Trump's Violent Instincts Get Glowing Reviews

It's not Donald Trump's ego that's turned out to be his Achilles heel. It's his maudlin heart. And the mainstream media are swooning with the revelation that the much-maligned president isn't so bad after all. How could he be, when he sentimentally ordered a massive Tomahawk missile attack on Syria in revenge for the gas attack deaths of 85 people, including two dozen children?

No matter that Trump just signed an executive order drastically reducing the number of Syrian refugees he will allow into the US. When he sees dead Syrian babies on TV, his grandfatherly instinct is to kill more babies, to show that he is a more virile baby-killer than Assad or Al Nusra or Al Qaeda, or whatever terrorist group is actually responsible for the latest chemical attack.

Trump's emotional response to suffering babies does not extend to the hundreds of little ones being killed by American bombs raining down on Mosul, Iraq. But to be fair, he probably didn't even see those graphic images, given that US corporate media haven't been airing them, and Congress hasn't been too bothered by them. After all, the bipartisan leaders have got RussiaGate to distract them as well as to mold us into compliance.

Trump is known to be a CNN addict, and CNN has been running the graphic images of the Syrian gas victims in a near-constant closed feedback loop for maximum public opinion-molding. It helped enormously that on the day after the gas attack, the cable channel also began running Northrup Grumman's family-friendly stealth bomber ads (see my last post) -- twice during the one after-school hour that I could bear to watch. Since the military-industrial complex has to keep making and selling weapons to make their investors happy, they've taken to marketing high-tech war directly to struggling families, whose children's employment prospects would be otherwise bleak without the prospect and acceptance of constant global violence.

It also helped enormously that the enormously popular war hawk Hillary Clinton went on TV on Thursday to urge the bombing of Syrian airfields in retribution for the gas attack. Nobody, not even Trump, can apparently resist doting grandma Hillary Clinton and the war-hungry neocons. Keep saying that Russia is the enemy, and enough people will eventually believe that her own horrible policies didn't cost her the election.

So practically overnight, Trump has gone from being liberal anathema to a humane commander in chief. He is doing exactly what Hillary wanted to do.

"Trump's Heart Came First," gushed one of today's approving New York Times pieces, comparing Barack Obama's own unmanly unwillingness to cross his own red line to The Donald's sudden pragmatic bravery. Never mind that Obama had bombed Syria ever since, with a whopping 26,000 of them dropped last year alone. The media narrative had Obama acting with his superior brain, with a veneer of decorum and modesty. But as Mark Landler writes, Trump is a more unpredictable, visceral kind of guy:

President Trump has always taken pride in his readiness to act on instinct, whether in real estate or reality television. On Thursday, an emotional Mr. Trump took the greatest risk of his young presidency, ordering a retaliatory missile strike on Syria for its latest chemical weapons attack. In a dizzying 48 hours, he upended a foreign policy doctrine based on putting America first and avoiding messy conflicts in distant lands.

Mr. Trump’s advisers framed his decision in the dry language of international norms and strategic deterrence. In truth, it was an emotional act by a man suddenly aware that the world’s problems were now his — and that turning away, to him, was not an option.

It's a far cry from 2013, when Barack Obama was considering his own vengeful mass attack, until his brain overcame his emotions and he desisted, performing one of the few independent and courageous acts of his entire war-torn presidency. But while Obama was still mulling over his options, Citizen Trump had tweeted in emotional ALL CAPS to his predecessor:

Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump)

AGAIN, TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER, DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA - IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING!

Sep 5, 2013 · Twitter

According to the UK's Telegraph, a few of Trump's missiles went astray overnight and killed four children. 

But don't worry about World War III, soothes the liberal explainer website Vox, because this illegal act of aggression was really meant as nothing more than a Sunday school sermon delivered by the moral arbiter of the world. Quoting a "liberal interventionist" from the Council on Foreign Relations, reporter Zach Beauchamp explains:

“Trump's statement makes it clear [that] US cruise missile strikes are for enhancing [the] international norm against chemical weapons use, not protecting Syrian civilians,” (Micah) Zenko tweeted.

The implication here is that Trump has no desire to launch any more strikes unless Assad uses more chemical weapons. If Assad sticks to his normal tactics, and kills children with explosives rather than banned chemicals, then the United States will leave him alone. This attack will, it seems, be a one-off — or at least part of a relatively small battery of punitive strikes.

But limited strikes, historically, don’t always stay limited. We have no idea if this will actually stop Assad from using banned weapons, or what Trump would do if he did. And a sense of “ownership” of the Syrian civil war afterward could lead to even further US escalation.

“Tonight's strikes may deter Assad, compel Russian cooperation with US interests, [and] not lead to deeper US military involvement,” Zenko tweeted. “However, if these rosy scenarios do all occur, it would be almost unprecedented in US military interventions dating back to [1975].”

Not mentioned was the inconvenient truth that Wednesday's chemical attack could have been a false flag operation, much like the one in 2013 described by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. That Assad is the instigator of Wednesday's chemical assault, rather than, say, CIA-funded militants, is taken for granted. So if the false flag scenario is true, the real culprits will only be encouraged to conduct even more lethal operations. They've discovered Trump's true Achilles heel: that his instincts substitute for critical thinking skills. He is as incurious as George W. Bush.

