He's So Vain

 (optional soundtrack.)

Poor Barack Obama. He went to all that trouble to break up the ragtag Occupy Wall Street movement during one hippie-punching, pepper-spraying police state week back in the fall of 2011. And now it's all come back to bite him in the ass.

 The elders of the Democratic Party thought that they'd accomplished, if not the death of OWS, at least its co-optation. After all, Obama handily won re-election the following year. But mirabile dictu!  Occupy, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Fight for 15 and other activist groups have sneaked right back in to occupy the Democratic Party itself. The national conversation has been hijacked by an FDR liberal named Bernie Sanders, who might end up not only succeeding Obama, but dealing the coup de grace to the entire Neoliberal Project of the Reagan Revolution and the Clintonoid Third Way.

Democracy is rearing its ugly head again, and Obama is reportedly very, very nervous about this whole revolution thing. Even with his legendary genius IQ -- augmented lavishly by the Deep State brains of the CIA, the NSA and the FBI  -- he never saw Bernie Sanders coming.

Empress-in-Waiting Hillary Clinton's gross corruption and incompetence has let him down, big-time. He is probably kicking himself for so ever cutely attempting to co-opt her as his Secretary of State, thereby keeping a dangerous political enemy close. Without that patronage fillip, she would only have been a First Lady, an unaccomplished Senator, and a failed 2008 presidential candidate. Without Obama's own arrogant willful blindness to her private Internet account and her use of public office to enrich her family slush fund, she might have even been fired halfway through her frequent flier marathon as his ineffectual Good Will Ambassador.

Obama has only himself to blame for the rise of Bernie Sanders and socialism as the default position of a whole lost generation of over-educated, underpaid, deeply indebted young people who have never known a day when this country has not been at war. And for that accomplishment alone, I think he should be allowed to keep his Nobel Peace Prize.

Since it would now appear unseemly to either actively campaign for Hillary Clinton, bring in Joe Biden, or directly criticize Bernie Sanders, Obama must look to other reliable sources to get his message of displeasure out. So he has turned to his exclusive cadre of journalists and opinion-writers to be his off-the-record conduits of the Obama Story he wants the public to hear.

Over the weekend, Carl Bernstein (both a White House insider and Hillary Clinton biographer) went on CNN to announce how very, very upset the president is about the ongoing bitter Democratic primary. It's hurting Obama's precious legacy. If Bernie Sanders beats Hillary, that legacy might go up in flames. Obama's corporate coup (the TPP) might be dust. His market-based health insurance kludge might morph into a single payer Medicare for All plan. Wall Street and corporate felons might actually be prosecuted instead of being granted the tax breaks and cabinet and government advisory positions to which they have become accustomed.

Therefore, said Bernstein, the White House wants all the people to realize how absolutely imperative it is that Hillary Clinton be elected to succeed Barack Obama:

 
 Obama wants to broadcast the fear-mongering message that Sanders's socialism is out of touch with mainstream America -- despite the fact that millennial voters themselves overwhelmingly identify as socialist. As Bernstein tells it on CNN, Hillary's problem is not that she accepted money from Goldman Sachs and other banks: it's that she doesn't know how to feign proper humility before the public.

 The Washington insider wisdom is that Bernie isn't electable, and Hillary isn't delectable.

In other words, she can't do the "I feel your pain" head-fake as well as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

So, cue right-of-center David Brooks, not only an esteemed member of Obama's inner circle of off-the-record pundits, but often described as the center-right president's particular favorite columnist.

Brooks wrote an elegiac piece titled "I Miss Barack Obama" in today's New York Times. The accompanying photo shows Obama wand'ring lonely as a cloud to the Oval Office, embowered in a princely burst of flowering foliage in lieu of the more obvious crown of laurels. 

  Brooks channels presidential angst in all its froth and narcissism. Barack's greatest fear is not for the dire fates of ordinary people. It's that all his genius will be for naught, given Hillary's tanking numbers, the Republican clown car, and the specter of Bernie Sanders succeeding him.

