber bumbling with guns a-blazing in broad daylight. Bauer's op-ed represents the overlapping stages of denial and bargaining, as he suggests that if only we had a stronger penal code, Trump might yet go to jail. All we need is the right legal miracle drug to catch this guy, juxtaposed with major changes in our legalized lifestyle regimens. It's the normalized shameless corruption, stupid! Democratic politicians are similarly in bargaining mode. If only they can subpoena more miracle documents, then maybe, just maybe, the lucrative #Russiagate enterprise can remain on life support. If only they can raise enough money through a barrage of email appeals demanding that Barr "release the report now!," maybe the outcome will be different. There's also a fair bit of pragmatic acceptance going on along with the understandable depression. Some pundits know when they're beat and already are urging the country to get over itself and move on. And some Democratic leaders, like New York's Hakeem Jeffries, seem downright relieved that they finally have permission to collude with Trump, while they simultaneously investigate him, now that their manufactured Russia scare has largely outlived its political and monetary usefulness to them. The Mueller report has served the desired purpose of tamping down all that pesky impeachment talk and vindicating Speaker Nancy Pelosi's reluctance to go that route. I hate to sound heartless here, but it's not as though the Russophobes weren't warned that their disease was terminal. As long ago as last October, legal experts were trying to impart the bad news in the gentlest possible terms. As Politico reported,
The public, they say, shouldn't expect a comprehensive and presidency-wrecking account of Kremlin meddling and alleged obstruction of justice by Trump -- not to mention an explanation of the myriad subplots that have bedeviled lawmakers, journalists and amateur Mueller sleuths. Perhaps most unsatisfying: Mueller's findings may never even see the light of day.
And as recently as a month ago, Senate investigators themselves were trying to hammer home the sad fact that as hard as they'd tried, they too had found no evidence of a Trump-Putin conspiracy. All eyes then turned to Doc Mueller as the last best hope to come up with some factual crimes to fit their beloved conspiracy theories. It must indeed be a buzzkill, after having spent more than two years of your life steadfastly performing conspiracy nursing duty, to suddenly discover that your seemingly viable patient has suddenly upped and died on you. The demise of #Russiagate, to its devotees, must feel like losing a beloved family pet. To the most extreme among them, it might even feel like losing a child. So while I am not going to gleefully stomp all over irresponsible propagandists and #Russiagate birthers like Paul "beware the Siberian Candidate!" Krugman and Rachel "the Russians will freeze us to death!" Maddow, I do sincerely hope that they and their ilk will at least just quietly fade away for a week or a month and do their grieving and their bargaining and their teeth-gnashing in a dark closed room somewhere. Because thanks to them and hundreds of other handsomely paid corporate group-thinkers like them, this country has entered into another Cold War, complete with a renewed nuclear arms race. Trump may have dodged an existential bullet. But the country and the world have not.
