How the Times SugarcoatsTerrorism

 If its coverage of the explosions in Lebanon of  booby-tapped pagers and radios hasn't been implicitly admiring of Israel's technical "prowess" in causing at least two dozen deaths and thousands of gruesome injuries, the New York Times added insult to injury by proclaiming that Hezbollah militants are feeling mighty "embarrassed" for having been such unwitting dupes of Israel.

In framing the atrocity in in such a "was my face red!" manner, the Times has tried to deflect readers' attention from the actual blood streaming down all those faces and from the fact that many of the victims literally had their faces blown right off their skulls.

I thought I was beyond feeling shock and disgust at how the pro-Zionist New York Times regularly dehumanizes the targets of this settler-colonialist apartheid state. But its coldly clinical coverage Israel's latest sadistic mass murder went beyond the pale, even for the Times. The Gray Lady has exposed herself in all her ghoulish nakedness.

Nowhere in the rapidly dwindling  coverage does the paper describe the carnage as an act of terrorism On the contrary, it is an act of counterterrorism.  You see, It's only terrorism if Arabs and Muslims do it. Or maybe if a white guy like Putin does it. I can assure you that the coverage would be very different if Russia had sent explosive devices to Ukraine and thousands of innocent people had been torn apart.

So the Lebanon massacre must be downplayed at all costs. One article headlined "Waves of Small Explosions Cause Chaos Inside Hezbollah" served both to minimize the horrific injuries and to give the false impression that only militants were injured. Israel apparently possesses so much technical prowess that the throngs of passersby were magically erased right out of the picture. As is its wont, however, the Times did deign to mention the death and funeral of one child.

As "eye-catching" as  the carnage (Israeli prowess) certainly was,  writes reporter  Patrick Kingsley in another article published on Wednesday, the usual experts in the statecraft biz are very confused as to why Israel has not capitalized" on it. It was a tactical success but not the ultimate victory over the entire Middle East that warmongers of all nations crave.

Because if nothing else, Kingsley grotesquely writes, the mass slaughter in Lebanon "has restored some of the prestige and aura that Israel’s intelligence agencies lost on Oct. 7, when Hamas led a surprise attack on Israel that the Israeli military failed to predict or prepare for." (Sadly, the nearly year-long genocide in Gaza has failed to impress the more discerning among connoisseurs of cruelty as not being sufficiently prestigious.)

That Israel has foresworn bragging rights is just the Times being its cute disingenuous self again. Why would Israe boast and dish on all the details when it has as its partner  the United States do it for them? For the most powerful and lethal fighting and intelligence force the world has ever known and feared, the US sources dishing to the Times certainly seemed instantly aware of every detail of the planting of explosives in the hand-held devices, despite their claims of having no knowledge of the booby-trapped devices and terror attacks in advance.

The terror is, of course, the whole point. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. It can happen to us. It's just a short step from surveilling us and censoring us to physically mangling us. Look at  how easily, to give you just one example, that the FBI was able to  crack iPhone security without Apple's help.

I don't think  I was being overly paranoid when I fleetingly wondered why my iPad gave out a cheery little ding the other day.

***

Books don't explode, thank goodness, despite the reactionaries wanting to ban them. So I am reading a lot these days, fiction and nonfiction. This passage from a book by James Baldwin that I just finished really hit a nerve in me, so allow me to share it with you:

"The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct. they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply. Life is their only weapon against life, life is all they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may coerced) in hte population control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring on the fields which others own, with their transistor radios on their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one of the heads of the civilized world. forbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them. the wretched. quite coldly and deliberately. znd do not intend to change the satus quo; they are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement' rain down their bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced. and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life. or the 'conscience' of the civilized world There  is 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child's arrival, but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the 'vital interest'' of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child."

De Bait & Switch '24

It was Kamala Harris For the Oligarch People all the way on Tuesday night.  With taunt after taunt, platitude after platitude, she utterly destroyed Donald Trump's portrait of her as a Marxist Commie radical. Beyond any reasonable doubt, she established her right-wing cred as both a neoliberal and a neoconservative.