So Trump has miraculously pivoted from bitter vetch to tasting as American as apple pie. Even his hypocritical critics are finding it hard to curb their suddenly unhealthy appetites for him. Because nothing brings the rich and powerful plutocrats of the media/political complex together better than war. Ka-ching goes the beat of their maudlin little hearts.

And as ever, the Invisible Guy in the Sky is totally on the side of state-sponsored American terrorism. Because the USA only commits humanitarian slaughter and bloodshed in order to end inhumane slaughter and bloodshed and promote peace and harmony throughout the world it has destabilized.

CNN takes total unabashed credit for inspiring Trump's violent instincts with its graphic TV images.

Marketing Death to a Sick America

Wherever there is pain and oppression, the lords of predatory capitalism will always find a way to profit from it. 

Are you a poor black kid who can't retrieve your wayward football from the unkempt yard containing Cujo's rabid litter-mate? In your kind of neighborhood, you obviously don't seek help from a responsible adult. You definitely don't want to call the cops. So you just close your eyes and fantasize that you're the super-hero designer of Northrup Grumman's stealth bomber. Your lost football will then magically float back to you just like an unmanned Predator drone. Because let's face it: you live in a Perma-War economy now, and the Trump administration is taking money away from poverty programs and giving it to the Pentagon. But please don't despair, all you poor and hungry children of America, because the Military-Industrial Complex is here to help. What a "turbulent world" needs is not more education and medical care and social programs. It needs more spying and destruction and maiming and killing. And so it's only natural that Northrup Grumman would take Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech and made it their very own.

Are you a working class refugee hopelessly hooked on opioids? Astra Zeneca is here to help - not by building rehab facilities, of course, but by pushing an anti-constipation drug designed specifically for junkies like you. Of course, the actor who plays the junkie on TV doesn't look like an actual junkie. In fact he is very hot. He is not only hale and hearty, he wears a hard hat and appears to be the boss on a major construction site. So the subliminal message here is that it's not the Oxy or the heroin that's holding you back. Those drugs are good for you, build up your muscles better than steroids. Your main problem, dude, is your embarrassing inability to have a bowel movement. So get "unplugged" and dream the dream of a full-time job.  Maybe you can even hallucinate piloting a stealth bomber while you're sitting on the toilet. Oh, and always indulge your addiction responsibly.

Are you a black or brown person who fears that you will one day get shot during a routine traffic stop or sentenced to solitary confinement for possessing a small amount of dope? No need to block highways or stage sit-down strikes or meet with politicians. Instead, always have an ice cold can of Pepsi at the ready as the weapon of choice to render your oppressor harmless. Or better yet, allow white super-model Kendall Jenner to do the honors for you, with a Bob Marley imitator crooning in the background for some added social justice ambience. And the world will live in perfect harmony forever as people slurp their sugary drinks and develop diabetes... which might sadly go untreated because there is no universal health care in America. Maybe Astra Zeneca can help. Or maybe you can join the military and bomb other oppressed people in turbulent countries far, far away from America the Beautiful.

Why bother with the messiness of Black Lives Matter, when #ResistanceInc is the cool way to go? We mustn't let the class war rear its ugly head. It might disturb the oligarchs, who only want to help through the magic of marketing more death to desperate people barely holding on in the end stage of Capitalism. 

The first rule of free market neoliberalism is to create a crisis. The second rule is never let it go to waste.

When Gut-Think Replaces Journalism

New York Times columnist Charles Blow has channeled his inner George Bush with his latest column. 

Just as Bush knew deep within his gut that Iraq's Saddam Hussein was hording weapons of mass destruction, so too does Blow instinctively know that Russia has meddled in the American electoral process. Despite the lack of direct proof, "this is not a debatable issue. This is not a witch hunt. This has happened."

No matter that "we are still not conclusively able to connect the dots on the question of whether there was any coordination or collusion between members of Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russians who interfered in our election to benefit him, but those dots do continue to multiply at an alarming rate."

With not a hint of irony, Blow complains that all the subterfuge, deflection, finger-pointing and misdirection are preventing liberal pundits like him from finding within the dot pattern whatever it is they want to see. They know, deep within their guts, that criminal collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is there. It just has to be. 

Therefore, they fight subterfuge with innuendo, misdirection with distraction. RussiaGate is duly exposed as a hall of mirrors.

"There is something there, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is," Blow jokingly continues. "And unlike some others, I find no glee in the prospect of something amiss."

How quickly Blow pivots from knowing deep within his gut that "this is not a debatable issue" to it being the mere prospect of something not quite right. If he is that un-gleeful about his innuendo-spreading, I'd recommend an immediate appointment with a sympathetic professional.

Perhaps Blow could begin with a therapeutic reading of philosopher W.K. Clifford who wrote that "it is wrong, always and everywhere, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Either that, or take a remedial crash course in Journalism 101.

As Stephen Law writes in the philosophy journal TPM Online, people like Bush and Blow who "just know" things despite possessing no evidence to back up their assertions are using the same technique employed by so-called psychics who claim to commune with the dead on a regular basis. They get away with it, because of course there is always the possibility that they are correct, that they can see things that mere mortals cannot. If Bush and Blow sincerely believe in what they say, then who are we to doubt their sincerity and their good faith?

  So as to further deflect rational thinking, Blow next complains about the "prurience" of the content-consuming American public. Unlike the high intellectual capacity of his own instincts, the gut of the rabble is not prudent enough to digest innuendo. They simply lack the intestinal fortitude to believe in the cult of Hillary Really Won This Election.

