Predatory Bipartisan Follies

Just when you thought that things couldn't get any zanier, the Reasonable Elites are going Donald Trump one better.

The media-political complex folks are almost literally beside themselves. Still reeling from their shock and awe that a president whose acting skills have been honed by decades of real estate hucksterism and reality TV can actually act presidential right on cue, they themselves are going totally totally bonkers.

First, the New York Times broke yet another anonymously-sourced Russian scare story. This one is about how, in the waning days of the Obama administration, officials (who were, of course, not Obama himself) spread alleged dirt about Trump and the Russians to each of the clans of the Intelligence Community.  This was to ensure that the leaks would flow freely from more sources than any one Trump official could possibly contain once he took office.

 At the Obama White House, Mr. Trump’s statements stoked fears among some that intelligence could be covered up or destroyed — or its sources exposed — once power changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that underscored the deep anxiety with which the White House and American intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.

It also reflected the suspicion among many in the Obama White House that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Russia on election email hacks — a suspicion that American officials say has not been confirmed. Former senior Obama administration officials said that none of the efforts were directed by Mr. Obama.

  Translation: Obama, either directly or through his publicists, claims that not only is he not Obama, he was as out of control and as out of the loop as he now accuses Trump of being. Pretty weird.

Thus does the apparent lunacy of Obama signing a last-minute executive order mandating that the NSA share all its warrantless data with the other 16 unaccountable "intelligence" agencies suddenly make a lot of crazy sense. Obama's bequest of even more excessive authoritarian power to Trump, coupled with his smarmy urging that people give the new president a chance to succeed, was a total head-fake all along. Obama was, and is, out to get Trump. And the mainstream media are all too willing and eager to help Obama succeed in the quest to protect his own legacy.

Next in craziness, the Washington Post broke the news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke to the chief Russian diplomat on two separate occasions while acting as a Trump campaign surrogate. The worst part is that he sort of lied about it during his Senate confirmation hearing. In other words, he carefully parsed his responses in that lawyerly fashion so beloved of slimy politicians throughout history. Although he eventually recused himself from investigating himself, Sessions has yet to fire himself.

Democrats, for their part, are acting more shocked about Sessions talking to the Russian diplomat than they are shocked about his racism, which he has now bureaucratized at the Department of Justice. In less than a month, Sessions has already reversed the Obama administration's (conveniently belated) order to phase out private, for-profit prisons, withdrawn a legal challenge to Texas's racist voter ID law, and reversed (also belated) guidelines for the protection of transgender students.

The Democrats don't seem too perturbed that Obama's last-minute, too cute by half executive order enhancing the Surveillance State will make Trump's xenophobic crackdowns all that more dangerously effective. Trump has ordered the Department of Homeland Security, now privy to everybody's emails and phone records, to start a new agency called VOICE: Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement. While at least one critic describes this program as pre-genocidal, most such criticism has been muted at best, in light of the frenzied Russophobic propaganda emanating from the corporate media.

 Democratic bigwigs like Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are demanding that Sessions resign not for his vicious assaults on basic civil rights, but for allegedly speaking to Russian diplomat Sergei Kislyak -- whose alleged dual espionage function has long been an open secret. If he was such a danger to democracy and to our free and fair elections, why didn't Obama expel him when he was seen openly canoodling with politicians at the Republican National Convention over the summer?

(Wild guess: along with 99% of the rest of the world, he thought that Hillary Clinton would win. Powerful countries spy on and hack each other, after all, and predatory elites don't much care unless the rich  (say, Sony execs) are victimized, or it suddenly becomes politically expedient to care.)

The bipartisan nature of the fight against Trump by the entrenched media-political establishment was made all the more blatant and bizarre this week with the glitzy comeback of George W. Bush.

Despite expanding upon such Bush policies as indefinite detention, the drone terror campaign against Muslims, the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, the outsourcing of torture, unconstitutional surveillance, and the continued enrichment, at public expense, of war profiteers and banksters and the Forbes 400, Obama carefully kept his distance. Except for such unavoidable formal events as memorial services and library dedications, the two men rarely interacted in public. Likewise, Bush was very careful to retreat into anonymity and to refrain from all criticism of the Obama administration. Why not? He had much to be grateful to Obama for, not least of which was Obama's vow to protect him and his cabinet against the war crime prosecutions mandated by the Geneva conventions.

That has now changed. Thanks to the simultaneous scourge and distraction that is Donald J. Trump, George is now considered rehabilitated enough to become a sought-after elder statesman and sparkling media personality. All of a sudden, even liberals are just loving him to death. You know you're cool when Ellen DeGeneres has you on her show. You know you've been forgiven when you're remembered for saying "Islam is Peace" and forgotten for having started a war on false pretenses and killing, maiming and expelling millions of Muslims in the process. You know you're going to cash in big-time when the liberal ladies of The View offer to purchase one of your kitschy paintings as the perfect way to #ResistRump.

And you are definitely in the all-clear when you can go on the Today show, plug your latest ghostwritten book, and defend the corporate media against attacks by Donald Trump.

It was Michelle Obama who began subtly paving the way for Bush Jr.'s lucrative comeback years ago, with the two of them photographed cracking jokes at the solemn Selma anniversary, bizarrely swaying in time to The Battle Hymn of the Republic at the service for five slain Texas police officers, and finally reveling in one of those branded Mom-in-Chief hugs, staged for purposes of repairing Bush's damaged global image. He has finally become a living portrait of unassailable shiny goodness, thanks to what Henry Giroux calls The Violence of Organized Forgetting:

 America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and idiotic, but also in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed. 