Caught up in a thorny Russophobic propaganda trap of their own making, Democratic presidential contenders are feebly trying extricate themselves from it without getting too badly scratched in the process. Ignoring, if not outright disowning, designated national hero heartthrob Robert Mueller is especially hard to do, given that most of the corporate news "resistance" to Trump in the last two years has revolved around Trump's alleged collusion with Vladimir Putin and the largely ineffectual meddling by a handful of Russian trolls in the 2016 election. One "blockbuster" scoop after another has fallen apart, with the latest one - that Special Counsel Mueller has documents proving that Trump ordered his former fixer to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate scheme -- having been directly debunked by Mueller himself. The #Russiagate propaganda crusade, you might remember, picked up steam in the days immediately following Hillary Clinton's embarrassing loss to Donald Trump. Her operatives had to come up with another scapegoat, besides the FBI, to divert attention from their own terrible campaign skills and lack of a coherent message. This emergency planning and plotting and placement of the propaganda by the Clintonites is well-documented in the book Shattered. But with public polling revealing that the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling and collusion is way down on the list of the electorate's concerns, Democratic Party consultants are suddenly warning candidates away from using #Russiagate as a campaign issue. Forget about an increasingly unhinged Rachel Maddow warning her MSNBC fans that we're all going to freeze to death in the Polar Vortex if "the Russians," and maybe even China, take it into their heads to mess with the US power grid. (see hilarious Jimmy Dore video below) After two years of relentlessly propagating their dangerous and nonstop McCarthyite hysteria, it now appears that Mueller has been a lousy boyfriend, if not a stalker, all along. "2020 Dems See Danger In the Mueller Probe," according to a Politico piece published today. Although skillfully flirting with the manufactured "seething outrage" of the politicized Russiagate franchise might help propel one lucky candidate to the Democratic nomination altar, the contenders must be very careful to not be seen as "politicizing" it, or enjoying it too lustfully. Instead, using one of the favorite neoliberal buzzwords that justifies everything from austerity for the poor to endless wars of aggression, they have to be "smart" about it:
"Smart campaigns will war game this very quietly," said Ben LaBolt, a former spokesman from the Obama White House and 2012 reelection campaign. "They'll have smart plans on the shelf. But it's not something they'll talk about. It's not something that they'll broadcast."
Translation: campaigns will have to carefully and anonymously leak Russiagate propaganda dirt-slime to churnalists like Maddow without the risk of getting personally scratched in the process. Because that would really smart. Not only would it hurt, but the cure for Trumpism actually turns out to be even worse than the disease:
Democrats working for 2020 candidates describe Mueller's work as something akin to a virus that will keep forcing their campaigns to take precautions.
I wonder if they'll come up with a vaccine in time to avoid getting infected by their own dirt-slime. I wonder how Mueller will react to being called a virus by the same fan club that's had such a huge crush on him for more than two years now. Maybe the Democratic operatives can invent a special condom to protect themselves from a Mueller STD or an unplanned Mueller pregnancy. Or, as one contender, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota bluntly puts it, they may even have to divorce themselves entirely from Mueller's probe.
It's the elephant in the room," said the party strategist working with a White House hopeful, fretting about the uncertainties tied to Mueller, from the rumors about possible new indictments to the advice from inside their own campaigns to just stay quiet about the topic.
What the anonymous strategists don't say and what the Politico article doesn't reveal is that #Russiagate might as well be called #Nothinggate. The so-called epidemic of "fake news" on social media which magically propelled Donald Trump to victory is itself fake news, according to Brendan Nyhan, professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. A study conducted by his team of researchers reveals that blaming fake news for Trump's win has provided nothing more than a "psychological refuge" for the millions of Clinton voters disappointed with the outcome.
Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans with the most conservative news diets. And, most notably, no credible evidence exists that exposure to fake news changed the outcome of the 2016 election.
The fake news panic echoes fears that prior forms of communication would brainwash the public. Just as exaggerated accounts of hysteria over Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast took advantage of doubts about radio, claims about the reach and influence of fake news express people’s broader concerns about social media and the internet.
His research, which relied upon the voluntary cooperation of people who allowed their Internet search histories to be examined, reveals that only 27 percent of Americans visited a fake news site in the final weeks before the 2016 election. These sites were designated "fake" because they made wild and misleading claims about either Trump or Clinton. The vast majority of people who visited these sites did so because they already had opinions which gelled with those espoused by the sites. Even then, Nyhan writes, these fake sites only made up eight percent of the subjects' total news diet. And despite all the hysteria to the contrary, Nyhan and his team found that visits to fake news outlets declined dramatically in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections. The alleged scourge of fake news is merely the excuse being used by the public-private surveillance state to censor independent journalism and to suppress independent thought. It's easier for the Powers That Be and their postmodern McCarthyite media hacks to blame an outside bogeyman like Russia for "sowing dissent" among the increasingly precarious masses of people than it is for them to admit that their own wrongdoing is causing America to collapse. Their fear-mongering helps them avoid supporting policies like universal health care and a living wage or guaranteed income for every citizen. Nyhan concludes:
Finally, there remains no evidence that fake news changed the result of the 2016 election. Any such claim must take into account not just the reach of fake news but also the proportion of those exposed to it whose behavior could be changed. As noted above, approximately six in 10 visits to fake news websites came from the 10 percent of Americans with the most conservative news diets — a group that was already especially likely to vote and to support Donald Trump. Accordingly, my colleagues and I find no association between pro-Trump fake news exposure and differential shifts in candidate support or voter turnout.