Having duly instilled doubt and confusion into the brain-centered minds of his gutless readers, Blow's editorial gaslighting finally comes to a blessed end. He feebly attempts to cover his own rear end as he smarmily admits:

At this point this is all conjecture. First we must clear the hurdle of finding out exactly what happened and who was involved. That could take months, if not years.

We must now decide how to process the mounting suggestions of impropriety.

Charles Blow seems to be suffering from a very painful case of mental constipation. He has imbibed so many undigestible weasel-worded dots that the "mounting suggestions of impropriety" seem stuck in the middle of his mind-gut. He offers neither evidence nor solutions. All he can emit in his  column is one more futile Clintonoid blast of editorial gas.

As I wrote in my published Times comment on his piece, 

There's plenty of real, solid evidence against Trump, evidence that in a just society would have sentenced him to prison decades ago. But rather than admit that he is merely the end-product of a corrupt political system, that he's a lot like those too big to fail corrupt financial institutions that get bailed out time and time again, we pursue McCarthyism in the name of neoliberal predatory capitalism.

Enough with instinctive journalism. It's time not only for a gut check but for a reality check.

Open Thread/Links

In the spirit of the folly day....

The New York Times finally admits that RussiaGate is a cheap spy thriller knockoff. It's nevertheless published one of those handy catch-up guides for distracted viewers who might have missed a few episodes in what they call this "bizarre Washington drama." It's comprised of the usual Tweets and echo chamber reports from such reliable corporate actors as CNN and, of course, itself.

  But the Handy Guide mysteriously omits the latest plot twist, in which Wikileaks reveals that the CIA itself could have been the original hacker/leaker of the DNC and Clinton campaign email caches. The spy agency has a Marble Framework tool, which enables it to install and hide source malware and make it appear as though cyberattacks are originating from anywhere else but Langley, Virginia.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Team Trump is struggling mightily to regain control of "the narrative." They're all pretty upset about being relegated to the supporting actor/villain category. Trump has the nerve to call it a witch hunt, while the hunters are sticking to their original story that their own epic unpopularity is due entirely to Vlad Putin personally planting the virus of discontent into 320 million otherwise happy American brains. Anybody daring to criticize the Democratic Party or the Security State or Permawar or Wall Street or inequality is secretly thinking in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Donald Trump himself was so rattled by the spectacle that he fled the Oval Office before signing some executive orders he'd gone to all the trouble of touting during a signing ceremony spectacle in the Oval Office.

In another bit of comic relief, a White House "ethics" report dumped on Friday night reveals that the Trump family members and cronies in charge of the government are even more obscenely rich than we thought. Welcome to the Oligarchy.

Correction: добро пожаловать к олигархии.

Democratic Party's Golf Cart of Doom

If Hillary Clinton is still wondering why she lost, she should look no further than the Washington Post op-ed recently penned by former aide Jennifer Palmieri.  This sermon is what the establishment wing of the Democratic Party believes will help to inspire the millions of struggling Americans who desperately seek some relief in their short, brutish, and nasty lives:

 At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia last summer, Jake Sullivan and I took to our golf carts one afternoon to make the rounds of the television networks’ tents in the parking lot of the Wells Fargo Center. It is standard for presidential campaign staffers to brief networks on what to expect during that night’s session. But on this day, we were on a mission to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

There are three things in this gripping lead paragraph guaranteed to make the reader stop and grip the nearest bottle of antacids:

1. Rather than trudge a few hundred yards around the parking lot like mere sweating mortals, Hillary's minions drove around in golf carts.

2. The reader is needlessly reminded that the Democrats held their closed convention in a venue owned and named for one of the most corrupt, bailed-out financial institutions ever created to be too big to fail and too big to jail. Why even bring up Wells Fargo, which has such a nasty history of ripping off the very same Americans whom the Democratic Party is ostensibly trying to woo back into the tent? (Hint: they love and need Wells Fargo more than they need average voters.)

3. Palmieri oafishly admits that she was trying to dictate the news and plant a story. She makes no attempt to hide the collusion which normally exists within the media-political complex. She complains that the rightly distrusted mainstream media fell down on its job to disseminate propaganda in the corporate Clintonoid interest.  It's all the media's fault that they didn't come through for Hillary back when it counted, despite lack of evidence of any actual Russian "hack."

Hillary Clinton's communications director didn't think it was in her job description to ride her golf cart around to the network booths in order to talk about such policy ideas as health care and free state college tuition. She was in such a bubble that she assumed that the anxious viewers at home would be more in tune with palace intrigue than with how her Anointed One planned to solve problems in their own everyday lives.

And thus does Jennifer Palmieri proceed to cast some of the blame for her party's loss on the millions of struggling people who were far too distracted by their own problems and not focused enough on Hillary's. Her op-ed blathers on:

 Voters didn’t seem worried. Earlier that week, our campaign manager, Robby Mook, was mocked for telling CNN that the leak of stolen emails before our convention was an indication that Russia was trying to help Trump. We did not know, as FBI Director James B. Comey told Congress this past week, that the bureau had already opened an investigation into Russian interference — and into possible links between Trump’s associates and the Russian government, including whether they worked together on his behalf.

Thanks a lot, Obama. Thanks a lot, Comey. Thanks a lot, Deplorables.