Idiotically Joking at the Bloody Sunday Selma Memorial

Banally Snickering at the Texas Police Massacre Funeral

Blissfully Misremembering War Crimes at the Smithsonian

Like Trump after him, the truth does occasionally pop out of George's mouth. As he told Ellen about his warm relationship with Michelle Obama, "That surprised everybody. That’s what is so weird about society today, that people on opposite sides of the political spectrum could actually like each other.”

He speaks the truth that when it comes to class and wealth, there is no such thing as a partisan divide. And it's not really weird at all. That the wealthy usually have each other's backs and feed from the same rent-seeking trough is not talked about much by powerful people with a vested interest in pretending that there is such a thing as democracy.

 "There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat." -- Gore Vidal.

 "The two political parties are but opposite cheeks of the same ass." -- Christopher Hitchens.

"The  political parties are two wings of the same bird of prey." -- Upton Sinclair.

There's Something So Weird About Society Today

A Brief Parsing of Evil

In his first address to Congress, Donald Trump vowed to destroy health care for the tens of millions of children, disabled people, low-paid workers and elderly citizens who now depend on Medicaid. He promised to continue viciously demonizing Muslims and Latinos as terrorists and criminals. He blustered that he will gut government health and safety regulations so that billionaires and corporations may prosper and plunder, buzzed on a permanent capitalistic crack high. He committed himself to the destruction of public education, euphemising it as "school choice." He pledged a massive build-up of the already bloated military forces abroad and enhanced militarized police forces at home.

And the mainstream media swooned, because Donald Trump uttered all his depraved fantasies in such a normal, reasonable tone of voice. Trump is finally acting "presidential." He abandoned the dark rhetoric of his inauguration, and magically morphed into the heir of that sunny sadist himself, Ronald Reagan. He even managed an echo of Barack Obama's own "adult in the room" glib, bipartisan doubletalk.

Among the group-think headlines:

Trump Offers Up a More Hopeful Vision; In Optimistic Address, Asks Congress to End Trivial Fights (New York Times)

How Trump's Disciplined Speech Came Together (Politico)

Trump Address: President Lays Out Bold Vision With Softer Tone (NBC News)

President Trump Strikes Softer Tone In Outlining Ambitious Vision (CNN)

Trump Seeks  To Move Forward After Well-Received Speech (USA Today.)
 
President Began His Address To Congress By Condemning Hate Crimes (Time)

Now, about that mealy-mouthed condemnation. There is a strong case to be made that Donald Trump himself has unleashed the spate of attacks on religious and ethnic groups as well as the virulent increase of hate speech all across the country and the entire world.

But to hear Trump bloviate to Congress on Tuesday night, he himself has had nothing to do with Making America Hate Again.  And it took him only one paragraph to gloss right over it before immediately pivoting to a nationalistic mythology which bears an unsettling resemblance to 1930s-style nationalistic rhetoric.

 Recent threats targeting Jewish community centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms.

That introduction appears to have been inspired, if not written, by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, members of the Jewish faith and recently registered Democrats who are said to have a soothing effect on Trump and at least some veto power on his cruelty. But the next part -- obviously the original introduction -- has neo-fascist adviser's Steve Bannon's fingerprints all over it:

Each American generation passes the torch of truth, liberty and justice, in an unbroken chain all the way down to the present. That torch is now in our hands. And we will use it to light up the world.

I am here tonight to deliver a message of unity and strength, and it is a message deeply delivered from my heart. A new chapter ...

(APPLAUSE)

 ... of American greatness is now beginning. A new national pride is sweeping across our nation. And a new surge of optimism is placing impossible dreams firmly within our grasp. What we are witnessing today is the renewal of the American spirit. Our allies will find that America is once again ready to lead.

(APPLAUSE)

All the nations of the world — friend or foe — will find that America is strong, America is proud, and America is free. In nine years, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our founding, 250 years since the day we declared our independence. It will be one of the great milestones in the history of the world.

Trump goes on to bemoan the drugs "pouring over our borders" and the trillions of dollars wasted on foreign aid and nation-building. He forgot all about the opioids being manufactured and marketed within our own borders by such  companies as Purdue Pharma and dispensed by the ubiquitous pill mills you can see wherever the middle class has been carved out.

And then he describes his squeaker of an electoral victory in outlandishly cataclysmic, revolutionary terms. According to TrumpBannon, citizens of America apparently shook the world as one unified blob by overwhelmingly annointing Donald Trump as our true leader:

Then, in 2016, the earth shifted beneath our feet. The rebellion started as a quiet protest, spoken by families of all colors and creeds, families who just wanted a fair shot for their children, and a fair hearing for their concerns.

But then the quiet voices became a loud chorus, as thousands of citizens now spoke out together, from cities small and large, all across our country.

Finally, the chorus became an earthquake, and the people turned out by the tens of millions, and they were all united by one very simple, but crucial demand, that America must put its own citizens first, because only then can we truly make America great again.

If you really want to get into the true spirit of things, try listening to this optional soundtrack alongside Trump's actual address. It certainly enhanced my own experience.

 On the other hand, if you prefer the fake conciliatory nicey-nice spirit being foisted upon you by the mainstream media, just skip the Wagnerian music and click on the headlines above. 

But I digress. While I don't have the stamina to parse and annotate Trump's whole hour-plus of mutterings, here are a few of the really scary nasty bits:

The stock market has gained almost $3 trillion in value since the election on November 8, a record. We’ve saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing down the price of fantastic — and it is a fantastic - new, F-35 jet fighter, and we will be saving billions more on contracts all across our government. We have placed a hiring freeze on non-military and non-essential federal workers.