But as Rachel Maddow might say, "what if" Nyhan and his team are really Russian stooges? I have a feeling that despite the squeamish Democratic candidates' avowed trial separation from the Mueller probe, #Russiagate will die over her dead body, her top ratings, and her $7 million annual salary. She'll war-game it to death, if the ongoing climate catastrophe doesn't do the trick first.
The name of this country is the United States of Oz, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller III has been operating the gears behind his secret curtain for going on two years now. The fate of renegade President Donald Trump, as well as the fate of the whole nation, rests in Mueller's hands, and his hands alone. Or so we are told, day in and day out, by the political-media complex. Absent a competent president with a popular mandate who possesses traditional authoritarian qualities and the respect accruing thereto, Mueller has stepped into the breach. Unlike a traditional elected leader, Mueller exercises unaccountable, undemocratic power. He is thus so paradoxically vulnerable, by dint of his own lack of a public persona and mandate, that a weak and corrupt Congress must also craft special legislation to protect Their Man Behind the Curtain. Mueller's very invisibility has fomented the growth of his own Authoritarian Personality Cult, composed of some of those traditional, mythical presidential qualities so sorely lacking in Donald Trump's more public personality cult. The Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève differentiated four kinds of power-wielding pure authority: that of father over children, that of master over slaves, that of judge of civic behavior, and that of leader of state and party. An ideal president or prime minister must possess all four of these qualities, or at least be able to present a reasonable fascimile of them: paternal disciplinarian and soother-in-chief, mature and selfless pragmatist, bully pulpit moralizer, and the setter of his own party's platform or agenda. Kojeve could have been talking about Donald Trump when he wrote how the "leader of the band" rather than "leader of the state" type of primitive authority can supersede the more "enlightened" kinds in the rise of totalitarian regimes:
A band of kids gathers to play. One of these kids proposes to go and steal apples from the orchard next door. Immediately by doing so, he casts himself in the role of the band's leader. He became this leader because he saw further than the others, because it was he alone who thought out a project, while the others did not manage to get beyond the level of immediate facts.
Every time that Trump bellows "build the wall" or "lock her up" at one of his rallies, the band of kids in the audience roars its approval, just as the crowd roars its approval every time he counters the elite discourse of more qualified corrupt politicians with his personal insults and disdain of facts. He won the election because he "got" the anger and disgust of the electorate, while the others did not. So there's this uncomfortable vacuum. Trump is the opposite of loving father, the opposite or moral arbiter, the antithesis of Solomon of Biblical judicial fame. And although Mueller does partially fill the acceptable authoritarian vacuum as benevolent judge, jury and executioner, the natives are getting restless. Teachers are striking, democratic socialist upstarts are getting elected to Congress and too many people are demanding universal health care and taxes on the rich.