But it's never too late to start World War III with Russia, voters! As Palmieri admonished us earlier this year, we mustn't let the Resistance to Trump be sucked up by such mundane concerns as a living wage and universal health care. The resistance is all about defending ourselves against Russian invaders and vindicating Hillary Clinton, just lately re-emerged from her Brothers Grimm part of the forest.

Now that Trump is president, though, the stakes are higher, because the Russian plot succeeded. The lessons we campaign officials learned in trying to turn the Russia story against Trump can help other Democrats  (and all Americans) figure out how to treat this interference no longer as a matter of electoral politics but as the threat to the republic that it really is.

No, the normally reliable mainstream media tented up in the Wells Fargo parking lot didn't pay enough attention to Golf Cart Jen when they still could have saved the Republic. And now, as a direct result of that failure, Trump is president. But who's to say that other corporate Democrats can't cash in on the manufactured hysteria? Since identity politics and attacks against deplorable Trump voters didn't elevate Democratic fortunes, perhaps the relentless fomenting of fear and panic will do the trick.

As someone who worked in the pathologically secretive Obama administration, Palmieri purports to be pleasantly shocked at how swiftly some normally close-mouthed security state types have been willing to go public with the anti-Russia party narrative. Former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell, for instance, actually went on TV to sound the public alarm during the campaign. Palmieri fails to mention in her op-ed that Morell was also in line to become Clinton's CIA director, and openly advocated for all-out war in Syria.

I remember my jaw dropping as I sat in our Brooklyn campaign headquarters and read the op-ed Morell submitted to the New York Times in early August, in which he shared his view that Russia had probably undertaken an effort to “recruit” Trump and that the Republican nominee had become an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

Whether her jaw dropped at the evidence-free charges, or whether it dropped because the CIA normally hides its political motivations as it orchestrates coups  and meddles in foreign elections, Jennifer Palmieri does not say. But it was so totally awesome that everybody else was as slack-jawed with wonder as she was.

Were it not for the spectacle of Hillary dredging up an old insult that Trump had aimed at a former Miss Universe, we the people would have paid more attention to RussiaGate. Besides, everybody thought Hillary would win.

So poor Jennifer Palmieri says she was stuck in a Catch-22 situation. How on earth to make the stupid voters take a paranoid and contrived narrative like RussiaGate as seriously as she did? Like Milo Minderbinder in the Joseph Heller novel, perhaps she "could see more things than most people, but could see none of them too distinctly."

We didn’t want her to talk too much about Russia because it wasn’t what voters were telling us they cared about — and, frankly, it sounded kind of wacky. At the same time, we understood the issue would never rise to the front of voters’ minds if we weren’t driving attention to it. It was already pretty clear they weren’t going to hear much about it in the press.

Thanks a lot, Comey. Thanks a lot, Obama. Thanks a lot, press. You left Hillary and Golf Cart Jen twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.

And even now, millions and millions of dumb Americans are not paying sufficient attention to the Russian takeover of their government. Trump's mundane outrages -- like the attempted destruction of the Environmental Protection Agency and the stuffing of the White House with some of the same financial institutions as Clinton and Obama -- are taking valuable attention away from what really matters: starting a war with Russia. Therefore, Jennifer Palmieri is going to work her heart out to convince dumb Americans to develop the acceptable and preferred kind of fear and dread that not only has always made our nation exceptional, but also has the potential to sweep more Democrats in to office in the midterms and beyond.

In another era, Americans would have been able to count on both Democrats and Republicans in Congress to stand up to this kind of threat. A lot of Democrats like to play the “If we were Republicans” game. I usually hate it; I don’t want to behave like the Republicans do. But it’s useful here. If Clinton had won with the help of the Russians, the Republicans would have impeachment proceedings underway for treason. No doubt. Instead, dealing with Russia falls nearly solely on Democrats’ shoulders.

It is very painful to be a liberal who has to come clean on one's own greed and bloodthirstiness and brutality. But that is what sometimes has to happen in the topsy-turvy world of the Duopoly. Even communications experts like Jennifer Palmieri occasionally have to communicate the distasteful truth that her prime allegiance is to the oligarchic war machine. Donald Trump simply cannot be allowed to grab more than his fair share of the booty.

What more can a liberal communications guru do but morph into Joseph Goebbels and tell a major major major lie often enough so that eventually, every last one of those dumb Americans will come to believe it?

But Democrats can break out of the Catch-22 of the campaign: If we make plain that what Russia has done is nothing less than an attack on our republic, the public will be with us. And the more we talk about it, the more they’ll be with us.

That was actually a pretty stupid thing for such a savvy PR flack to admit. This op-ed could be a case study in how not to subtly manufacture public consent. She very publicly discloses the neoliberal strategy designed to literally hound us into a state of abject submission. She very liberally promises that Democratic Party functionaries will talk about nothing but Russia in every one of their TV appearances. Russia is more important than a living wage, Medicare for All, restoration of Glass-Steagall and a tax on high speed trades, stopping the obscene control wielded by a few billionaires over both major political parties, and most of all, the amelioration of man-made pollution and climate change.

The detritus of a dwindling middle class, extreme wealth inequality, outsourced jobs, plummeting wages, rising homelessness and the worst drug catastrophe in American history is not the fault of the bipartisan, privatization-happy Neoliberal Thought Collective. Golf Cart Jen would lose her ride if she ever admitted such a thing. 