It's happy days for the oligarchy, and the average worker in the gig economy should also rejoice that Trump is saving her some of her lousy take-home pay by negotiating down the price of a horrendous piece of military hardware to kill more Others. And since Big Business is good, and the Public Good is bad, let's only hire those federal workers whose job description is blowing up stuff and killing a whole bunch of people.

 We have undertaken a historic effort to massively reduce job crushing regulations, creating a deregulation task force inside of every government agency.

Because breathing clean air and drinking clean water and making sure our food and medicines are safe stands in the way of profits for Trump and his cronies. If they don't kill you over there with their jet fighters, they'll kill you over here with their greed.

We have cleared the way for the construction of the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines.

(applause)

Thereby creating tens of thousands of jobs, and I’ve issued a new directive that new American pipelines be made with American steel.

Tens of thousands is such a phony outlandish number that sounds almost as good as a thousand-year reich, doesn't it? And it's so good and patriotic if we can destroy the environment with tar sands oil flowing through only good, clean, pure Amerikan-made steel.

 And with the help of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, we have formed a counsel with our neighbors in Canada to help ensure that women entrepreneurs have access to the networks, markets and capital they need to start a business and live out their financial dreams.

This nugget has Business Everywoman Ivanka Trump's fingerprints all over it. Forget equal pay for equal work. Ivanka is the consummate neoliberal: branding, entrepreneurship and networking take precedence over wages, hours and workplace protections in the new gig economy.

 To protect our citizens, I have directed the Department of Justice to form a task force on reducing violent crime. I have further ordered the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice, along with the Department of State and the Director of National Intelligence, to coordinate an aggressive strategy to dismantle the criminal cartels that have spread all across our nation.

This sounds ominously all of a piece with Trump's recent "gaffe" announcing that ICE is now part of the military. The surveillance state will be granted new powers to crack down on "criminal cartels" (Trumpian dog whistle for people who exist while brown or black.) Trump's Department of Homeland Security is also establishing an assistance bureau specifically limited to helping victims of crimes committed by undocumented refugees and migrants. This program, known as VOICE, further demonizes Latinos and Muslims as being somehow more guilty than white criminal suspects lucky enough and politically correct enough to have been born within our borders. It insinuates that being mugged by a foreign-born person is more painful and deserving of extra help than being mugged by a white person. This is institutionalized racism, pure and simple.

 As we speak tonight, we are removing gang members, drug dealers, and criminals that threaten our communities and prey on our very innocent citizens. Bad ones are going out, as I speak, and as I promised throughout the campaign. To any in Congress who do not believe we should enforce our laws, I would ask you this one question: What would you say to the American family that loses their jobs, their income, or their loved one because America refused to uphold its laws and defend its borders?

Ask not about white  people committing crimes. Blame everything on non-white people. Above all, blame none of your economic problems on members of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, whose policies instigated the worst wealth inequality in recent history, and in turn spawned reactionary nationalistic demagogues like Donald Trump.

 According to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offense since 9/11 came here from outside of our country. We have seen the attacks at home, from Boston to San Bernardino, to the Pentagon, and yes, even the World Trade Center. We have seen the attacks in France, in Belgium, in Germany, and all over the world. It is not compassion but reckless to allow uncontrolled entry from places where proper vetting cannot occur.

Trump just lied again, in that newly reasonable and much-admired softer tone of voice. As NPR notes in its own annotated transcript of the speech, "in the 16 years since Sept. 11, 94 people have been killed in the U.S. by what Trump would describe as "radical Islamic terrorism," according to a policy analyst with the International Security Program at New America, a think tank that tracks terrorist attacks in the U.S. Each of those deaths is a tragedy, but more than six times as many Americans have been killed in that time by lightning strikes. Of the 12 terrorists behind those attacks, seven were from the United States and none came from the countries targeted in Trump's original travel ban. By focusing on preventing foreign infiltration, Trump may be neglecting the challenge of domestic radicalization." 

Furthermore,"although Trump has cited the danger of attacks by people traveling from the countries affected by his travel restrictions, all the lethal attacks by radicalized Muslims in the U.S. since 2001 have been carried out by U.S. citizens or people who were in the country lawfully."

And now we come to another dog-whistle threat to the nation's most vulnerable citizens, an announcement that visibly excited Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan, seated just to the rear of the Trump of Doom:

We should give our state governors the resources and flexibility they need with Medicaid to make sure no one is left out.

Translation: Trump supports Ryan's initiative of taking Medicaid funding and control out of the federal government, and transforming the program into block grants to the states. This ploy has a built-in expiration date for assistance, limits benefits, and seems designed to ensure that the poorest and sickest among us themselves expire sooner rather than later.

Like all modern presidents addressing a joint session of Congress, Donald  Trump finally paraded out the requisite gallery of victims, human shields for his draconian antisocial programs and war policies designed to make us feel guilty and sympathetic enough to be cowed into compliance with our own destruction.

The star of the human prop show in this year's edition was the widow of Navy SEAL William "Ryan" Owens, who died in a botched raid in Yemen last month. Without mentioning the women and children who were also killed in an impoverished country with which we're not even at war, Trump brayed that it was "a highly successful raid," in the vein of the operation was a success, just so sad that the patient died.

Gazing up at Mrs Owens with all the rehearsed reverence he could conjure up on a moment's notice, Trump smirked:

I just spoke to our great Gen. Mattis, who reconfirmed that, and I quote, "Ryan was a part of a highly successful raid that generated large amounts of vital intelligence that will lead to many more victories in the future against our enemies.” Ryan's legacy is etched into eternity.  Thank you. Ryan is looking down right now. You know that. And he is very happy because I think he just broke a record.