Since supplemental physical and verbal authority is sorely needed to augment the strong silent Mueller mystique and to oppressively placate the restive and frightened public, enter the forces of the national security state (the FBI and the CIA) as adjuncts if not full partners of the "opposition" Democratic Party. Law enforcement personnel and spies have effectively taken over the cable propaganda networks and corporate print publications in order to become the public relations "face" of the anti-Trump resistance, as we all wait with baited breath for Robert Mueller's own final word as some sort of Second Coming of Christ. That Mueller is, in fact, a totalitarian corporate leader in his own right was made painfully clear by the media's cowed reaction to his "rare" pronouncement last Friday (albeit through an Emerald City gate-keeper) that the BuzzFeed scoop claiming that his office possessed documentary evidence proving that Trump had instructed his former fixer to lie to Congress was not accurate. The media reaction to Mueller's terse pronouncement was swift and it was chastened. If the Man Behind the Curtain refutes something, then his must be the final word. At most, the deferential media are presuming to beg our wonderful paternalistic wizard to please, Sir, explain to us exactly what was not accurate about the Bombshell. Even brown-nosing "veteran journalists" are confused by the paternalistic rebuke from on high behind the curtain, finding it hard to square with BuzzFeed's own insistence (aping the "high confidence" of the Security State in it own myriad unproven RussiaGate allegations) that it has "high confidence" in the accuracy of its own reporting. CNN's Brian "Reliable Sources" Stelter jumped to the Wizard's defense, accusing BuzzFeed of acting "shockingly casual" toward Mueller when it first asked him to comment on the latest allegations. Meanwhile, somewhat shockingly, the Columbia Journalism Review seems to diverge from the narrative as it warns reporters to start acting like journalists instead of Mueller personality cultists:
But commentators should be careful not to treat the special counsel’s office—whose inner workings are opaque—as the infallible, benevolent voice of God. In any case, the statement neither kills the central essence of the story (it does not take a position on whether Trump did, in fact, tell Cohen to lie), nor specifies exactly what Mueller thinks BuzzFeed got wrong.
Well, maybe not so shocking after all, because the CJR's criticism of Mueller is not so much pushback against the special prosecutor's power as it is reflective of the disappointment among the media operatives of the RussiaGate franchise that one more "blockbuster that changed everything" story turned out be a dud. Because maybe it's not really a dud at all, but only a delayed explosion. Where there's relentless propaganda, there's always hope. Faces must be saved. Mueller is a de facto dictator because not only does he elicit fawning respect from the press, his presence also serves to frighten Trump and his band of kleptocrats from doing anything too criminally outrageous and discourages incipient criminals from accepting White House job offers to further their own interests. Most important, Mueller usurps Congress's constitutional mandate of oversight - with, of course, the full permission and complicity of Congress. The legislative branch, while planning its own piecemeal investigations of the Trump administration, readily admits that it clears the probes with Mueller first, not wishing to step on his toes or interfere with his own work. Dead silence, meanwhile, emanates from Dad's Den. The Wizard tinkers on, operating his legal gears, protected from public gaze and scrutiny. Talk of impeachment ebbs, flows, recedes and rises again in regular little wavelets. The faux-Resistance media can barely contain themselves, gnashing their teeth over their increasingly debunked RussiaGate narratives, but ravenously ready to devour the next "plant" about Trump malfeasance from anonymous sources within the national police security state -- sources who, if not among Mueller's own top-secret team of investigators, are at least operating in tandem with them. No matter that Trump damages the world and the people in it a little (really, rather a lot) more every day. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and one insidious form of totalitarianism is doing battle with another. Why else would the Ruling Class continue using the right-wing former FBI director and Iraq War architect and the authoritarian Police Security State as their Resistance? Why would they continue accusing Trump of treason, yet unaccountably allow him to stay in office more than two years after Putin allegedly installed him in the Oval Office with cheesy Facebook ads? They will do whatever it takes to maintain their grip on their own record wealth, using the police state as their propagandists and news sources at least until the lesser evil corporate Democrats can take up the slack and further fill the authoritarian vacuum with their endless identity-intensive campaigning and debates and a record number of candidates. Who knows, perhaps one of them will defeat Trump in 2020. And if they don't, it won't affect the oligarchs one way or another. Trump has only ever been a symptom, the end-stage product of malevolent capitalism long disguised as representative democracy. And whoever said irony is dead doesn't remember this bloodthirsty neoconservative 2003 exhortation from the Bush regime: "We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."
--- Robert S. Mueller III, quoting Ephesians 6:12-18, to make the case for the illegal invasion of Iraq and the subsequent deaths, dismemberments and displacements of hundreds of thousands of people, both civilian and military.
