How Sociopaths Lecture Psychopaths

I hadn't wanted to write anything yet on the Texas and Ohio shooting sprees, because I was and still am trying to absorb the horror, and think about it some more before adding my own two cents to the mass outrage. I find it very hard to think clearly when I feel so mad and yes, helpless. 

Watching a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump laboriously reading the platitudes written for him by a public relations flack was bad enough. Actually, I should have stopped at my first attempt to watch his statement live-streaming on the New York Times homepage. My old computer combined with slow Internet speed showed a blurry image of the president, with an endlessly rotating buffer-circle perfectly centered over his face, completely obliterating his features. It was like a cartoon rendering of our fiendishly cartoonish president suffering a bad dizzy spell.

So I switched to C-Span and unfortunately got a much clearer cartoon of the cardboard cutout Trump struggling to read in a voice so monotonous and lethargic that it was chilling.

I'd still been feeling mad and scared enough when I clicked on the Times again this morning and was hit by a sanctimonious op-ed written by Susan Rice, Barack Obama's former national security advisor and co-architect of the US's destructive Libya regime-change war, and currently a very highly-paid board member of the Netflix entertainment empire.

After expressing the outrage that we all feel at the murders and at Trump's role as a hate and violence instigator bar none, Rice bemoans what liberal interventionists and their neocon brethren usually bemoan whenever they talk about Trump: America's sudden, shocking loss of Standing in the World.

It was a dream world in which the rest of the world totally loved the United States, or at least relied on the United States to bring peace and love and democracy to it.... or at least feared the United States enough to kowtow to its awesome might. Rice opines:

When the president of the United States reveals himself to be an unabashed bigot, attacking minorities in his own country, America’s ability to stand credibly against human rights abuses, especially repression of minorities in other countries — from the Uighurs in China to Shiites in Bahrain and Christians throughout the Middle East — is thwarted in ways lasting and immeasurable. Dictators around the world encounter no opprobrium from our government and are comforted to find a fellow traveler in rhetoric and policies that demean his own people.
In case anyone needs reminding: A majority of the world is populated by what we Americans call “people of color.” To fight terrorism or prevent the spread of pandemic disease, to stem weapons proliferation or organized criminal organizations, to address climate change or punish outlaw states, we need the willing cooperation of nations around the world. None of these transnational security challenges can be combated effectively by the United States alone.

She ignores the truth that American administrations have long propped up those corrupt dictators who enable US-based corporate plunder at the expense of their own citizens. Her idea of an "outlaw state" is Venezuela, upon whose people economic war was declared in the Obama administration. She does not mention that the US military is the biggest polluter on the planet and that the US is the largest arms manufacturer on earth. 

She's upset because Trump has deprived the murderous Military-Industrial Complex of its precious mask of humanity and rectitude 

And Susan Rice would not be a neoliberal warmonger in good standing if she didn't also blame Russia, with its nine global military bases so unfairly competing with America's thousand or so. Black people also were apparently either sanguine or comatose about police abuses until those damned Russian trolls got them all riled up and prevented them from turning out for Hillary Clinton.

Most dangerously, President Trump is serving up to our adversaries an ever more divided and weakened America, one that is animated by suspicion, rived by hatred of the “other” and increasingly incapable of uniting in the face of external threats. Russia, above all, continues to exploit and exacerbate these divisions.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russian trolls stoked American white nationalism while amplifying black anger about police brutality in an effort to suppress the African-American vote. Today, President Vladimir Putin of Russia continues to use social media to undermine our democracy and provoke internal conflict. 

She counters Trump-style xenophobia and fear-mongering with Democratic Party-style xenophobia and fear-mongering.

As a matter of fact, I would not be surprised if the Establishment now co-opts the latest gun massacres to justify even more corporatized government censorship of independent news sites and security state oppression of citizens than it does now.

My published comment to Susan Rice:

That Trump has reduced our country to a "fresh nadir" and is endangering people with his vile rhetoric is beyond question.

 But to say that the US previously had "credibility" as a global human rights champion is a real stretch, given our relentless wars of aggression and regime change. These wars have unleashed an immigration crisis, most widely being felt in Europe, with its own rise in right-wing populism. Blaming the immigrant "other" for the effects of unfettered capitalism and climate change and state-sanctioned terror (bombs and drones) aimed disproportionately at dark-hued people isn't just a Trumpian conflagration, although his Twitter bully pulpit certainly pours oceans of gasoline on it.