Trump, whose own need for constant adulation is a full-blown addiction, projected his pathology upon the dead Navy man and his surviving wife. The surviving wife obliged by gazing up at the ceiling, eyes overflowing and hands clasped together in prayer. She even enjoyed a few curtain calls to sustained and thunderous applause from the Congress which unblinkingly funds all the wars, declared or not, proxified or direct.

Basking in the glory of the drama, Trump was certainly very happy.  His opinion of himself as national lord and savior was validated Tuesday night. His performance as president is getting rounds of applause and glowing reviews from the same media establishment that he so recently castigated as the enemy of the American people.

The ratings so important to Trump broke records. It was the speech and the face that launched three million Tweets.

He is the consummate salesman whose acting skills would qualify him for an Oscar if Hollywood ever changed its mind and decided to like him after all. Never say never.

As a testament to his never-ending neediness and quest for attention, Trump sent out a morning-after email survey which asks his fans to rate his performance on a scale of 1 to 5. (No perfect 10 available, so I guess Trump is figuring out that even a special president like him has to be realistic and adult during these fraught times.)

Commentariat Central (continued)

Readers, thank you for all your excellent contributions to this weekend's open thread. Since the response was so good, I'll be making this a regular "thing" in the future.

As for me, I took some time off from my time off to write a few comments on a trio of New York Times op-eds.  Here they are, with synopses on/snippets from the columns preceding my reactions to them:

1. Nicholas Kristof, who just the other day begged liberals to stop being so mean to Trump voters, now takes his message directly to Trump voters. He paternally warns them that Donald is not only not their savior, he is betraying them. Kristof makes the startling observation that the president frequently lies, exaggerates and bloviates. So I am sure that the millions and millions of Trump voters who devoured this column are slapping their foreheads, Homer Simpson-style. A massive "D'oh!" is echoing throughout the heartland --  or what the pundits disdainfully call Flyover Country.

Kristof tells people something they didn't already know:

The biggest Trump bait-and-switch was visible Friday when he talked about giving Americans “access” to health care. That’s a scam his administration is moving toward, with millions of Americans likely to lose health insurance: Instead of promising insurance coverage, Trump now promises “access” — and if you can’t afford it, tough luck.

This promise of “access” is an echo of Marie Antoinette. In Trump’s worldview, starving French peasants wouldn’t have needed bread because they had “access” to cake.

Many of you voted for Trump because he campaigned as a populist. But instead of draining the swamp, he’s wallowing in it and monetizing the presidency. He retains his financial interests, refuses to release his taxes or explain what financial leverage Russia may have over him, and doubled the fee to join Mar-a-Lago to $200,000.

I won't go into a full discussion here of why high-deductible, high-premium Obamacare, too, is merely "access" to health care.  You can still go broke or bankrupt even with a shiny insurance card in your pocket. Moreover, even Barack Obama himself defined the Affordable Care Act as "access," frequently bloviating about the program and fudging the numbers freely. He just didn't do his bragging and his lying with a lowbrow Archie Bunker Queens accent. 

What also struck me so negatively about Kristof's smarmy advice column is his assumption that working class Trump voters even care about his taxes and the still-unproven claims by the Power Elite of his nefarious ties to Russia. I doubt that his fans are agonizing about him cheating other rich people by doubling their price of admission to his Florida club. If anything, they're cheering about it. Screw the rich!

Anyway. here's my published comment to Mister Ann Landers:

So what do you have to offer the Trump voter in lieu of Trump?

It's not enough to whine about what a lying jerk he is. Who, or what, will replace him? Another centrist Democrat who promises incrementalism we can believe in, as the jobs continue to be outsourced, the wages continue to plummet, the lives continue to be foreshortened?

If Trump is impeached or otherwise leaves office prematurely, his fans will cry foul. It'll get ugly, regardless.

There's more than a little truth to his charge of media bias. MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski annoyed a lot of people, and not just Trumpists, when she announced the other day that it's the media's job not only to inform us, but to control what we actually think. That's pretty rich, coming from one of the pundits  who worked so hard to elevate a proven crook during the grotesquely prolonged campaign season. It was (and is) a carnival reality show produced for the sole purpose of raking in record ad revenue for the six media conglomerates controlling 90% of everything we're allowed to see, hear, and read.

Yes, many Trump fans are deluded enough to deem this huckster their savior, yet others are just grimly satisfied watching him insult the same elite institutions that have deliberately helped stretch wealth inequality to record proportions. Trump is a charlatan, but even our "honest" leaders have deliberately ignored social and economic problems at home in the insane quest for profits for the few, penury for the many, and permanent war.

***

2. Maureen Dowd is still hung up on Trump's war with the corporate media, enmeshing it this week with literary and political figures as varied as King Lear, Batman, Rodney Dangerfield and William Jennings Bryan. (which she spelled "Bryant" before a copy editor corrected the error in the online addition.)  Like her corporate cohort, she accepts Vladimir Putin's takeover of the US Government as a given, a factless truth that is no longer even up for debate:

The White House has been trying to shape coverage by giving passes and questions at press conferences to Breitbart and other conservative outlets, including some fringe ones. And on Friday afternoon, the White House barred several news organizations from a Sean Spicer briefing. This included The New York Times and CNN, which angered the White House by reporting on links between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence officials.

This Russian-style domination of the press came only a few hours after the president told CPAC: “I love the First Amendment; nobody loves it better than me. Nobody.”

Fake news. Let’s just hope he doesn’t love the First Amendment to death.

My response (written before Trump wisely decided to skip this year's press dinner/aka Incest Fest:

Trump is 70 years old, and developmentally arrested as he is, he is sadly discovering that this is no country for old men who can't even tell the difference between the world and themselves.

We should have gotten the awful message when he let out this Freudian slip at a January press con (the one with the piles and piles of empty dossiers as a prop):

"As president, I could run the Trump organization, great, great company, and I could run the company—the country. I’d do a very good job [at both], but I don’t want to do that."

Meanwhile, the press is as hooked on Trump as he is hooked on them. I suspect he gets a rush out of even the negative stories, because his resentment needs stoking right along with the rest of his massive super-id. He might not want to share his actual wealth and that of the oligarchy with the rest of us, but he is more than eager to share his resentment with us. As a matter of fact, he wants to stuff it down our throats. He doesn't want us to gag, of course; he merely wants to gag the media.

So my 'umble advice to the press would be to stop whining, get into Trump rehab, pronto, and restrict your reporting to his many provable crimes. You might start with his mob connections and casino flim-flams and the associated New Jersey graft and corruption. Get hold of his tax returns and prove this alleged Russia connection once and for all.

Have your Correspondents' Dinner -- just don't invite him.

Let him wither away from sheer neglect.

*** 
3. Ross Douthat, the Times's young right-wing Catholic hypocrite, goes full extreme centrist this week and rehashes Barack Obama's own Trump-producing, neoliberal prescription for a sensible, balanced approach to rewarding the rich and urging the poor to show some grit and resilience in these tough times. He calls for some bipartisan legislation to help Republicans put themselves at a safe distance from the dastardly Trump, and humorlessly dubs his own suggestions an "immodest proposal." Thus he proactively (or so he seems to think) removes himself as one of those annoying postmodern reactionaries who'd be a prime target of Jonathan Swift's withering attack on selfish rich jerks. Douthat writes: 

Let’s start this week with what one might call an emergency response to the social crisis. That crisis is apparent in the data that Eberstadt and many others have collected, showing wage stagnation in an era of unprecedented wealth, a culture of male worklessness in which older men take disability and young men live with their parents and play video games, an epidemic of opioid abuse, a historically low birthrate, a withdrawal from marriage and civic engagement and religious practice, a decline in life expectancy and a rise in suicide, and so on through a depressing litany.

To get rid of the "gridlock" that only the Washington Consensuals actually care about, Douthat suggests the carrots of a larger child care tax credit, a payroll holiday, an infrastructure bill, expanding the military, and hiring more cops.  His sticks surprisingly include cuts in unemployment and disability and Medicaid benefits in order to encourage those lazy poors to throw away their Oxycontin and pick up their shovels.  

You'd be surprised at the number of reader-responders who actually think that Douthat's sense and sensibility approach is a yuuuge improvement over the enervating Trumpian insanity. Why, he sounds almost refreshingly Obaman! But here's my published response:

This might sound depraved, but offered two choices of entertainment in Dante's seventh circle of hell, I'd rather endure an eternity of Trump's rantings than be tortured by Ross's series of radical proposals to fix poor people. At least The Donald is funny about a hundredth of the time.

But the NYT's resident young Social Darwinist is apparently dead serious as he riffs on Jonathan Swift's satiric masterpiece.

Ross calls for a reduction in disability and unemployment benefits to offset infrastructure costs. But how newly immiserated poor, jobless and sick people are then supposed to navigate those wonderful new bridges and highways to their dream job is apparently their own problem. Maybe they can sign up for a stint in the armed forces to escape the hell that Ross's radical mind has devised for them. And if they misbehave as a symptom of their manufactured despair, let's hire a whole bunch of militarized cops to keep
the ingrates in line. There's got to something amiss when people can't envision some good old Trickle Down flowing downhill from the billionaires enjoying even more tax breaks and subsidies.

Given that 4.3 million children are recipients of the disability benefits Ross wants to cut, I'm surprised that he just doesn't go full Swift and suggest using poor children as food for the rich before they become a "burthen" to society. It's such a waste of time, trying to hide your sadism behind God.

As Pope Francis said, it's better to be an atheist than a hypocritical Catholic.

(credit: Simpsons Wiki)

Weekend Open Thread

Since there's been a quite sizeable increase in this blog's readership over the past couple of months, I'm again offering the open forum feature.  I'd discontinued it some time ago due to lack of interest, so we'll see what happens this weekend. If more than a few people contribute, then it will again become a permanent part of the blog.

The sky's the limit. And there's certainly plenty going on. Talk about the slow-mo Deep State coup, the weather, the climate, the Oscars, your favorite recipe, what you're reading, the undemocratic Democratic Party chairperson selection.... whatever strikes your fancy.

Just a few rules about commenting. If you wish to post anonymously, please select the "name/url" option and use any handle you wish if you prefer not to use your real name. More than one "Anonymous" contributor leads to needless confusion.

Comments are again being moderated, due to some recurring problems I've been having with spam. Submissions will be published in a timely fashion during the day, but overnight offerings usually won't see the light of day until the light of day.

Ad hominem attacks won't be tolerated unless they are directed at the wealthy and powerful. Express your disagreements with me and with each other, but please treat your fellow readers in a respectful manner. One of the aspects of this blog's commenting section that I've always found particularly valuable is the variety of views expressed. "Regulars" have ranged from conservatives to libertarians to liberals to leftists, and the discussions have remained largely civil.

I'd also like to re-extend my invitation to anyone interested in writing a guest post for placement in this slot. I used to publish a couple of these every month, and will be happy to do so again. If you've gone to a town hall during the congressional recess or have participated in other direct actions, I'd also love to hear from you.

You can contact me by email with queries, tips, suggestions, complaints or anything else at kmgarcia2000@yahoo.com.

That's about it. Happy commenting, and happy weekend!

Trump Admits Military Runs the Place, Deep State Panic Ensues

Donald Trump's minions are once again in damage control mode, forced to rush out some alternative facts and excuses to squelch the inconvenient truths that have an increasing tendency to escape from his big fat mouth.

Trump on Thursday made the big gaffe of claiming that his threatened crackdown on migrants and refugees will be a militarized operation, even though we have laws against that sort of thing in America. On the books, anyway.

"We’re getting really bad dudes out of this country and at a rate that nobody has ever seen before,” Trump boasted to a gaggle of multinational CEOs meeting with him at the White House. "And it’s a military operation because what has been allowed to come into our country—when you see gang violence that you’ve read about like never before and all of the things—much of that is people that are here illegally. And they’re rough and they’re tough, but they’re not tough like our people. So we’re getting them out.”

He couldn't have picked a better time for his bluster, given how the military dude in charge of domestic Homeland Security is just fresh off his stint of running American military operations in huge chunks of Central and South America. Even more awkward, Gen. John Kelly was physically present in Mexico at the exact moment that Trump was thumping his chest. Accompanied by Rex Tillerson, Exxon-Mobil's new Secretary of State, Kelly already was ineffectually trying to convince his Mexican counterparts that America really loves Mexico. He was already trying to do damage control over the Wall business as well as over Trump's threat to send armed troops over the border to "fight the drug war" in a more public fashion than has been heretofore deemed proper by the Deep State/military-industrial complex.

"There will be no use of military forces in immigration,” Kelly insisted in a direct rebuttal of his putative boss. “There will be no—repeat, no—mass deportations.”

There's also the matter of the administration "dumping" immigrants into Mexico who are not even Mexican citizens. Most of those coming across the southern border are refugees from the drug and gang violence in Central American countries.

And that, as the Intercept's Lee Fang puts it, has the private prison industry salivating. If the Mexican government refuses to accept the deportees, they'll have to be locked up somewhere. And there is a shortage of "facilities" to deal with the millions of human beings whom the Trump administration apparently has in mind.

Meanwhile, the corporate mainstream media has chosen to freak out not so much about the deportations per se, but about Trump's semantics on the militarization of the crackdown. Press Secretary Sean Spicer, for his own part, ineffectually tried to explain that his boss was only using the military term as an adjective to describe how "precise" and streamlined the roundups are going to be.

But the alternative reality is that Trump was only speaking the truth in his own usual disjointed, context-free way. 

US law enforcement - and that very much includes the Border Patrol and Immigration enforcement - has been highly militarized for at least the past decade. As Nafeez Ahmed writes in Alternet,

  Under the controversial "1033" program, the Department of Defense (DoD) is able to provide "surplus" military-grade equipment to law-enforcement agencies.

The program, legislated for in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), provided local police forces access to billions of dollars worth of high-tech military equipment, including armoured tanks, rocket launchers, automatic weapons, night-vision goggles, and other supplies traditionally used by the U.S. Army in foreign war theaters.

The DHS often provided multimillion-dollar grants to law-enforcement agencies to purchase the military equipment.

After criticism of the program in the wake of militarized police force during protests in Ferguson and Baltimore, the Obama administration made some feeble P.R. efforts to rein in the foisting of excess war hardware upon minimally trained local law enforcement agencies.

The truth, though, is that domestic militarization is easier than ever. The only requirement is for the agencies to convince the feds -- specifically, the Pentagon - that such high tech weaponry is needed to control any number of vaguely-defined situations and "threats."

Despite what Obama's public relations offensive claimed at the time, Ahmed continues, 

 The 1033 program’s open-ended carte blanche for domestic law-enforcement agencies to access military-grade equipment has not been repealed, but integrated deeper into the Pentagon bureaucracy.

The new amendments dramatically increase the Pentagon’s powers to scrutinize and supervise the use of military equipment in the homeland. Among their implications, they make DoD-supervised military training mandatory for domestic agencies who receive these weapons.

In effect, this places all domestic law enforcement operations using Pentagon-supplied military equipment under the partial jurisdictional authority of the Secretary of Defense. By making domestic agencies more accountable to the DoD, the revamped 1033 program in effect extends the Pentagon’s jurisdictional authority into the homeland by bureaucratic fiat.

 Trump's military "adjective" is boosted by the fact that the Pentagon is now run not by the traditional civilian, but by an active military man -- Gen. James "Mad Dog" Mattis, who has absolute legal carte blanche to militarize whatever domestic agency he feels like.

Trump's deportation directives are only the culmination of decades of institutional xenophobia and greed.  According to Princeton University sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen Pren, "(...) border enforcement emerged as a policy response to a moral panic about the perceived threat of Latino immigration to the United States propounded by self-interested bureaucrats, politicians, and pundits who sought to mobilize political and material resources for their own benefit. The end result was a self-perpetuating cycle of rising enforcement and increased apprehensions that resulted in the militarization of the border in a way that was disconnected from the actual size of the undocumented flow."

Translation: follow the money.

After 9/11 and the founding of the Homeland Security state, the militarization of the Mexico border took off like a shot. And the very definition of "border" has increased exponentially. For greed and fear purposes, the border is the entire contiguous United States. This is not a new Trump invention, according to the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights:

The border has become an imagined war zone, where the war on drugs, crime, and aliens are fought. Such arrangements make the border an area where the U.S. constitution has little to no value, a post-constitutional territory that expands across the country. Although there are many ways to assess just how militarized the border has become, one of the clearest ones is looking at the colossal spike in funds funnelled into border security.

And Trump's Wall is also a highly unoriginal concept, given that there is already a huge fence spanning much of the border. In 2006,  the Bush-era Congress (and that included an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) approved the construction of the multibillion-dollar Secure Fence, which turned 700 miles of the southern border into a virtual war zone. 

Then during the Obama presidency came the draconian enforcement and expansion of 2008's Secure Communities initiative. It tore apart millions of families whose members were arrested and deported for even very minor traffic infractions, such as an unpaid parking ticket. 

This is the exact same program which Trump now wants to revive, after Obama scaled it back somewhat in 2014, due to legal challenges and electoral pressure from immigration rights activists and Latinos, whose votes the Democratic Party so desperately needs for its continued survival.

And Sarah Lazare explains,

Meanwhile, Obama expanded the 287(g) program, which was authorized in 1996 by former President Bill Clinton. According to ICE, the program “allows a state or local law enforcement entity to enter into a partnership with ICE, under a joint Memorandum of Agreement (MOA), in order to receive delegated authority for immigration enforcement within their jurisdictions.” The program expanded immigration enforcement powers to local police, giving them the authority target undocumented people in the streets and in jails, leading to an escalation in racial profiling. While the Obama administration later partially scaled back 287(g), Trump has referenced this initiative and Secure Communities as models to emulate and “revitalize.”

Still, Obama always kept up his big propaganda show of supporting immigrants, even as ICE continued its cruel - and racist - raids and roundups throughout his tenure. In 2013, for example, under the Criminal Alien Removal Initiative in New Orleans, ICE stalked and arrested people in their Bible Study groups, in laundromats, in apartment complexes with the aid of the same high-tech mobile biometric devices first designed for military use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

McClatchey's James Rosen reported in November that the very authoritarian Obama has actually been unfairly castigated by Trump and other Republicans as a weak little pussycat, given how cruel and right-wing his administration actually was in its accomplishment of more than 2.5 million deported human beings. The record proves it:

David Burnham, co-founder of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, said the increase represents a joint crackdown by lawmakers and the Justice Department under Obama.
“This outcome is a combination of policies and actions by a very aggressive Congress and a very aggressive Obama administration both wanting to work the borders – keep people out, as Mr. Trump says,” Burnham told McClatchy.
Obama has long been described as the “deporter in chief” by immigration advocates who dispute President-elect Donald Trump’s characterization of Obama as soft on immigration.
But the new numbers provide the first concrete evidence of how Obama’s record compares with his predecessors’.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/nationalrticle118022043.html#storylink=cpy

Therefore, if and when he does succeed in revitalizing Obama's cruel agenda, Trump is absolutely right in characterizing this long-standing weaponized American policy of stalking, harassing, terrorizing, fingerprinting, arresting, incarcerating, deporting, wounding, and yes, even killing people as a military operation.

It's a domestic war in every brutal, racist, demeaning and profit-motivated sense of the word. It is what Barack Obama so cloyingly called a "norm" in that self-protective and self-serving farewell speech that he gave to the nation right before jetting off to canoodle with billionaires and raise a billion and half dollars for a museum celebrating his life. 

Trump is simply the first high-ranking American official to call it exactly what it is. His big lie is that more immigrants kill native-born Americans than are injured or killed by American immigration policies.

Today's Corporate News Agenda

His name is Milo Yiannopoulos, and he ran Breitbart News until the other day. Then something outrageous he once said about pedophilia lost him his job, ruined his book deal and rescinded his invitation to the annual CPAC confab. Bill Maher had just had him on his show to display what an open-minded liberal Bill Maher is, and what wusses other liberals are.

Maher is, of course, taking full credit for Milo's stunning downfall.

But following the show, Mr. Maher came under attack for the chummy and conciliatory vibe of his conversation with Mr. Yiannopoulos and for a panel segment, broadcast online, in which his guest made more inflammatory remarks that seemed to go unchallenged.

Speaking on Tuesday night, Mr. Maher, who counts himself as a liberal, did not sound particularly chastened by these assessments. He said he knew his interview with Mr. Yiannopoulos would never be satisfactory to some viewers. “No matter what I did,” he said, “it was never going to be enough for that slice of liberalism that would much rather judge a friend than engage an enemy, because it’s easier.”

 I suspect that Maher would much rather book an inflammatory right-winger than a boring right-winger, because outrage sells. The more that you can profit off divisiveness, the more that you can encourage hatred, the better it is for ratings and audience share and corporate profits. You have to supplement those standard and obligatory Moments of Hate with countering Moments of Outrage and Sanctimony. It's the duopolistic American way. It distracts the audience of consumers who used to be quaintly known as citizens. You are hereby divided between the Deplorables and the Enlightenees.

 I have to admit that I'd never heard of Milo, except for vaguely remembering the name from something I'd skimmed in Salon about some two-bit provocateur getting disinvited from a Berkeley speech and inspiring a small riot. But there is no avoiding him now. Today, he is all the outrageous mainstream rage. He is the distraction du jour.

Just quickly glancing at today's New York Times homepage, I counted four prominent articles (including the one quoting Maher above) about this provocative little creep of a guy. Unlike the Kardashians, though, he is not famous for just being a famous attention addict. He is famous because he is vaguely associated with Donald J. Trump.

And since the Powers That Be desperately want to get rid of Trump by any means possible, they will smear him with all the means at their disposal. If the tape about assaulting women didn't bring him down, then maybe his vague association with a guy who thinks pedophilia is O.K. will at least speed up the process. You see, the Deep State campaign is to gin up the liberal outrage to such a sustained fever pitch that Donald Trump will be history sooner rather than later. And then finally, the world can again be made safe for American hegemony and global capitalism on crack.

"Milo is the Mini-Donald!" dutifully shrills the ever-reliable Frank Bruni:

If you halved Donald Trump’s age, changed his sexual orientation, gave him a British accent and fussed with his hair only a little, you’d end up with a creature much like Milo Yiannopoulos.

He could be Trump’s lost gay child. In fact, Yiannopoulos, 33, has a habit of referring to Trump, 70, as “Daddy.”

Trump the father and Yiannopoulos the son are both provocateurs who realize that in this day and age especially, the currency of celebrity isn’t demeaned by the outrageousness and offensiveness through which a person achieves it.

The currency of celebrity wouldn't be half as valuable without the likes of Frank Bruni to keep it center-stage in his bi-weekly columns, which only pretend to be offended at such titillating outrageousness. (No, I didn't submit a comment to this crap. The liberal choir was dutifully outraged, with one of the most popular and prolific respondents lifting his own outrage directly from the Wikipedia entry on Narcissism.)

Meanwhile, resident Catholic conservative young fogey Ross Douthat not only couldn't help being titillated by the Milo distraction, he dutifully and artificially deepened the shallow discourse by purporting to ponder "The Meaning of Milo."

Douthat's lede is pure offended boilerplate topped off with a generous dollop of his trademark bigotry (not to be confused with the more lowbrow Trumpian xenophobia), describing Milo as

...a gay cross-dressing Catholic part-Jewish Brit who likes to boast about his sexual appetite, favors “ironic” racial and misogynist humor, and not occasionally describes the president of the United States as “Daddy.”

The only reason I still read the New York Times is because it's kind of amusing to see what kind of creative anti-Trump propaganda they'll cook up next. How many anonymous Deep State sources can be crammed into any one story? Which supposedly unrelated stories actually are part of the same predigested narrative?

Last week, for example, Andrew Ross Sorkin had a piece about plutocrat Steve Schwarzman's excessive birthday bash no longer being such a big deal now that we have a wealth of Trumpian excesses to sneer at. And lo and behold, this week the Times is running a special "wealth section" on the plight of the poor billionaires. The gist of these stories is that there really are a lot of virtuous tycoons out there who are not Trumpian grifters, but who "pledge" to give some of their money away to good causes, such as one another's charities. Or at the very least they park it in a tax shelter or hedge fund so that it has the potential to do a little good one of these centuries.

Better to be one of the eight benevolent billionaires now owning as much wealth as the bottom half of the whole global population than to be creeps like Malevolent Milo or Daddy Donald. The Times is only too happy to pick out your enemies for you.

The paper now as much as admits that it has an agenda to maintain the pre-Trump ruling order and to get rid of Trump in the bargain. One blurb on the homepage asks the moneyed class to "support a student subscription and inspire the future generation of readers." Suggested amounts in the click-boxes go up to $1,000, but larger donations are more than welcome.

"Supporting The Times is my way of fighting back against fake news and alternative facts. I wanted to give till it hurt," one alleged benefactor liberally gushed in the promo.

Another front page message which has begun appearing daily blatantly invites anonymous disgruntled anti-Trump whistle-blowers to write in and dish some dirt. Maybe this is where they got that big scoop about Trump hanging around the White House in his old bathrobe and how he can't even find the light switches as he roams the premises in all his demented ignominy.

In order to anonymously tip off the Times, though, you are ironically required to relinquish some of your privacy through the use a Facebook app:

WhatsApp is a free messaging app owned by Facebook that allows full end-to-end encryption for its service. Only the sender and recipient can read messages, photos, videos, voice messages, documents and calls. Though you can limit some account information shared to Facebook, WhatsApp still keeps records of the phone numbers involved in the exchange and the users’ metadata, including timestamps on messages.

 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world's eight top billionaires, is meanwhile doing his own dubious part to combat "Fake News" as his organization stays in the business of scooping up the personal information of all its participants for the sole purpose of marketing and profiting off as many of the world's human beings as is plutocratically possible.

He recently wrote a "manifesto" to his serfs subscribers asking them to ponder how they can support global institutions that he doesn't bother to name, but which, he says, will to serve to "bring humanity together." (If I had to make a wild guess about his meaning, I'd pick the International Monetary Fund, seeing how it brings humanity together by saddling poor countries with such onerous debt that they stay permanently tethered to the Lords of Finance, whether they like it or not.)

  The plutocratic manifesto is a paradoxical feel-good study in innocuousness. It even has echoes of a more polite version of Bill Maher. For example,

Research shows that some of the most obvious ideas, like showing people an article from the opposite perspective, actually deepen polarization by framing other perspectives as foreign. A more effective approach is to show a range of perspectives, let people see where their views are on a spectrum and come to a conclusion on what they think is right. Over time, our community will identify which sources provide a complete range of perspectives so that content will naturally surface more.

If it reads like a political campaign document, it's a political campaign document. He's all "for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”

And you thought Donald Trump was a scary dude? Mark Zuckerberg doesn't just want to be president, it sounds like he wants to be dictator of the whole world. He wants to Make the Globe Great Again.

Not only must we learn to love Big Brother, we must learn to love the worldwide neoliberalism designed to keep us numb as it extracts our dwindling money and directs the bulk of our wrath toward cartoon villains like Malevolent Milo.