Virtue-Signalers Gone Wild

The blue wave forecast to wash over Congress like the storm surge from a hurricane has just been downgraded to a torpid depression. Democrats, if they do take the lower House, will trickle in like a shallow babbling brook, while the Senate looks to be complete loss. Or so say the ever-unreliable polls.

Is this doom-saying simply a clever way to get voters, whether they be  disaffected or smug, to the polls next month? We'll soon find out, but in the meantime, those intrepid Democrats are doubling down on their phony moralizing as energetically as Donald Trump is doubling down on his mendacity about the Big Alien Invasion from Mexico. To hear him tell it, there are not only Hispanics in that caravan, but Muslims and rapists of all nations.

So you'd think, wouldn't you, that Democrats would react to opinion polls by offering to give people what they want, nice things like universal health care, decent jobs with good pay, and affordable housing and education.

Nah.

They'll keep doubling down on how patriotic and virtuous they are compared to Trump. The fact that they're haranguing voters about "values" to the exclusion of actual social programs shows just how reactionary they have become. It used to be only conservatives who were so hung up on values. Republicans are so obsessed with values, in fact, that they hold an annual confab in Washington called the Values Voters Summit. So when Democrats try to beat them at their own right-wing game, they have no choice but to go further right themselves. Witness Donald Trump's own escalating neofascist rhetoric and policy agendas.

It's not that the Democrats don't recognize the trap they've created for themselves. Many liberal pundits are latter-day lackadaisical John the Baptists, drawling that the end is nigh and therefore "we" should stop obsessing so much over Trump and instead, cling to our American Values.

John the Baptist - Hieronymus Bosch

Take Charles Blow of the New York Times as a case in point. He led off his latest jeremiad with

One thing that I find profoundly disappointing about modern liberalism, particularly as it now stands in opposition to Trumpism, is the degree to which it is reactive, governed by what is being done to it rather than its own positive vision.

And Blow proceeded to fill the rest of the column with the usual laundry list of all the awful things that Trump has done this week, not least of which was slandering the Democrats as a "mob." 

You can almost see the smoke coming out of his ears as he types out the revolutionary words in the comfort of his corner office:

Well, count me among the mob, if that means people who stand in opposition to Trump’s degradation of the country in all ways. If the mob stands up for women and stands up to the National Rifle Association, I want in. If the mob hates corruption and loves the increasing diversity of this country, then it is for me. If the mob finds it abhorrent that during the same week that it became clear that a Washington Post columnist had been killed in a Saudi Arabian consulate, Trump praised an American politician who assaulted a journalist, then yes, yes, yes to the mob.

My submitted comment, which was rejected by the Times: 

How about single payer health care? Polls show that it is wildly popular among whole mobs of Democratic, Republican and independent voters. The main problem, of course, is that it's very unpopular with the wealthy donors who've already forked over record-breaking billions to fund the midterms. The rich get what they pay for, and they don't want Medicare for All.

This makes no sense.  Because if you want the hoi polloi to get all fired up about "liberal values", then you must first ensure that the voters are healthy.  On top of an estimated 30 million uninsured Americans,  there are tens of millions more with such junky insurance that they can still go bankrupt if they get sick.

Some economists predict that in another 15 years, health care costs will suck up the entire average household budget and actually surpass today's unaffordable housing costs. Are not the lack of a federal guaranteed housing policy and universal health care deliberate, immoral, corrupt and longstanding political decisions? Is it a liberal value that increasing numbers of people have been dying deaths of despair since the 2008 financial collapse?

What about joining a mob demanding that we divert those trillions of dollars spent on the bloated military toward improving the lives of our own citizens?
There was nary a mention by Resistance, Inc. of the Women's March on the Pentagon held over the weekend. 

Perhaps that's because war is indeed an all-American value, if only for the oligarchic mobsters who profit so handsomely by it.

Liberal pundit Paul Krugman, meanwhile, is following the Democratic script of just now noticing that Saudi Arabia is a bad actor because it murdered an important Washington Post columnist, an event which provides some much needed glue for elite journalistic solidarity and a box of verbal dummy bullets for their Resistance, Inc. movement of social justice for the moneyed professional class and their mutual hatred for Donald Trump, and only Donald Trump.