Her manufactured message is this: If you think that your life sucks and you feel too helpless and apathetic and unpatriotic to vote for the self-dealing corporate Democrats, then it is obviously all Russia's fault. Must.Resist.Putin.

The worst part about our lackluster collective response to Russia’s interference is that it represents exactly what the Russians were hoping to produce: apathy. Their goal, in addition to installing a president sympathetic to their views, was to undermine Americans’ belief in our democracy. For Americans to think that none of this really matters, that it’s all a game. That’s how they truly erode U.S. moral authority and strength over the long term. It’s what they have sought to do to European adversaries for many years, and now they have brought this seed of destruction here.

And thus does Golf Cart Jen end her screed, with all the inspirational garbage at her disposal.

 "The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa.” -- Joseph Heller, Catch-22.

Silver Lining of the Silver Streak Trainwreck

With nearly a trillion dollars worth of succulent tax cuts dangling just out of reach of ravening plutocratic jaws, is it really a coincidence that Republicans pulled their wealth care package just as the stock market was closing for the weekend?

I suspect the main reason that GOP leaders prolonged their charade for one more theatrical day was not to glean more votes, but to buy time to plot their next billionaire-saving move. Anything to avoid the public spectacle of a market dive, anything keep investors and health insurance predators from thrashing around in a greedy panic before the platoons of political lifeguards went on TV to reinflate the swim bladders of freedom.

Paul Ryan, who in a sane and just world would have resigned both his seat and his speakership by now, instead used his big moment of defeat to dog-whine to his overlords. Despite their failure to repeal Obamacare and rip millions of people away from life-saving Medicaid benefits, they have concocted plenty of toxic back-up snacks, designed to cull the population in a more stealthy and piecemeal fashion. If anybody can make the vulnerable population sink like lead, these miscreants can. They just got a bit ahead of their sadistic selves, is all.

Barry Grey of World Socialist Website has them absolutely pegged:

 Both Ryan and Trump hinted that the administration would use its executive powers to slash away at Obamacare restraints on the health care industry and restrict eligibility and benefits for recipients, particularly those who depend on Medicaid.
Ryan said ominously, “There are things the secretary of health and human services can do.” He was referring to Tom Price, a rabid opponent of both Medicaid and Medicare, the government health program for the elderly.
Trump repeatedly predicted with relish that Obamacare would implode. “It will have a very bad year,” he said, suggesting that he and Price would do their best to undermine the program.

So notwithstanding the victory dance creakily performed on Friday by senescent Democratic Party leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, this is no time for hoi polloi rejoicing. The GOP legislation failed, and yet at least 20 million Americans remain as uninsured as ever, with tens of millions more finding their premiums, co-pays and deductibles to be increasingly onerous. It's actual people continuing to drown. Not that the tide of the global plutonomy ever raised any rickety lifeboats, of course, It just that, lately, it's loading them down with enough ballast to sink them as quickly as possible.

Donald Trump certainly had a point when he cynically observed on Friday that Obamacare is not sustainable. He acted almost relieved in the aftermath of the AHCA debacle.

So what better time for Bernie Sanders, whose political capital and national popularity have only soared with every passing day of the chaotic Trump administration, to formally introduce another Senate version of Medicare for All?

If Donald Trump had any political smarts, he would rush to triangulate with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party against both the corporate Ryan and the fanatical Freedom Caucus wings of the GOP, and espouse true single payer health care. He'd help punch some big old holes in each bloated swim-bladder. And who knows - there may even be a handful of "moderate" Republicans willing to join the cause in the interest of saving their own political lives.

As Brent Budowsky writes in The Hill,

The consistently high ratings for Sanders, and the consistently low ratings for Trump, show that the real majority in America is the genuinely progressive and genuinely populist view of Sanders, not the phony populism or warped conservatism represented by Trump.
Based on the historical pattern of midterm election voting, if the midterm election were held today with the president's unpopularity so high, the result would be a landslide victory for Democrats.

Let Hillary Clinton, who recently announced that she's "ready to come out the woods" just try to denounce cost-effective and humane and egalitarian health care coverage, and pissily admonish single payer advocates to "get real" as she echoes her campaign's specious talking points against universal guaranteed care. She'll deservedly sound every inch the demented Grimm Brothers character who lost her way and stumbled out of the woods into the sunlight by pure, moral compass-free, mistake

Since there is no longer even the fuzziest of lines between entertainment and politics, why not treat America to a madcap buddy film instead of the current box office dud called RussiaGate?

There will never be enough lifeboats on the Titanic to allow disasters to end well, so let's forget for a moment all those depressing drowning metaphors - and hop on board the Medicare For All Express!

In an imaginary remake of Silver Streak, for example, a couple of erstwhile antagonists named Donald and Bernie would lead an improbable team of health care reformers who join forces to throw a band of neoliberals off the runaway capitalistic train. They'd manage to decouple the locomotive from the cars right in the nick of time, saving the day for their fellow passengers seated left, right and center. It's a relatively easy script to imitate, given that two of the characters in the original movie were also named Hilly and Whiney.

The suspense will be in guessing who are the villains and who are the heroes. Who finally sees the light, and who still adamantly refuses to seek treatment for chronic tunnel vision and willful myopia?

