Leave Us Poor Plutocrats Alone!

It's been quite the week for rich and powerful people whining about how oppressed they are, hasn't it?

Most recently and famously, Celebrity Apprentident Donald Trump complained Wednesday that he feels like he's in Nazi Germany, what with that John LeCarré fan-fic of a dossier alleging that he'd enjoyed a "golden shower" from Russian prostitutes on a Moscow hotel bed once occupied by Michelle and Barack. This claim is ridiculous on its face, said Trump, because he is a well-known germophobe. And that, in turn, reveals Trump's profound scientific ignorance, given that normal urine is, if not exactly sterile, usually free of some of the nastier microbes that can make us sick.  I don't think that Donald Trump ever would have engaged prostitutes who were unable to produce certificates of health completed by the Mayo Clinic any later than five minutes ago. Moreover, I don't think that Donald Trump has ever had to pay direct cash money for sexual favors. Cash is way too contaminated.

Naturally, the dossier leakage in the national press has only helped Trump to rise, once again, in the court of public opinion. His fans are paying more attention to his persecution at the hands of the "intelligence community" than they are to the fact that he adamantly refuses to divest from his global business empire while he acts out the role of leader of the free world. 

Since oppression flows downhill as readily as any bodily effluvia, the pundits and mainstream press are beside themselves in a frenzy of victimhood at Trump's short-fingered hands. Thanks to his insults aimed directly at them, they are ignoring his big Freudian slip at the press conference, when he actually seemed to confuse the United States with his company. He as much as announced that America will hereby be known as Trumpistan, Inc: 

 As president, I could run the Trump organization, great, great company, and I could run the company—the country. I’d do a very good job [at both], but I don’t want to do that.

  So when Trump talks about draining the swamp, perhaps what he really means is that he is germophobically placing some tissue paper on the toilet seat and "stanitizing" it for his own protection.

The more he insists that he's doing America a solid, the less we're supposed to notice when the solid starts inexorably flowing downhill.

And speaking of ignorance, I think that a more apt comparison for what poor old Tweety is going through would be Stasi East Germany under Communist rule. That was the true spy state. Under Hitler, enemies of the state just tended to get killed instead of being blackmailed or discreetly graced with years and years of surveillance.

Preceding L'Affaire Golden Showers by just a few days was Hollywood's Golden Globes affair. Meryl Streep used the occasion of one of her lifetime high achiever awards to lambast Trump for his own poor "performance" imitating a disabled New York Times reporter. But forget Meryl using her pulpit to advocate for rights for disabled people and perhaps alerting the nation that the Republican Congress is always aiming to reduce or discontinue Social Security benefits for the chronically sick and disabled. On the contrary: Trump has his beady sights aimed directly at Hollywood's "diverse" group of multimillionaires and their publicists in the media. To hear Meryl Streep tell it, movie actors who were born in Canada or Africa or Israel are right on the top of Donald's basket of deportees.

She didn't give one mention to the hundreds of poor Central American mothers and children who, fleeing drug and gang violence in their home countries, are currently locked up in so-called family detention centers. She didn't mention that regardless of his lip service to "Dreamers," President Obama has deported more Latinos than in all previous administrations combined.

Instead, Streep informed her audience that were it not for her and other professional actors, we poor slobs would never know what it's really like to be a poor slob. On second thought, she wasn't really talking to the TV audience, was she? She was virtue-signaling to her liberal peers:

 An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.

Like many Democratic surrogates criticizing Trump, Meryl Streep daintily refused to actually call him out by name. And while she rightly advocated for a strong independent press to hold Trump to account, she has never done likewise during the Obama regime, which has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Maybe this oversight had something to do with Meryl being exhausted after partying into the wee, wee hours with Barack and Michelle and hundreds of other aggrieved A-Listers just two nights before the Globes extravaganza. 

And who, really, can be more oppressed by Donald Trump than the current president himself? Obama might have partied hearty at the White House over the weekend, but his whole political party has just imploded. Millions of people might lose their health coverage, and much of the population stands to become even more impoverished under direct oligarchic rule. But to hear the hagiographic mainstream media tell it, this is all about the destruction of Obama's precious personal legacy. His star-studded, golden-voiced farewell address in Chicago was so maudlin a performance that even he was reduced to tears by it. Or so I've read - I forgot to remember to watch it.

And then there's the parade of plutocratic creatures being "grilled" by the Senate this week in preparation for the rubber-stamping of their cabinet appointments. Xenophobic reprobate Jeff Sessions, who aims to selectively safeguard our civil rights as Trump's attorney general, used his biracial granddaughter as a human shield at his confirmation hearing as his "history of making racist statements" was carefully differentiated from any specific racist actions. Plus, he is an equal opportunity bigot: he opposes legal immigration as heartily as he opposes illegal immigration. His cordial Democratic colleague Dianne Feinstein did the obligatory civil rights concern-trolling before she praised him for his fealty to the "intelligence community." So all is fair in hate and war. He looks like a shoo-in for the job.

 Oil magnate Rex Tillerson, meanwhile, prissily fretted over his own privacy rights when questioned about his finances and tax returns, while at the same time casually admitting that, as potential Secretary of State, he has never even discussed foreign policy specifics with his new boss. Because of his cordial history with Vladimir Putin and the epidemic of Russophobia bipartisanly plaguing Congress at the moment, however, Tillerson doesn't look like a done deal quite yet. The members of the senate judiciary committee nonetheless carefully kept their grilling on Exxon-Mobil's long sordid history of global pollution and plunder and corporate welfare and political bribery to an absolute discreet minimum.

And last but not least, and to demonstrate that they can do a bravura performance every bit as well as Meryl Streep, the downtrodden millionaire Democrats of the Senate staged another one of their "rare" protests in the wee overnight hours. It seems that the Republicans have filibuster-proofed the repeal of Obamacare. As the New York Times reported it,

One by one, Democrats rose to voice their objections. Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington said that Republicans were “stealing health care from Americans.” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said he was voting no “because health care should not just be for the healthy and wealthy.”

The presiding officer, Senator Cory Gardner, Republican of Colorado, repeatedly banged his gavel and said the Democrats were out of order because “debate is not allowed during a vote.”

No Democrat, of course, actually brought his or her emotive acting to the level of introducing a true single payer health bill as the most cost-effective and humane replacement for the kludge known as the "Affordable" Care Act.

After all, they're only there in supporting roles.

There's so much elitist trickle-down going on that we regular folk will be lucky to catch even one golden beneficent drop of it.