The president not only personally profits from the Saudi Arabian autocracy, he is lying through his teeth about the sales of arms being necessary to protect American jobs! It is downright immoral and unheard of!

You can almost envision the Cotton Mather brimstone setting Krugman's grizzled beard on fire as he pecks out these righteous words:

O.K., it's not news that the religious right has prostrated itself at Donald Trump's feet. But Trump's attempt to head off retaliation for Saudi crimes by claiming that there are big economic rewards to staying friendly with killers -- and the willingness of his political allies to embrace his logic - nonetheless represents a new stage in the debasement of America.
It's not just that Trump's claims about the number of jobs at stake -- first it was 40,000, then 450,000, then 600,000, then a million -- are lies. Even if the claims were true, we're the United States; we're supposed to be a moral beacon for the world, not a mercenary nation willing to abandon its principles if the money is good.

I suppose it's not really fair to accuse Krugman of abandoning the journalistic principles of fair-mindedness and putting things into context, because he is not really a journalist. He's an economist hired to parrot and preach the talking points of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party.

I had better luck with Times censors accepting the following comment, although they did carefully hold it back from publication for seven hours, until the wee hours of this morning when all good and righteous people were safely asleep in their beds: 

Yes, Trump is a dishonest blowhard, but to present him as some sort of hypocritical outlier in the longstanding special relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia is a bit much.

Wikileaks revealed that although Sec. Clinton in 2009 had called Saudi Arabia the major backer of terrorist groups, including a Qaeda, this knowledge didn't prevent the Obama administration from selling these murderous autocrats $29.4 billion in weapons in 2016.

As Obama's Undersecretary of Defense, Jim Miller, bragged at the celebratory press briefing: "This will positively impact the U.S. economy and further advance the President's commitment to create jobs by increasing exports. According to industry experts, this agreement will support more than 50,000 American jobs. It will engage 600 suppliers in 44 states and provide $3.6 billion in annual economic impact on the U.S. economy. This will support jobs not only in the aerospace sector but also in our manufacturing base and support chain, which are all crucial for sustaining our national defense."

Wow. As the great I.F. Stone acerbically noted in 1968 during the mendacious U.S. war on Vietnam, "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."

There's been a whole lot of smoking going on for decades, if not centuries, so it's gratifying, in a bitter sort of way, to finally have a president who lies so often and so ineptly that catching him out is virtual child's play.

Homegrown Hate, Global Chaos

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.

Hillary's Hideous Honesty

 You can take the woman out of the authoritarian New York Times, but you can't take the authoritarian New York Times out of the woman.

Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor ever to be hired and fired by the Paper of Record, has a new gig writing a bi-weekly column on politics for the centrist Guardian. That is neoliberal code for writing a bi-weekly press release for Hillary Clinton.

In Monday's offering, Abramson touts Hillary's "shocking honesty". Clinton's problem is not corruption, Abramson claims. Her problem is a lack of transparency about her own innate decency. Plus, Hillary is a victim of sexism. Jill should know. 

Meanwhile, the smarmy Hillaphilia practically jumps off the page at you:

The yardsticks I use for measuring a politician’s honesty are pretty simple. Ever since I was an investigative reporter covering the nexus of money and politics, I’ve looked for connections between money (including campaign donations, loans, Super Pac funds, speaking fees, foundation ties) and official actions. I’m on the lookout for lies, scrutinizing statements candidates make in the heat of an election.

The connection between money and action is often fuzzy. Many investigative articles about Clinton end up “raising serious questions” about “potential” conflicts of interest or lapses in her judgment. Of course, she should be held accountable. It was bad judgment, as she has said, to use a private email server. It was colossally stupid to take those hefty speaking fees, but not corrupt. There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.

See my previous post about a quid pro quo not being a necessity for influence peddling and corruption to occur. Jill Abramson has obviously never delved into Zephyr Teachout's masterful Corruption in America.

But just for the sake of honesty, let's take Abramson at her word. Although she doesn't use it as an example, Hillary's painful honesty about endemic American corruption and brutality shines through loud and clear in the following State Department cable, released by Wikileaks in December 2009:

"Saudia Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan and other support groups." -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who then went on to complain that the Saudis only act against terrorists when their own country is threatened. 