Therefore, the audience is definitely urged to participate. Keep calling your congress critters. Keep inundating the White House with synopses of Single Payer health care proposals. Don't get derailed by the emerging schlock horror genre called Them Bad Russians.

Poet Allen Ginsberg poignantly sounded the alarm half a century ago. "America: This is serious."

Weekend Open Thread

Fear Itself

"It's not the big things that are important to me, but the everyday life of tyranny, which gets forgotten. A thousand mosquito bites are worse than a blow to the head. I observe, note down the mosquito bites." -- Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness.

It's not so much that Donald Trump's Budget Manifesto of Hate is such a great big blow to our heads. For now, anyway, it's only a campaign speech dressed up in sadistic language and some alleged math.

 It's the ceaseless drone of the swarms of mosquitoes that's doing us in. By merely voicing their desire to punish our most vulnerable friends and family members, Trump and his Congressional cohort are accomplishing their core goal, which is inspiring fear. That we might not, after all, lose the daily bodily and social sustenance of Meals on Wheels; that we might not, after all, lose all our Medicaid and Medicare health coverage; that we might not, after all, get deported, beaten up or killed on the basis of our race, religion or ethnicity is of secondary importance to the main agenda of the oligarchs now directly running the government. The agenda is intimidation.

We're still only in Phase One of the Trump regime. And it behooves both sides of the duopoly to prolong his reign in the interest of maximum psychological control of the population. It's the anticipation of pain that does us harm before even one dollar of our Social Security is cut, before even one trip to our doctor's office is cancelled, before even one unionized nurse or public school teacher loses her job to the complete privatization of what is still left of the commons.

 We are being terrorized today, right this minute, by the mere threat of being punished tomorrow.

And once the Democrats make one of their feeble eleventh-hour deals with Republicans -- to perhaps rip more than the average number of holes in the social safety as opposed to tearing it to shreds in one fell swoop -- won't we psychologically tortured people feel ever so grateful to our leaders? We never let the perfect be the enemy of the good, do we? Our grit and determination and resilience and resistance will get us through, every single time. Rah, D-Team!

 Klemperer wrote in his diary: "How I dreaded the house search. And when the Gestapo came, I was quite cold and defiant. And how good our food tasted afterward! All the good things, which we had hidden and they had not found."

  A neoliberal gaslighting campaign is also on full bipartisan display in Congress. Democrats almost daily declare themselves absolutely helpless in the face of Trumpian tyranny, even as they make vague promises to save us if only we elect more candidates from within their own corrupt corporate apparatus. But for now, they say, we'll just have to wait Donald Trump out as they foment some more Russophobia to tide us over.

Dianne Feinstein, one of the highest ranking Democrats in the Senate, soothed that it's only a matter of time before we get some relief. There is no need right now for her and her liberal colleagues to personally confront Trump on his various conflicts of interest and his blatant breaches of the Constitution. As reported by Politico:

 How are we going to get him out?" the questioner asked.
"I think he's gonna get himself out," the California Democrat and member of the Senate intelligence committee replied.
Her comment was captured on video by LA Times reporter Javier Panzar, who posted the exchanges on Twitter. A Feinstein spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment.

So far, impeachment is off the table, just as it was once off the table for George W. Bush and his coterie of unindicted and still-thriving war criminals. Despite the mountains of evidence against Trump being unearthed almost daily, Feinstein claimed not to know whether he has committed any impeachable offenses. She did allow, however, that "questions are being raised" by such things as the Trump sons' international deal-making on behalf of the family. Trips for personal gain are being conducted on the taxpayer dime, and that doesn't look so good on the surface.

If Dianne Feinstein, with her estimated net worth of $42 million, can afford to bide her time, then so too must the frightened pensioner worried that her Meals on Wheels and her government heating assistance will get cut off. And once her food intake and her heat are mercifully reduced by a mere third, she'll rejoice just to be barely subsisting.

Meanwhile, we're told by liberal economist Robert Reich, "Washington is more divided, angry, bewildered and fearful - than I've ever seen it."

Oh, the poor things. It must be the upending of The Norms. The Republicans think Trump is nuts, and will pull the Party right down with him. Furthermore, Reich informs us, the White House itself is "a cesspool of intrigue and fear. Apparently everyone working there hates and distrusts everybody else."

  While Washington insiders are quivering and bickering, the CIA now enjoys carte blanche to assassinate at will with Predator and Reaper drones, the Pentagon has sent ground troops into Syria with no input or discussion by Congress, and a ravenous cabal of oligarchs makes the Robber Barons of the first Gilded Age look like angels by comparison. At least back then they built company towns and company stores to keep people indebted. If you're poor and indebted nowadays, they've been building privatized prisons to fulfill all your housing needs.

So while the political ruling class prepares for even more war by drumming up our fear of the Russians, the Social Contract is being ripped to pieces right under our noses.

There's been a lot of ink spilled recently about how comparing of Donald Trump's America to Adolf Hitler's Germany is wildly overblown. For one thing, Trump doesn't have thousands of Brownshirts running around the country beating hundreds of people up, every single day. In the United States, "only" about one person is killed by a law enforcement officer in any given 24-hour period. Such fascistic practices as New York City's "stop and frisk" police abuse of black and Latino men have eventually been ordered stopped by a functioning court system. And so far, every single one of Trump's anti-Muslim bans have been overturned by the judicial system.