Previous presidents have been lots more skillful and glib at spewing platitudes of love and peace to help US citizens to more easily ignore the horrors being done in our names in faraway lands.

Trump is giving tacit permission for disturbed individuals to act out their violent fantasies. It's a scorched earth policy at its most extreme and its most dangerous. That such violence has now come home to roost should come as no surprise, especially in a country that has more guns than people, where most people don't have a few hundred dollars in savings for household emergencies or retirement, where tens of millions of people lack basic medical care, and where the death rate has risen for a third straight year.

 Defeating Trump is only the tiniest first baby step to cure what ails us.

Trump Ruins Xenophobia For Everybody

That's the gist of a New York Times "news analysis" published on Saturday.

In the good old Bipartisan Days, reporter Michael Shear laments, Both Sides had no trouble agreeing that migrants and refugees entering the US had to be dealt with, and dealt with sternly. But now Donald Trump's Wall is diverting the desired official discourse away from all those other harsh methods of keeping people out and disposing of them.

Back in the good old polite days, officials knew how to keep their racism and xenophobia carefully hidden from public view as they crafted their racist, xenophobic policies.

By conjuring images of a towering stone edifice around a medieval fortress — and branding those on the outside as invaders threatening to bring crime, drugs and disease to the United States — Mr. Trump has transformed what used to be a complicated, nuanced negotiation into a take-it-or-leave-it demand, laced with xenophobia, that has shuttered nearly a quarter of the government for weeks.

Only "laced with" xenophobia? Shear must be so used to reporting the legendary nuanced collegiality among the politicians of the Uniparty that he can only complain that Trump's demands and rhetoric are a tad on the bigoted side. He dare not state the obvious: that this president is a human-shaped brick of pure cocaine, or maybe it's a boulder-sized rock of crystal meth with a chaser of heroin. Those drugs that Trump claims are "flooding" over the border are unfairly competing with him. And he won't rest until he poisons a lot more people than the current third of the population that is currently hooked on him.

But back to the good old sober days. The Uniparty racketeers would often collegially stuff their faces with pizza as they politely debated how many tens of thousands of extra border security agents should be hired to confiscate the clandestine jugs of water left by sympathetic citizens for the migrants making the deadly trek through some of the most brutal climate conditions on the planet.

It was so reasonable back then that Democrats even agreed to double the border security patrols, a good faith gesture of overkill designed to placate the more openly racist Republicans.

They were such ardent sticklers for xenophobic decency, in fact, that

Senators from both parties also agreed on money for technological improvements along the border. The bill allocated $3.2 billion for drones, infrared ground sensors and long-range thermal imaging cameras to give Border Patrol agents advance notice when migrants cross illegally, especially at night. It also included money for an electronic employment verification system for all employers and upgrades at airports to catch immigrants who overstay their visas.
And the consensus included some physical barriers — what Mr. Trump might call walls and others would call fencing. Years earlier, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 allocated money to build about 650 miles of barriers along the border. The 2013 bill, had it been signed into law, would have increased that total to almost 700 miles, mostly along the eastern half of the border with Mexico.

The polite xenophobes at least had the good taste to call their barriers "fencing" while pretending that Reaper drones are totally benign. In the good old pre-Trumpian days, the profiteers of the military-industrial complex could mask their greed and inhumanity behind all that overpriced surveillance and weaponry. And now Trump has to ruin the whole enterprise with his unrefined, retrograde, low-tech gibberish. He has brought such uncomfortable and unwanted attention to the heretofore ignored border. It used to be that Homeland Security cops firing tear gas across the border into another sovereign nation (Mexico), and the imprisonment of mothers and children in "family detention" prisons were perfectly acceptable to most American liberals. The previous Democratic administration practiced their inhumanity so discreetly, you see.

No more. Thanks a lot, Trump, for ripping the mask off the all-American cruelty.