Whereupon she wasted no time in completing the sale of billions of dollars' worth of lethal weapons to Saudi Arabia, which has since openly and honestly used  them them to slaughter innocent civilians in the United States' proxy war against Yemen. Whether any arms were also spirited by the Saudis to such fundamentalist terror groups as ISIS is still unknown.

Hillary's deal with the Saudis was not a secret backroom accomplishment by any stretch of the imagination. It was totally, boastfully transparent.  Although both Hillary and her boss, Obama, were safely out of town enjoying the winter holidays while the actual papers were being signed, her Neocon minion Victoria Nuland held a totally open and honest press briefing about the sale. During one foggy Christmas Week, Santa and a whole retinue of his right jolly old elves came to Foggy Bottom to have their say.

The bureaucrats doing the honors, and the reporters basking in the honors, sounded absolutely merry and giddy. Whether they were drunk on booze or whether they were simply drunk on power/access to power is anyone's guess. From the transcript: 

NULAND: Good afternoon, everybody. Before we do our regular daily briefing, we have a special briefing today on U.S. arms sales to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. With us today, we have Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro, and we have Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Miller.

So without further ado, Assistant Secretary Shapiro.

QUESTION: Can we attribute the on-time nature of this briefing to the fact that someone from the Pentagon is here? (Laughter.)

MS. NULAND: Absolutely. We have military discipline – (laughter).

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SHAPIRO: Well, thank you everyone for coming this afternoon. And as Toria mentioned, I’m joined by Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Dr. Jim Miller.

As you may recall, in October 2010, I officially announced the Administration’s plan to sell to Saudi Arabia a significant defense package that would include advanced F-15 fighter aircraft and helicopters. We are pleased to announce that over this past weekend, the United States and Saudi Arabia signed a letter of offer and acceptance for the sale of up to 84 advanced F-15SA fighter aircraft. It also includes upgrades to its current fleet of 70 F-15 aircraft, as well as munitions, spare parts, training, maintenance, and logistics.

This sale is worth $29.4 billion. These F-15SA aircraft, manufactured by the Boeing company, will be among the most sophisticated and capable aircraft in the world. This agreement serves to reinforce the strong and enduring relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. It demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a strong Saudi defense capability as a key component to regional security.

Miller went on to claim that the sale would "advance U.S. interests" (read: bloat the obscene profits of Boeing, chief beneficiary of the Export-Import Bank boosted by Clinton and decried by her rival Bernie Sanders.)

 It would, Miller continued, "send a strong message to countries in the region that the United States is committed to stability in the Gulf and the broader Middle East." (read: better watch out, Yemeni wedding parties and Doctors Without Borders hospitals and mothers and children who have the nerve to exist in the buffer zone between the Saudis and countries like Syria and Iraq and Iran and Libya.)

Although he glossed over Hillary's brutally honest, yet secret, assessment that Saudi Arabia is the major financier of terror in that region, Miller himself was brutally honest in admitting that the arms sale was all about the brutal greed of everybody concerned:

 It will enhance Saudi Arabia’s ability to deter and defend against external threats to its sovereignty. It will advance interoperability between the air forces of our two countries through joint training and exercises. And lastly, this agreement will positively impact the U.S. economy and further advance the President’s commitment to create jobs by increasing exports. According to industry experts, this agreement will support more than 50,000 American jobs. It will engage 600 suppliers in 44 states and provide $3.5 billion in annual economic impact to the U.S. economy. This will support jobs not only in the aerospace sector but also in our manufacturing base and support chain, which are all crucial for sustaining our national defense.

War is only hell for the grunts who get killed and maimed fighting it. It is pure heaven for the tax-exempt "job creators" and investors who make tons of money from megatons of death and destruction every single minute of every single day. 

And in Hillaryland, every day is Christmas.

In the spirit of sincere honesty preceding her run for the presidency, husband Bill forthrightly admitted that Saudi bigwigs had returned the favoritism and gifted the Clinton Foundation with millions of dollars in "charitable" donations. The Clintons have transparently decided to keep the money from an aider and abettor of terrorism just because they are so above-board and deserving of our trust.

Ethics? They don't need any stinking ethics when they are absolutely shameless in their honesty.