Brooks mawkishly allows that while he often has had to pretend to disagree with Obama for partisan tribal purposes, the current occupant of the White House stands head and shoulders above mere mortals.

But over the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply.

The first and most important of these is basic integrity. The Obama administration has been remarkably scandal-free. Think of the way Iran-contra or the Lewinsky scandals swallowed years from Reagan and Clinton.

There are no mass media-reported scandals because the Obama regime has been rightly described as the most secretive in modern history. We know few details of his drone assassination program, for example, or his own closed-door fundraisers, or what went on behind the scenes of the orchestrated crackdown on Occupy, or the suppression of the 9/11 report section dealing with the Saudi royal family's role in the attacks, or the suppression of the CIA torture report. And those are just the scandals that come immediately to my mind. (For a full accounting of his first term, please see the "Obama Scandals List" on my Blog Roll.)

Meanwhile, Brooks manages to destroy his own homage by displaying some unintentional colorblind racism, fawning over the Obamas as one of those "respectable" black families. Barack and Michelle have displayed "superior integrity," Brooks gushes. "You'd be happy to have them in your community." (Apparently they would be that rare black couple who would not lower Brooks's property values if they moved next door to him.)

Brooks would not like Bernie Sanders to live within a thousand miles of him, because he is "so blinded by his values that reality doesn't seem to penetrate his mind." He would rip health care away from thousands (SanderScare) and even worse, rip the wings right off the insurance raptors!  Obama, on the other hand, knows his proper place in the grand white supremacy scheme of things.  He also doesn't "wallow in the pornography of pessimism."

Obama always presents a rapturous, G-rated Pollyannish picture about how great America is, how much the economy is improving, how much he loves peace even as he rains down his bombs and orchestrates his secret coups. Because if he told the truth to people -- the truth that their lives and prospects suck because of the unfettered capitalism he enables -- then the people might just stage a revolution.

Oh, wait.

Skål, Amerika!

Just as Woodrow Wilson made the world safe for democracy, Larry David has made Bernie Sanders safe for America.

Once you've been impersonated by an A-list comic who regularly plays golf with Obama, you have finally arrived as a respected mainstream politician. Paul Krugman will even break down and write a whole column about you. OK, so I exaggerate. He actually wrote a column about Denmark, and somehow concluded that Hillary and Bernie are the same person. Or, to be more specific, he glibly turned Hillary's snarky debate remark about Denmark into a "demure" Bernie mind-meld in order to spread the message that Hillbern is better than Republicans. She is not only a progressive, she's a damned born-again socialist to boot!

Krugman boldly goes where no pundit has gone heretofore. He goes to Denmark, and proves that it is not the scary Commie place that the Beltway Thought Collective makes it out to be. It turns out that not only are those dour Danes outrageously fortunate, they rank at the very top of the global life satisfaction heap:

Denmark maintains a welfare state — a set of government programs designed to provide economic security — that is beyond the wildest dreams of American liberals. Denmark provides universal health care; college education is free, and students receive a stipend; day care is heavily subsidized. Overall, working-age families receive more than three times as much aid, as a share of G.D.P., as their U.S. counterparts.

To pay for these programs, Denmark collects a lot of taxes. The top income tax rate is 60.3 percent; there’s also a 25 percent national sales tax. Overall, Denmark’s tax take is almost half of national income, compared with 25 percent in the United States.

My published comment:

 The Nordic countries in general rank among the happiest places on earth. Our own version of the happiest place on earth is the Disney theme park. The wages are low, and the high price of admission is way out of the reach of what is still quaintly called the middle class. In that sense, Disney is a true American symbol.

Despite this being a rich country with the highest health care costs on earth, we still lack universal coverage, still rank near the bottom in morbidity and mortality. Inequality is extreme.

Scandinavian happiness is predicated not upon money and consumerism, but upon societal solidarity. Their politicians don’t wage wars, have SuperPACs, or campaign for years on end. That fascism is now gaining a toehold even in Northern Europe speaks to the contamination by Eurozone austerity and the migrant crisis spawned by American wars of aggression.