Oh, and the word salad that keeps spinning out of that pursed little mouth! Michael Shear quotes The Donald:

In remarks to reporters after a meeting with Democrats at the White House earlier this month, Mr. Trump insisted that the only way to prevent immigrants from crossing between the 25 official ports of entry is to erect fences everywhere else.
“We can’t let gaps. Because if you have gaps, those people are going to turn their vehicles, or the gangs — they’re going to coming in through those gaps,” the president said. “And we cannot let that happen.”

Still, faithful establishment scribe that he is, Shear soon reverts back to Both Siderism, decrying the dreaded Tone that all too often gets in way of proper racketeering discourse:  

In recent days, the rhetoric between the two sides has become more strident than ever. Mr. Trump and his Republican allies have pointed out that Democrats supported fencing in the past, though they purposefully ignore the context of those votes and the difference between the fencing that Democrats supported and the all-or-nothing wall that the president has demanded.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California has called the wall “immoral,” cementing her position against it.

And she was no doubt also very steely while she was at it.

The Great White Rant, Revisited

Just as Donald Trump regularly dehumanizes dark-skinned people, incurring the requisite (and much-desired) outrage from all who claim to be decent,  so too is he uncannily proficient at then turning the tables upon the decently outraged.

In typical gaslighting fashion, Trump is calling the outraged media and citizens to account for their coverage of and reaction to his latest "animals" remark aimed at undocumented immigrants. He lambasted the outraged, saying that if they'd been paying close enough attention to his well-known nuanced verbal skills, they would have noticed he was again only talking about the notorious MS-13 gang.

He's technically right about that to a minor degree, but very wrong about it to a truly major degree.. His incendiary comment was, in fact, a response to a complaint by the Fresno County (California) sheriff that state law precludes her from reporting to federal immigration authorities information about undocumented migrants, including MS-13 gang members, being held in her county jail.

"We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country,” Trump responded without referring to MS-13. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.”

He was perfectly OK to let the conventional interpretation of his remarks about "these people" stand for more than 24 hours - more than enough time to rebroadcast his bullhorn of a message that all Latino migrants are animals and criminals  - before complaining that he'd been deliberately misunderstood... again.

This has caused a minor corporate media and political frenzy, with some hastily cobbled-together retractions and corrections about the "misunderstanding." So score a win for Trump among his base and his enablers from the Duopoly, and a loss for the coastal elites who pay lip service to the rights of migrants and refugees when it suits their political agendas and party prospects to do so. 

And most of all, score more terror and angst for Latinos and other immigrants, who are being torn from their families by the abusive Trump administration.

For the most part, the corporate media are acting like a bunch of wimps in the face of Trump's critique. They should neither have retracted their stories and tweets, like the A.P. did, nor issued even the flimsiest of apologies to the Trump administration for appearing to "coddle" the MS-13 gang the way that they did, nor even "declined to comment" on the issue, as the New York Times safely did.

 The media were certainly co-opted by Trump in getting the xenophobic message out to the base, loud and clear, before many outlets took the easy way out and decided that yes, they had indeed misinterpreted Trump's "true" message. The lone exception, strange as it may seem, was the Washington Post, which stands by its factual headline "Trump Refers To Some Undocumented Immigrants As Animals."

CNN, long the profitable subject of Trump's "fake news" wrath, took the low road and sided with Trump, accusing and naming the major outlets which took his "animals" comments out of context. The cable network posted its screed, aptly enough, on its "Money Blog."

Heaven forbid that CNN personalities lose their credentials or "access" to the presidential seat of malevolent power as their bosses and corporate sponsors rake in record revenues by selectively #resisting Trump.

  Meanwhile,Trump is having his cake and eating it too, gleefully tweeting today: 

"Fake News Media had me calling Immigrants, or Illegal Immigrants, ‘Animals.’ Wrong! They were begrudgingly forced to withdraw their stories.. I referred to MS 13 Gang Members as “Animals,” a big difference — and so true. Fake News got it purposely wrong, as usual!”

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders went even further. At Thursday's daily White House briefing, she read from a prepared statement:  “The president was very clearly referring to MS-13 gang members who enter the country illegally and whose deportations are hamstrung by our laws. If the media and liberals want to defend MS-13, they’re more than welcome to. Frankly, I don’t think the term that the president used was strong enough.”

She then went on to gleefully and graphically imagine the press corps getting their jollies over the gang cutting off heads and ripping out hearts.

There were no follow-up questions from the cowed assembled court stenographers.