  It has taken gallons of the recombinant political DNA of Dick Cheney, Barack Obama and both Clintons to create the ultra-processed finished product known as Kamala Harris.

But even her skilled verbal waterboarding of Trump has left barely a dent in the admittedly unreliable national polls.

Here's a highly condensed analytic version of the official courtroom transcript:

ABC's David Muir(DM): Welcome to the high stakes showdown in the presidential sweepstakes horserace. As they face each other for the first time, they 're neck-and-neck, which makes actually facing each other physically impossible. But never mind all that. It's the foaming and the snorting and the frothing that count in these political spectacles.

ABC's Linsey Davis : And I am the token female sidekick.

Muir: Vice President Harris, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?

KH: So to avoid answering your question, I was raised as a middle class kid. And I am the only one on this stage who has a plan to lift up middle class people such as myself, unlike Doonald Trump who never talks about anyone but himself. So my plan is to build an Opportunity Economy which is simply a rehash of neoliberal bootstraps and ladders and stuff. So I want to help families buy a crib and a car seat, which are pathways to access to a house and a car. I will give a $5,000 tax deduction to small business start-ups.  Unlike Trump, who will impose a 20 percent sales tax on cribs and car seats And don't forget Project 2025.

Muir: Trump, you get two minutes to take the bait.

DT: Nah, it's not a sales tax, i's tariffs and they've kept them in place. It's me and me against the world. I am going to make other countries pay us back. They are sending us millions of people from their prisons and stealing jobs from Blacks and Hispanics and unions. They are taking over towns and buildings and stealing people's cats and dogs and eating them. They are destroying the pet population of the whole country.

DM: The fact checking machine in my ear has instantly checked  and reports that not one single cat or dog has been eaten. Now, Kamala, would you care to respond on the economy?

KH: Trump left us the worst economy since the Great Depression. Even though the unemployment was nowhere near the 25  percent it was then, this lie will pass right over your selective fact checkers who are still stuck on dead cats being stolen from single women.  Not only that, Trump's capitol riot was the worst attack on the country since the Civil War. Worse than even than 9/11 which viewers might remember used to be a holy day of obligation Now, Jan. 6th is. We must not lett our jingoistic holidays separate us.

DT: I have nothing to do with Project 25, I never even read it because I am not a reader and she knows it, okay? I am not going to read it because everybody knows I am an open book. The only jobs they got back were bounce-back jobs. Those are jobs that bounce. I threw them my balls and they grabbed them and then they took all the credit. 

DM: Kamala?

KH: He doesn't have a plan. I have a plan to create an Opportunity Economy which is the same thing as Obama's Ladders of Opportunity. You climb the ladders and you get to my land of opportunity. Goldman Sachs. which I won't mention  wrecked the economy before Obama rewarded them, says that Donald Trump will wreck the economy.

DT: I wemt to the Wharton School of Business. They say my plan is a brilliant plan. I am going to create a lot of good solid money for our comp - er, our country.  At least I will make them want to create jobs if not make actual jobs

Muir: Trump, I want to drill down and go to bat for Kamala and make her argument that your tariffs are really taxes. Your plan will make things costlier for average Americans. Do you believe Americans can afford your tariffs?

DT: I had no inflation. They have inflation.

Muir: Kamala, let's keep this debate focused on scaring people about Trump's evil tariffs.

:KH: Let's be clear. Since Joe Biden and I kept Trump's tax breaks for the rich in place, I will change the subject and mention that he sold chips to China that they're using for their military which will attack us because of him. Trump actually thanked Xi in a Tweet. This puts a real damper on our war plans. Plus China not transparent about being the origin of COVID!

Muir: The fact checker is taking a nap in my ear. Trump, you may respond.

DT: She's a Marxist. She is letting millions and millions of illegals into our country. They are criminals. They are bad for our country.

Linsey: Let's talk about abortion .Trump, Kamala says you keep flip flopping

DT: The previous governor of West Virginia said we can execute babies after they're born. And I say that is not OK.

Muir: My fact checker just woke up and tells me there is no state where it is legal to kill a newborn. Kamala, please respond.

KH: I am not surprised that that is a fact. Donald Trump is telling a woman what to do with her body. He will sign a national abortion ban. He will monitor your pregnancies, your marriages.

DT: There will no national abortion ban. It would never pass Coongress. And abortion reminds me of student loans. 

Muir: We might as well get back to immigration. Kamala?

KH: We were ready to sign the cruelest border law in history. But Donald Trump killed the bill. You should go to his rallies. He talks about fictional characters, whereas I have prosecuted human traffickers and drug dealers who actually exist. You will not hear him talk about your desires. I, on the other hand, will pledge to put your first, before his windmills that cause cancer.

DT: Sure, I'll take your bait. People don't go to her rallies. And the ones that do go, she's busing them and paying them. I have the most incredible rallies in the history of rallies. We are a failing nation, people want their country back. Look at the towns. They're eating our cats.

Muir: There are no dead cats.

DT: But people on television say there are dead cats beiing used for food.

KH: Talk about extreme! So I will. More than 200 Republicans including Dick Cheney say that America will never survive a Trump term.

DT: I fire bad people. You never fire bad people. Let me add I got more votes than anybody in history by far.

Muir: Will you go door to door rounding up deportees? What does this look like?

DT: Yeah, millions of terrorists, drug dealers. They have destroyed our fabric. All over the world crime is down except for here. And if the FBI says crime is down they're not looking at the worst cities.

KH: Well, I think this is so rich, coming from a criminal prosecuted for national security interference and found liable for rape with his next big court appearance in November. So let us move forward and address the housing crisis and support start-ups. Let us address groceries. The American people are tired of the same old playbook.

DT: You're weaponizing the court system against me. I will win on appeal. This is called lawfare. RussiaRussia Russia.

KH: No, Trump is the one who threatens to arrest political enemies. We must stop him.

Linsey: What about your flip flops, Kamala - on fracking, border decriminalization, buybacks of assault weapons. We will not mention your reversal on Medicare For All because our corporate sponsors in the insurance cartel forbid it.

KH: If we pollute our air and water here, we don't have to rely on foreign polluters over there. I was raised by a hard working mother and I wasn't handed $400 million on a silver platter. Didja really think I can't play shallow defense and lob non sequiturs as well as my opponent? Plus I am a gun owner, so there!

DT: She wants to win Pennsylvania where I almost got my head blown off thanks to democrats. If she wins., fossil fuel will be dead.

Muir: Let's rehash January Sixth.

(They proceed to sling the hash with abandon)

Muir: Madam Veep, Trump says he did not lose the last election.

KH: Let us be perfectly Nixonically clear. Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. The whole world is laughing at Donald Trump;

Trump: I just cannot resist this delicious bait. Victor Orban doesn't laugh at me, so there! The whole world is afraid of me and they need me. We got 14 million votes. She got zero votes.

Muir: And now to Israel-Hamas

KH: Let me repeat my unwavering support for Israel. All those women who were so horribly raped, as opposed to being run of the mill raped. And even when I am here on this stage, I am there working around the clock for a two state solution knowing full well that the time for such a solution is long past.

Muir: Trump, would you negotiate with Hamas?

DT: She hates Israel. And if I were president, the Ukraine war would never have started.

KH: He talks to Putin! He talks to Kim Jong-un. He has no regard for our military, the most lethal greatest fighting force the world has ever known. The world must fear us, not laugh at us.

DT: We shouldn't be playing with World War III. But thanks to ABC for not asking me why I ripped up the nuclear weapons treaty back when I was such a global laughingstock.

(De Bait and Switch meanders along in much the same redundant way. I think you get the exhausting drift.)

To make it even sadder than it already was, Taylor Swift did not endorse Kamala until the show was over. She deprived the Veep of bragging about it the same way she keeps bragging about the Dick and Liz Cheney endorsements, as though they were worthy of bragging about.

The good news is that this supposedly will be the only "debate" between these two scary clowns.

The Return of Russiagate

Despite the best efforts of her Joyful Vibe Machine, Kamala Harris remains in a statistical dead heat with Donald Trump.

So with only two months to go before Election Day, the Uniparty has had to augment the joy with some good old-fashioned fear-mongering. Just when you thought the debunked Russiagate vampire narrative was resting safely in its grave, the stake of sanity thrust firmly in its heart, its producers have come back to haunt us with yet another cheesy sequel.

It's even more gruesomely  gory messaging than usual in this election cycle, because the US is actually at physical war with Russia via its client state, Ukraine. And a Trump victory, we are told, might slow or even stop the flow of billions of dollars in weaponry, the profits of which continue to  enrich investors and corporations beyond their wildest dreams. 

So the Paper of Record and the Uniparty have no other choice but to spread the word that if you are opoosed to this war or  or even worse, openly express your negative opinions about this war,  you just might be a Trump supporter and/or or a Putin puppet. You are at least the"unwitting" victim of another Russian disinformation and election-interference campaign.

If you're not careful, you may even end up in a a criminal courtroom!

 The New York Times, perhaps the premier self-professed media guardian against the alleged plague of "disinformation" sweeping the globe, wasn't taking any chances in its Tuesday edition.  It  was even forced to fight Bad Disinformation with Less-bad Disinformation! 

"Activists Charged With Pushing Russian Propaganda Go on Trial in Florida" was the false and misleading home page headline,  strategically placed right below its coverage of the Ukraine war, which is not going particularly well these days. 

Since the spreading of propaganda - Russian or otherwise - is not a criminal offense in the United States thanks to the First Amendment, the Times headline is deliberately and patently false.

It is not until deep into the article that the Times bothers to correctly report that the actual charge is not the spreading of propaganda at all. The crime alleged is simply the activists' failure to register as agents of a foreign government.  Their acceptance of relatively small donations or payments from a Russian national to help finance a run for local office is apparently the gist of their perfidy.

 But the damage was done in the headline. Many readers of news don't read beyond the headline or lead of any given news story.

The subhead of the Times article continues the subterfuge, citing "experts" who have been warning us that Russia has "tried for decades to secretly influence American politics."

However, the only expert that the article quotes by name is one Bret Schafer, a "senior fellow" at the German Marshall Fund,  weapons industry-funded NATO think tank located in Washington.

In the Florida case, which did not result in any pro-Russia candidate elected to public office, the payoff for Russia may seem exceedingly small. But on a broader level, Mr. Schafer said, Russia wants more “authentic” American groups to adopt Russia’s perspective.

“Even if they are not in a real position of power,” he said, “if you can infiltrate and influence enough of these groups and have them at some level adopting positions that are beneficial to you — and that doesn’t necessarily mean pro-Russian positions, but just to further radicalize them and create further divisions — we know that’s obviously a win for Russia."

The subterfuge still continues.  The Times has failed to inform readers that Schafer's expertise is limited to his creation of the notorious Hamilton 68 Dashboard, which purported to list hundreds of Twitter users as Russian bots or trolls trying to  mess with our free, fair and democratic elections. Journalist Matt Taibbi exposed the dashboard last year as a complete fraud, and verified that many if not most of the accounts belonged to innocent citizens who were unaware of their placement on the phony blacklist.

The fake dashboard has risen from the grave under the new name of Hamilton 2.0 and Schafer continues his role as go-to source for any corporate media outlet invested in the lucrative Russiagate franchise. Don't they say that love is better the second time around?

In case you're wondering how Schafer got to be such an expert , look no further than his website bio. Before embarking on a career in professional Russophobia,he worked as a writer at the Cartoon Network.

The Russiagate franchise is just starting to get its second (or third or fourth or fifth) wind. 

Of course, since no one fraudster or clown can  sell the Russiagate product all byhis lonesome, the Times followed up the next day with an announcement that the entire "United States Announces Plan to Counter Russian Influence Ahead of 3024 Election."

Just in case you aren't taking the cautionary tale of those Florida defendants seriously enough, or  scoffing at AOC's vicious attack on Jill Stein, the Times is here to inform you that as either witting or unwitting tools of the Kremlin, you may be subject to searches and seizures of your computers, your websites with resulting criminal indictments and even economic sanctions! You may be under FBI investigation right this very minute:

"The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have also been investigating a handful of Americans accused of knowingly spreading false Kremlin narratives. But officials have emphasized that they are not aiming to curb free speech. Americans who merely repeat or spread stories they see on Russian state media are not being investigated as part of the efforts, officials said."

I love the way they claim that their McCarthyism does not infringe upon the First Amendment. You can think or write or say anything you want. Just know that they are watching you.

Ray McGovern over at Consortium News quotes the article at greater length, suggesting  that the latest version of Russiagate is designed to make American citizens amenable to a direct war on Russia. And that means getting Kamala Harris elected.

The latest indication that the U.S. is already under rule by one state party is Liz Cheney's endorsement of Harris. She is already being floated for a cabinet position in a next Democratic administration. And that makes it more pressing for the media-political complex to overcome what's known as the Vietnam Syndrome: the distaste of US citizens for war and imperialsm. If they were able to cure this syndrome temporarily with Daddy Dick Cheney's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, they think they can overcome it again, by making war and mass death so damned bipartisan and downright joyful.

Send in the clowns, indeed.

"If You Have Nothing to Hide, You Have Nothing to Fear!"

Curtains For Democracy

Did anybody else notice that about the same time mass media started spreading online rumors that Beyonce would perform at the last night of the Democratic convention, various military types started strutting on the stage to tout Kamala Harris as the ideal commander in chief to the troops stationed all over the world?

The last night of the convention was a freaking recruiting drive, people! It was also pretty shady bait and switch. The ruling elites are absolutely desperate for more young bodies to enlist to fight their endless wars for fun and profit.

Just when the TV audience were expecting Beyonce to light up the stage, out walked Kamala in a severe navy pantsuit. She is the designated rock star. She is her own Beyonce. And that is how she aims to sell herself to disaffected young voters

That militarism was the overriding theme at the culmination of the four-day show also explains why Kamala Harris refused to allow an uncommitted Palestinian-American delegate to appear on the stage. This was a guy who'd already endorsed Kamala, mind you.

 But she was not about to let even a mealy-mouthed plea for a ceasefire ruin the happy vibe the jingoism, the  mindless chants of USA! US! USA as the curtain came down on this grotesque Ode to Joy. The final act actually gave off more an 1812 Overture stench, what with Kamala summoning up her inner Napoleon Biden to bray that the United States is "the greatest, most lethal fighting force the world ever known!"

She wasn't about to ruin her big moment by letting even the most fleeting thought of dead babies buried under tons of Gazan rubble or even slightly harsh the mellow of the uni-brain of the assembled K-Hive.

She also wasn't about to step on the toes of her investors, many of whom were watching from their million-dollar skyboxes high above her in the arena.

As a matter of fact, the democrats actually invited billionaires to speak. Illinois Gov. Jay Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune,  even boasted that he was a smarter billionaire than Trump who had only inherited  slum rental properties in the outer boroughs.

Bernie Sanders, who was allowed a speaking gig on the stage earlier in the week, didn't dare repeat his famous line that billionaires should not even exist. He didn't even renew his pitch for Medicare For All. He merely suggested that the program be expanded for seniors. And of course, he made no mention at all of the Gaza genocide. It would have spoiled the joyful vibe.

They really mean it when they scream "we can't go back." It's "Forward, march" all the way, baby! "Onward then, ye people, join our happy throng/Blend with ours your voices in the triumph song."

Occupational Therapy For Democrats: Weaving a Basket of Persuadables

aHow can we be sure that those microplastics recently discovered in human brains aren't also caused by toxic overdoses of political propaganda, supplementing  a steady diet ultra-processed food and breathing air polluted by petroleum byproducts?

Studies show that plastic brain pollution is worse now, in the recently dead, than it was in 2016 cadavers. 

But you may remember 2016 as the year when the ultra-processed Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Her loss was blamed on, among other things,  her notorious Basket of Deplorables  remarks to a group of wealthy donors at Club Cipriani in the Wall Street district of Manhattan.

And that brings me to Bill Clinton's speech on Night Three of the Democratic National Convention. The words oozed like petroleum jelly on electroshock paddles for a real jolt to the Trump-deranged throngs in the convention center.

Clinton sold a placatory mind-bend to the liberally confused. He sagely counseled the hyperactive audience with their signs and their cazy hats  that vocal liberal disdain for the hinterlands is a recipe for another disaster.  He lectured them to "meet your neighbors where they live" and to not equate Donald Trump supporters with Donald Trump himself.

You can still, of course, insult Donald Trump all you want. Bill Clinton doesn't seem to realize that if you trash Trump, you also trash his supporters, if only by proxy. They know when they're being tolerated, condescended to, and obliquely insulted. People have been indoctrinated by competing corporate media siloes to  internalize their cult leaders, making them and their trials and tribulations  a virtual part of themselves..

Clinton set the cautionary tone the whole night. After all, with Robert Kennedy dropping out and fixing to endorse Trump, the manic joy must now be tempered by caution. Even Oprah Winfrey made a surprise appearance to magnanimously urge Democrats to be nice to their Trump-supporting neighbors. You can so folksily agree without being disagreeable. 

Please, people, try to pretend to be nice to the erstwhile Deplorables at least until after November election!

Of course, no soul-searching is  ever attempted by the liberal elites, who still haven't figured out that it was the Clinton and Obama administrations, and their wealth gap-enhancing neoliberal policies and job-destroying trade deals which paved the way for Trump in the first place. It still paves the way for Trump in the second place.

This is despite the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Kamala Harris's running mate. He embodies the tweaked Democratic narrative that despite being funded and controlled by corporations and billionaires, they have suddenly developed a soft spot for Flyover Country.

Bill Clinton himself bragged about spending time in "rural areas" of New York. He evidently considers  pricey Westchester County, where he lives, to be a rural area. Or maybe he's ventured even further north. His wife Hillary actually spent a week in my own town of New Paltz n late fall of 2016 , to help herself heal after she lost to Trump. She stayed at the exclusive Mohonk Mountain house, whose employees can't afford to rent a small apartment in a town where the majority of residents are in fact, renters and not owners. 

But I digress. Suffice it to say, though, that Kamala's solution to the housing crisis doesn't involve the construction of more public housing stock. Rather, she has merely called for cutting bureaucratic red tape and pesky regulations so that real estate speculators and developers will be more incentivized to build more "affordable" housing.

Compared to Bill Clinton's hour-long schmooze, the aforementioned Tim Walz confined his own remarks to an affordable 15 minutes. He fully embraced his assigned role as Coach. We're all supposed to take the field and win one for the Gipper - actually for the right-of-center Reagan Democrats descended from the Gipper. Walz did mangle his metaphor slightly by intimating that football fields also apparently have developed trenches that we must fight within to beat Trump. Or maybe even in World War III, which the still-sitting President Biden took to another level this week with his enhanced nuclear weapons deployment package.

This is truly a made for TV stuff, nostalgically evoking memories of the 90s TV sitcom "Coach." Although filmed in Hollywood, it was set right in Walz's own hometown of Mankato, where the leading character, played by Craig T. Nelson, was the sometimes hapless mentor to his small college football team and long-suffering family and friends.

It was truly another made for TV moment as the camera repeatedly panned to  Walz's real-life family weeping openly and copiously in the audience. It was almost good enough to melt brain-plastic.

The Marketing of "Mamala"

She's a tough prosecutor who will eat Donald Trump for lunch!

No, wait. She's also the fairy godmother who will swoop into our lives to rescue us, the same way she swooped into her now-husband Doug Emhoff's lfe to rescue him, his kids, and even his ex-wife. That is exactly what he told us Tuesday night, anyway.

In other words, she is the authoritaran "strong Black woman" stereotype who balances strict discipline with loving-kindness.  These are just the qualities that the consumers/spectators making up the US electorate apparently crave in a leader. Someone who can bomb Palestinian mothers and babies to death while at the same time projecting an empathetic maternal persona.

 Barack Obama gave a speech Tuesday night with that same implicit theme. He made a big gallant show of allowing himself to be upstaged by wife Michelle, who totally eviscerated Donald Trump in her own barnstorming performance. Obama even pretended to cower behind the ghost of his late mother-in-law, in a cartoonish effort to show that only the strong matriarch of the family could protect him from being regularly hen-pecked by her daughter and his wife.

Taking the emasculation trope  a step farther, Obama mocked Trump's obsession with the size of his crowds, making a hand gesture to hint that Trump's manhood will absolutely shrink once he is faced by the candidate whom  Mrs. Obama called "my girl  Kamala." 

The crowd in the arena was already "all fired up and ready to go" before the Obamas took the stage.

No matter that Kamala Harris already had clinched the nomination withou ever winning a single primary. They staged a ceremonial roll call vote anyway, just for the spectacular fun of it. 

Lacking, as it did, the suspense of an actually democratic and competitive roll call in an open convention, it was staged as a glitzy game show, complete with strobe lights and even a professional D.J. to provide musical entertainment as a substitute for democracy. This forced the reps of the states and the occupied territories to scream their support for Kamala into the microphones. Sure, there was a handful of "present" votes in the mix to mar the joyful forced unanimity, but those results were uttered in comparative cowed whispers.

The fake roll call culminated with the arena going completely dark. And then came a  mystical cascade of thousands of tiny floating lights. It was fairy dust, the all-encompassing presence of the Fairy Godmother herself, whose actual corporal body was off campaigning in Wisconsin. Even so, her image magically appeared on the screen, even better than Glinda in Oz in her floating bubble.

This spectacle carried a  vibe creepily similar to what the Marxist critic Ernst Bloch observed in an essay titled "Dust," about pre-Hitler Germany in the 1920s:

"Even those who are not listening take notice of the bourgeois  conversations of the conformist; so propping up the table remains the gossip, the visitors, the false laughter and the real poison they strew amongst each other. The close, stale air greets even those who are not breathing it. It seeps down to the young man, and up to the beautiful people. Keeps him good and quiet, them good and deaf."

Thankfully, though, the propaganda fairy dust has not infiltrated every brain. Goodness and quietude are not universal. Anti-genocide protesters have mostly be barred from the DNC arena,  but they did succeed in interrupting a live televised interview between Stephen Colbert and Nancy Pelosi at a different venue a few miles away.

The 84-year-old Democratic matriarch was there to pump sales of her new book on "The Art of Power" - despite the mosty artless power she wielded in the ouster of Joe Biden. All she could lamely tell Colbert was that Israel has a right to defend itself... presumably against all those dangerous mothers and infants. 

Her party's definition of reproductive rights for Palestinian women is to keep the American weapons flowing. Bombs are  such a foolproof method of birth control that even Republicans can accept their use as population control of those they deem undesirable and less than human.

Despite all the angst about Trumpian hatred for women, misogyny is absolutely and disgustingly bipartisan.

Opening Night at the DNC: Passing the Cudgel

In the same speech in which he once again decried Donald Trump's infamous remark "there are good people on both sides" in the wake of a far-right rally that ended with the death of an innocent bystander, Joe Biden proceeded to both-side the genocide by Israel of Palestinians in Gaza:

"Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides."

A small subset of those tens of thousands of protesters, converging on the Democrats' nominating convention in Chicago, had just managed to break through the barricades guarding Biden and assorted dignitaries, factotums and celebrities all gathered to witness "the passing of the torch" to Kamala Harris. Although the protesters were stopped by police before they could enter the building, a group of delegates from Minnesota pointedly turned their backs on the president as he spoke.

Actually, Biden yelled his whole speech. Highly touted by the mainstream press as a "bittersweet moment" for him, he sounded a lot more bitter than sweet. For one thing, the producers of the event had delayed his appearance until close to midnight e.d.t. rather than the prime time slot usually given to the designated "keynote speaker."

Biden had to wait for a whole slew of party functionaries had their moment in the limelight before he was allowed to shuffle onstage. He delivered his remarks in his usual style: belligerent, boastful and slurry.

He sucked the carefully manufactured joy right out of the arena. Thousands of blue-and-white "We love you, Joe!" signs began to visibly wilt. The frequent camera pans to Kamala caught her in a visible wince. Maybe she was still smarting from the kiss that Jill Biden blew to her from the stage just moments before.

All the happy vibes that her marketing team and media sycophants had worked so hard to create seemed in collapse into one last atonal mess that was Biden's unfinished symphony before he blew the joint for a California vacation.

There's a good reason why they delayed his closing act until near midnight. I can't imagine that many people at home stayed up to hear the end of a five and a half hour-long slog. 

The theme of the evening (and the whole convention and campaign) was happiness and light and hope and no change .If I'd taken a drink every time some pundit uttered the word "joy" I would still be drunk now, the morning after. The convention actually evoked in my brain the scene of the Nuremberg rally from the Leni Riefenstahl film "Triumph of the Will," that's how joyful it was. I wouldn't be surprised if the Harris campaign dredged up the Nazi motto "Strength Through Joy" to replace the banal "When we fight (insert heavy pregnant pause here) we win! 

Or maybe it was all those "force the enthusiasm"  high school pep rallies that we had to attend prior to our football classmates getting permanent brain damage out on the field. Or maybe it was the satiric old Ren and Stimpy song "Happy Happy Joy Joy."

USA! USA! USA!

I get the creepy vibe that this presidential campaign is at its core the drama of two dueling fascisms. (or cartoons). The corporate sponsorships, the heavy reliance on emotions to replace thought, the demonization of others, and celebration of militarism are the hallmarks.

 When Biden bellowed out that "there is no place for political violence in America," he was talking about desperate freelance violence - not about his endless wars and occupations abroad. Not about the heavily armed police guarding him from the anti-violence peaceful protesters.

When he bragged about trying to enact gun control at home, he didn't mention that his administration has just quietly loosened controls on the international arms trade, via new trilateral agreement with Great Britain and Australia. America simply cannot manufacture bombs and ammo fast enough to meet the demand for mass death worldwide!

As reported by the New York Times last week,

"While some details are still in flux, equipment removed from the licensing requirements would likely include traditional munitions, like the artillery shells Australia is already producing to help replenish stockpiles that have been depleted by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Some technologies that have both military and civilian uses, such as sensors and propulsion systems, will also get exemptions across all three partner countries."  

Lest folks be worried that this accelerated global free flow of deadly weapons for endless wars might end up "in the wrong hands" the agreement states that abusers will be punished, even for sending a "stray email" that is susceptible to interception by bad actors. Also, any concerns about migrants crossing borders as easily as guns and bombs do will be allayed by treating the transfer of weapons and technology to any foreign worker as the same thing as transfer to that worker's country of origin. So it's all good. Not to mention joyful. 

They are letting their smiles be their umbrellas, shielding them (or so they think) from all those pesky storms of mass public protest.

+++++++

The raucous ovation for Hillary Clinton went on so long that it messed up ABC-Disney's whole primetime schedule. They shockingly cut to commercial break right in the middle of her cracked ceiling speech. But no worries. When they resumed the broadcast in five minutes, she was still at it. The ceiling had developed even more cracks. And when the crowd later erupted into  Trumpian calls of "Lock him up!" during Biden's stentorian diatribe, the camera panned right to Hillary, chuckling with all the grim joy at her disposal.