We are still allowed to choose from among a field of candidates approved by a handful of billionaires. We still have a free press, despite the corporate consolidation of the media into six main conglomerates and the demise of independent and local newspapers. Trump can call it "fake news" all he wants, but he doesn't have the power to send in federal troops to shut down the New York Times and CNN. For one thing, his approval rating is only the 30-something percent range. Hitler demanded, and got, national loyalty based upon his decades of hard work building up his very own hate-based political party. 

Trump is more of an afterthought, a side-effect, an excrescence of decades of neoliberalism's hard work of feeding itself into a bloated and corrupt system of unaccountable capitalism

That "it" hasn't quite happened here yet doesn't mean it won't, or isn't happening already, like Klemperer's thousand little mosquito bites. The attacks on American social programs have been ongoing for decades, reaching their zenith with the Reagan Revolution, and continuing apace since then.

While we're being distracted by those damned Russians, Paul Ryan and his pals are tearing up the Social Contract in full public view but to little public fanfare. The first House vote to destroy Medicaid as we have known it since LBJ's 1960s Great Society anti-poverty legislation is scheduled for this Thursday. Since punishing more people has now been made slightly more cruel in order to attract more GOP hardliners, its chance of passage is considered to be slightly better than it was last week.

But you wouldn't know it from reading the front pages or turning on the TV news.

From the top of today's New York Times homepage:

Comey's Haunting News on Trump and Russia.

 Fresh Worries on Russia from Trump's Weary Defenders.

FBI Confirms Inquiry on Trump Team's Russia Ties.

Stone, a Trump Ally and Dirty Trickster, Under Investigation For Russia Connections.

Below what used to be called the "fold," we finally come to a piece about the planned destruction of Medicaid. In bloodless anodyne terms, the piece lists such additions to the GOP bill as allowing upstate (read: white) New York counties to reduce their Medicaid contributions to Albany (read: punishing "those people" in New York City.)

And in its opinion section, the Times today published an op-ed suggesting that Democrats and Republicans can heal their differences by allowing private insurance predators to market "universal catastrophic coverage" policies across state lines.

 "It would be a step consistent with President Trump’s bold message and it could resolve the current debate on Capitol Hill, now headed in a direction unlikely to satisfy anyone. President Trump has never shied away from thinking big, and now he has the potential to turn the politics of health care upside down with a populist solution that might go a long way toward solving one of the nation’s biggest problems," enthuses Benjamin Domenech, publisher of the right-wing Federalist.

Got that, proles? Read mainstream media, and develop a constant unhealthy fear of Russia. Continue to also relentlessly fear and loathe Trump, the whole Trump, and nothing but the Trump. Cheer from your nosebleed seats as Democrats and pundits gleefully call out his constant lies, grandstand on his unproven Russian connections, ignore his proven decades-long track record of graft and corruption right here in the USA, and do nothing to remove him from office. After all, he brings lots of clicks, and cable and newspaper subscriptions, and ad revenue, and political donations from the sleepless and rattled population.

Quite deliberately, they never discuss Medicare for All as the only sane, humane and cost-effective counterweight to GOP nihilism. 

Instead, we are told to dream the impossible dream of someday being able to purchase true, universal and unaffordable catastrophic coverage. We'll need it, because heretofore treatable, but soon-to-be neglected and uncovered, illnesses will needlessly lead to more humanitarian catastrophes.

Just take one item from the "budget," and the planned annihilation of the most vulnerable among us becomes all too obvious. Trump's proposed draconian cuts to the US Department of Agriculture alone are bound to cause a huge spike in the rate of food-borne illness, which in turn could lead to many catastrophic cases of sepsis in such vulnerable people as infants and the elderly and the immuno-suppressed.

And speaking of death by a thousand mosquitoes, Trump is even attaching a greedy profit motive to the fight against the Zika virus. As Bernie Sanders, Medicare for All proponent and the most popular politician in America, wrote recently:

Now his administration, through the Army, is on the brink of making a bad deal, giving a French pharmaceutical company, Sanofi, the exclusive license to patents and thus a monopoly to sell a vaccine against the Zika virus. If Mr. Trump allows this deal, Sanofi will be able to charge whatever astronomical price it wants for its vaccine. Millions of people in the United States and around the world will not be able to afford it even though American taxpayers have already spent more than $1 billion on Zika research and prevention efforts, including millions to develop this vaccine.

The Department of Health and Human Services gave Sanofi $43 million to develop the Zika vaccine with the United States Army. And the company is expected to receive at least $130 million more in federal funding.

But look over there, it's Russia infiltrating our democracy! Our leaders will never be able to prove it, but they'll gladly keep up the act as long as the right people continue to get rich. 

Regardless of party affiliation, plutocrats will tolerate Trump because he deflects attention from the system which they created and of which they are such an integral, self-dealing part. Their resistance movement should not be our resistance movement. Don't buy into their buzz.

Don't be afraid of Russia. Be afraid instead of Paul Ryan's rushin' fingers, ripping the Social Contract into a thousand tiny shreds in the grim hope that we won't notice the real catastrophe until it's way too late. 

Weekend Open Thread

This incident, which just about sums up how many people are feeling this week, occurred not too far away from where I live. So on the off-chance you missed this viral vid (more than a million views and counting) here it is again.

The first part of the clip is the Republican plan for our mass extinction. The second, in slo-mo, is the Democratic version of the same process.