 It's no wonder that deficit hawks don’t want to hear about Scandinavia. But how ironic, their crabbily calling Bernie Sanders a grumpy Quixote as he talks about happy countries. He merely speaks the truth that we, too, could get a good thing going if we’d only tax the richest families and corporations at about the same rates that they were taxed during the Eisenhower years. You might even remember those wonder years, when Walt Disney built his empire, and the middle class reached its zenith, and all you needed to be happy was a steady job and a living wage and a secure retirement.

Skål, Bernie!

In response to another Times commenter who took umbrage at my unpatriotic dissing of Disney, I wrote:

 The price of a one-day Disney pass has been jacked up to $108 per person, while the workers employed there as characters are paid low wages and no-to-low benefits. Rich families can go to the head of the line by paying extra, or by paying down-and-out people to wait in line for them. It is truly all-American, right down to the classism and the jingoism and the buy-buy-buy mentality.

At Tivoli Gardens, Denmark's iconic amusement park, children under 8 are admitted free and adults are charged the equivalent of $15.

My point was that American and European values, and their measurements of happiness and well-being, are worlds apart.

And I personally don't know any struggling families who can afford a day at Disney World.

But I digress. Upon further reflection, I fear that my toast to Bernie may have been somewhat premature, if not downright misplaced. My Bernie-emblazoned mug of Carlsberg is not only losing its froth, it's going flatter by the minute. It seems I'd missed Bernie's TV appearance yesterday in which he declared himself A-OK with Obama's wars. How can you be a democratic socialist and a war-monger at the same time?

As always, the good folks over at the World Socialist Website have the bummer of a lowdown. From the transcript of Bernie's  interview with ABC-Disney's George Stephanopoulos, in which he dodged and weaved on how, why, when and where he would use unilateral military force:

BS: Well, I’m not going to get into hypotheticals.... I think sensible foreign policy and military policies suggest that it cannot be the United States of America alone which solves all of the world’s military…

GS: In all circumstances?

BS: Well, of course, you know, I’m not saying, you know, I don’t want to get into hypotheticals. I didn’t say in all circumstances.

The WSW's Patrick Martin is scathing in his assessment:

While Sanders is happy to denounce George W. Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq as one of the worst decisions ever made in US foreign policy, he made no reference to the devastation created by Barack Obama’s interventions in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan.
Sanders is in no sense an “antiwar” candidate. He uses demagogic condemnations of “millionaires and billionaires” and the growth of social inequality to appeal to working people and young people who are deeply opposed to American militarism, but only to divert their attention from the growing danger of the imperialist war. His support for the policy of the ruling class abroad exposes his pretense of opposing the policy of this same ruling class within the United States.
Even on the infrequent occasions when he has discussed the disastrous consequences of US policy in the Middle East, it is only from the standpoint of American nationalism, not genuine opposition to imperialist war. Once in a while, Sanders bemoans the casualties suffered by American troops or the waste of resources better used at home, but he has never indicated any sympathy for the people of the countries targeted for destruction by US military interventions.

Krugman was wrong about the Bernary mind-meld, but only insofar as it pertains to their economic policies, which are as different as FDR and Clinton. Bernie and Hillary are, unfortunately, of the same mindset as regards US militarism. Why else would he not confront her about her pathological plot to bomb Libya and the subsequent refugee crisis that it engendered?  Why else would he ignore the corruption of her family foundation, and her record billions of dollars in arms sales to despotic regimes?

So, to be a Bernie supporter or not to be?  All I can say to you is "to thine own self be true."

Meanwhile, Bernie proclaims himself so pleased with Larry David's impersonation of him that he thinks the comic can substitute for him on the stump.

But if you think Bernie tells it like it is, how about Lewis Black trying to explain Amerikan kapitalisme to a bunch of socialists from Amsterdam? This rant makes Bernie look like a centrist Democrat on Valium:

 "Pull out your gold fillings and put them on E-bay. I'm getting the &*$% out of here!"-- Lewis Black.