Biden Takes Classified Documents... Seriously

 Whereas when Donald Trump smuggles top-secret papers out of the White House, he takes them very capriciously. He apparently just crumpled them up and thoughtlessly tossed them in boxes with other household miscellany.  Then the boxes got spread, willy-nilly, all over the tacky, garish grounds of MAGA-Largo.

Joe Biden, then the outgoing vice president, on the other hand carefully folded and sorted classified papers before responsibly removing them from the White House and then securely locking them in a closet in his think tank. That should prove to everyone's satisfaction how thoughtful and serious he is. 

And to prove just what a down-home regular guy Joe also is, he even folksily stashed some of the stolen papers in the humble garage of his Delaware home. He reportedly did not store them in his beach house, possibly because, unlike Trump, he knows the dangers of flooding from hurricanes, not to mention the damage that salty air can do to exposed paper. 

Feigning surprise that a team of his own lawyers just happened upon the first batch of papers in a closet during the routine performance of their professional duties, Biden scoffed during a Mexico summit press conference, in a non-admission admission that "People know that I take classified information seriously."

As Biden is fond of insisting before many a misleading statement: "No joke". He gives you his word as a Biden that he has no idea what's even in the purloined classified documents. As long as he knows people who know, what more do you want of him?  If you're not one of those people who know, then you ain't human. The same way that if you're an African-American and you didn't vote for him, you ain't Black.

The weird similarity between the discovery of Trump's stolen documents and Biden's is that both were accomplished by whole teams of lawyers - rather than, say office assistants or household cleaners. Either the job description of lawyers has radically changed, or else mere servants simply aren't good enough for presidents. Just being speculative here, but when you're a former or current president with a consciousness of guilt, it seems that using whole armies of expensive private attorneys to ethically discover your booty before the cops do is a fine way of shielding yourself you from any culpability -  before, during or after the crime.

But, hidden deep within the New York Times article on the second garage discovery, lies the real crux of this story. 

The inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter, is a type aimed at helping Attorney General Merrick B. Garland decide whether to appoint a special counsel, like the one investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents and failure to return all of them.

The all-too-convenient discovery of the stolen documents on two of Biden's properties may give the Justice Department just the excuse it needs not to prosecute Trump for his own thefts as they go through the serious motions of investigating Biden.* They probably don't have a case. It would be uncomfortable for Garland to prosecute The Donald without also charging Uncle Joe. The Republicans would only play their hypocrisy card were Biden to be given a pass when Trump went to trial. These two sticky-fingered presidents may just end up canceling each other right out. We can put it behind us, turn the page, go forward and not backward.

It's also possible that Team Biden simply created the classified documents drama as a way to deflect attention from his son Hunter's own legal troubles and imminent GOP attacks and congressional hearings. By coming clean on his own misdeeds, Joe Biden aims to be seen as seriously and nobly and pre-emptively copping to innocent mistakes that were made, in an aw-shucks kind of way. He's shielding his kid by pretending to fall on his own sword.

Since it is still theoretically possible to fool some of the people most of the time, or at least most of the people some of the time, Biden can even use his trademark motto ("Here's the deal, Folks!") to market the latest diversionary product in his Battle For the Soul of Our Nation franchise.

Dems Vs. GOP: The Play's the Thing, Or "You Can Bring a Sword to a Gunfight!"

*After I posted this, Garland did indeed appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden's stash of classified documents. The appointment gives the appearance of fairness and equity with Trump's own ongoing special counsel probe. It's probably only a matter of time before someone dubs this "GarageGate" - because Biden's immediate goofy defense argument was that his expensive Corvette is in the same hallowed space as the second stash of documents. And if he keeps his precious car so secure, then the documents adjacent to the car must be secure, too. Seriously.

Hot Planet, Warmed-Over Trump

The post-midterms punditry about Donald Trump falls into two basic categories:

1) Trump is finished. He has no more friends, no more Rupert Murdoch media empire. no more megadonors. Plus, his presidential announcement sounded weak and whiney.

2) Trump is still so all-powerful that he will effectively run the House of Representatives.

And even if you put your full faith and credit in Door #1, there's still a chance to both have your Trump-fear and eat it too. That is because monsters are at their most vicious when they are weak and when they are cornered. 

As I wrote in a (rejected) New York Times comment on Maureen Dowd's latest Sunday column detailing the latest act in this deliberately drawn-out psychodrama (the naming of a Very Special Prosecutor):

 It's so much easier for the media to alternately ridicule Trump as a powerless weakling in one breath and still swear that he is the satanic destroyer of democracy in the next. Maybe he wouldn't have gotten those 70 million votes in 2016 had not the for-profit cable channels and news outlets forced him down our throats 24/7.

And the media mavens are still at it. You just can't quit him, for the basic reason that continuing to talk about him absolves you from the responsibility of examining the conditions that elected him in the first place. They include, but are not limited to, the mass offshoring of jobs to low-wage countries, the endless military adventures abroad while austerity was imposed at home, and the corporate capture of both legacy parties and their media partners, thus making the US a de facto oligarchy. Those 70 million votes are at least in part a giant middle finger to the ruling class, or as they are also referred to, "The Blob." And here I was, so looking forward to an ode to her good pal Nancy Pelosi from our esteemed columnist. Let me quote comic Michelle Wolf in this regard: "You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? You act like you hate him, but I think you really love him. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him.”

Speaking of Nancy Pelosi, does anyone really believe that she won't still be pulling most if not all the strings of the House minority? The first possible clue might be her scoring some luxe physical office space as befits the status of Queen Emeritus. Even though no longer second in line to the presidential throne come January, this tenacious faux-feminist will cling to her power and prestige, or what she herself euphemizes as "influence" as a supposedly humble rank-and-filer still privy to the inside-trading dope that made her so wealthy. At the very least she will be a regular star on all the Sunday talk shows, the venue where official policies and discourse are set and finessed by "guests" who never disclose the corporations and weapons dealers that are financing them. Why would they? They are elites talking to other elites. The audience, such as it is, be damned. 

In other news that might sound good on the surface, the US hegemon was so chagrined at beating both Russia and China in the Colossal Fossil contest for worst polluter in the world that it has reversed course at the UN COP27 summit, and agreed in principle to join a global fund to compensate the developing countries which have borne the brunt of US-based pollution. And here we were being told that Trump was the only reason that America had lost its alleged superior standing in the world! Of course, the agreement is purely aspirational, not to mention being a very thinly-disguised propaganda gimmick. 

The loss and damage agreement hammered out in this Red Sea resort town makes clear that payments are not to be seen as an admission of liability. The deal calls for a committee with representatives from 24 countries to work over the next year to figure out exactly what form the fund should take, which mcountries and financial institutions should contribute, and where the money should go. Many of the other details are still to be determined.

It's hard enough for the pundits champing at the bit for a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024 to gloss over Uncle Joe's own journey in fossil-hood, having now completed 80 years on earth. For despite being very unpopular, Biden did eke out one win and one near-win in the mid-terms. A fossil doing battle against a whimpering zombie with a combover is just the theatrical trick to keep the proles distracted from boring existential stuff like the climate catastrophe.  The debate will once again pit a climate believer against a climate denier, with ideology substituting for any solutions that might put a damper on predatory capitalism.

The world drowns and burns, and meanwhile all that these alleged COP27 experts can come up with is choosing a committee to study the problem. Therefore you are directed to aim all your angst at the 2024 horserace. 

 They hope we won't notice when Exxon-Mobil, Duke Energy and other Colossal Fossils are named to the UN Climate Study committee in the interest of balance and fairness. These, and not the victims of pollution themselves, are grotesquely still considered to be valuable "stakeholders" whose money-fueled emissions deserve to be heard and respected even as people choke on them.

At the end of the day and at the end of the world, they are the only ones who really matter in this de facto oligarchy we live in. Why else would Joe Biden insanely grant blanket immunity to the Saudi oil despot who ordered the grisly murder of a US journalist?  

Ugh

Keeping the Trump Franchise Alive

 Something must be off with my aghastitude meter, because for the life of me I just can't get excited about the ongoing saga of the FBI raid on Donald Trump's Florida estate, in search of allegedly stolen top secret classified documents.

Rumor had it that the G-Men were tipped off by an insider that Trump was hoarding the nuclear codes. This is despite numerous mainstream media reports, when he was in the White House within physical reach of the Big Red Phone, that his alarmed minions were keeping all this info out of his reckless hands. He was apparently in the habit of flushing sensitive stuff in the toilet, anyway. And besides, if he'd really wanted to sell the codes to the highest bidder, you'd think he would have struck a deal by now.

 The only thing we should really fear about nuclear war is the recent reckless provocations of the United States against both Russia and China. The manufactured fear that we'd get nuked got so intense, in fact, that New York City had taken to running public service announcements about what to do in the event of Armageddon.

 If you, like me, are of a certain age and vividly remember those useless classroom "duck and cover" drills during the First Cold war, you'll be happy to know that you can now save yourselves the modern way, without having to tax your knees and spine. All you have to do is go indoors and shut all your windows before lowering the blinds so that Russian or Chinese missiles won't see you. Or so that nobody else can see you either, given that you are also instructed to remove all your clothing and place it in a bag to contain radioactive dust. Then you should switch on the TV and await further instructions from experts who are sheltering in place in their network studios or underground bunkers. These instructions assume, of course, that you are not among the growing number of homeless people in the United States.

As it is right now, as I write this, turning on the TV or logging on to your favorite mainstream news site will subject you to one of two images: either a scowling Donald Trump raising his defiant fist, or numerous ground and aerial shots of Mar-a-Lago.

Given that the FBI raid and its wall-to-wall media coverage has boosted Trump ten points ahead of his closest GOP primary rival (Ron De Santis), he might consider renaming his club MAGA Largo and bragging that he is the reincarnation of that other embattled film noir hero hotelier Humphrey Bogart, holed up in his own Florida club, fighting off both the cops and the various sleazy gangsters and stool pigeons lurking about the place.

In actuality, Trump is simply the buffoon he always was. His coup attempt largely failed both because of his stupidity and lack of foresight and those of his inner circle of gangsters and stool pigeons. As historian and author (The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order) Gary Gerstle writes, 

The January 6 committee has now revealed how far Donald Trump was willing to go to prevent the peaceful and lawful transfer of power from his presidency to that of Joe Biden. Yet, his deadly serious attempt to upend American democracy also had a slapdash quality to it, reflecting Trump’s own impulsive nature and his reliance on a group of schemers – Rudy Giuliani, Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, Roger Stone and John Eastman among them – of limited ability. It is not entirely surprising that Trump’s coup failed.

Another brazen GOP action, however, has succeeded – this one engineered by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, whose chess-like skills of political strategizing put to shame Trump’s powerful but limited game of bluster and bullying. The act to which I refer is McConnell’s theft of Barack Obama’s 2016 appointment to the supreme court, a radical deed that has dimmed somewhat in public consciousness even as it proved crucial to fashioning a rightwing supreme court willing to overturn Roe v Wade and to destabilize American politics and American democracy in the process.

So as I see it, there are several "takeaways" from both the raid and the corporate media's overwrought coverage of it. The first is that just because Trump is a doofus doesn't mean that his political rivals in the Democratic Party and the Biden Administration are all that intelligent either. Did they really think that going after him on suspicion of violating the Espionage Act and stealing papers would not boost his poll numbers, his cult of victimhood, and instigate a rightwing backlash against the rightwing FBI? Or, did they stupidly assume that the raid and possible resulting indictments would make him the ideal "pied piper" candidate for the doddering Joe Biden or other weak Wall Street candidate to easily trounce in 2024? Remember how well that cynical ploy worked out for the Dems in 2016, thanks in no small part to Bill Clinton urging Trump to run.

It seems odd that the Feds only got around to getting their search warrant a year and a half after these highly sensitive documents had gone missing. They were hiding in plain sight all along, or at least were in a secure location known to the authorities.

 The whole scenario could have been lifted straight from Edgar Allan Poe's classic tale of duplicates and duplicity, The Purloined Letter, plotted around a mysterious document rumored to expose the French queen's indiscretions and thus making her and various VIPS prone to blackmail and extortion. It isn't the content or even the existence of the stolen document that matters in this story. It's the suspicion that it does matter. It's the speculation of what it contains, if it does exist. It's the assigning of any importance or meaning of the recovered (or not) document.

 And we'll probably never learn about the content (or not) of Trump's purloined documents and perhaps compromising emails, photos or other intel. Censorious elites in fear of being embarrassed or compromised can and will always claim that transparency would only endanger "national security" and reward China, Russia, Iran or whatever enemy they can come up with next. Life imitates art in this case: one of the alleged documents sought and/or seized by the FBI involves the French president. Where's C. Auguste Dupin when you need him to untangle this latest mess of intra-oligarchic intrigue? Instead of the raiding FBI goons ruining Trump's day, perhaps an all-American rumpled cigar-chomping Columbo-type detective showing up at MAGA Largo HQ to flatter Trump would probably have gotten much better results than the elite army of J. Edgar Hoover has, so far anyway.

Could Trump himself have avoided all this drama if he had simply converted his palace into his official presidential library with the help of the National Archivist, as Barack Obama and others have done? Not that Obama's presidential library will contain the actual physical documents, but only an assurance that "digital" copies of same will be released, sometime in the vague and distant future. Trump's biggest offense, perhaps, is that he isn't a reader or a frequenter of libraries. He's not even offering the excuse that he is hard at work on his memoirs and thus needs copious official research material to refresh his memory and ensure accuracy, if not correct spelling or the editing out of numerous superfluous exclamation points. 

Donald Trump should be the least of our worries. The Supreme Court, the CIA, McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, the White House - they are only the first villains who come to mind. 

The MAGA Largo saga appears to be the Establishment's second act in the drama leading up to the November midterms, when both sides of the Duopoly would be perfectly fine with a banishment of both Trump fans and what's left of the progressive left. With the centrist liberal class's defense of both the police state, and their actual or attempted censorship of independent media voices, they have chosen to ignore that their FBI heroes also just raided the home of the leader of the African Black Socialists as well as other unnamed targets, accusing them of conspiring with Russia in order to undermine American democracy, interfere with the political process and worst of all offenses against neoliberal decency, "sow division." among citizens with their anti-war rhetoric. As reported by the World Socialist Website,

The APSP’s only activities noted in the indictment consist of holding rallies in various American cities opposing the “Genocide of African People in the United States” and making public statements denouncing US-NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine, while expressing political sympathy for Russia.

The case has all the hallmarks of a political frame-up targeting a political organization for its opposition to the US-NATO war against Russia. It points to an attempt to intimidate and criminalize opposition to the war more broadly.

It's gotten to the ridiculous point that any criticism of war and our leaders' reckless provocations of war, of censorship, and of the police state will get you labeled a Trump sympathizer or a fascist. They're gaslighting us not with expert propaganda, but with the equivalent of nitrous oxide. Their narratives are meant to manufacture fear and submission, but they're full of sound and furious silliness, signifying nothing so much as their own desperation. Their slapstick comedy would make us laugh if it weren't also so damned dangerous.

 

Whaddya Say, Boys - Should We Flush It Or Steal It?

 

Brace Yourselves For a Bracing 2022

 I know it's early days yet, but my nomination for the most annoying phrase of 2022 is "bracing for."

In lieu of paying people to isolate and quarantine during the worst outbreak of Covid-19 yet, our leaders are instructing us to simply brace ourselves for the inevitable. People will simply have to sicken and die if capitalism is to survive. So take one for the team, Proles. Go back to work and school. Take a tip from Joe Biden, who reassured us just the other day that we have every reason to be "optimistic about 2020." After all, if you heard him say that, it means that you survived the First Plague Year and that you are still alive, even if just barely.

 Uncle Joe is adhering perfectly to the modern job description of US presidents. To wit: Always Campaign, Never Govern. Leave the governing and policy formation to the billionaire donor class and to the Pentagon and the CIA. 

So I say give the poor guy a break. Since he was effectively prevented from physically campaigning during the final year of this country's most recent money-soaked perpetual campaign, that's all the more reason for him to go full Proust and search for lost time. He has every reason to be retroactively hopeful about 2020, because his depressing promise to donors that nothing would fundamentally change under his watch is what paradoxically propelled him to his less than stellar victory over Donald Trump.  

Since that miracle occurred, can you really blame him for continuing to indulge in such magical-thinking episodes as insisting that unvaccinated young children will be safe in their unventilated school buildings at the very same time he claims that this is a pandemic of The Willfully Unvaccinated? If he admitted that the current outbreak of the Omicron variant is directly attributable to the parallel pandemic of windfall Wall Street profits and super-spreading corporate greed, not to mention his own failure to prepare and to protect the country, then his snow-job might lose what little magic it still retains. This is despite social media going nuts and describing him as a "bad-ass" for bravely allowing snow to fall upon his heavily guarded self as he alit from Air Force One during this week's blizzard. It's called bracing oneself for low approval ratings amongst multiple bracing catastrophes - in lieu of actually doing anything to help people.

If, Biden insinuates, you can't be optimistic about the fortunes of the weaponized oligarchy, then please just accept your fate so as to appease the mightiest of them all, The Almighty Guy in the Sky. “There’s a lot of reason to be hopeful in 2020. But for God’s sake, please take advantage of what is available,” Biden scolded.

The  other thing that "we" are all supposedly bracing for is the dreaded anniversary of the Capitol Riot, a/k/a the attempted Fascist Coup. They are doing their utmost to make January Sixth the most awesome holy day of national obligation to come around year after year after year since September Eleventh.

Joe Biden will mark the new solemn day of remembrance and fear with a campaign event cast as a  major speech to the Nation - not about improving people's lives, mind you - but about Speaking Truth to Power, carefully limited to Donald Trump's lies. He will not, for example  (as two sources dished to Reuters), touch the voting rights crisis with a ten foot pole.

Good Catholic that he is, Biden should know that January Sixth is also the Feast of the Epiphany, or what Christians used to mark as Twelfth Night back when there was still a long Yuletide season and people weren't forced back to work after only one or two legal days off for the holidays. Besides the name of the day marking the Three Kings' legendary homage to the infant Jesus after following the star of Bethlehem, "epiphany" also describes "a moment when you suddenly see or understand something in a very new or clear way."

And notwithstanding the ruling class's apparent failure to see the Capitol riot and attempted coup not only as a result of Donald Trump's corruption and incitement to violence but at least partly as a manifestation of the legitimate angst of the working class, said working class certainly has signaled its own long-delayed epiphany about how badly neoliberalism has screwed them over for the last 40-plus years. They are quitting their jobs in unprecedented numbers.

 The most recent Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) reveals that a record 4.5 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in November, an increase of more than 380,000 from October 2021. Most of those finally deciding to take this job and shove it were employed in the low-paying hospitality and service sectors, which now advertise the most job openings in the country. At the same time as "the Great Resignation," however, more than six million Americans have gotten new jobs, which ostensibly pay better wages and offer more benefits. After nearly half a century, labor is finally gaining the upper hand again.

No wonder Biden is nostalgic for 2020, when the pandemic and the ruling class's refusal to handle it has rightly weakened the ruling class and strengthened the resolve of the rest of us, shifting our priorities so inexorably that the erstwhile Movers and Shakers are bracing themselves for the Great Revolt following the Great Resignation.

Never ones to let such a serious crisis go to waste, though, they will no doubt pair the January Sixth anniversary with the Nine-Eleven Anniversary to justify the imposition of even more surveillance and repression upon the citizenry, which as a body are simply not going to take any more of it.

Biden can nonsensically call the slowly collapsing ruling order a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" till he's blue in the face, but his swirling, scapegoating blizzard of fear-mongering, alternating with the obligatory insipid platitudes, makes crystal clear to the vast majority of us just what their vile agenda truly is.

Ask yourselves this: why have more 700 alleged Capitol rioters been arrested, but the supposedly reviled and existentially threatening Instigator-in-Chief not only remains free, but continues to grow rich and powerful while holding his political rallies? Could it be because Trump is essentially just the oppositional wing of the ruling oligarchy, and vital to the liberal, "Democratic" party side, because he makes them look so good by comparison? 

Vigilantism and militia movements in service to the ruling class are not just the bailiwick of the right wing faction. As chillingly headlined in the Jan. 5th edition of the New York Times:

While the Justice Department has called the inquiry one of the largest in its history, traditional law enforcement officials have not been acting alone. Working with information from online sleuths who style themselves as “Sedition Hunters,” the authorities have made more than 700 arrests — with little sign of slowing down.

The government estimates that as many as 2,500 people who took part in the events of Jan. 6 could be charged with federal crimes. That includes more than 1,000 incidents that prosecutors believe could be assaults....

But a big question hangs over the prosecutions: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?

So far, the department has provided no public indication of the degree to which it might be pursuing a case against former President Donald J. Trump and the circle of his allies who helped inspire the chaos with their baseless claims of election fraud. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is scheduled to give a speech on Wednesday, one day before the anniversary of the attack on the Capitol, but is not expected to provide any signals about the direction of the department’s investigation. A spokeswoman said he would not address any specific cases or individuals.

It's all about surveilling, intimidating and controlling the masses of people. The rich and powerful make no secret of despising regular people, whom they find convenient to pit against one another by virtue of their alleged cultural differences and political allegiances. They have taken to admitting that their concern about the threat to democracy has nothing to do with the ongoing threat to the lives and livelihoods of actual people.

If the title ("Is Democracy Failing and Putting Our Economic System at Risk?) of a recent Brookings Institution (a neoliberal Democratic Party-aligned think tank) paper doesn't make what the elites are truly bracing for clear enough for mere mortals, then the lead paragraph, penned by a Harvard Business School poobah, certainly should:

"I think the decline of democracy is a mortal threat to the legitimacy and health of capitalism."

Since democracy and capitalism are defined as the exact same thing according to neoliberal ideology, the Demos, or people. are not actually part of this pathocratic equation, are they?

The Brookings Paper, by the way, was produced in conjunction with the neoconservative United States Democracy Center, whose own chilling mission statement is heavy on weaponized police protection of oligarchs to protect them from the Demos. Its board of advisers is a rogues' gallery of Bush-era Iraq War architects, surveillance privateers, military brass and GOP bigwigs who are now finding unabashed common cause with centrist Democrats. This should give absolute lie to the controlled media narrative of "divided government" and congressional gridlock. 

For as long as the bipartisan protect racket can embrace Trump as their main scapegoat, as long as they can delay holding him to account, then their increasingly undemocratic and repressive hold on power will persist.

Their problem is, they just aren't all that bright. 

This Is Exactly Who America Is

 Donald Trump's big mistake is that he did not delegate the authority to smash democratic norms to his lawyers and various underlings so as to achieve plausible deniability. Throughout history, United States presidents have largely escaped widespread public opprobrium both at home and abroad via their studied personal absences from the scenes of actual crimes.

Richard Nixon was done in by the smoking gun of his tapes. Trump was done in by the smoking gun of his big fat mouth and his Twitter feed. When the ultimate sacrilege of the storming of the Capitol by his supporters came down, his various partners - who include both his right-wing pals and the liberal enablers who have profited mightily by substituting their contrived shock and outrage at Trump for providing any meaningful pandemic relief for the masses of people - cannot rid themselves of him fast enough.

His right-wing pals in the oligarchic establishment are cutting off the money spigots, and the neocon wing of the GOP is cutting off their political and emotional support. His Democratic enablers are impeaching him for a second time and fund-raising like mad as they attempt to elicit public sympathy for the physical danger they faced sheltering in place, and for the bodily fear they say they still experience, This fear in high places is already opening the doors for more social repression and more liberal McCarthyism to take up where #Russiagate left off.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested this week that Congress form a new commission to "rein in" the media in order to combat misinformation, the right erupted in anger. But there has been nary a peep from the establishment "left" about the censorship threat. If liberals and progressives think that our elected officials will stop at squelching the speech of Q-Anon conspiracy theorists and their ilk, they should probably think again.  Outlets (see, for example, this puff-piece in Jacobin) perhaps should also think twice about canonizing AOC the same way they once canonized Barack Obama, who later attained the dubious distinction of running one of the most secretive and repressive administrations in recent history.

Unlike Donald Trump, though, Obama did not make the mistake of tweeting and bragging about his right to target the very same perceived enemies, which include journalists, whistleblowers, immigrants, Muslims, and anti-police brutality protesters. When the nation's Democratic governors enforced a coordinated crackdown on Occupy camps in late fall 2011, Obama was conveniently out of the country on a trade junket. He did not unilaterally decide to assassinate thousands of people with his drones, but rather contrived a  Disposition Matrix with the CIA and enlisted his attorney general to write erudite legal opinions to give him the necessary cover for assassinating people. 

When the now fully rehabilitated George W. Bush gave his O.K. to mass surveillance and torture, he had his own team of lawyers write secret manifestos euphemized as "opinions." Thus do credentialed experts like John Yoo not only escape opprobrium and accountability, they are given regular platforms on cable news and the New York Times  from which to virtuously pontificate on Donald Trump's serial assaults on democracy and the rule of law, but at the same time "consult with" Trump on ways to skirt the law. No matter that declaring an atrocity to be legal doesn't miraculously make it morally right. They wear their historical precedents as shields.

Nevertheless, liberal interventionists and neoconservative warmongers alike are not only proclaiming themselves "woke" to the racism in this country, they are also congratulating themselves for the "courage" to label Trump and his base as fascists. Critics have pointed out, rightly, that American fascism erupted with a real vengeance during Reconstruction and the implementation of Jim Crow - under, of course, all the usual legal niceties and opinions written by the well-credentialed in order to give all kinds of inhumane horrors like lynchings and mob violence that all-important gloss of expert respectability.

Fast forward to 2021, and the newly Woke Elites are talking a lot about the Trump era being our own Weimar Republic. Fascism is suddenly all the fashion, but not the kind that they'd be caught dead wearing themselves, of course.

 They're certainly not talking so much about the American Jim Crow laws against miscegenation being one of the main inspirations for Nazi Germany's own September 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of most of their human rights.

The New York Times, even in its own contemporaneous coverage,  glossed right over the passage of those draconian edicts by headlining its article "Reich Adopts Swastika As Official Flag" and framing the Nuremberg Laws around Hitler's reaction to a group of anti-fascist protesters who'd torn down the swastika-emblazoned flag from a German ship docked in New York, and the ensuing diplomatic kerfuffle when a low-level New York City judge named Louis Brodsky dismissed all charges against the culprits. It was not the Nuremberg Laws themselves that the Roosevelt administration initially condemned. It was the fact that an upstart judge exceeded his job description and compared Nazis to pirates. Secretary of State Cordell Hull actually sent Hitler a letter of regret.

  A later New York Times article assured readers that the Nuremberg law forbidding Jews from hiring Aryan household help did not apply to Jewish-Americans doing business in the Reich.

But let's not totally pile on the Paper of Record, which did not yet even exist during the colonial era when the frenzy of corporate land-grabbing and extermination of native human beings proceeded, in tandem with the kidnapping and enslavement of African people, in full fascistic fashion.

Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report aptly calls last week's Capitol riot a "white settler uprising." Fascism has not sprung fully-fledged from the small brain of Donald Trump. Not by a long shot:

White mobs and armed groups have been inflicting violence against the non-white presence in their colonial settler state ever since their ancestors arrived on these shores. The Puritans – a colony-in-arms — had all but completed the mission of racially “purifying” New England within a century of setting foot at Plymouth Rock. Far more Native Americans were killed by massed, armed settler civilians than by uniformed armies of the British Crown or the young U.S. republic. Whites in the slave states of the U.S. South were a people perpetually in arms in “defense” against slave rebellions, with every able-bodied white man obligated to aid in suppressing real or threatened Black revolts. Hundreds of Blacks were massacred in the wake of Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion. 

Speaking of presidents, let's not forget the dude on the almighty dollar bill, Father of Our Country George Washington.

Before he fought the Brits and won the revolution despite his own ineptitude in battle, Washington was a slave-owning real estate speculator with a sick hunger for more riches no matter what the human cost. He was every inch the precursor of Donald Trump, only with a powdered wig instead of a comb-over. He relied on his base of aggrieved white settlers and failed farmers and small business people fleeing the East coast for native American territory to do his dirty work for him as much as Trump has relied on his. Washington flouted British peace treaties with the Indians as much as Trump flouts the "norms" of our own neoliberal system. 

Extracting from written correspondence of Washington and sundry of his  plutocratic pals, historian Peter Cozzens writes about the pre-Revolutionary class system, circa 1774, in his biography of the great Indian leader Tecumseh: 

The royal governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunsmore, who himself coveted Indian land for personal profit, had no expectation of peaceful denouement. Frontier subjects, he wrote the Crown, despised treaties made with Indians, "whom they consider but little removed from brute creation." So too did the Virginia aristocracy. With the spring thaw in 1774, surveyors representing George Washington, Patrick Henry and other Tidewater elites staked large claims along the Ohio River. Waving away the royal edict against land grabs as "a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians," Washington told his personal surveyor not to worry.

With the surveyors came settlers willing to wage their scalps on a scrap of land.

So the original meaning of Patrick Henry's clarion cry, "Give me liberty or give me death" seems to have been "Give me the liberty to plunder and get rich and I'll give you the freedom to sweep up my crumbs and kill and die for me in the process."

Some things never change.

Forget AOC's special commission on reining in disinformation. We need a commission on disseminating the truth and not hiding it, as officials and the aristocracy and ruling elites have striven to do probably since hominids first figured out how to get up and walk with two legs and developed the ability to think with autonomous brains.  We need a well-stocked library in every neighborhood. We need courses in history, philosophy and the liberal arts much more than we need STEM curricula to prepare us for the low-wage precarious jobs of the future.

Our ignorance is their greatest strength. Always has been, always will be. 

Trump Sees Dead People, Elite Hysteria Ensues

There's something kind of forlorn about Democrats threatening to launch Impeachment 2.0 when the Scoundrel-in-Chief has only a couple of weeks to go before he is: 

A) Dragged kicking and screaming from the White House on Inauguration Day after trashing the Lincoln Bedroom in a fit of evicted pique.

B) Spoiling Joe Biden's Big Day by shockingly adhering to Norms and actually showing up for the inaugural address, and proceeding to shock all that is decent by making his silly scowling eye-rolling faces and performing various hand gestures from his prominent front row seat, in a very successful attempt to steal all the televised media attention for himself.

C) Invisibly skulking off to Mar-a-Lago to no fanfare whatsoever, a scenario that will leave the establishment media howling about the restriction to their access of the usual staged poignant presidential departure photo-op of Marine One circling nostalgically over Washington.

With the terrifying void of having no Donald Trump to kick around, will the feckless Dems nonetheless bring new Articles of Impeachment against him?  Lacking any actual agenda to make people's lives better during the worst public health and economic catastrophe in modern times, they do have to justify their existence somehow. As far as the feckless Republicans are concerned, one subset of them are nihilistically posturing to deny the presidency to Joe Biden. The other subset, who are proclaiming themselves aghast at the "coup" attempt, are the same ones who hope to run for president themselves a few short years from now to bring the real corporate coup against democracy to a swift and total completion.

So with only a few weeks to go before Joe Biden finally dodders into the White House to go about his soul-restoring business, all the media attention remains riveted on Trump's latest attempt to overturn the election via strong-arming Georgia officials into "finding" him the necessary votes to achieve his desired outcome. These mobster antics are causing massive conniption fits among the more civilized and discreet members of the criminal ruling class, including virtually all the surviving US "defense" secretaries of War, Inc. and most of the predatory reigning moguls of Wall Street and corporate America. It seems that Donald Trump is once again single-handedly destroying the sublime stature of America as the world's bastion of superpower democracy, even as America can't even get its act together to protect its own citizens by giving them health care and a modicum of financial relief.

The narrative therefore has conveniently morphed from thousands of needless deaths from Covid-19 into Donald Trump starring as Haley Joel Osment in a remake of The Sixth Sense. 

Here's Trump talking to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger playing Bruce Willis this past Sunday on that blockbuster hit of a taped phone call:

The other thing, dead people, so dead people voted. And I think the, the number is in the close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number. And a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters. The bottom line is when you add it all up, and then you start adding, you know, 300,000 fake ballots. Then the other thing they said is in Fulton County and other areas, and this may or may not be true. This just came up this morning that they are burning their ballots, that they are shredding, shredding ballots and removing equipment. They’re changing the equipment on the, on the Dominion machines. And, you know, that’s not legal. And they supposedly shred. And I think they said 300 pounds of, 3,000 pounds of ballots. And that just came to us as a report today. And you know, it’s a, it’s a very sad situation.

On second thought,  Donald Trump is actually lost in a remake of the far grislier and darkly funnier Night of the Living Dead. Not only are thousands of corpses rising from the grave to vote, Trump makes it sound like they are reading their own obituaries and shredding documents the same way that George A. Romero's zombies shredded and devoured human flesh. They are also moving out of state, only to shamble back over the Georgia border to shred his chances of staying in the White House.

But here's where Trump is definitely mistaken: they couldn't possibly have burned any ballots, legally or otherwise. If he was paying attention, he'd know that the only thing that terrifies hordes of roaming homeless out-of-state zombie voters and stops them right in their tracks is fire. He is probably too shocked that he's actually been fired from anything for the first time in his long misbegotten life to pay much attention to the finer details.

The only "sad situation" is Trump's real or feigned dementia. Equally sad, as Trump fade-rages into the sunset, is that the media is still treating him as though he were a dire existential threat to American supremacy and imperialistic democracy, a/k/a global "standing." Sure, he has two more weeks in which to wreak havoc, maybe start a war after four years of not starting a new war, roll back a few more environmental rules that Biden can reverse on Day One, pardon a few more of his fellow hoodlums. But the over-the-top reactions to Trump's last gasp of run-of-the-mill buffoonery are simply the attempts of the war-mongering elites to foist their own toxic version of reality upon us.

They'll be scapegoating Trump, the undead monster that they themselves created, long after his funeral.

Off With Their Heads

 What is the country for, but to support its prince in his enterprise?

-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

While the American punditocracy is busy deciding which insipid courtier won the vice presidential debate  - was the "pivotal moment" the fly resting on Mike Pence's stiff white coif, or was it Kamala Harris bragging about all the generals and reactionary Republicans who are backing Joe Biden? - the rest of the country is wondering when the hell they'll be getting more Covid-19 relief.

As aristocratic scolds like Michelle Obama love to remind us all day and every day, our job as citizens is not to make strident demands for guaranteed health care, housing and food. It is to Vote for a more "soothing" Joe Biden as if our lives depended on it, even more than we depend on food, health and shelter. Because choosing a third party candidate, such as a Green, who supports universal health coverage and a pro-environment, antiwar agenda would just be, Mrs. Obama chided this week, simply "throwing away your vote."

That statement pretty much tells you what the country is really for. And it ain't for you. What is an election for, after all, but for the lesser people to give the quadrennial stamp of legitimacy to a cabal of princes and wolves?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also made it absolutely and chillingly plain this week that her priority is not restoring the nation's actual people to health, but to restore her exiled Democratic Party to power. Sending those $1200 relief checks to people struggling to pay their bills would only make Donald the Usurper look good, the same way that Henry VIII tried to make himself look good 500 years ago by handing out baskets of leftover food to the poor at Christmastime.

That was a monarchy and this is a democracy, by golly, so Madam Speaker is not about to stoop to Noblesse Oblige - not when she views the deliberate withholding of direct cash aid to hundreds of millions of people as just the right hook to get them out there to vote. And they say King Donald is the demented one, the way he cut off the desultory-at-best negotiations on pandemic relief between her and Treasury Chancellor Steve Mnuchin in a fit of steroid-enhanced pique.

But since wealthy people still have to get around their playground of an exploited planet, Pelosi and Mnuchin were reported to be feverishly working on a stand-alone bailout of the polluting airline industry. Airline stocks soared anew as these two courtier/oligarchs renewed their negotiations. This was despite the fact that Pelosi had previously denounced negotiating Covid relief in such separate, limited packages, because "they (the party currently in power) don’t want to put food on the table and rent in the pockets of the American people, crush the virus, support our heroes, and the rest.”

Because here's the thing. Stand-alone stimulus checks sent out to needy Americans would bear Donald Trump's name on them, and could conceivably garner him extra votes. It's much better, Pelosi insinuated, to draw out the mass hardship for several more weeks or months to achieve the noble goal of Joe Biden winning the election.  If Nancy Pelosi can make enough people too hungry, homeless, terrified, desperate or disgusted to follow Michelle Obama's hectoring advice to get out there and vote, then at least they won't be voting for Donald Trump.

(Update: As I was writing this article, Pelosi had flip-flopped - once again - to calling for a broader stimulus package, including checks. I believe that this topsy-turvy negotiation process is mainly theater, to keep us properly gaslit as we wait in suspense for the barest kind of relief, and then both sides can declare victory.)

 When you hear them warn that "everything is at stake" in this election, maybe they can make you forget about the big juicy steak you can't afford.

What Pelosi and the Democrats are essentially saying is that American children going to bed hungry or families getting evicted for just a little teensy while longer is certainly better than having Trump in the White House for another four whole horrible years. Let them eat Biden, who promised his Wall Street donors that under his rule, "nothing would fundamentally change." 

This is being sold as a choice that we can all believe in.

 As the Red Queen lectured Alice in Through the Looking Glass: "You may call it nonsense if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared to which that would be as sensible as a dictionary."

Vote for the Lesser Greater Nonsense!

Because the United States, ranking first or near-first in the world in Covid cases, despite having the most expensive health care system in the world, is not the "slow country" which the Red Queen scoffed at, nor is it even (not quite yet anyway) among the "shithole countries" that King Donald sneered it.

"Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place," she lectured to the panting, befuddled Alice."If you want to get somewhere else, you have to run twice as fast." 

 

And political courtiers talking fast and folksily (yet wolfishly) out of both sides of their mouths is also an absolute must if the princely enterprise that is America can continue to thrive, and so that the political courtiers can fulfill the great American meritocratic dream of one day becoming full-fledged princes and media moguls themselves.

Debate & Switch, Crash & Burn

Lots of people feared that the first presidential "debate" between our two designated right-wing codgers would end up being a train wreck. But nobody could ever have expected a reenactment of the Hindenburg disaster. That Nazi airship blew up in 1937 New Jersey, whereas the more modern fascist version exploded in Ohio on Tuesday night.

If you were still naively operating under the assumption that we have even the merest vestige of a functioning democracy left, than Tuesday night's spectacle starring human dirigible Donald Trump (with a largely muted walk-on assist from Joe Biden) should have permanently disabused you of that quaint notion.

The commentary running through many an aghast head as the grisly event streamed into millions of foreclosure-prone American homes went something like this:  (h/t Herb Morrison)

"Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers screaming around here. I... I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest, it's completely a mess of smoking wreckage. And everybody can't hardly breathe. It's hard, it's crazy. Honestly, I can hardly breathe. I'm going to step inside where I cannot see it.... This is the worst thing I've ever witnessed!"

The gasbag blimp known as Donald Trump has been blowing things up for quite awhile now, both verbally and operationally. And since his wreckage will be raining down upon the earth far into the future. the phrase "Oh, the humanity" can't even begin to describe what we witnessed on Tuesday night. For as much as we thought that we were steeled by the last three and a half years of Trumpism, could anything have prepared us for an American president publicly calling on the crypto-fascist Proud Boys militia to "stand back and stand by?" He also urged his ad hoc troops to converge on the nation's polling places on Election Day to monitor balloting and, presumably, to accost voters who look or act suspiciously un-American. Presumably, these volunteer monitor-militias will also be fully armed. Presumably, the very thought of armed freelance election monitors will also keep enough people away from the polls to even affect the outcome.

It's no wonder that Trump wants all the schools to reopen in the middle of a pandemic. Without schools, young people cannot be properly indoctrinated by his proposed Patriotism re-education curriculum. Without the monitoring custodial function which classrooms provide, students might even start to wake up and realize that their leaders in both parties are making a real botch of things.

If they watched the Tuesday night debate debacle, however, they are probably already realizing it.

If anything can finally terrify Undecideds or Stay-At-Homes into voting for the detritus known as Joe Biden, it was Tuesday night's dirigible disaster. Maybe we can pick through the wreckage and salvage something. Although, with such "gaffes" as Biden's indignant insistence  that he has "nothing against" Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett because she seems like "a very fine person" Biden does sort of evoke Trump's own infamous remark that "there are very fine people on both sides" of the racist/anti-racist divide.

Biden's disavowal of the Green New Deal, and his admission that his "public option" in health care coverage would just be a means-tested renaming of Medicaid, that he is more prone to starting a war with Russia than "Putin's puppy" is, that he repeated discredited CIA propaganda about Russia putting a bounty on the American invaders and occupiers of Afghanistan, and that he said all of these "reassuring" things with his beady eyes squinting straight through the camera at the terrified viewers at home, might still make some of those annoying  "purists"  out there continue to refuse to find their sustenance in a toxic landfill.

Here's what Biden said about the bait and switch of a "public option":

 "It’s only for those people who are so poor they qualify for Medicaid they can get that free in most States, except Governors who want to deny people who are poor Medicaid. Anyone who qualifies for Medicaid would automatically be enrolled in the public option. The vast majority of the American people would still not be in that option." (my bold.)

Translation: the option is not only restrictive, it is every bit as mandatory as a law requiring people living high on the hog of the minimum wage or reduced unemployment benefits to buy a Bronze plan which they can never afford to use because of obscenely high deductibles and co-pays.

Since cutting off Trump's microphone as he lit his own poisoned gas on fire apparently was not part of the plan by the ratings and profit-hungry corporate media outlets which created Trump in the first place, they will forge right ahead in their unending game of disaster-feasting:

"And, I - I've... lost my breath several times during this exciting moment here. Will you pardon me just a moment? I'm not going to stop talking.... I'm just going to swallow several times until I can keep on."

 

 

Culture War Witchery Strikes Again

So much for Bernie Sanders's prediction that a President Joe Biden would, after a 50-year conservative political career, become a raging progressive in the vein of FDR if we only give him the chance.

With the specter of a far-right Supreme Court tribunal controlling the country for at least another generation, Biden just nixed the antidote of Democrats packing the court.and ending the Senate filibuster, should he win the presidency. Even though the Republican majority has locked in the votes to confirm Donald Trump's nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Biden was still appealing to them to examine their consciences and delay the vote until after the November election.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett, widely believed to be a shoo-in for the nomination, is, like Biden a devout conservative Roman Catholic, and the jurist that Democrats believe will usher in the final death-blow to Roe v Wade.

Biden could very well be delighted with this nomination, given that he already had to bow to liberal pressure and in 2019 disown his longstanding support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortion. He has always opposed late-term abortions, voted against aid to organizations which promote legalizing abortion overseas, and, as vice president, he unsuccessfully fought for increased religious exemptions to birth control coverage in the Affordable Care Act.

So, in keeping with his outreach to conservative Republican voters and his dismissal of such progressive policies as Medicare For All and a Green New Deal,will Biden now openly pander to the "right to life" advocates whom he so sorely disappointed when he disowned the Hyde Amendment last year? His ongoing silence on the issue speaks volumes.

Meanwhile, the increasing liberal angst surrounding a newly revived and very serendipitous (for the duopolistic oligarchy, that is) wedge issue of abortion is all of a piece with the much more contrived angst over Donald Trump's trolling revival of the eugenics movement.

Much is being made of how his praise of the "good (Nordic) genes" of Minnesotans and "racehorse theory" is inspired by the rhetoric of Nazi Germany. But none of these current critics add that Adolf Hitler was himself directly inspired by the American eugenics movement that held sway in the interwar years of the 20th century. The Nuremberg Laws barring Jews from full status as German citizens contain numerous glowing references to America's racist Jim Crow laws.

 The designated targets of xenophobic exclusion from the US in the early decades of the century were Southern and Eastern Europeans, mainly Italians and Jews. The latter group was later denied refugee status and barred by draconian US immigration laws from entering the country to escape Nazi oppression. Tens of thousands of Jews are believed to have been killed when they were forced to return to Nazi-controlled territories.

Trump's allusion to racehorse theory actually stems from an American book called "The Passing of the Great Race" published by Charles Scribner & Sons in 1916 and heavily promoted and praised by politicians, intellectuals and such media mainstays as Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post and the New York Times. Its author, Madison Grant, was once widely lauded as one of the leading thinkers and environmental activists of the Progressive Era.

It's no surprise that forced sterilization, along with xenophobia as government policy, is also making a comeback. Anybody who is shocked, shocked that imprisoned migrant women are reportedly undergoing forced hysterectomies in a  Georgia ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) prison shouldn't be. Laws upholding sterilizations of the "unfit" were on the books in many states until fairly recently. The irony that these procedures are now allegedly being performed under a Republican administration which purports to be anti-birth control should not be lost on us. The purported religious principles of the "right to life" crowd is simply a fig leaf serving to mask their real agenda, which is the empowerment and enrichment of the ruling classes though the debasement of women, minorities  and let's face it, just about anybody who has no power and no money.

Trump may be a throwback to an era when racism and xenophobia were openly celebrated and championed by the most respectable elements of American society. But he is certainly no anomaly in the big historical picture.

And speaking of the Supreme Court: it has never expressly overturned its ignominious Buck v Bell decision, an oversight which theoretically makes the reported ICE sterilizations perfectly legal. In the 1927 opinion against Carrie Bell, a woman wrongfully committed to a Virginia asylum for the "feebleminded" after her rape by the son of her wealthy foster parents who'd used her as their personal maid, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote (relying upon the fake "science" which claimed that deviance and imbecility are passed down from generation to generation):

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, not Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was actually the first liberal rock star of the Supreme Court, thanks in large part to the mainstream media marketing and fawning by his elite peers. Lionel Barrymore even played him in a hagiographic movie.

And speaking of irony - First Amendment champion Holmes also wrote the opinion which upheld Woodrow Wilson's reactionary Espionage Act, the law under which Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was indicted. Confined to a Dickensian British prison while his extradition trial proceeds, Assange is essentially being punished for exposing American war crimes and political corruption. The First Amendment itself is effectively on trial, while mainstream corporate media remains largely silent.

And that leads me to my final question. Why the hell do we even have a Supreme Court? It has become more than ever the equivalent of the archaic and unelected class of priests which have always existed in authoritarian regimes. The highest court is neither the check nor the balance that our own overly-honored Pantheon of Founders envisioned.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, that great 19th century literary critic of American pathology, reminds us that neither right wing authoritarianism nor liberal hypocrisy nor personality cults nor culture wars are anything new under the Trumpian sun. From his novel The House of the Seven Gables about the execution of Matthew Maule, an accused witch:

"He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion which should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen - the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day - stood in their inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived."

GOP Confab: Tony Soprano Complains About "The Mob"

The  oligarchic bickering within the suffocating confines of our two-party system has reached full throttle this week with the Republican side's version of reality.

  Who even needs a party platform, when the GOP train already left the station quite a while ago? But if you act now, perhaps you too can catch up and score a one-way ticket to hell on the Donald Trump special.

But first, you have to dodge all the "socialist mobs" that are fleeing the crime-ridden cities to attack white people in the pristine suburbs. And stay patriotically paranoid at all times, because Joe and Kamala are popping up at every curve, blocking the tracks with their hammers and sickles and threatening to derail the freedom train with all that Marxism. (If only!)

To help set the mood and the desired tone, the notorious St. Louis couple arrested for aiming their guns at peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters earlier this summer showed up in the first class dining car to warn passengers that Joe Biden's party wants to "abolish the suburbs" and allow low-income apartments to replace big single family homes. (again - if only!) 

"Make no mistake," recited Patricia McCloskey. "No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats' America!"

"If you don't stand up for yourself, the Mob will try to destroy you!" subtly chimed in her aggrieved multimillionaire husband Mark.

You really do have to hand it to the Trump Crime Family, who have the chutzpah to cast themselves and their supporters and sycophants as the victims of mob (read: Black. progressive) oppression. The real oligarchic mob bosses, the real usurpers of democracy, will say whatever it takes to transform themselves into the Usurped. As the late Christopher Hitchens once said about the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, Donald Trump's whole shtick is similarly all about "co-opting populism in the service of elitism."

So. semi-adept conductors that they are. the Trumpies have  thoughtfully staffed their virtual Dog-Whistlestop campaign train with dozens of token Black Pullman porters - even one renegade Black congressman, Democrat Tim Scott - as supposed proof that Donald Trump is not the hardcore racist that those damned Wall Street socialist elitists are always making him out to be. If you hop aboard his train, he'll punch your ticket so many times that you'll barely feel him punching you right in the face.

Despite trying to beat the Dems at their own shallow diversity/identity politics game, however, Trump still hasn't quite mastered the art of pandering and co-opting the pain of others with the finesse necessary to pull it off. He simply cannot resist making himself the centerpiece of every hard luck story. Each of the designated sufferers who appeared on opening night to tell their sad stories were also required to proclaim themselves saved by Trump and by Trump alone.  One cancer patient as much as suggested that Trump had single-handedly cured her disease by fast-tracking an experimental drug.

 This is a huge step up from Biden trying to beat the Republicans at their own cruel right-wing game by throwing cold water all over a dying Medicare For All advocate with a feeble "I get it, man" as he vowed to veto any future single payer healthcare legislation. 

Trump doesn't merely play a quack doctor on TV. As another regular person convention speaker testified, Trump has nobly abandoned his previous carefree billionaire lifestyle in order to sacrifice himself for the country.(doing, I suppose, the unaccustomed hard work of personally looting the public treasury on his own behalf rather than relying on lawyers and bribed politicians.)

 This buffoonery was designed to be in such stark contrast to last week's very serious Democratic convention, where Joe Biden marketed the notion that his personal warmth and "decency" and shared national grief over the death of his son should erase any desire or need that voters might have for health care and other frivolous things

So it's a real quandary. Do we cast our lot with the death by a thousand cuts/ benign neglect, liberal interventionist imperialism, and syrupy platitudes of the Democrats, or do we join the screaming brutal descent into fascist hell with Donald Trump?

Neither of the above, you say? Well, it turns out that there might be a third choice after all, an option which, for some strange reason, the corporate media are not bothering to tell you about. 

There's going to be a separate People's Party Convention, to be held online this coming weekend, And everybody is invited.

Now, before you scream the word "spoiler" at me, please rest assured that this convention is not (yet) an actual third party with a place on the ballot. For now, it's all in the planning stages to explore how we can finally wean ourselves away from the toxic teat of the corporate duopoly. 

Call it a pipe dream if you like, but even failing at this goal is certainly better than never having tried at all.