Hellbent Persistence: The Chelsea Clinton Story

Second in annoyance only to Donald Trump's Tweets are the persistent stories about how Chelsea Clinton is being "groomed" for public office. Every time I read one of these ubiquitous pieces, I can't help but wonder: who, exactly, is doing all this mysterious grooming?

Mom? Dad? The DNC? MSNBC? The Hamilton Project? The Center for American Progress? The articles never say, exactly. So I have no choice but to let my imagination run wild.

What immediately comes to mind, totally unbidden of course, are the libertines of De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. These depraved characters have the persistent habit of assaulting, in a variety of ways, the young people whom they've kidnapped and imprisoned in a remote luxury resort castle. The violations commence only after a very rigorous grooming regimen in which the victims are transformed into compliant and trusting objects who never exhibit even a whimper of protest, let alone display any emotions or original thoughts. The grooming has a profound deadening effect upon them.

That De Sade's predators hailed from the highest echelons of the church, the nobility, and academia would prove all too realistically prescient. But that's a blog post for another day.  

So anyway, once I manage to get those horrid sadistic images out of my head, the next thing that occurs to me is what an insult it is to use the word "grooming" about an already hyper-educated and impeccably put together woman like Chelsea Clinton. How much more grooming can one living picture of perfection even stand?

The publicists planting all these stories about her solo debut on the public stage are, I assume, getting paid top dollar by Clinton World. So isn't it a bit degrading to keep using this "being groomed" trope about Chelsea, as though she were a dog or a horse? Not only is the phrase demeaning, it robs her of her own agency. It implies that she needs lots and lots of expert help to maintain her position in life. And we all know that Chelsea only got where she is today by virtue of her own grit, talent and persistence.

She's even written a new book about these unique qualities, directly plagiarizing channeling Elizabeth Warren's recent tirade against racist Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions before his confirmation. After obeying Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's order to stop persisting and shut up, Warren had bravely continued her speech outside the Senate Chamber, via Facebook. She persisted in reciting a letter written by Coretta Scott King and as a result, her feminist brand skyrocketed to new levels, most notably within the elite Pussy Hat Brigade. Chelsea has recently become a branded soldier of The Movement herself. This is evidenced by her recent spate of #ResistanceInc tweets directed at Donald Trump and her publicizing of her toddler daughter's debutante stint:

 Notice that Chelsea didn't quite get to the level of "no drones, no bombs, no wars."

Chelsea's mom even got into the act, tweeting about Warren, the woman she'd only recently spurned as a running mate: "She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless she persisted. So must we all."

And thus was a whole Persisterhood industry spawned. What - you thought this was democratic socialism? There are She Persisted energy bars, and She Persisted fashions, and even a She Persisted online store with products designed for the "woman warriors in your life." If you are a persistentrepreneur looking for product placement, there are experts to help you market your stuff. They will even send you a monthly inspirational story to help you get marching all the way to the bank.

A Movement Can't Go Ka-Ching If It Ain't Got No Bling

So what better time for Chelsea Clinton to rush out another book, and call it (surprise) She Persisted?

Given that she's probably only had a few weeks to cobble this tome together, with little to no time for original academic research or multiple revisions or relentless editing, Chelsea's publishers are marketing it direct-to-children - or what she adorably calls "tiny feminists, mini activists and little kids who are ready to take on the world."

Expose the nursery school set to neoliberal Clintonism while they're still too young to resist. Groom them early, groom them often. 

According to the helpful plug planted in the New York Times:

The book will share the stories of 13 historical women who relentlessly pursued their goals in the face of opposition, including Harriet Tubman, Nellie Bly, Maria Tallchief and Oprah Winfrey.

Now hold it right there, and I'm not talking about the gratuitous addition of billionaire Oprah Winfrey. I'm talking about the need of Chelsea's publicist for a copy editor of her own. These women are historic, not historical. The word historical applies to all women and to all the humans and events of the past. They existed, therefore they were. Historic, on the other hand, correctly connotes that these people were unique or highly influential in their fields. Plus, since Oprah is not even dead yet, it is highly insulting to call her historical.

  So somebody needs a little grammar-grooming here, no? And puh-leeze -- shouldn't these lucky 13 ladies be termed Herstoric? If it can't be politically correct, then what hysterical good is it?

If you think this is too cute by half already, wait a minute, because we're not done yet. According to the Times puff piece, you'll have to hold your breath until She Persisted reaches bookstores on May 30 for "a cameo that is yet to be announced." 

I'm not exactly sure, but I think that what Chelsea teasingly means is a bonus chapter featuring one of the most relentlessly persistent people around. You'll have to buy the ticket before the big reveal, though; did you really think she'd be giving this book away? Hah! It'll set you back $17.99 for all 32 pages of it.

Anybody want to take a wild, wild guess as to the identity of Secret Cameo? Hint: her own last book was titled Stronger Together. Published in September last year, its first week sales were so awful, it should have set off an immediate persistent cacophony of alarm bells.

In a truly democratic country, the political life of this Mystery Cameo person  would be considered historical - as in The Blessed Past. But now that she is reportedly being groomed to become the next mayor of the Income Inequality Capital of the World, I think we can safely say that it when it comes to this family, the chutzpah alone is of truly historic and earth-shattering proportions. It's been consequential, to say the least.

It's Surreal: The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali