Slow-Jamming #Resistance, Inc.

Like neglected children, congressional Democrats are once again pinning all their hopes on Deadbeat Dad Robert Mueller III. The chief Russiagate investigator had come under liberal fire in recent weeks not only for failing to make the facts fit MSNBC's conspiracy theories, but for not immediately disowning Attorney General William Barr's semi-accurate spin on the long-awaited report.

Therefore, the Desperate Dems hope to haul Mueller in the actual flesh before their committees to try and elicit the secret inner workings of his mind. If he gives them what they want, who knows? He might even be re-elevated to the Father of Our Country status he had enjoyed for the past couple of years. As long as they could count on getting their child support payments, with interest, in the not-too-distant future, they were quite content these past few years to subsist on their own speculative hot air as the official gourmet feast was being quietly and painstakingly prepared for them.

It's safe to say that the Democrats are now officially in the bargaining phase of their Five Stages of Russiagate Grief. Still awaiting salvation and sustenance from Mueller, whose public testimony is still far from a done deal, they've had to satisfy themselves this week with another marathon reading, this time with a cameo by John Cusack, of the entire redacted Mueller report. Unlike the usual grandstanding Congressional theatrics, though, the ensemble cast's bravura performance was conducted in a private room and live-streamed on C-Span for viewing by anybody with 12 masochistic hours to kill.

House Judiciary Chair Adam Schiff was certainly not sated by the performance, demanding to hear from Mueller himself, because "seeing is believing, hearing is believing." In other words, if only Mueller can channel his inner Rachel Maddow, all might be forgiven.

Unless and until it is proven otherwise by the special counsel himself,  the suspicion lingers that Mueller could have written his report under the influence. He might not have written or redacted the report himself. He could even be a Russian asset. The revered elder statesman that everybody assumed was Mueller could even be an alien pod person who took over Mueller's body when we weren't looking. This is far more plausible than it sounds, given that Mueller has rarely been seen and virtually never heard in public during the years that everybody naively assumed he was carefully plodding through his investigation and discovering the desired facts. 

So if Mueller finally does appear before Congress and he does stick to his findings, the next step of the Desperate Dems might include using advanced technology to discern whether his eyes turn into red pulsating pinwheels while he stands firmly by his written words. At the very least, they can produce body language experts to interpret the testimony, and cable talking heads can count how many times Mueller blinks every time he persists in alleging that there was no grand conspiracy between Trump and Putin.

The New York Times cuts right to the chase and reports that the Democrats' biggest fear is that they are not keeping the manufactured public fear of TrumPutin and Russia sufficiently alive. People might actually be losing interest in the Mueller Report, which had immediately shot to the top of the bestseller lists when it was hastily printed, redactions and all, in book form last month. Things are now getting so fraught that Michelle Obama's memoir even threatens to reclaim its rightful place at Number One.

From the Times:

Any appearance by Mr. Mueller, however noncommittal or boring it turns out to be, is one of the only means to snap the issue of Mr. Trump’s actions back to center stage, they said, along with testimony from someone like Mr. (former White House chief counsel Don) McGahn.

Shakespeare was only partly right. All the world's a stage, for sure. But it's really not the play that's the thing when it comes to Washington theatrics. It's the relentless hyping of the play. It's the production of constant cliff-hangers to keep us binge-watching and riveted on anything except the myriad existential crises that the political class is doing nothing to address or remedy. 

With that truism in mind, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally allowed on Thursday that while she is still averse to bringing impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, she is now a little more open to talking about impeachment. And who knows, she added, given that Trump is providing them new grounds for impeachment every single day with his obstructions of House subpoenas, he could even end up impeaching his own self with no effort even needed by the Democrats!

Impeachment doesn't necessarily mean a definite move to remove Trump from office, it means constructing a legal path to arrive at the facts, she cogently explained. Courts are also more likely to take Trump's obstruction seriously if the I word is tacked on to the Democrats' legal challenges to his recalcitrance.

 "You never say, blanketly, I'm not answering any subpoenas," Pelosi chided Trump at a different appearance Thursday at Georgetown University.

Blanketly? I checked, and it's a real adverb, meaning that one approach should never be applied to too many disparate things. Now, I may be too much of a literal thinker, but when I first read that statement, it immediately conjured up a mental picture of Linus stubbornly and blissfully clutching his security blanket despite Lucy's hectoring.

Marx was right about tragedy and farce. Not only does history keep repeating itself, the repetitions are now coming so close together that the genres seamlessly merge and become indistinguishable from one another. The messages become mixed and the actors all mixed up as the whole facade crumbles around them, and the curtain falls.

Until next time. Stayed tuned for another exciting episode. True, it may turn out to be as boring as the last one, but the anticipation alone is guaranteed to keep our eyes glued to the ubiquitous screens that, like Linus's lovey, have become virtual and indispensable parts of our physical and mental selves.

Lose our gadgets blanketly? Shut the blankety-blank up!

Pelosi the Appeaser

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tells the New York Times that the way to beat Trump is not through impeachment or championing progressive causes. To win, Democrats have to be more friendly to "centrists" - which is neoliberal-speak for the donor and corporate class which owns her organization.

If you cower, they (the mythical center of the electorate) will come.

Remember how well that smarmy strategy worked out when Neville Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler by granting him permission to invade neighboring countries in the belief the rest of Europe (and capitalist interests) would be spared?  Even more recently, remember how well that worked out when Pelosi's party thought it would be a great idea to run Hillary Clinton in 2016 and destroy Bernie Sanders at the same time? The polls and the pundits certainly thought she'd be a shoo-in to beat Trump.

So let's double down on that winning strategy. If it doesn't work out, it will all be the fault of the Deplorables, again. If it doesn't work out, Nancy Pelosi personally will never have to suffer. Nor will the Democratic donor class, who are flusher with cash than ever thanks to Trump's tax cuts and their investments in his military machine and prison-industrial complex.

It's a toss-up as to whether Pelosi's main problem is corruption or senility, or a combination of the two, when she posits that only a boring centrist can win in 2020. This boring individual will win by such a stupendous margin that Trump will never be able to challenge the results. 

On the other hand, the results of a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren victory could not possibly be stupendous enough to physically scare Trump out of the White House. Only a Biden or a Buttigieg or maybe a Harris would triumph in a landslide, which would bury Trump forever and ever.

Glenn Thrush reports:

Sitting in her office with its panoramic view of the National Mall, Ms. Pelosi — the de facto head of the Democratic Party until a presidential nominee is selected in 2020 — offered Democrats her “coldblooded” plan for decisively ridding themselves of Mr. Trump: Do not get dragged into a protracted impeachment bid that will ultimately get crushed in the Republican-controlled Senate, and do not risk alienating the moderate voters who flocked to the party in 2018 by drifting too far to the left.
“Own the center left, own the mainstream,” Ms. Pelosi, 79, said.

Of course, Pelosi's version of center left actually skews more toward right of center. She neglects to mention that the "moderates" who did win their mid-term races were heavily bankrolled by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which refused financial aid to what she dismisses as the "exuberances"- including the victorious Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She also neglects to mention that such right-wing Democratic senators as Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp lost badly in their own bids for re-election, despite their soulless valiant efforts to appeal to the Mythical Center.  

The tacit message of the Times article is that if Sanders or Warren win, Trump will not go quietly. But he magically will go quietly if Biden wins. 

If you really want to dig right down to the center of the centrist Id, Pelosi doesn't even want a Democrat in the White House. She'd rather dance the triangulation tango with Trump for four more years. 

Pelosi is trying to gaslight the electorate at the same time she dog-whistles her reassurances to nervous Democratic Party donors, who have made no secret of the fact that they dread Sanders or Warren in the White House, because both these candidates threaten to unconscionably use their power to serve people who don't have has much money as the big donors and the corporate lobbyists do.

She claims that if Democrats would just cringe pragmatically and appease Trump now, he will be less nasty and dangerous, less likely to irrevocably poison the minds of the malleable against the Democrats during the primaries and the general election. She bizarrely calls this her "cold-blooded plan" for victory. I'll grant her the cold-blooded part. And I'll even compliment her for having one hell of an overdeveloped lizard brain to go along with all that ice in her veins.

Her strategy amounts to pretending to be scared and disgusted by the Trump administration in public, but being complicit with, and accommodating to, the Trump administration in private. Pelosi seems confident that the actual public is not reading about this cynical strategy in the Times, mostly because they probably can't afford the subscription, despite working several jobs. And if the bottom 80 percent or so of the reading public are perusing the Times, maybe Pelosi can instill the requisite doubt and fear into their psyches.  I doubt that she cares about anybody but her donors. The underlying message to her real constituents is that she's got their backs. She's cold-bloodedly pushing the scales. Hers and theirs.

One thing to keep in mind about many Times articles and op-eds is that they are essentially telegraphed messages from the rich to the rich. But in a show of egalitarianism, they are happy to offer the lesser people a tiny box with which to share their expertise (1500 characters or less) with their peers. If you are very lucky, your comment will be accepted by some mystery algorithm and make it into print. If you write from a centrist, pragmatic  point of view, a human moderator is very likely to award you a coveted golden "Times Pick" icon. This digital badge of honor is the equivalent of a jolt of dopamine, and will encourage you to write more centrist - and influential! - comments in the future.

The Appeasement Not Impeachment For Our Time Tango. 

*Update, 5/5: Boy, do I ever feel dope-amined. After suppressing my submitted comment on a Maureen Dowd column for about five hours last night, the moderators not only finally published it, they awarded it a coveted Times Pick! I must have subconsciously inserted some pragmatism in there - but more likely, they viewed it as a hook for all the self-avowed "centrists" in Timesland to digitally venture forth to set me straight, to insist that yes, they really do exist, and that befuddled old me must not let the Perfect be the Enemy of the Good. 

I have a bone to pick with Dowd's odd, but typically "insidery" characterization of Atty. Gen. Barr as a heretofore revered elder statesman in Washington, before Trump ruined his stellar reputation. How soon she and her corporate media cohort forget that it was Barr who orchestrated a pardon for (among others in the Iran-Contra scandal) Elliot Abrams - who has returned bigger and meaner than ever to spread more mayhem in Latin America via the ongoing US-led Venezuela coup attempt.

My comment is basically a rehash of the stuff I've been writing recently at Sardonicky, but I'll repost it here anyway:

No shock that D.C. insiders saw Barr as an upright member of the legal establishment, despite his crafting of pardons for war criminals under Bush Sr. In an ethical system, he would have been divested of the respectability badge decades ago.

  He served corrupt power then, and he serves corrupt power now. Yet somehow, Trump has suddenly and single-handedly corrupted an honorable man. This narrative speaks to the rot in the entire political establishment and the media's complicity in it.The media who so slavishly treated Mueller as a virtual Father of Our Country are now dissing him as a Deadbeat Dad for not sending Barr to the rhetorical naughty chair sooner. Why would he, when "tradition"  also dictates that no sitting president, not even Trump, can ever be taken to the legal woodshed and indicted?

Nancy Pelosi herself says impeachment is off the table, claiming that this Constitutional remedy would only embolden Trump to act brattier. In effect, she's the parent who yells a lot and threatens her kid with punishment but never follows through, which only emboldens the kid and his feral gang to act more brazen by the day.Meanwhile, in a Times interview, she says that only a mild centrist (not Sanders or Warren) can attract enough mythical centrist voters to beat Trump into enough of a quivering pulp to actually agree to vacate the White House when the time comes.

 It's Neville Chamberlain deja vu all over again.

"Appeasement Not Impeachment For Our Time." 

Kirstjen Nielsen Enters New York Times Halfway House

If you kidnapped, caged and misplaced thousands of immigrant children and were still fired for not being "tough enough," the New York Times will help to rehabilitate you and maybe even salvage your moribund Deep State career.

But there's a catch. First, you must anonymously portray your former boss, President Donald Trump, as a Putin stooge and wimpy enabler and paranoid denier of an alleged continuing Russian attack on our Democracy. You must also declare yourself a loyal Russophobe in good standing in order keep the Russiagate fairy tale alive.

The Times will then portray you as a courageous public official who tried to sound the Russian alarm in the last harrowing months of your tenure, only to be silenced by Trump's gatekeepers. But undaunted, you then bravely went behind his back and formed a secret working group to valiantly defend our nation against Russian meddling. You had the guts to direct the full strength of the World's Only Remaining Superpower against a Russian troll farm which had spent $100,000 to place the cheesy Facebook ads which miraculously swung the 2016 election away from Hillary Clinton. The estimated $5 billion worth of free advertising for broadcasts of Trump's campaign rallies by United States cable TV outlets pales in comparison.

In exchange for this "whistle-blowing," the Times will never once, in its "breaking news" article, mention your grisly recent past as the Homeland Security secretary who willingly followed Trump's orders and ripped thousands of migrant children right out of their parents' arms at the border. The newspaper will never mention that outraged liberals have urged corporations and media outlets never, ever to give Kirstjen Nielsen another job or another platform - not only because she imprisoned kids, but because she did such a lousy job keeping track of the kids she deported or transferred, and that their whereabouts still are unknown and many will probably be lost forever.

It was only a few short weeks ago that Times itself had joined full-throatedly in the anti-Nielsen chorus. "Her role in terrorizing children should make her a permanent pariah," wrote columnist Michelle Goldberg.

But with their Russiagate narrative now in tatters, it might be in the best interests of the lucrative franchise investors to forgive and forget in a huge hurry. The Times will even allow you, Kirstjen Nielson, to modestly both protect and aggrandize yourself by sourcing you only as "a former top administration official." And five of its big-name reporters will speak to another four anonymous current officials to lend further alleged credence to the yarn.

As blatant propaganda goes, the piece is a classic of the genre. It is so off-the-wall, in fact, that as of this writing it was not even prominently featured, as most of these "scoops" are, at the top of the digital homepage. Maybe it's because even the editors were mildly nauseated by the globs of whipped cream on the top of the confection. The prose is so breathless, it leaves you dizzy.

An example:

Ms. Nielsen left the Department of Homeland Security early this month after a tumultuous 16-month tenure and tensions with the White House. Officials said she had become increasingly concerned about Russia’s continued activity in the United States during and after the 2018 midterm elections — ranging from its search for new techniques to divide Americans using social media, to experiments by hackers, to rerouting internet traffic and infiltrating power grids.

The Times does not mention that the Washington Post report of a Russian attempt to hack the Vermont power grid was almost immediately retracted, because it wasn't true.

After allegedly being ordered by Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney never to discuss Russian malfeasance in Trump's presence, lest he erupt in paranoid rage, Nielsen dished to the Times (anonymously) that she agonized about how Russians were gathering for the big attack and how she was rendered powerless to do anything about it. She seemingly forgot all about the kids she was snatching and caging at the time - as has the Times in its rehab of a puff piece. It's like the child abuse never even happened. 

The only thing we have to fear is not a near-fascist form of government within our own borders and the worst wealth inequality in recent history, but that "Russians" are sowing dissent and threatening our free and fair elections. If it weren't for those damned Russians, people would still believe in the American Dream. Because plucky patriotic child kidnapper Kirstjen Nielsen was thwarted in her efforts, the Times continues,

the issue did not gain the urgency or widespread attention that a president can command. And it meant that many Americans remain unaware of the latest versions of Russian interference.

As Robert Mueller III himself acknowledged in his report on Russian meddling, just because he could not provide evidence of terrible things does not mean that the evidence does not exist, somewhere out there.  In other words, just because you can't prove a negative doesn't mean the allegations can't keep shambling along like a zombie that refuses to completely die.

While American intelligence agencies have warned of the dangers of new influence campaigns penetrating the 2020 elections, Mr. Trump and those closest to him have maintained that the effects of Russia’s interference in 2016 was overblown.
“You look at what Russia did — you know, buying some Facebook ads to try to sow dissent and do it — and it’s a terrible thing,” Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, said on Tuesday during an interview at the Time 100 Summit in New York.
“But I think the investigations, and all of the speculation that’s happened for the last two years, has had a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple of Facebook ads,” he said.

When a corporate media outlet like the Times wants to bury the truth, they go to some of the most mistrusted public figures in America to elicit the truthful quotes they wish to debunk. So rather than turn to respected journalists like Aaron Mate, Stephen Cohen, Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald and other so-called "Russoskeptics" for insight, they go to Jared Kushner of all people.. People hate this career grifter and slumlord so much that even when he does speak the truth - that the Russiagate propaganda franchise is far more dangerous, given the nuclear powers involved, than any alleged "meddling" - that they will discount anything he says out of hand.

Although Barack Obama also faces renewed criticism for not taking Russian meddling seriously enough, the Times also tries to rehabilitate his reputation by going to some of his former national security advisers for confirmation that Trump is even worse - despite his recent warning to Putin to get out of "his" Venezuela, and his administration's increased verbal threats and economic sanctions against Russia.

It's almost as if the Times and other investors in the Russiagate franchise want Trump to be re-elected, or at least are unwittingly handing him re-election. It seems that they'll say anything to divert a restive population's attention from the country's leftward bent and overwhelming voter enthusiasm for progressive policy proposals like Medicare For All and debt-free higher education.

The first Cold War, beginning in the 50s, set the stage for reversal of FDR's "socialist" New Deal by instilling fear of socialist Russia in people. Perhaps Cold War 2.0 can recapture the magic and complete the job. 

Ask not what your country is doing to others. Ask what others are doing to your country... even though it really isn't "your" country, and democracy is pretty much limited to allowing the news and entertainment consumers of America to vote every two and four years.

As for Kirstjen Nielsen, despite what scolding liberal pundits wrote about her mere weeks ago, look for her to show up on MSNBC or CNN as a regular paid national security contributor and Russia expert any day now. She has taken that all-important first step in her rehabilitation crusade by being an anonymous source for the #Resistance in the pages of the Times. If George W. Bush can be resurrected as a beloved elder statesman by the liberal class despite his epic war crimes, then child-snatcher Nielsen should graduate to corporate forgiveness respectability in record time.

Take a look at the top-rated reader comments on the article. It did its job and evoked the requisite sympathy for Nielsen. She is halfway home in her journey toward forgiveness. The public consent has been duly manufactured.

If Gina Haspel could torture people and destroy video of the torture sessions and still be confirmed by the Senate to head the CIA, who's to say that Nielsen also can't reinvent herself and advance in her own career? After all, if people like John Brennan and James Clapper can parlay their own crimes into talking-head gigs on cable TV, the sky is the absolute limit.

It was Barack Obama himself who famously urged us to "look forward, not back" as he refused to prosecute the "patriots who tortured some folks."

How quickly the bad things that American leaders do slide down the Orwellian memory hole. Maybe Nielsen, her image transformed with the help of the corporate media, can put the nightmare behind her even as thousands of her asylum-seeking victims will never be able to.

Blasphemy In the Church of Nine-Eleven

Nancy Pelosi‏Verified account @SpeakerPelosi

The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must be done with reverence. The President shouldn’t use the painful images of 9/11 for a political attack.

4:20 AM - 13 Apr 2019

• 13,147 Retweets
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20,228 replies13,147 retweets65,771 likes

 

 

1. 1. Nancy Pelosi‏Verified account @SpeakerPelosi Apr 13
      

      As we visit our troops in Stuttgart to thank them and be briefed by them, we honor our first responsibility as leaders to protect and defend the American people. It is wrong for the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to fan the flames to make anyone less safe.

The target of much criticism from the left for her bland scolding of Donald Trump over his own incendiary Tweet against Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Pelosi has since announced she will ask for another security review by the FBI and Capitol Police to determine how Omar, her family and her staff can be best protected from a sitting president of the United States. She has also belatedly suggested that his original offensive tweet, with a photo of Omar interposed with a graphic of the flaming World Trade Center, "be taken down."

Omar's remarks about Islamophobia at a conference last month were recently ripped out of context by a right-wing agitator, then enhanced by Rupert Murdoch's tabloid New York Post, and finally grotesquely inflamed by Provocateur-in-Chief Donald Trump. What Trump actually presides over is not so much the government as it is the xenophobia and racism which has always been an integral, albeit usually verbally suppressed, part of the American ruling class agenda.

 And that very much includes the United States military, whose Civil War army was reconstituted and professionalized for the express purpose of enforcing the mass expulsions and exterminations of native American populations. To this day, military weapons and other hardware, such as the Apache helicopter, are named after Indian tribes. Osama bin Laden was code-named Geronimo prior to his extrajudicial sneak execution as Barack Obama began preparations for his re-election campaign.

 So Trump just happens to be the most vocal and vicious (and for the more discreet ruling elite, the most embarrassing) spokesman for this dark part of the American psyche, not arriving on the scene until some some 300 years after the Puritans first erected their own model shining City on the Hill off a foundation of corpses of the native populations of New England, whom they exterminated both through their diseases and their wars.

So the cowardly and tepid response of Pelosi and Democratic Party leadership to Trump's not-so-veiled incitements to racist violence against Omar in particular and Muslims in general, should thus be put into historical context.

Pelosi in her Tweet avoided directly addressing his threats against Ilhan Omar by diverting the issue into a bizarre sermon whose theme is that any discussion  of the Sept. 11th attacks should be akin to prayer - a "sacred memory" - to be chanted only with the approved words and contained within the walls of the established cathedral. This deflection is nothing new. The horrific act of mass murder began its transformation into a cult, founded and led by the political-media complex, almost from the day it happened. The attacks had to be fetishized in order to avoid discussions of its root cause, which was blowback by former CIA asset Osama bin Laden, revenge against the US militaristic/capitalistic meddling and plunder in the entire Middle Eastern world and the militarization of Israel by its US partner, funder and enabler.

 The physical site of the lower Manhattan attack has been transformed into a national shrine and museum. The 2,753 victims have been canonized as martyrs.

The attacks became the impetus for even more US meddling, with the ensuing full scale military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and still-ongoing bombings of at least seven other majority-Muslim countries, including Ilhan Omar's native Somalia. More than a million people have died, been maimed or displaced by this overkill. The 9/11 attacks also became the perfect excuse to criminalize dissent and whittle away the civil rights of both US and global populations. They spawned a whole new Department of Homeland Security and transformed the  country into what journalist Todd Miller aptly calls Border Patrol Nation. This year, the United States Congress has allocated more money to the permanent war machine than it did during the bloodiest year of the Iraq War.

Long before the September day in 2001 "when everything changed," of course, Islam was being demonized by Western leaders, and their corporate news media and Hollywood propagandists. Islam has regularly been equated with fundamentalism, extremism and terrorism for decades. As the late Palestinian author Edward Said explained in the introduction of the 1997 edition of his book "Covering Islam," Muslims became especially convenient scapegoats after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the wake of the bombing by Libyan terrorists of the Pan Am flight above Lockerbie, Scotland, and the first bombing of the World Trade Center and other attacks, the simple utterance of the word "Islam" in the West became a means of attacking Islam. 

This, in turn, has "provoked more hostility between self-appointed Muslim and Western spokespersons. 'Islam' defines a relatively small proportion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world, which numbers a billion people, and includes dozens of countries, societies, traditions, languages, and of course an infinite number of different experiences."

This is exactly what Ilhan Omar was talking about in her speech last month,  correctly observing that the actions of "some people" on 9/11 paved the way for the perpetual criminalization of an entire religion as practiced in myriad ways by over a billion people worldwide.

As for Donald Trump, inveterate entertainment consumer and purveyor that he is, his own personal xenophobia did not sprout full-fledged from the murky depths of his personality disorder. He probably, for example, saw the 1994 Hollywood blockbuster, True Lies. Its star villains, notes author Zachary Karabell, are stereotypical Arabs "complete with glinty eyes and a passionate desire to kill Americans" who must, in turn, be killed by the sexy intrepid American hero, played by future GOP California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

As Edward Said observed, "Covering Islam is a one-sided activity that obscures what 'we' do, and highlights instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are."

Ilhan Omar was initially celebrated by the Democratic Party because she so perfectly fit its identity politics agenda as a cosmetic antithesis of Trump: she is a woman, she is Black, she is an immigrant, and she is a Muslim. If only she could have stayed in her appointed place as an exotic statue instead of criticizing the right-wing government of Israel - on top of having the effrontery to be one of the most progressive members of Congress. As such, she puts lie to the propaganda that Muslims live in a medieval, anti-feminist world. The corporate wing of the party, led by Pelosi, is not progressive and it fully supports the right-wing government of Israel. While pretending to be all-inclusive and anti-bigotry, this corporate wing has fully colluded in waging the forever wars on Muslim-majority countries. Pelosi never blinked an eye at Barack Obama's drone assassination program, which specifically targeted Muslim civilians as incipient terrorists simply by virtue of who they are and where they live (unprotected "tribal areas").

Pelosi therefore must have found it easier to castigate Trump for blaspheming  the "sacred memory" of 9/11 than to castigate him for implicitly threatening Ilhan Omar's life. It took her three whole days to even factor Omar's well-being into her narrative. Her main gripe was that Trump abused the sacred memory by making it all about himself and his political future. 

Although she didn't spell it out, Pelosi also implied in her April 13th tweet that the carefully unmentioned Omar had also abused the sacred memory by juxtaposing her own religion next to the US Imperium's virtual state religion and holy day of obligation, which became the very basis for attacking Omar's religion and its various adherents, the vast majority of whom are peace-loving people.

The Church of Nine-Eleven was constructed by the war-mongering capitalist elites for the sole propaganda purpose of ramping up war and plunder, cynically repurposing the victims and first responders into patriotic martyrs and human shields, even as some of these same first responders went to war to die for the sole profit of corporations. And, even as sections of the 9/11 Commission report implicating the Saudi government were kept secret for many years. The volunteer troops fighting the oligarchs' wars were then used by the Obamas and other politicians to shame the economically struggling population at home into "sharing the sacrifice" as jobs were lost and punishing austerity was imposed after the 2008 financial collapse. 

 Pelosi's tepid tweet sends the hysterical message that it is reckless, rank heresy for Trump to openly and verbally admit that he hates Muslims, Mexicans and all dark-skinned people.

Her sub-Tweet, gushing about her own visit to a US military base in Germany,  which is still semi-occupied 75 years after the end of World War II, says it all. When she writes that the military protection of "the American people" is her first priority, keep in mind that the de facto definition of "the people" and their national security is the corporate state, which armed forces must protect around the clock and around the globe if their plunder is to proceed apace.

As Edward Said wrote:

"The tendency to consider the whole world as one country's imperium is very much in the ascendancy in today's United States, the last remaining superpower.... Such an idea of rightful Western dominance is in reality an uncritical idolization of Western power. "

Keep in mind that Said penned those words in 1997, before 9/11 "changed everything." The ascendancy has already reached its peak and it has nowhere else to go but down.

Thus, for Pelosi and for her fellow imperialists, it is likewise heresy for a progressive elected representative like Ilhan Omar to bring too much attention to herself, to her maligned religion and her war-torn native country, to her fellow immigrants and refugees, and to bipartisan hypocrisy. The ruling class does not want the American public to get the idea that the United States kills and expels and robs people for any reason other than humanitarianism, or that other countries hate us not for our "freedoms", but for our crimes.

Pelosi might be getting this year's Profiles in Courage award from the Kennedy dynasty, but it's really Omar who deserves an award for her serene courage under immense, unrelenting pressure. In the days since Trump's incendiary tweet, she has received even more death threats, and Trump himself has escalated his Twitter attacks on her.

Even so, her mind is on the plight of others:

Ilhan Omar‏Verified account @IlhanMN

This country was founded on the ideas of justice, of liberty, of the pursuit of happiness. But these core beliefs are under threat. Each and every day. We are under threat by an administration that would rather cage children than pass comprehensive immigration reform.

11:18 AM - 13 Apr 2019

Health Care Kabuki

Since hell hath no fury like a president vindicated, Donald Trump has again gone on the attack against Obamacare. This time, though, Trump is doing an end run around Congress and is using another recent Texas court decision to try and overturn the law. 

The fake resistance Vichy Democrats, meanwhile, are doing their own oligarch-pleasing part by introducing a bill to merely "shore up" Obamacare and keep the private insurance predators in business. Single Payer is off the table. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made sure of that, just as she has made sure that impeachment is off the table.

Trump isn't even bothering suggesting a replacement for Obamacare this go-round. He wants, or at least pretends to want, to destroy the whole thing in one fell judicial swoop. He is using the tried-and-true Goebbels method of viciously going on the offense as a way to play cowardly defense. For despite all his boasts of "exoneration!" Trump is not out of the woods yet.  Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller III has reportedly farmed out acres of new evidence to states attorney general and US attorneys which tie him and his extended family to bank fraud, tax fraud, and real estate fraud, to name just three treats on the criminal smorgasbord. Never mind that these are the same local prosecution shops that have let the Trump empire get away with its sleaze for whole decades, absent making secret deals and paying the occasional civil fine. This time could be different, especially when there are political names to be made for any number of hungry headline-seeking prosecutors.

Now, here's where Trump's crusade to destroy Obamacare could hit a snag. As Vicky Ward lays out in her new book, "Kushner, Inc." the president's son-in-law Jared has a big financial stake in keeping Obamacare alive and kicking. His brother Josh's online health insurance company, currently valued at close to $3 billion, could be destroyed right along with the Affordable Care Act. Jared was adamantly opposed to the first attempt at repealing the law, for very good reason. Ward writes:

Josh had co-founded the online health insurer, Oscar, which was predicated on Obamacare: it could be purchased on the state exchanges that the Affordable Care Act had created.... If the new (repeal) legislation rolled back Obamacare, it could be financially catastrophic. Someone close to the brothers pointed out to me that "no other asset (in the Kushner family) comes close (to Oscar)." 

Trump's former economic adviser, Gary Cohn, a Democratic alumnus of Goldman Sachs, also opposed repealing Obamacare. Ward adds that at one point, Jared even brought in Obama health adviser Ezekiel Emanuel, to consult on saving the law and by extension, saving the family's financial skin.

It all became moot when the late John McCain cast the deciding GOP vote that saved the law.

I wonder if Ivanka might now whisper in Daddy's ear that, as pleasurable as it is to scare and sicken millions of people by ripping their health insurance out from under them, it might be smarter to keep the family peace, and most important of all, keep the windfall profits flowing to the family, all thanks to Obamacare. The Oscar company's bronze plan requires subscribers to pay an $18,000 deductible before they receive any benefits at all, making it as legally corrupt as most neoliberal schemes designed to extract money from the desperate and put it in plutocratic pockets for the greater pragmatic good.

It's quite the dilemma for Trump. He will have to choose between pleasing his base, and pleasing his kids and the insurance companies. What variety of greed and graft shall he pick? Stay tuned.

It's possible and even probable that Trump's latest authoritarian gambit is just another head fake to distract the country from his own cowering fears and continuing legal woes. It could even be a way of thanking Speaker Nancy Pelosi for squelching impeachment talk, for slapping his main rival Bernie Sanders' Medicare For All plan, and for fighting her very hardest to further enrich the health care marketplace which has been so good to Trump's in-laws and other wealthy investors.

The corporate Democrats' bill, after all, greatly expands federal subsidies to the insurance cartel, which is already flush with record windfall profits.