Trump Channels Tulsi Gabbard

If he wasn't such a blithering idiot, Donald Trump wouldn't stop with the shock announcement that he is withdrawing US troops from northeast Syria, leaving the Kurd fighters to their fate of possible extermination by the Turkish dictator. He wouldn't stop with simply borrowing Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard's antiwar rhetoric to justify his rash decision:

“The Kurds fought with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so. They have been fighting Turkey for decades. I held off this fight for almost 3 years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.”

If he really wanted to wreak revenge on the Democratic Party/CIA Partnership which is seeking his ouster, he would go far beyond embracing all the insanity ascribed to him and begin to attack his enemies from the left. He might go into full bonkers mode and even start talking up Medicare For All. He'd advance from channeling Tulsi to channeling Bernie Sanders.

Not that he would really mean it, of course. His idea of single payer health care would be probably be Medicare For All Whites Who Are Rich Enough To Pay For It. He rarely means anything he says, anyway. Even his Syria troop withdrawal is, at the moment, just the latest in a long series of whimsical threats and diversionary tactics to get the neocons and the liberal hawks riled up as he simply adjusts the territory and the bombing. But channeling Tulsi in his tweets no doubt appeals to his base in those areas of the country which have seen a disproportionate number of their sons and daughters killed and maimed in the forever wars, and whose voters therefore picked Trump over the hawkish Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The Syria troop withdrawal is also a way for Trump to deflect attention from his impeachment and Ukraine-gate woes, to give his opponents a new reason to hate him while also gaining him some support from what is still left of the peace movement - which, incidentally, rightly criticizes Barack Obama's own role in creating ISIS by arming Syrian terrorist groups. As reported by AntiWar.Com:

The Syrian Civil War is one of the worst tragedies of the 21st century. Over 500,000 people have been killed. The Obama administration knowingly armed Al Qaeda affiliated opposition groups at the beginning of the war. A declassified document from the Department of Defense dated August 12th 2012 said, "The Salafist, The Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq) are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria." The document also said, "AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media."

 Continuing the war in Syria has become a bipartisan effort. Any politicians who make efforts to end our involvement in the war come under enormous criticism. Congresswoman and 2020 presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard took a trip to Syria in 2017 and had an unexpected meeting with Assad. Now whenever faced by liberals who don’t like her, Gabbard gets called an "Assad Apologist" no matter what the issue is. Even after the most recent debates when Gabbard went after Senator Kamala Harris over her record as a prosecutor, Harris responded in an interview after and said, "I think that this coming from someone who has been an apologist for an individual, Assad…I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously."

There is no way, meanwhile, fake peacenick or not, that Trump would ever reverse his xenophobic immigration policies. As a matter of fact, his fascistic administration has just issued a new directive requiring all immigrants to either have private health coverage or prove their independent financial wherewithal to pay for their care out-of-pocket. I guess that lets out the Kurds, whom Trump is leaving high and dry at the Syria-Turkey border, from ever entering the US as refugees. 

Still, if Trump could only begin to nudge his autocratic mindset just a wee bit more in the Huey Long direction instead of simply doubling and tripling down on the tyrannical regression, his approval ratings might just start to pick back up.

Because seeing as how his bowing to elite pressure and intensifying economic sanctions against his alleged puppet-master in Russia and then even scrapping the Reagan-Gorbachev nuclear arms accord did not in the least placate the Cold War 2.0 warriors who want to see him gone, what more does Trump have to lose at this point?

Many Trump voters already support Medicare For All. These are among the same voters who have been successfully indoctrinated by the ruling elites into scapegoating immigrants as the enemies who are stealing all those jobs. As much as they claim to hate "socialism" and Big Government, Trump voters live in the reality-based world in which you can still go bankrupt even if you're insured. You can still lose your health care if your job disappears or if your employer decides he can no longer afford to pay the premiums. Regardless of political ideology, people in ever greater numbers are struggling to pay the bills.   

So if he wasn't such a very stable moron, Trump would move to the left, at least rhetorically. It certainly worked to his advantage during the GOP primaries, when everybody applauded his hilariously insulting take-downs of anointed front-runner Jeb Bush, forced to defend his brother George's illegal invasion and occupation and destruction of Iraq.

The liberal interventionists now raising such a ruckus over his latest threat to end a war are the very same elites who, while giving Trump even more Pentagon funding than he asked for, vow to defend the predatory Affordable Care Act to the death. Think of their anguish if Trump starts gaslighting them and opposing the ACA by calling for its replacement with a true single payer system akin to the coverage enjoyed by service members and veterans and Congress. The centrists would themselves go nuts if forced to futilely do battle against such a multi-pronged daily onslaught of craziness. It would be a real hoot to watch as the US Imperium collapses around the whole sorry lot of them, in any case.

So who knows? If any more of his GOP cohort start throwing him under the bus regarding Ukraine-gate and his Syria policy, Trump could always spitefully quit the party in a huff and become an Independent, if not the registered Democrat that he was for most of his life.

There may come a point where Trump has nothing left to lose.

Now that Trump is so embattled from all sides, perhaps now would be a good time for Bernie Sanders to renew the "M4A" challenge he issued to the president two years ago:

“Ideally, where we should be going is to join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all people as a right,” Sanders said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “That’s why I’m going to introduce a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program.”

 Sanders said he would reach out to President Donald Trump and urge him to back this and other effective measures to improve health-care coverage, starting with pending legislation of limiting drug prices.

“President Trump, come on board,” Sanders said on CNN. “Let’s work together. Let’s end the absurdity of Americans paying by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.”

 Support for such a “socialist” intervention seems to be growing. The Pew Research Center found in January that 60% of Americans surveyed believe the government should be responsible for ensuring health coverage for all.

That was two years ago. Support for single payer across the political spectrum is now at least 70 percent, despite the best propaganda efforts of the corporate-sponsored news media and the health insurance lobby. They emphasize the tax increase bogeyman without informing the audience that any increased taxes for M4A would still be about half what people are now paying in premiums and deductibles. 

In other words, say as a hypothetical that you currently pay $20,000 (including the premium, a high annual deductible and co-pays) for a private insurance policy. That expenditure would stop. You might end up paying $10,000 in additional taxes depending upon your bracket and deductions, but that still leaves you in possession of the $10,000 previously sucked up by Blue Cross or United Health. This extra ten grand will not only make your life better, it will help the economy at large. No more shopping around on an online insurance marketplace every single year. No more worries about your employer dropping your coverage. 

The powers-that-be don't particularly want your lives to be better. That would be an insult to capitalism itself, whose ultimate aim is to sicken all but the very rich.

Unstable and malignant system that it is, capitalism will eventually kill even the oligarchs, some of whom seem to think they can escape to Outer Space one day to save themselves.

Trump is certainly not the only moron in the mix. 

True Confessions, TrumPelosi-Style

Donnie just stole all the thunder from the Democratic Party's Ukraine-gate impeachment case. He entered a shock pre-emptive guilty plea right on the White House Lawn before heading off to Florida to sign an executive order allowing private insurance predators to profit even more blatantly from government-funded Medicare than they already do.

Unlike most guilty pleas, though, Trump's admission that he did ask the president of Ukraine get dirt on the Bidens was not entered in the spirit of contrition or with the abject aim of getting off with probation or a plea deal. It was entered in the spirit of Bite Me.

From the gobsmacked Guardian newspaper report:

Trump was asked what he thought Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy – who Trump was recorded pressuring to investigate the Bidens – should do.

“If they were honest about it, they would start a major investigation into the Bidens,” Trump said when asked what he wanted Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to do.

“I would say President Zelenskiy, if it was me, I would start an investigation into the Bidens.”

Trump then discussed his trade war with China, before adding:

“China should start an investigation into the Bidens because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened in Ukraine.”

He and his minions will keep asking foreign governments to investigate the political origins of the Russiagate story, and to get the Bidens while they're at it.  Trump will continue acting with impunity, triple dog-daring the other side of the Duopoly to just try and stop him. All on national TV. So much for the "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up of the crime" trope. 

It's the exact opposite of Nixon's "I am not a crook" ploy. Trump is boasting "I am a crook. Whaddaya gonna do about, my fellow American crooks, chumps, and swamp creatures?"

Meanwhile, not even his administration's boastful fascistic announcement that it will forcibly take DNA samples from imprisoned migrants and refugees for inclusion in a racist data base is distracting the Democrats from their Sublime Message. Nor is the simultaneous blockbuster report that Trump had ordered refugees and migrants to be shot in the legs if they try to swim alligator and snake-infested moats or to scale electrified razor-topped walls painted just the right dystopian shade of black. 

To show just how solemn she is and how seriously she takes her sworn constitutional duty to consider to impeach Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared on ABC-Disney's Good Morning America on Thursday to trade impeachment quips with the hosts and to inform the TV audience that "we have some serious repair and healing to do in our country for what he's done so far."

Just the day before, she'd insisted that she is still eager to chat with the world's most dangerously unhinged criminal leader on long-overdue repairs to the nation's crumbling infrastructure. She's also pushing prescription drug price-tweaking as a feeble substitute for the single payer health care system demanded by the vast majority of Americans. It behooves both right wings of the Duopoly to go through the motions, if for no other purpose than to keep the rabble in line.

Pelosi carefully made no mention of any serious repair or healing for what 40 years of neoliberal austerity, coupled with the record enrichment of the Military-Carceral-Surveillance Complex, have done to our country. To confess this would be to implicate herself. Boasting of criminality is not her style. The closest she comes is her frequent praise for the vicious Ronald Reagan and her appearances at Pete Peterson austerity conferences for the punishment of the poor and the self-glorification of the plutocracy.

But like Trump, Pelosi was also making a bee-line to "battleground state" Florida on Thursday. He was pandering to well-heeled retirees in The Villages, a kind of Disneyland for the right-wing geriatric set.  She was attempting to seriously heal an elite group of well-heeled Venezuelan exiles, and to show continuing support for the cruel economic sanctions leveled (beginning under Obama) against the less well-off citizens of Venezuela. She was and she is fully on board with the Trump administration's attempted overthrow of the socialist Maduro government. As such, she planned to huddle with high-ranking representatives of Juan Guiado's US-backed right-wing opposition to plot their next moves. The violent US-backed coup attempt is hideously euphemized by Florida Rep. Donna Shalala as "a peaceful return to democracy."

A discussion forum for "invited guests only" was to include such elite Cold War 2.0 concerns as "Russia’s growing military presence in Venezuela" and the spread of uninvited (or bottom-up) citizen protests against US-backed political corruption in Haiti. As reported by Jacobin, 

 Last January at the Organization of American States, Haiti voted with the United States against its longtime former benefactor, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. The resolution said the body did not recognize the Maduro government, noting it was concerned “about the worsening political, economic, social and humanitarian crisis” and “the breakdown of democratic order and serious human rights violations.” It was part of a gambit to legitimize opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s claim to power.The vote was a quid pro quo, according to Gilles.
“The US is supporting Moïse because of the vote against Venezuela,” she noted.
Whether or not the vote is a main reason, it is clear to any Haiti observer that Moïse — who came to power in races where only about 21 percent of the population even bothered voting — has remained in office only because of the support of Washington and its partners.

Unlike Trump, the last thing Pelosi wants is to be seen actually meddling in foreign countries for crass political gain right in the middle of a virtue-signalling impeachment gambit. Ergo, she was barring the media and the public from important parts of her taxpayer-financed junket to Florida. Otherwise, the Quid Pro Quo accusation that the Democrats are hurling at Trump might boomerang right back at them as pertains to the Haiti-Venezuela connection. Ironically, Trump fans were planning to protest her visit on the silly grounds that she is a pro-Maduro democratic socialist rather than the exact opposite.

That's how the two right wings of one bird of prey envisioned by Upton Sinclair stay aloft. For all the mutual ruffling of their feathers, they always give each other protective cover where it counts the most: the talons and the beak. 

Trump brags about his corruption and skips the platitudes. Pelosi embraces the platitudes and hides her corruption.

And both of them paste on the obligatory grotesque grimace whenever the spirit of bellicose bipartisanship in service of Oligarchy demands it.

Democracy, CIA-Style

By artificially narrowing the Trump impeachment inquiry to "Ukraine-gate" under the auspices of the House Intelligence Committee, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has all but assured that this constitutional remedy for removing a criminal president from office will proceed largely in secret, away from the public eye and away from public accountability.

At the very least, much if not most of the star witness testimony of the unnamed CIA official, who is rather ridiculously being marketed as a "whistle-blower," will not be held in a public forum. This is for the ostensible reason of protecting him from the nefarious machinations of Doctor Evil, a/k/a Donald Trump.

To help effect public compliance with this essential secrecy, the ubiquitous Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff is waxing breathless to the point of asphyxia on the corporate cable shows about all the complicated security protections needed to be put in place in order to keep the Informer's identity anonymous and his physical well-being assured.

Once the script of the CIA official's testimony has been honed and edited to self-serving perfection, this individual may finally make his debut before the cameras incognito, probably with a hood over his head and his voice disguised by some of the cool technology that we so admire in the Hollywood movies about our sexy, daring, cool and selfless Intelligence Community. Whatever props can elicit the maximum cloak-and-dagger excitement for the TV audience, the better that the producers of the Democratic Party-Security State-Media Complex, or Impeachment, Inc. will look.

Meanwhile, we'll have to be satisfied with such tawdry episodes as The Rudy Giuliani Story. In perhaps the most extreme role reversal and plot twist in modern political theater history, the once-lauded Mayor of Nine Eleven has morphed from prosecuting mob bosses to defending them. 

Lest the Impeachers come across as too James Bond-ish, Nancy Pelosi has carefully leaked her own secret list of solemn Impeachment Talking Points for use by the supporting congressional cast as they head for their home districts for a two-week recess to try and convince their constituents that the national security of the elites should be of grave concern to one and all.

Forget hassling your elected representatives about health care and the climate catastrophe and your crushing college debt and your unaffordable housing costs. Because the fates of certain centrist Democrats are more important than your lives. Pelosi and her henchmen are thus embarking on an unabashed Psy-Ops campaign of the type first devised by the CIA itself some 75 years ago in order to convince the world that they were not safe from Russian aggression in the aftermath of World War II. 

And make no mistake: "Ukraine-gate" is not only about impeachment, it's about the reanimated Cold War against Russia waged by an ever more militarized United States. With 800 to perhaps one thousand global bases under dire threat by Putin's grand total of nine, the USA is obviously in profound danger from "the Russians" - not least because they posted a few thousand cheesy Facebook ads to swing the election to Donald Trump and to sow domestic discord in the Happiest Place on Earth. That's right: America was a consumer paradise, a virtual Disneyland on steroids before Trump came along to spoil the mood and make American consumerism look bad to the whole free world. If we can only get rid of him and go back to the Status Quo, all will be well.

As it is, Trump is such a profound threat to the world order that even his imposition of more economic sanctions on Russia and his trashing of a nuclear arms accord were not enough for the order-mongers. The fact that he withheld, or is accused of withholding, a fortune in deadly weapons from the US-sponsored Ukrainian fighting forces was the last straw. It was more than the American Security State can be expected to bear.

So think of this artificially narrow impeachment inquiry as a proxy battle in the larger US-backed Ukraine vs. Russia war. The CIA has always acted in behalf of US multinational corporations anxious to plunder the wealth and natural resources of other countries and anxious to overthrow "corrupt" socialist-leaning or worker-friendly regimes. The CIA has always partnered with or installed US-friendly right wing puppets, arming them and training their death squads.

 They view Donald Trump as the Putin surrogate who has had the absolute chutzpah to denigrate corporation-serving NATO forces even as he caved to their Russophobic demands in a futile attempt to show that he can be just as vicious a team player as the rest of the elite American establishment. 

It hasn't worked. He just can't keep his big oafish mouth shut, and his clumsy paranoid tweeting thumbs still, and his self-dealing and corruption under as good control as his fellow elite leaders have historically done. He totally lacks the charm offensive skills so necessary in any chief executive, whether it be of a corporation or of the One Exceptional Nation itself. 

Donald Trump has got to go. He is not a good marketing or propaganda tool for our weaponized Democracy, neither the domestic variety nor the deadlier exported variety.

The Democrats and their "deep state" partners don't want to delve too deeply in Trump's long history of financial chicanery, however. Because as the Mueller investigation so painfully showed, some of their own respectable colleagues also run the risk of becoming collateral damage in such open-ended investigations. Witness the downfall of super-lobbyist Tony Podesta and the criminal trial of former White House attorney Greg Craig, who served under Obama and who was just acquitted of charges stemming from his own self-dealing in behalf of Ukrainian oligarchs.

But lest the corporate Democrats look even more like the hypocrites they are, they're claiming that a handful of valiant "front-line" representatives are in danger of losing their seats and the House of losing its majority if impeachment proceedings are not severely truncated and limited in scope.

"Front-line" is a telling bellicose adjective, describing a cadre of conservative congress critters who supposedly are just as endangered as the anonymous CIA "whistle-blower" due to their wins in solid GOP districts. Two of the most prominent Front-liners are Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin, who themselves are high-ranking (allegedly former) CIA officials.

Thanks to a highly coordinated week-long corporate media blitz calling for Trump's impeachment,"the polls have changed drastically on this," Pelosi said in a carefully-leaked "private" conference with her members on Sunday. In so saying, she used another common information warfare ploy: transforming a desire of the elite class into a desire of the non-elite class through the magic of propaganda and the measuring of its effectiveness through skewed, selective polling.

But lest the Party appear too gleeful and vindictive, she added:

“Our tone must be prayerful, respectful, solemn, worthy of the Constitution.”

As far as we know, she didn't suggest that congress critters appear at their constituent town halls decked out in religious garb and swinging incense-wafting chasubles, the better to awe-strike people who already are feeling mightily struck down by the worst income inequality of modern times. 

But as the New York Times reports, they will be "clutching talking points cards headlined 'No One is Above the Law.'"

These index cards contain a Holy Trinity of classic psy-ops techniques for the lawmaking preachers to inculcate into their congregations: (my interpretations in parentheses)

• that Trump “engaged in serious wrongdoing betrayed his oath of office and undermined national security;” (security for the ruling establishment and the maintenance of elite rule)

• that the president “pressured a foreign government to target a political opponent,” and what’s more, “tried to cover it up;” (instill fear in the populace by the "othering" technique, or xenophobia.)

• and that Democrats are planning to stick to just the facts in the inquiry as it moves forward. (the facts which fit the desired narrative, but which do not necessarily include facts which don't adhere to the narrowly defined narrative.)

It is an easy-to-understand, digestible narrative, unlike the other inquiries Democrats have been pursuing, including the Russia investigation, hush money payments and Mr. Trump’s business dealings.
“I still believe in story,” said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California and a close ally of Ms. Pelosi. “There’s clarity to this Ukraine story.”

Centrist Democrats must think that their constituents are real dolts, unable to understand even basic cheating or bribery, yet easily swayed by Cold War rhetoric and the fear and xenophobia that it instills. All people need in lieu of guaranteed health care and food on the table is a good story, especially if it has echoes of James Bond or Austin Powers to keep them diverted and entertained. 

The coincidental fact that the CIA whistle-blower law was just quietly changed to allow reports to be based on second-hand complaints and information should alert us to the inconvenient truth that this secretive, unaccountable "government within a government" has also arrogated to itself the power to remove, in collusion with our elected representatives, any elected representative that the ruling elites of Empire don't like - in this case, Donald Trump.

 Trump is the most criminal person ever elected to our nation's highest office, so you may ask why it should even matter if the CIA is coordinating his removal.

But it does matter, because a disturbing precedent is being set, one that is actually antithetical to the Constitution that Nancy Pelosi claims to so revere. 

What if by some miracle Bernie Sanders overcomes the Democratic Party's meddling and undemocratic machinations and does indeed become our next president?

The CIA, promoted and even initially staffed by some of this country's most eminent intellectual and financial elites from the cosseted world of the Ivy League, the landed aristocracy,Wall Street and prominent mainstream media outlets, will no doubt perform its sworn duty and do everything in its power to remove him from office, on any pretext whatsoever. A coordinated, relentless, disempowering stealth campaign of red-baiting to prevent any resurgence of the New Deal would probably begin within a day of his election.

And it would all be perfectly legal. It was during Christmas week 2016, when nobody was paying much attention, that Barack Obama very modestly, quietly, and un-Trumpily signed into law the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which allows the State Department to coordinate its own domestic propaganda programs with other agencies and mainstream media outlets in order to battle so-called foreign disinformation. Such domestic propaganda from government agencies, specifically aimed at US citizens, had previously been banned. 

As Mint Press News reported,

Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”

 “As Russia continues to spew its disinformation and false narratives, they undermine the United States and its interests in places like Ukraine, while also breeding further instability in these countries,” Kinzinger explained in a statement. “The United States has a role in countering these destabilizing acts of propaganda, which is why I’m proud to introduce [the aforementioned bill]. This important legislation develops a comprehensive U.S. strategy to counter disinformation campaigns through interagency cooperation and on-the-ground partnerships with outside organizations that have experience in countering foreign propaganda.”

Make no mistake — this legislation isn’t proposing some team of noble fact-finders, chiseling away to free the truth from the façades of various foreign governmental narratives for the betterment of American and allied populations. If passed, this legislation will allow cumbrously pro-‘American’ propaganda to infiltrate cable, online, and mainstream news organizations wherever the government deems necessary.

Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, hails from the US Air Force's elite Special Ops division. A veteran of the war on Iraq, he is a currently-serving member of the Air National Guard and was recently deployed to the militarized Texas border "to oversee security." 

California Democrat Lieu, an early proponent of Trump impeachment, also hails from the Air Force, with a current rank of colonel in the Air Force Reserve Command. Pelosi appointed him her assistant whip in 2017

It's no big surprise that Nancy Pelosi and Impeachment, Inc. are limiting the scope of their investigations. They don't want to expose themselves as the loyal anti-social and anti-socialist servants of the oligarchy and the Military-Industrial Complex that they always have been.

They are just as much the enemies of democracy as the more boorish Trump.

Son of #Russiagate

First let's get the obligatory "I'm not a Trump fan" disclaimer out of the way. The transcript of the July phone conversation that the U.S. president had with the Ukrainian president did indeed showcase Trump at his oafish, garbled, self-interested worst. He did indeed sound like a less talented and less subtle Tony Soprano.

 A smoking gun, though,the phone call definitely was not, Besides hinting that he wanted dirt on Joe Biden and his lovely son Hunter, Trump seemed just as interested in getting dirt on CrowdStrike. That's the investigatory agency employed by the Democratic National Committee which provided the FBI with its subsequent "assessment," or best guess, that the theft of emails so embarrassing to the Clinton campaign was done via  Russian hack rather than through an inside job. The FBI never independently examined the DNC servers, which Trump and others believe might currently be residing in Ukraine. There is an ongoing Department of Justice investigation into the actual origins of #Russiagate.

(I, for one, would love to get the dirt on CrowdStrike and the Clinton origins of Cold War 2.0)

The one thing that might nail Trump is the attempted cover-up of the transcript before he finally blinked and released the transcript - after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally blinked and agreed to at least consider impeachment. The CIA whistleblower, according to a just-released letter, claims that the phone call transcript in question had been illegally secreted within a separate White House computer system in order to protect Trump.

Even before the release of both the transcript and the whistle-blower complaint, the corporate media went into full hysterical overdrive last weekend. What finally changed Pelosi's mind were demands by the media and a group of so-called "Frontline" Democrats for impeachment. These congress critters, many of whom just happen to be former CIA and Pentagon employees, apparently made her an offer she couldn't refuse.

This is the same Nancy Pelosi who built her entire political career on the House Intelligence Committee. This is the same Nancy Pelosi who refused to impeach George W. Bush over his own abuses of power, including ordering torture and  illegally invading Iraq based solely upon fraudulent CIA claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that he planned to wield against the United States.

And this is the same old Democratic Party that would rather manufacture enemies and instill fear in voters than give voters what they actually want and what they truly need:  Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, medical and student debt forgiveness - you know, everything that Bernie Sanders is campaigning for. Once again, the elites are trying to co-opt non-elites in another one of their intra-oligarchical battles.

And who knows, maybe this is even their passive-aggressive way of getting rid of Joe Biden while they smarmily pretend to defend him against all manner of Trumpian slings and arrows. It could even be their passive-aggressive way of  getting Trump re-elected. They certainly aren't doing any favors to Elizabeth Warren's anti-corruption platform when she becomes forced to defend the corrupt Bidens on behalf of the party.

The best outcome will be the election of Bernie Sanders. This, of course, will happen over the DNC's cold dead body. (Fingers crossed.)

I responded over the weekend to the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof's hysterical Saturday column, which he penned even before the transcript and whistle-blower letter were released. He knew, he just knew, that there was something rotten going on. Because of the stinky stench! My published comment:

The Biden-Ukraine connection has been an open secret for some time. That Trump is using it for political gain has also been an open secret for quite some time. And it certainly is not the first, nor will it be the last,time that a president engages with a foreign leader for non-altruistic reasons.

 Look at the big picture. As the NYT reported back in May, "Hunter Biden...was one of many politically prominent Americans of both major parties who made money in Ukraine over the last decade. In several cases — most notably that of Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman — that business came under criminal investigation that exposed a seedy side of the lucrative Western consulting industry in Ukraine."

The fact that an employee of the CIA - perhaps the most secretive and unaccountable, de facto branch of the US government ever invented - is raising an alarm should also be taken with a huge grain of salt. In my view, both the media and the Democratic Party are being way too friendly to this agency, not least by constantly describing it as the "intelligence "community" as though it were a sewing circle. In fact, it is an often rogue operation that "tortured some folks" and quite recently burglarized Senate computers to meddle with that body's investigation and reporting of said torture.

 This is more palace intrigue designed to pit American against American based on their allegiance to one wing or the other of the oligarchic duopoly. That's what stinks.

Needless to say, my unpatriotic failure to jump on the impeachment bandwagon with the New York Times was not kindly received by some of the Reading Faithful. 

I can no longer access either the stand-alone comment (reprinted below) or a  follow-up from one "Mike Bonnell" who urged the Times to investigate me and other non-believers in order to confirm his suspicion that we are Russian assets. I flagged them both. After the better part of a day, the Times in its infinite wisdom finally removed them. Because if there is one thing they insist on, it's that people remain civil to one another as the Paper of Record drums up the xenophobia to a fever pitch. They also removed my own reply to "Mike" in which I surmised that Joe McCarthy must be cackling in his grave. I'd also politely requested that he divulge his complete list of tell-tale Russian code words in the interests of keeping my fellow Times readers safe from subversives.  

Mike BonnellMontreal, Canada1h ago
The Russians are hard at it. I've read at least three comments (names below) that made me think of caviar as I read them. I encourage readers to check out the 'letters' by the following and see if they don't find the grammar, expressions and sentiments a bit...Russian-trying-to-write-'good'-English like.
"Karen Garcia, Kirk & Lars"

Democratic Senators Secretly Hope For Trump Re-Election

Or, as The Hill newspaper so delicately puts it, the neoliberal wingnuts in the Democratic Senate minority "quietly hope that Biden wins the nomination over rivals" Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Because there is no way that Biden, given his declining mental faculties combined with his racist, war-mongering, pro-Wall Street history, can ever beat Trump despite what largely unreliable polls say. Fewer people - especially fewer young people - will come out to vote for Biden than came out for Hillary Clinton. He is actually worse than Hillary Clinton, who at least didn't pocket $200,000 for enthusiastically endorsing a swing state GOP politician during her numerous paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other predatory institutions.

It was a speech, incidentally, that then-V.P. Biden delivered right in the middle of a 2016 Midwest midterm campaign swing for his fellow Democrats. As the New York Times reported, Biden gushed to a group of conservative business leaders that Michigan's Fred Upton "is one of the finest guys I ever worked with."

 Mr. Biden’s remarks, coming amid a wide-ranging discourse on American politics, quickly appeared in Republican advertising. The local Democratic Party pleaded with Mr. Biden to repair what it saw as a damaging error, to no avail. On Nov. 6, Mr. Upton defeated his Democratic challenger by four and a half percentage points.

Upton is such a great guy that he voted against establishing humanitarian standards for the people being held in border prisons and for Trump's continued sale of arms to Saudi Arabia for its war against Yemeni civilians, as well as the continued unfettered deep sea drilling for oil. He also voted to approve Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. All told, Upton is such a great guy that he's voted with Trump more than 85 percent of the time.
  
No wonder that The Hill's Alexander Bolton granted pro-Biden senators anonymity to whisper their wishes as they smeared Bernie and Liz. They don't want to be outed as hypocritical, de facto Trump enablers who are very supportive of his bloated military, his shredding of environmental protections, his planned cuts to the social safety net, his cruel crackdowns on immigrants and refugees, his tax giveaways to predatory capitalists, his whole oligarchy-serving agenda. According to Bolton, these Democrats cower in fear at the very thought of saving the planet and making regular people healthy and secure:

The two progressives are to the left of many of their colleagues, and some of their best-known proposals, such as “Medicare for All” and free college education, do not have widespread support within the Democratic caucus.

 If Warren or Sanders wins the party’s presidential nomination, there will be pressure in the Senate to adopt their proposals. And there could be tensions between a nominee and senators who do not back their proposals.

Another factor is the race for the Senate. Some Democrats think it will be easier to win races in conservative-leaning states such as Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia if Biden is their nominee and not Warren or Sanders.

In other words, the lobbyists, oligarchs and corporations which bankroll these craven senators will feel uncomfortable, the prospect of which makes the Democratic senators feel uncomfortable, because they might actually be forced to acknowledge where their true allegiances lie and who their real constituents are.

And Alabama? This sudden concern about the vote totals in Alabama is right down there with Trump's Sharpie marker putting George Wallace Country in the direct path of a hurricane. Alabama has suddenly become a battleground state, usurping even Michigan - which Biden would probably lose to Warren and Sanders and later to Trump, largely because of his continuing support for NAFTA and other anti-labor "trade" schemes and despite his endorsement of a Republican in 2016.

Better to have a united duopoly and to maintain America's one big business party than to have an ascendant Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. A President Sanders or (to a much lesser extent) a President Warren would only endanger the "party unity" trope peddled by the centrist Neoliberal Wing as though the party is an actual country deserving of rights and protection and nurturing rather than as the exclusive country club that it truly is. All of a sudden, therefore, it's more important to protect Alabama's arch-conservative Democratic Senator, Doug Jones, than it is to ensure that the climate catastrophe is addressed and that US citizens get the same guaranteed single payer health care as the rest of the civilized world.

You can almost smell the stench of desperation wafting right off the The Hill article.

Dianne Feinstein of California, who is rumored not to be seeking re-election to another term (she's pushing 90, thanks mainly to her own guaranteed health insurance and her stash of billions) is one of the few Democratic senators with the chutzpah to openly back Biden, even if it means overlooking her own state's younger neoliberal presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris.

Feinstein also is at least patriotic enough to privilege the entire United States plutocracy over just Alabama and the rest of George Wallace County, saying coherently:"If you ask me to weigh America, I actually think America is a pretty centrist country."

Earth to Dianne: The scales already are tipped way too far to the right, and they will remain so with either a Biden or a Trump in the Oval Office. The only way to balance them is with a left-leaning president - say, Bernie Sanders - and the political extinction of people like you.

They are nameless neoliberals who know only how to smear progressive ideas and candidates as they peddle their own stale pragmatic garbage. Hear them anonymously and desperately roar:

When Virtue-Signaling Backfires

Trump Allies Target Journalists Over Coverage Deemed Hostile to White House is the scare headline in Monday's New York Times.

The lead paragraph follows up with the desired alarmist tone. Cue Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia - or if you're not all that adventuresome, just settle for Joe McCarthy's America:

A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.

OK, so at least Trump hasn't as far as we know yet ordered a hit on a reporter, as Richard Nixon did on muckraker Jack Anderson. Or seized the phone records of reporters and subpoenaed journalists to testify against whistleblowers, as Barack Obama did.

So are the Trumpies going through reporters' garbage to glean their private financial information? Interviewing old girlfriends or boyfriends or spouses to dig up some sleazy dirt on them? Tapping their phones? Hacking their email accounts? Breaking into doctors' offices to steal their medical or psychiatric records?

Well, not quite:

 It is the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting. Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.

This is truly shocking stuff. The Trumpies have had the unmitigated gall to read embarrassing information posted by the journalists themselves on social media. And not just regular journalists, like the ones targeted by the Washington Post and the shadowy Prop Or Not organization in 2016,which accused both right-wing and leftist writers of being witting or unwitting Putin operatives who helped steal the election from Hillary Clinton. The public social media posts that are being collected by the Trump operatives were written by employees of some of the most prominent and important news organizations in all of Corporate America. And the operatives are not only reading their social media posts, they are nefariously secreting them in Putinesque dossiers for sordid political purposes!

The Times breathlessly continues:

Operatives have closely examined more than a decade’s worth of public posts and statements by journalists, the people familiar with the operation said. Only a fraction of what the network claims to have uncovered has been made public, the people said, with more to be disclosed as the 2020 election heats up. The research is said to extend to members of journalists’ families who are active in politics, as well as liberal activists and other political opponents of the president.

How can one make something public that is already in the public domain, for all to see? Could the "research" extending to journalists' families possibly include the widely-known fact that the spouse of NBC anchor Chuck Todd is a paid Democratic Party official, or that CNN personality Chris Cuomo is the brother of the New York governor, or that CNN legal analyst Laura Jarrett is the daughter of chief Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, or that nepotism is pretty much a standard hiring and promotion principle within the consolidated, oligarch-controlled media? The Trump operatives aren't saying, and neither is the New York Times. But when the operatives do leak out their treasure trove of widely available speech transcripts and public tweets and Facebook posts, I'm sure that the Times and the Post and all the rest of the Prominents will be right on it.

Of course, if the right-wing operatives are also targeting lesser-known (and unprotected) critics and writers, that would be a completely different story, ranking right down there with Prop Or Not. But it's telling that the Times seems to be restricting its First Amendment concerns to its own employees and to those employees of other "major" outlets.

No prominent major outlet has ever, for example, written critically about the Prop Or Not smear campaign against some 200 relatively powerless writers and websites. We still don't know the identities of those who compiled the blacklist and tried to ruin the careers and reputations of those decidedly non-prominent journalists.

While it keeps its readers in suspense, the Times claims that at this moment it is virtually impossible for them to speculate on future possibly career-destroying leaks. This is especially true since the already-leaked media posts were all true,  and even future, already-public information from the past is also true, mainly because the targets themselves had already openly and honestly leaked and exposed and even bragged their own dirt and hypocrisy back when, as the Times insists, they were mainly callow, brash young adults who didn't know enough to keep their vile qualities to themselves.

Nonetheless, the Times pleads ignorance, because admitting that it doesn't examine either its potential hires' or its current employees' social media histories would be tantamount to admitting that they really don't care if their staffers don't practice or believe in what they now preach. They are loath to admit that their screening practices are also a bit on the shoddy side. The newspaper was caught with its pants spectacularly down only last year, when new editorial hire Sarah Jeong was fired after only six hours on the job when her own fairly well-known public association with Neo-Nazis was publicly "leaked" all over social media.

But that was then, and the Times has conveniently shoved that ancient truth down its memory hole. And this is Now: 

It is not possible to independently assess the claims about the quantity or potential significance of the material the pro-Trump network has assembled. Some involved in the operation have histories of bluster and exaggeration. And those willing to describe its techniques and goals may be trying to intimidate journalists or their employers.
But the material publicized so far, while in some cases stripped of context or presented in misleading ways, has proved authentic, and much of it has been professionally harmful to its targets.

It is not until we delve deep into the Times coverage that we get to the true nitty-gritty of the piece. Here is the carefully buried lead: it seems that a pair of editorials decrying Donald Trump's recent anti-Semitic remarks and the shady employment past of his new press secretary had been edited by a staffer on the political desk who a decade ago had written a bunch of his own nasty racist and anti-Semitic tweets. And when the Trumpies called the newly "race-woke" paper out on its hypocrisy, the Gray Lady was not amused:

One person involved in the effort said the pro-Trump forces, aware ahead of time about the coverage... were prepared to respond. Early Thursday morning, soon after the profile appeared online, Breitbart News published an article that documented anti-Semitic and racist tweets written a decade ago by Tom Wright-Piersanti, who was in college at the time and has since become an editor on the Times’ politics desk. The Times said it was reviewing the matter and considered the posts “a clear violation of our standards.”

My published comment:

The right-wingers are using "reverse virtue-signaling" and cashing in on the obnoxious Call-Out Culture to do damage to writers whom they perceive to be their political opponents.

When, for example, they exposed a reporter's old anti-Semitic tweets, it wasn't for the purpose of fighting xenophobia, but to gleefully point out that liberals ("elites") can at times be as hypocritical as reactionary neo-fascists. This is not to excuse the anti-Semitic tweets by the reporter, because a 20-something should know better. His excuse that he was only trying to rile up his peers falls flat.

 Journalists and aspiring journalists, and for that matter, anybody who cares about their careers and life prospects should probably just stay the heck off Twitter. As the article points out, once you press "submit" or "send" there is no going back. Your whole life can be ruined because of a few ill-advised words that will float forever in cyberspace to be plucked, sliced, diced and taken out of context.

What's more disturbing, to me, is that the Trumpies are also targeting the relatives of reporters in an obvious effort to get them to self-censor. It has the whiff of organized criminal extortionists who threaten the children of their targets to get them to pay up and shut up.

 Journalists and all writers should fearlessly keep writing articles and commentary and forgo Twitter wars and trolling. It's a waste of their talents, it's mentally exhausting, and it can come back to bite them.

Like a bedbug in the New York Times "Wellness Room" for embattled and Twitter-exhausted journalists. 

The Spellbound Summer of Trump

Salvador Dali Animation From the Film "Spellbound"

It's been quite the surreal week of weeks in the Show of Shows.

Donald Trump retweeted a right-wing testimonial proclaiming him King of the Jews and the Chosen One, even as he accused any Jew who votes for the opposition party ( a/k/a The Enemy) of stupidity and disloyalty.

 He called the Danish prime minister "nasty" because she scoffed at his offer to buy Greenland. He is stalking away from an upcoming state visit to Denmark the same way he's pretended to walk away from other real estate deals his whole adult life- including his ultimately successful and highly leveraged acquisition of Mar-a-Lago at a relatively cheap (for him, personally) price after he and his lawyers performed much local government finagling, arm-twisting, whisper-campaigning, gaslighting, and other tricks of the property plunder trade.

So give the Greenland debacle some more time. Despite his legendary short fuse, Trump is a very patient man when it comes to real estate. He is also a lot smarter than he lets on in his word-salad tweets and rants. It should be fairly obvious that his craving for Greenland is proof that he is indeed rationally tethered to the reality of climate catastrophe. Greenland will turn green as the ice melts. It would be quite the haven for a good chunk of what The Economist in 2011 optimistically forecast to be the comfortable survival of hordes of remaining "reasonably rich people." The Brave New "Smart" World-Creators. The Chosen Ones. The Saviors.

You can help Trump and the Chosen Few to seal the deal and relocate for their own national security and that of their heirs by forking over $25 for a special t-shirt. It'll make you feel so cool while you swelter in our increasingly hot summers. Because Greenland will be closed to the proles, unfortunately.

But wait. There's more!

To effect what his cohort deems the survival of the fittest, Trump also ordered that refugees and immigrants be imprisoned indefinitely in border concentration camps and other lock-ups as vaccines, basic hygiene products and timely medical care are withheld from them. Even the newly "race-woke" New York Times euphemizes these gulags as "family residential centers." This hearkens back to the recent past when, for nearly a decade, the Times euphemized the Bush-era program of waterboarding and sleep deprivation and other torture techniques as "enhanced interrogation" methods.

I'm sure there is still more Trump atrocity news, but I can't think of any more right off the top of my head and I'm too bummed out to go in search of the latest criminal caper or yet another example of the opposition party's group ennui. All the Democrats can do is counter-tweet in tepid outrage as they stuff themselves full on Iowa corn dogs, fund-raise to the hilt in the Hamptons or vacation their blues away on Martha's Vineyard.

It's the Dog Days and the dog-tired days and everybody is exhausted.

That is pretty much the whole point, isn't it? To make us so depressed and feeling so helpless that we're rendered paralyzed and even questioning our own sanity. It doesn't make us feel any better to realize that Donald Trump is acting nuttier than usual because he's worried about the coming economic recession and his plummeting poll numbers. Examining his damaged psyche is a complete waste of time. Been there, done that.

As the late psychiatrist Andew Lobaczewski wrote in Political Ponerology, authoritarian leaders' diseased psyches can easily spread to the rest of society. Emotionally damaged demagogues like Trump possess the preternatural ability to spread their malignant personality defects far and wide, spellbinding whole societies into veritable contagions of mass psychic distress. 

'Persons with an innate talent for intuiting psychological situations tend to take advantage of this gift in an egotistical and ruthless fashion. In the thought process of such people, a short cut way develops which bypasses the handicapped (brain) function, thus leading from associations directly to words, deeds, and decisions which are not subject to any dissuasion.

Such individuals interpret their talent for intuiting situations and making split-second oversimplified decisions a sign of their superiority compared to normal people, who need to think for a long time, experiencing self-doubt and conflicting motivations.

 "Such characters traumatize and actively spellbind others, and their influence finds it exceptionally easy to bypass the controls of common sense. A large proportion of people tend to credit such individuals with special powers, thereby succumbing to their egotistic beliefs. If a parent manifests such a defect, no matter how minimal, all the children in the family evidence anomalies in personality development.

 "Subordinating a normal person to psychologically abnormal individuals has severe and deforming effects on his or her personality: it engenders trauma and neurosis. This is accomplished in a manner which generally evades conscious controls. Such a situation deprives a person of his natural rights: to practice his own mental hygiene, develop a sufficiently autonomous personality, and utilize his common sense. In the light of natural law, it thus constitutes a kind of crime - which can appear at any social scale, in any context - although it is not mentioned in any code of law."

Witness the apparent helplessness, if not the outright collusion, of Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic Party leaders on the imprisonment of refugees. Without so much as a blink, they robotically appropriated Trump the billions of dollars he demanded for his cruel militarized border policies. All that Pelosi reportedly demanded in return for her cooperation was to be "kept in the loop" about child migrant deaths as they occur.

In a healthy society, Lobaczewski wrote, the activities of spellbinders can usually be stifled fairly quickly. But in an unhealthy society, riven by extreme wealth and social inequalities, the spellbinder finds that people are amenable to his influence. And all that "normal" people can do is moralize and express disgust, rather than do anything concrete to stop the madness. That would necessarily include acknowledging the evil of their own policies, which helped give rise to Trump in the first place.

There are many psychopaths behind the scenes who steer and/or enable Trump even as they pretend to condemn his words. Even the "good" Democrats seem  increasingly exhausted by the futile effort of telling the president he ought to behave himself so that the quiet work of the oligarchy can proceed apace, and they can pretend that bombing and droning people to death in foreign countries is not also a form of hideous racism.

 Trump's deviant personality is no more deviant than American hegemony itself. He is simply the exception to the unwritten rule that it's the skillfully discreet psychopaths who, after careful corporate vetting, win high office because, as Lobaczewski wrote, "they have thought-processes more similar to the world of normal people; in general, they are sufficiently connected to the pathological system to provide a guarantee of loyalty."

It's telling that in the updated preface to his book, Lobaczewski used the George W. Bush administration and its immoral invasion of Iraq as a prime example of how the psychopathy of leaders can infect societies, specifically those (Congress, media) who normally might be in a powerful enough position to combat it.

So we ordinary people have to protect ourselves both from Trump and from the equally dangerous, reactionary, self-righteous and ineffectual ruling class reactions to Trump. Our own psychological health as individuals and as members of society depends upon it.

We should be neither the helpless Ingrid Bergman wife in Gaslight nor the hapless Ingrid Bergman therapist in Spellbound. We can't play the part of analysts and critics only to succumb and let our emotions of fear and disgust rise above our intellects. We can't be good citizens if we criticize the villainous Trump one minute, and then besottedly fall for the next slick political marketing campaign and neoliberal savior the next.

Howard Zinn was right: "The really critical thing isn't who's sitting in he White House, but who is sitting in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating? Those are the things that determine what happens."

Even Bernie Sanders, who judging from the latest polls has a better than ever chance of winning the presidency, acknowledges that he can't do it alone, that the residual evil and sickness of Trumpism will last long past the time that Donald Trump physically leaves the scene.

We have miles to go before we sleep. And gallons of coffee to drink.