Donald Trump at the G-7 summit in Quebec reminded me of the scene in "A Christmas Story" (the original movie, not the lousy musical remake) right before juvenile neighborhood terrorist Scut Farkus finally gets the crap beaten out of him by one of his victims as the other victim-kids look on in awe and disbelief and barely-contained schadenfreude. The scowl on Donald's face and the arms folded defensively across his flabby chest was the public relations equivalent of German Chancellor Angela Merkel beating him to a pulp, as toady John Bolton just stood there helplessly, even his grotesque mustache unable to hide his idiotically gaping mouth. Sadly, before he could get pummeled into a complete mess, Donald managed to scut out of Canada on his safe space, Air Force One, so he could nurse his psychic wounds and call neoliberal prime minister Justin Trudeau names from 35,000 feet up in the air, which made him very much taller and stronger than Trudeau. Trump was very mad because Justin rudely refused to accept his bullying graciously. The victims are all being very, very mean to him. They were even making fake smiley faces at him for the cameras. “The European Union is brutal to the United States,” Trump blubber-tweeted. (bleated) “And they understand that. They know it. When I’m telling them, they’re smiling at me. You know, it’s like the gig is up.” (I think he might have been suspecting that his own gig in the Oval Office may soon be up and that he could very well be dancing a jig all the way to the federal pen. Oh, I forgot: rich felons don't go to prison, they might pay a fine and retire permanently to their scores of properties until such time as the oligarchic imperium which spawned them pays them off, arranges for their comebacks, or both. Think of Ferdinand Marcos luxuriously exiled in Hawaii or Charlie Rose getting invited to that annual mogul retreat in Idaho.) So anyway, Trump has touched down in Singapore for his meeting with Kim Jung Un, who is a lot shorter than him and therefore prime bullying fodder. Or so Trump seems to think. That even a couple of Trump's toadies admitted that he left the G-7 early and scuttled the whole joint agreement just so he could save face as he faced the North Korean dictator doesn't bode well for whatever propaganda value he thinks he can suck up in Asia. Meanwhile, all that the establishment corporate media can do is moan and groan about the demise of the United States as the great Western power holding all its NATO client-states in thrall for the past seventy-odd years. Trump's Republican party-cult and its Democratic toady offshoot will take decisive action against him if and only if the richest people and corporations on the planet start losing too much money from his trade war and other shenanigans. They will not take action against him for seizing children from their parents at the Mexican border, or for dropping bombs on civilians in Syria, or other things which adversely affect the relatively powerless people in this world.
As long as Wall Street continues to boom, the lords of capital will at least tacitly cheer on Trump's chaos, both controlled and uncontrolled. And if this chaos leads to more wars, all the better for their bottom lines and military investment portfolios. These people have private security guards, yachts, jets and even private islands to retreat to if things get more violent than they are already are. Still, there's that positive aspect of Trump. He is hastening the demise of American Exceptionalism by making the whole world healthily creeped out and emboldened at the same time. What sane person would not experience the adrenaline rush of fight/flight listening to Trump boast:
“How long will it take to figure out if they’re serious? … Maybe in the first minute. You know, the way they say you know if you’re going to like somebody in the first five seconds, you ever hear that one? I think very quickly I’ll know whether or not something good is going to happen. And if I think it won’t happen, I’m not going to waste my time. I don’t want to waste his time." Asked how he would read Kim so swiftly, Trump said: “My touch, my feel, that’s what I do.”
So Kim, remembering that notorious Access Hollywood tape, had better guard his crotch right along with his real estate holdings and his offshore bank accounts and his marching slave girl cheerleaders.
Billionaire deficit hawk and Catfood Commission funder Pete Peterson may be dead, but that hasn't stopped House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi from continuing to gorge herself like a zombie on his ideological corpus. Pelosi, who once infamously urged her fellow Democrats to "embrace the suck" and abolish long-term federal unemployment benefits during the height of the Wall Street-manufactured recession, now vows to re-implement noxious "pay-go" rules if her party wins back the majority in November.
In light of the revelation just published by Politico,that the campaign arm of the House minority party has expressly forbidden candidates to utter the words "single payer" in midterm campaign ads, her twisted logic actually starts to make some grotesque sense. She could have and should have come right out and admitted that the wealthy corporations and plutocrats who run the party don't want true universal health care. "We" can't afford it actually means that "they" don't want to help pay for it. Never mind that the government is not like a family, and can never run out of money. After all, there's always plenty of money to maintain the trillion dollar-plus war machine.
The reanimation of Pay-Go deficit hawkery is a dog whistle to donors: although Pelosi's Democrats will "look at" Medicare For All, it will never make it out of committee on her continuing watch.
That the erstwhile "party of the people" is fully owned and operated by what Bernie Sanders castigates as "the billionaire class" is more glaringly obvious than ever. These party leaders, despite all their happy talk of a Blue Wave in November, really don't seem to care whether they win or lose. The rich, after all, already got their grotesque tax cuts under Trump, and there is no way they're going to break out of their mold and agree to part with even a small portion of their windfalls to ensure that their fellow citizens get health care, from the cradle to the grave. No deficit spending in the public interest will be a top negative 2019 priority if her party wins, bragged Pelosi, whose own net worth ranges upwards of $29 million. But, as The Hill reports,
The idea is already prompting howls from some liberals in the
caucus, who want to pursue an ambitious legislative agenda next year —
including costly, big-ticket items such as expanding health-care access,
subsidizing education opportunities and boosting infrastructure
projects — and fear pay-go might be too confining. Rep. Raúl
Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus
(CPC), said the Democrats would be foolish to adopt the fiscal
restraints, especially in light of the Republicans’ newly adopted
tax-reform law, which is estimated to add almost $2 trillion to the debt
over the next decade. “The pay-go thing is an absurd idea now
given the times and given what’s already been done to curry favor with
corporate America,” Grijalva said.
Nevertheless, centrist Democrats like Pelosi are persisting, insisting that being the "party of fiscal responsibility" is a sure winner, guaranteed to drag at least the richest 10 percent of liberals and recovering Republicans away from MSNBC and RussiaGate and #TheResistance long enough to cast their ballots for moderate, heavily bankrolled Democrats. So what if it was this same insane reasoning that propelled Donald Trump to victory in 2016? Remember - this is not about winning elections. This is about a certain segment of career politicians and consultants staying in business as "loyal opposition" apparatchiks, and increasingly, fellow travelers in neoconservatism and proponents of endless violent wars for democracy.
We all have responsibility for reducing the debt for our children,”
Pelosi said last month at a forum hosted by the Peter G. Peterson
Foundation, which advocates for reducing the national debt. “Democrats believe that you must pay as you go. Whatever you want to invest in, you must offset.” The
Democrats have a long history of supporting pay-go, which was first
adopted as a platform item at their 1982 convention. In 2007, after
Democrats took control of the House, they adopted a pay-go rule, which
governed legislation moving through the lower chamber while Pelosi held
the Speaker’s gavel. Two years later, with more Democrats in the Senate
and President Obama in the White House, the Democrats went even further,
enacting a statutory pay-go rule applying to both chambers.
Translation: if you want to invest in Pre-K, you must reduce college aid and ax loan forgiveness for adults. If you want to invest in infrastructure, you have to make cuts in food assistance programs. And if you don't like eating those shriveled peas, you can always watch Obama's upcoming inspirational Netflix series about people hoisting themselves up by their bootstraps. These inspirational people won't get rich, but the Obamas themselves will haul in an estimated $50 million to ensure that the lesser inspirationals at least get their 15 minutes of fame.
Even Rep. Barbara Lee, considered one of the most liberal members of Congress, is drinking the koolaid when she says Democrats can still "pursue a progressive agenda" without eating into the Trump-generated, oligarch-enriching deficit.
“This government has the resources to make sure that everyone has an
opportunity to move into the middle class,” Lee said. “It’s the
priorities and who we believe should have access to the Americandream
is the question.”
(The neoliberal buzzwords are in my bold.) Maybe you can't eat three meals or see the dentist today, but they'll fight to get you that opportunity someday, in the future. So stop complaining that you don't earn enough money or have even $200 in savings to pay for an emergency car repair. Go to sleep, and if you are really, really lucky and really, really optimistic, you might even get access to pleasant dreams as an antidote to your hunger, joblessness and despair.
As the late George Carlin said of that amorphous American Dream, "They call it that, because you have to be asleep to believe in it." Speaking of despair, the American suicide rate has shot up in nearly every state. As revealed in a new report by the Centers for Disease Control, it has increased by a whopping 30 percent in the last 16 years. People began taking their own lives in these increasing numbers in 1999, just after the Clinton administration colluded with Republicans to slash welfare and deregulate finance capital. And as a rejoinder to all those duopolistic politicians who murmur platitudes and call for "more mental health treatment" to prevent these suicides, the CDC points out that only about half of the people who took their own lives in 2015 were known to be suffering from mental illness. The other half were having relationship problems, job problems, money problems and unspecified "impending crises" in their lives. In other words, half the people who died from suicide took the only logical step they thought was left open to them. They were not deranged. Suicide is not just a mental health crisis. It's a public health crisis. It's indicative of the extreme wealth disparity that has been increasing in America for the past four decades. But to hear Nancy Pelosi and her Republican co-conspirators tell it, if you can't pay, then you just might as well go. And if you want to live, don't pin your hopes and dreams on either right wing of the Money Party - unless, of course, you're in the top 10 percent of earners or heirs, and have plenty of money to burn. Since we're in the midst of a perpetual class war, and our two-party system keeps denying that there is even such a thing, what we obviously need is a new working class party in this country.
Although Donald Trump may be the most irresistible -and oh so convenient - outrage magnet ever presented to us by the media-political complex, he really should be the least of our worries. As much as he loves to distract, he himself is the major distraction in a dying American empire.
Just in case you still had any doubts, Donald Trump's official job description is our self-proclaimed culture warrior-in-chief. His latest act was to disinvite Super Bowl champions, the Philadelphia Eagles from a White House celebration. He instead used the occasion to outdo embattled Culture Warrior Princess Roseanne Barr in belting out one of our great national hymns. Donald didn't have to take a knee to disrespect the flag. He kneed the sensibilities of the entire nation with his botched lip-synced rendition of God Bless America. The god in question, of course, being himself.
Vying for attention with the latest rendering of Great American Culture Wars is the new game show sensation, "Where In the World is Melania Trump?" Except for a blurred glimpse at a different, closed military-themed White House affair this week, she hadn't been seen in public for nearly a month, ever since undergoing a minor kidney procedure in May. My own catty theory is that she had a little cosmetic surgery - a facelift, an eyelift, a whatever-lift - along with, or even instead of, the alleged kidney embolization. This is what extremely wealthy, famous women do after plastic surgery. They go on an extended vacation to a secret location, or they stayed holed up in their mega-mansions until the scars and bruising fade, a process which can take many weeks. So when I read a report that Melania had been spotted wearing dark glasses indoors as she strolled through the West Wing, my cat-sense went into high alert. If my theory is true, then my recommendation to Melania would be to go the iconoclastic Betty Ford route and become a national spokesperson for the benefits of cosmetic surgery. Betty was the trailblazer, having had the first ever public First Lady Facelift, frankly admitting at the time that she had an eye job and neck tightening because "I wanted a fresh new face to go with my beautiful new life." Betty Ford was also forthcoming about her mastectomy during her husband Jerry's truncated White House tenure, an announcement that encouraged many women to seek out mammograms and detect early cancers. She was later famously honest with revelations about her drug addiction. Again, assuming that I'm right about Melania, she could even out-do Betty and become an advocate for making cosmetic surgery available under Medicare and Medicaid -- or, to make her hubby and his party really pissed off, Obamacare silver and bronze plans. Of course,Donald (who decades ago underwent his own scalp reduction surgery) would probably nix the idea, given how he'd so cattily Twitter-mocked former friend Mika Brzesinki's "bleeding face" last year at Mar-a-Lago (she later staunchly denied having had had a facelift) as well as mean-spirited remarks from Trump supporters about Hillary Clinton's own rumored work and reputed Botox injections. *** Speaking of cattiness, Paul Krugman has been having a field day lambasting fellow Ivy League academic Niall Ferguson for urging his conservative Stanford students to do "oppo research" on the life of a liberal student activist on campus. This act of unseemly cattiness, the New York Time's chief Bernie Bro-bashing intellectual writes, is emblematic of the "bad faith" of conservative intellectuals in general:
And yes, I do mean “conservative.” There are dishonest individuals of every political persuasion, but if you’re looking for systematic gaslighting, insistence that up is down and black is white, you’ll find it disproportionately on one side of the political spectrum. And the trouble many have in accepting that asymmetry is an important reason for the mess we’re in.
But how can I say that the media refuses to acknowledge conservative bad faith? While some journalists remain squeamish about actually using the word “lie,” and there’s still a tendency for headlines to repeat false talking points (which are only revealed to be false in the body of the article), readers do get a generally accurate picture of the extent to which dishonesty prevails within the Trump administration.
True, Trumpism is infectious -- but the anti-Trump oligarchic resistance antidote of more austerity and more corporate Democrats in Congress and more allegiance to the authorities of the "intelligence community" is an equally addicting and dangerous off-label regimen. Manufactured "divisiveness" sells, and both sides of the corporate Duopoly profit, whether they be electoral winners or losers. My two-part published response focuses on the suppression of free speech and dissent:
"Registered Republican professional historian" is an oxymoron. Phony intellectuals like Ferguson are, in fact, really nothing more than the "snowflakes" they love to accuse liberals of being. Meanwhile, a recent survey by the PEN press rights group shows that more journalists are actually self-censoring out of fear of government reprisals. With no real ideology other than Greed is Good, the right wing's m.o. is the stifling of the very First Amendment rights they purport to champion. Take the case of Cal State writing professor Randa Jarrar, who sent the phony moralizing hordes to the fainting couch this spring when she tweeted that the late Barbara Bush "was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal." Although the college initially seemed to bow to demands from reactionary media for her firing, she kept her job. These same reactionaries are now having conniption fits because Samantha Bee got away with calling Ivanka Trump a bad name for her insensitivity to Daddy's ripping tots way from their mothers' arms at the border, while complaining that Trump Show prima donna Roseanne Barr got unfairly fired for her louder, crasser racism. Ferguson is simply a bully and a coward for "punching down" on a student from his position of power. He might as well declare himself Roseanne's replacement as best supporting actor in the Trump Show, which is what the GOP might actually rename itself. If it were honest, that is. Which it most definitely is not. (And following up with a reader pointing out that renowned war critic and historian Andrew Bacevich is a registered Republican) -- Notice that I used the term "reactionary" -- not conservative -- to describe the modern Republican Party. Not all conservatives are alike, and of course they should not be painted with the same broad brush. Maybe Ferguson is a smart guy, but he was very stupid to buy into the divisive tactics perfected by Trump. I hadn't realized that Andrew Bacevich, whose work I admire, was still a registered Republican. He writes for, besides outlets like TomDispatch, The American Conservative. While I strongly disagree with much of this site's sexist and even "colorblind" racist content (Pat Buchanan is a regular), it is also reliably critical of American imperialism, endless war and especially neoconservatism. They publish a variety of viewpoints. Here, for example, is an article on the US drone war, which has gotten especially vicious and unaccountable under Trump: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/targeted-killing-donald-...
*** To his great credit, centrist Times columnist Frank Bruni is not taking Bill Clinton's appearance on the Today show (see my Monday post) kindly. In a scathing piece aptly called "the Sultans of Self-Pity," he writes:
Move over, Alec Baldwin. Bill Clinton does a much better impersonation of Donald Trump.
The hair is wrong but the air is right — self-righteous, self-pitying and suffused with anger that anyone would peddle a version of events less heroic than the one that he prefers. We’re shaming him about ancient groping when we should be showering him with eternal gratitude. And what about his pain?
“I left the White House $16 million in debt,” Clinton said, in an interview that NBC’s “Today” aired on Monday, batting back questions about whether he had demonstrated sufficient contrition for converting a 22-year-old’s romantic idolization of him into sexual favors and setting off a sequence of events that savaged her. I don’t know what legal bills have to do with a moral ledger. But I can see that his fixations on money and martyrdom are intact.
The Clinton team is now in full damage control mode. The Times swiftly disappeared Bruni's column from the top right corner of the digital home page, and Stephen Colbert invited Bill on his Tuesday show not for a comb-over gag, but for a moral makeover - or as Colbert termed it, a "do-over." Now that Bill has summoned up enough moral courage to finally utter Monica's name right out loud, maybe he hopes he can get on with his book tour without further ado. Let us hope that he cannot. (Hiss, scratch.) My published response to the Bruni column:
One common theme in the MeToo movement is that the perpetrators aren't getting called to account until relatively late in their lives,often decades after their predatory behavior was an "open secret" within the overlapping spheres of power they inhabit. Better late than never, of course, but oh what damage these men have done, not only to their female victims, but to the country and society at large. During the Lewinsky episode, leading feminists, most notably Gloria Steinem, came to Bill's defense. His abuse of power was cast as a purely partisan issue, with blame deflected from him onto the much nastier and hypocritical Republicans. At the same time he was castigating Bill, Newt Gingrich was cheating on his own wife. Meanwhile, Bill had connived with Newt to "end welfare as we know it" with the ensuing cruel reform package condemning millions of women to whole lifetimes of poverty. It's not surprising that Trump and Clinton, who were both once considered "outsiders" in New York high society, golfed together at Trump's club. It's not surprising that the Clintons attended Trump's third wedding. Not because they liked Trump, of course, but because these "transactional" things are what rich and famous people have to do to maintain their lifestyles and images and status and power. How ironic that Bill is now promoting pulp called "The President Is Missing." In reality it's the presidency that's missing, since Trump's organized crime cartel has effectively hijacked it.
I'm not talking about Donald Trump's latest tweet. I'm talking about Bill Clinton's latest interview, which aired on NBC Monday morning.
He was on TV to plug his new book, a "thriller" co-written with James Patterson, when the questions veered off into the Me Too movement and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Needless to say, Clinton was not too thrilled when past episodes of his sexual predations came back to haunt him. Borrowing a page from the playbook of long-suffering wife Hillary, who once complained that she and Bill were "dead broke" from legal bills by the time they left the White House, necessitating a new career of extreme money-grubbing just to make ends meet, the former president portrayed himself as the real victim of his tryst with a White House intern.
As such, he's never felt the need to apologize to Lewinsky, whose own public profile and "wokeness" to the lopsided power dynamics of the affair has risen as much as Clinton's has fallen in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein crime spree and other revelations of bad behavior in the highest places. His relationship with Monica Lewinsky, plus the accusations of outright sexual assault have, as Hillary parsed it during her latest political campaign, already been "litigated" and are therefore not open to further serious discussion -- MeToo movement, or no MeToo movement. Even if he were president today, Clinton insisted, the movement would do nothing to change how he viewed the Lewinsky episode.
“I don’t think it would be an issue because people would be using the facts instead of the imagined facts,” he whined in his best legal parsing fashion, bringing back memories of "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is" and "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." (So much for his jab at Trump and the previously unheard-of phenomenon of "fake news" emanating from the mouths of government officials.)
He said he has never spoken to her let alone apologized to her in the decades following. Why should he? He already took the initiative, made his generic proxy apology once to the whole globe, for crying out loud. This unforced apology apparently inspired him so much that he then went on to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars from the Clinton Global Initiative branch of his family foundation. In exonerating himself yet again on Monday, Clinton gave the feeblest possible compliment to the MeToo movement, parsing his approval with the disclaimer that he "disagree(s) with some of the decisions that have been made." He didn't say if he was referring to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's belated decision to charge Democratic mega-donor Harvey Weinstein even after Vance had accepted campaign donations from him, albeit carefully and legally funneled through the disgraced mogul's lawyer. Vance said he has since returned Weinstein's cash. The Clintons, though, carefully parsing to the end, dodged the issue by claiming all Weinstein's donations to their Initiative and Foundation had already been given away to charity anyway, so they cannot possibly return the money. As far as her political campaign chest goes, since Weinstein was largely a "bundler" of millions of dollars from his fellow oligarchs, she won't be returning that money, either. Her running mate, Tim Kaine, has falsely claimed that since the campaign was over anyway, they couldn't possibly even return Weinstein's own personal donation. (The campaign is over, of course, but as FactCheck.org notes, the excess cash was deftly funneled right into her super-pac, Onward Together.)
***
Meanwhile, Barack Obama has apparently pardoned himself for his own role in giving us Donald Trump by promoting Hillary Clinton, not to mention rewarding Wall Street over Main Street during his eight-year tenure, ensuring that the richest Americans clawed back 94% of all the trillions of household wealth "lost" in the wake of the 2007-08 financial meltdown.
The D.C. Bubble is full to bursting about of the latest blame-game book, this one from one of his former flacks, one-time aspirational novelist and national security adviser Benjamin Rhodes. Since I don't have my barf bucket close to hand at the moment, I'll just refer you to one nauseating positive review from the New York Times's resident palace stenographer, and to another much more palatable one from the New York Times's resident style maven.
Long story short: Obama was shaken, if not stirred, by Trump's victory. He confided to his flacks that the ingrates of America were just not ready for his awesomeness. The legend in his own time turns out to have been about ten or twenty years ahead of his time. So it's our bad, Bottom 90% of America. But just in case you're concerned that Obama is wallowing in a dysfunctional depression like tens of millions of bad and unready Americans, you'll be happy to learn that fresh off inking his reputed $50 million production deal with Netflix, he'll be the headline act at a major Hollywood bash later this month. He will sell intimate access to his cool self for a cool $100,000 a pop. (the flashbulb kind, not the unwanted and odious Clinton/Weinstein kind.)
“I am very excited to announce that President Barack Obama will be joining DNC Chair Tom Perez in Los Angeles on Thursday, June 28 to headline his first fundraising event for the DNC on the West Coast this year,” said the invite to the $2,700 to $100,000 priced event. “This will be a rare opportunity to spend an evening with President Obama,” the pitch added. “While at the event, President Obama and Chair Perez will discuss the strategy of the Democratic Party for winning elections in 2018 and beyond.”
And the Democratic functionaries still wonder why the party lost a thousand seats during the Obama years, not to mention a huge hunk of the working class vote to Donald Trump's paranoid-style populism. Meanwhile, former President Jimmy Carter took a much-needed break from building Habitat for Humanity houses last week, and visited a North Carolina McDonald's restaurant for an egg biscuit and a "senior" cup of coffee with his wife Rosalynn. And he isn't even running for anything. He also isn't getting invited to headline Hollywood fundraisers or to appear on the Today show.
Never one to gush platitudes like "normal" presidents do when touting American Exceptionalism on solemn occasions, Donald Trump certainly did not disappoint in his Memorial Day tweet. Instead of thanking God, Mom, and Apple Pie on this great national day of fake mourning for people who allegedly "gave their lives" rather than having their lives snatched out from under them by the Lords of Capitalism, Trump did what Trump does best. He instigated yet another bout of fake outrage by making Memorial Day 2018 all about memorializing... gasp, surprise...himself.
"Happy Memorial Day!" was his jovial message to America. "Those who died for our great country would be very happy and proud at how well our country is doing today. Best economy in decades, lowest unemployment numbers for Blacks and Hispanics EVER (& women for 18 years), rebuilding our Military and so much more. Nice!" But hey, let's give the oaf at least a little credit. For someone who's trashed our sacred norms day in and day out, even failing to utter the requisite "God Bless America" at the end of his presidential acceptance speech, he has at least advanced to the point of envisioning all those dead American soldiers partying up in Heaven and cheering him (Trump, not the other boring old God) on. Well, maybe not, when you parse it. The tweet says the dead soldiers "would" be happy, as opposed to Trump speciously claiming that they actually are happy. So fact-checkers, beware, because this was a highly nuanced tweet. I still think the president is a closet atheist despite going to church with Melania at Easter and Christmas. The semi-good news is that Trump graciously capitalized Blacks and Hispanics, giving them parity with the Military, one of the few remaining job opportunities with benefits for poor people, of whom America's Blacks and Hispanics represent a big chunk. Lower-case "women" sadly didn't fare nearly as well, but at least more of them are working at crappy jobs at salaries so meager and benefits so nonexistent that Exceptional America's birthrate is now plummeting to record low levels. But our ruling class racketeers don't want you to be outraged about those grim facts. They want you to be outraged at Trump's lack of presidential etiquette.
Since Trump didn't mention the Invisible Guy in the Sky, former CIA and National Security Chief Michael Hayden did the hypocritical honors for him, tweeting out "OMG!" in response to Trump's tweet. Talk about disrespect! Hayden couldn't even be bothered to spell out G-O-D, for Christ's sake. Professional #Resistance Fighter Chris Cilizza of CNN did the next best outraged thing. He dredged up (who else?) Barack Obama as the shining standard of how presidents should vapidly "do" Memorial Day via Twitter: "We can never truly repay the debt we owe our fallen heroes," tapped out Obama in his final year in office. "But we can remember them, honor their sacrifice, and affirm in our own lives those enduring ideals of justice, equality and opportunity for which generations of Americans have given that last full measure of devotion." With soaring neoliberal rhetoric like that, it's not shocking at all that Barack and wife Michelle just signed a reputed $50 million dollar deal with Netflix to produce fiction, nonfiction, documentaries, talk shows, you name it, for the purpose of "telling stories to the world." It's also not shocking that they immediately parked the cash in a Delaware LLC, a/k/a tax shelter, which they dubbed "Higher Ground Productions." As Obama lectured to the soon-to-be displaced tenants of the Chicago neighborhood hosting his presidential "library," they shouldn't complain or sue him over their incipient homelessness, because he and Michelle "won't be making a dime on it." On their library/entertainment venue, that is. True fact: it's not that he can't ever truly repay the destitute and the evicted. It's that he won't. But they'll always have his Ladders of Opportunity to tide over future generations of Americans, if not already existing Americans. If they die prematurely, at least they'll have given "that last full measure of devotion" to him, Barack Obama.
But, I digress. Since this post is ostensibly about the Military Industrial Complex's glorification of violent death and sugar-coating it under the twin platitudes of God and Democracy, I'd now like to send a prayer-gram to all the bellicose American presidents of all the Memorial Days Past, Present and (Dicey) Future.
This prayer actually has multi-purpose functionality and would come in especially handy on those very special School Massacre Days, when the banal Thoughts and Prayers being so tediously offered in lieu of gun control laws just don't seem to do the trick on the public psyche any more. From E.M. Cioran's "The Arrogance of Prayer"--
Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts with Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath your sun. Lonelier than You, I want my hands pure, the contrary of Yours which were forever corrupted by kneading the earth and busying themselves with the world's affairs. I ask Your stupid omnipotence for nothing but the respect of my solitude and torments.... Grant me the miracle gathered before the first moment, the peace which You could not tolerate and which incited You to breach the nothingness in order to make way for this carnival of time, and thereby to condemn me to the universe -- to humiliation and the shame of Being.
Surely, I jest.
***
On a related note, I offered a riposte the other day to Maureen Dowd's latest New York Times effort, in which the Puff Queen of Shallow bemoaned all the Grifters -- Trump, Harvey Weinstein, Elizabeth Holmes -- who are giving such grief these days to the more staid division of the Ruling Class Racket. Her prescription? Delete your social media accounts, pronto... but be sure to keep following Maureen Dowd on Facebook and, of course, Twitter.
My published comment:
Trump is as all-American as rancid apple pie, just another poster child for the de facto twin mottoes of the USA: Might Makes Right, and Greed Is Good.
The golden thread that links all these charlatans together is that while they might get charged and convicted due to public outcries so loud that even corrupt prosecutors can't ignore them, few ever see the inside of a jail cell.
Billionaire Elizabeth Holmes, despite perpetrating one of the biggest frauds in history, to date has only had to pay a $500,000 fine, return shares, and promise not to lead another public company for a decade. Poor little rich girl, huh?
Trump has enjoyed a whole lifetime of slaps on the wrist because, essentially, he is just like one of those too big to fail banks for whom financial settlements are the cost of doing business. Fines become just another tax write-off, a nifty way to suck more money from regular people.
.
Usually it's only when plutocrats and celebrities begin failing to provide nice returns on the investments of their fellow rich people that the "justice" system suddenly develops a moral compass and takes a brief break from prosecuting low-level, mainly black and poor, offenders.
It's certainly no accident that the current CEO to worker pay ratio is 275 to 1, while United Way reports that more than a third of US citizens don't earn enough money to meet their basic needs.
This goes way beyond Silicon Valley and Hollywood and D.C. It's capitalism on steroids that's run amok.
Sorry not sorry for the dearth of new posts. Springtime warmth has finally arrived here in my corner of the elitist Northeast, and snnshine and birds and flowers beckon like an irresistible magnet away from the dank confines of my depressively cluttered little computer alcove. The only writing I've done this whole week is respond to Charles Blow's latest column in the New York Times, which takes issue with Donald Trump's sloppy, vague and unaccountable, but still paradoxically effective, language skills. Since analysis of media-political language is my game, I joined the fray and wrote a comment:
Trump is the Pontius Pilate of presidents.
"Things" may or may
not passive-aggressively happen. Stay tuned, because this is the highest
rated cliffhanger of a reality show that, to use his words, "the
world has ever seen."
"People" are saying, because his regime is defined as the pulpy pages of a checkout gossip mag.
I
just read that a judge has ruled Trump can no longer ban people from
his Twitter account. I also read that his staff largely ghost-writes his
tweets, deliberately misspelling words and using CAPs and too many
!!!!s so as to make him a Deplorable in good standing, a very stable
genius whose base, he perceives, is slightly less intellekchul than he
is. And the media gobble it all up., as he merely pretends to despise
them. And the feeling is utterly mutual. Michelle Wolf was right when she
told the D.C. press that "you guys love Trump." And well they should:
the ratings and revenues of the consolidated corporate media are through
the roof. #Resistance, Inc. is a very lucrative franchise, for
professional Trumpers and anti-Trumpers alike.
The only losers are the bottom 90% of the US population, not to mention close to 100% of the world's population.
Trump
might lie like the day-glo orange rug on the top of his head, but
whenever he brays "Winning!!!!" he is very sadly speaking Mammon's
honest truth.
He's been the poster boy of our two-tiered justice
system for all 70-odd years of his existence. Poor people go to jail.
Trump pays a fine and signs an NDA.
Just as Donald Trump regularly dehumanizes dark-skinned people, incurring the requisite (and much-desired) outrage from all who claim to be decent, so too is he uncannily proficient at then turning the tables upon the decently outraged. In typical gaslighting fashion, Trump is calling the outraged media and citizens to account for their coverage of and reaction to his latest "animals" remark aimed at undocumented immigrants. He lambasted the outraged, saying that if they'd been paying close enough attention to his well-known nuanced verbal skills, they would have noticed he was again only talking about the notorious MS-13 gang. He's technically right about that to a minor degree, but very wrong about it to a truly major degree.. His incendiary comment was, in fact, a response to a complaint by the Fresno County (California) sheriff that state law precludes her from reporting to federal immigration authorities information about undocumented migrants, including MS-13 gang members, being held in her county jail. "We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country,” Trump responded without referring to MS-13. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.” He was perfectly OK to let the conventional interpretation of his remarks about "these people" stand for more than 24 hours - more than enough time to rebroadcast his bullhorn of a message that all Latino migrants are animals and criminals - before complaining that he'd been deliberately misunderstood... again.
This has caused a minor corporate media and political frenzy, with some hastily cobbled-together retractions and corrections about the "misunderstanding." So score a win for Trump among his base and his enablers from the Duopoly, and a loss for the coastal elites who pay lip service to the rights of migrants and refugees when it suits their political agendas and party prospects to do so.
And most of all, score more terror and angst for Latinos and other immigrants, who are being torn from their families by the abusive Trump administration. For the most part, the corporate media are acting like a bunch of wimps in the face of Trump's critique. They should neither have retracted their stories and tweets, like the A.P. did, nor issued even the flimsiest of apologies to the Trump administration for appearing to "coddle" the MS-13 gang the way that they did, nor even "declined to comment" on the issue, as the New York Times safely did.
The media were certainly co-opted by Trump in getting the xenophobic message out to the base, loud and clear, before many outlets took the easy way out and decided that yes, they had indeed misinterpreted Trump's "true" message. The lone exception, strange as it may seem, was the Washington Post, which stands by its factual headline "Trump Refers To Some Undocumented Immigrants As Animals."
CNN, long the profitable subject of Trump's "fake news" wrath, took the low road and sided with Trump, accusing and naming the major outlets which took his "animals" comments out of context. The cable network posted its screed, aptly enough, on its "Money Blog."
Heaven forbid that CNN personalities lose their credentials or "access" to the presidential seat of malevolent power as their bosses and corporate sponsors rake in record revenues by selectively #resisting Trump. Meanwhile,Trump is having his cake and eating it too, gleefully tweeting today:
"Fake News Media had me calling Immigrants, or Illegal Immigrants, ‘Animals.’ Wrong! They were begrudgingly forced to withdraw their stories.. I referred to MS 13 Gang Members as “Animals,” a big difference — and so true. Fake News got it purposely wrong, as usual!”
Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders went even further. At Thursday's daily White House briefing, she read from a prepared statement: “The president was very clearly referring to MS-13 gang members who enter the country illegally and whose deportations are hamstrung by our laws. If the media and liberals want to defend MS-13, they’re more than welcome to. Frankly, I don’t think the term that the president used was strong enough.”
She then went on to gleefully and graphically imagine the press corps getting their jollies over the gang cutting off heads and ripping out hearts.
There were no follow-up questions from the cowed assembled court stenographers.
Not for the first time has Donald Trump dehumanized people by calling them "animals" during one of his habitual rants. Last month, it was alleged gang members. On Wednesday, it was the immigrants entering the country from Mexico, all for the lack of a magical wall to keep Whiteness safe.
But this time he revved up his violent rhetoric to maximum overdrive:
"We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — we’re stopping a lot of them,” Mr. Trump said in the Cabinet Room during an hourlong meeting that reporters were allowed to document. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people, these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.”
Well, not quite. Trump still hasn't deported as many people as his predecessor, who set the real record. That probably explains at least part of his spittle-inflected rage. He gets away with it, though, because Barack Obama was not one to brag about his own inhumanity. On the contrary, he herded them out of the country very quietly, to little outrage from his own party, no credit from the Republican Party, and nearly nonexistent coverage by the corporate media. When his administration was rarely confronted over his mass deportations, officials soothed it was only in order "to send a message" to future border crossers.
And if outright deportation wasn't feasible, especially for those migrants claiming refugee status because of violence in their home countries, Obama's immigration bureaucrats did the proper public relations thing and locked them up in immigration jails, often euphemised as "family detention centers." Trump, of course, is far from the first American official to dehumanize dark-skinned people. The US was founded upon slavery and the expulsion and extermination of the continent's native populations, the xenophobic language of which survives to this very day in military jargon and the naming of sports teams.
Along with tens of millions of other modern-day citizens, Trump became a true believer during the post-civil rights victory decades which featured the reactionary law-and-order regimes of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton herself was a true believer, touting the harsh sentencing reforms of her husband's administration by infamously calling young black men "super-predators who must be brought to heel," as though they were vicious dogs. That remark came back to haunt her during her latest ill-fated presidential bid. But the autocratic Trump brings the institutional racism, long a part of the American fabric, to a whole new level. His diatribes act as much as a rebuke to "politically correct" liberals on behalf of his army of proud Deplorables as they are a reflection of his own bigotry. From the New York Times:
His harsh criticism came as American and Mexican officials were at a critical stage in their efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Mr. Trump’s heated remarks on immigration, both private and public, appear to have resonated with his advisers, who have been moving to put in place ever-stricter policies in line with the president’s vision. Mr. Sessions said the Department of Justice would be adding immigration judges and prosecuting twice as many immigration cases this year.
“The president has made clear to all of us that we have to do better,” he said. “We are going to do better.”
My published comment on the article:
With every hateful rant, Trump gives tacit permission to his base and all manner of disturbed individuals to act out their most violent fantasies. When you consider that, according to polls, at least a third of this country's citizens heartily approve of him, I think it's fair to conclude that this potential for violence is increasing exponentially with every passing day.
This applies both to state-sanctioned violence, as in the average of three people now getting killed daily by law enforcement, and the non-state sanctioned violence of people taking matters into their own hands, specifically their own hands gripping guns.
Not that our politicians seem to care. They're actually complicit. Trump doesn't seem like such an anomaly when the Senate has all but confirmed a known torturer and war criminal to head the CIA.
Trump refuses to feed any other belly besides the bloated one of the de facto oligarchy. The only thing he's interested in feeding to ordinary people is resentment.
Too many of us have become numbed to Trump's relentless bursts of projectile verbal vomitus. I don't know what's more noxious: calling immigrants "animals," his cruel demand to break up immigrant families, or his call for the prosecution of a democratically elected official acting to protect these same families.
This isn't a dog whistle to his fans: it's a bullhorn giving them permission to be brown-shirted vigilantes.
It's a very scary time to be alive.
And not just in America, of course. Witness SLOTUS (son-in-law of the United States) Jared Kushner's dehumanization of the Gaza Palestinians shot to death by Israeli snipers this week as mere propaganda tools who deserved to die by daring to venture too close to the barbed-wire fence of the world's largest open air prison.
Trump might be nothing but an ignorant con man riling up the base for the benefit of his own business empire. But Kushner, whose own relatives were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, should know better. Violent language aimed at rendering people less than human is historically the prelude to actual physical violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide. If nothing else, this language serves to terrorize entire populations for the crime of simply existing.
Were it not for the corporate media's disdain for the Trump administration and the oafish damage this oligarchic crime family does every day to the reputation of the permanent ruling class, I doubt that American audiences would ever have been treated by CNN to the grotesque, side-by-side images of a simpering Jared and Ivanka and scores of Palestinians getting mowed down in cold blood by Israeli snipers.
The message could not have been made any more graphic if Ivanka had been pictured digging her designer stiletto heel into a wounded child, her finishing-school bromides vainly competing with the sound of gunfire and the stench of human slaughter. This pictorial juxtaposition is quite a new, sympathetic development in the media's portrayal of the prisoners of Gaza and American war in general. For purposes of critiquing Trump, the Palestinians have been granted an unprecedented modicum of humanity by the media-political complex. For the first time in a long time, the "other side" of the story is being told. When the White House discounted the massacre, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of Israel and the removal of the official capital to Jerusalem as Hamas "propaganda," and when Jared Kushner's words blaming Palestinian protesters for own deaths were censored from the official government transcript of the event, the Fourth Estate took notice and spoke out. With Trump and his neocon enablers bellowing out their xenophobia in decibels guaranteed to make even the most jaded ears bleed, the media has had no choice. When the minister tapped to deliver a speech at the dedication of the new US embassy gave his personal blessing to Jared and Ivanka, his racist past - he once called black people "monkeys" -- had even some of the most valiant supporters of the apartheid state of Israel cringing in discomfort. This speaking of truth to power is almost entirely new, given that the media and both establishment political parties have never exactly been critics of the Gaza concentration camp and the historical atrocities unleashed by Israel against the inmates behind the barbed wire. For the first time in a long time, American audiences are not being granted the customary sanitized "safe distance" between the violence directed against the powerless by the powerful. Either the media have finally undergone an ethical epiphany, or their almost universal hatred of the Trump regime has made truth-telling suddenly and politically convenient. You decide. Previous corporate media accounts have, for example, usually cast the child victims of Israeli overkill as "human shields" used by their terrorist parents. This is a propaganda ploy, used for the sole purpose of rendering even the tiniest Palestinians in Gaza as less than human creatures.
As philosopher Judith Butler lays out in Frames of War, the lives of civilians targeted in American wars have traditionally been cast by the corporate US media as "ungrievable."
Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone.... To destroy them actively might even seem like a kind of redundancy, or a way of simply ratifying a prior truth.
That's how we can understand Jared Kushner's cold portrayal of the slaughtered Palestinian protesters as nothing but propaganda puppets. If they were already effectively dead to him anyway, how could they possibly be murdered again? This mindset is nothing new in Imperial America, of course. The late Barbara Bush infamously opined that Hurricane Katrina victims were doing just fine packed in the Houston Astrodome because they had been "underprivileged to begin with." American authorities have never bothered counting or naming the "collateral damage" of their drone assassinations in Yemen and Pakistan, because as denizens of "tribal areas" they are not only not considered human, they are demonized as "militants." As apologists for US hegemony have rationalized it, why count victims if their lives never really counted in the first place? This is further rationalized by pleading that the counting of the dead would entail endangering more precious - and grievable - American troop-lives.
The massacres of Middle Eastern children are simply not as "grievable" as the massacres of American children in their classrooms. Similarly, the shooting deaths of black and brown people in The Homeland are not grieved (covered) in the media and by politicians as much as the shooting deaths of white people, especially white celebrities. As Butler describes it, it's all a matter of the media "framing."
Framing is contrived by "norms" defining who and who is not a person, and whose status of living is open to apprehension. A picture is framed, but so too is a criminal suspect (by the police) or an innocent person (by someone nefarious, often the police) so that to be framed is to be set up, or have evidence planted against one that ultimately "proves" one's guilt. The frame of a picture serves as a limiting editorialized embellishment of the image, if not a self-commentary on the history of the frame itself. It is also possible to frame the frame or the framer and expose the ruse.
As far as the Trumps In Jerusalem story is concerned, the framing has been effectively stretched far beyond the heretofore artificially narrow canvas, exposing the grotesque surrealism of the painting for the whole audience to see. The New York Daily Newscorrectly called Ivanka "Daddy's Little Ghoul" as she primly applauded while real human beings were being murdered just 50 miles away from her latest insipid Project Runway public relations event. So we might just be making progress against American war propaganda in spite of ourselves. Neither norms nor frames are meant to last forever, so the sooner that the four rigid corners of acceptable media war discourse can be broken, the better.
The Trump framers have been framed, and the whole neocon ruse is being exposed.
After Gina Haspel's weasel-worded performance at her Senate hearing for the CIA directorship this week, the only surprise (besides her arrogance, that is) is the fact that so many lawmakers are still "waffling" over whether to confirm her to the post. It's not because Haspel supervised torture sessions, including waterboarding, at a secret black site prison in Thailand and later destroyed the video evidence of same that the senators are wringing their hands, or pretending to. It's because she refused to be straightforward about whether she has a moral code or not. She refused to acknowledge that while torture may once have been deemed "legal" by the Bush administration, it has always been inherently immoral. She refused to admit there could even be a gap between bad law and basic morality.
This has put many politicians and corporate media pundits into a quandary, at least insofar as their own public personae are concerned. If only she'd groveled a little and said she has a few regrets for her war crimes, the wafflers (mainly liberals but also a smattering of conservatives) would feel free to wash their own hands of the sordid past, in which many of them were complicit at the time, if only by their very silence. They desperately want to look forward, not backward. But they can't. It's all nasty old Trump's fault, you see. If Barack Obama was able to successfully appoint torture apologist and architect (if not actual practitioner) John Brennan to lead the agency, and then later to suppress huge classified chunks of the Senate's report on CIA torture, redact Haspel's name, and instead classify Brennan, Haspel and their co-workers as "patriots who tortured some folks," then who are liberals to defy his conventional wisdom? Who are they to possibly sully Obama's carefully manufactured reputation as he rakes in the big bucks on the speaking circuit?
Their dilemma is that Trump is simply not capable of being as glib and discreet as Obama was in deploying the sadism and protecting the sadists in grand old circumspect American tradition. Trump has bellowed on more than one occasion that he'd love to bring back torture as official US policy rather than just continue outsourcing it, as Obama quietly did, to other countries.
So if the Democrats make too big a public stink about Haspel and refuse to give her the job, it will be a slap on the wrist to Obama himself and a betrayal of all that the Democratic Party now stands for: unquestioning allegiance to the "intelligence community" as the manufactured foil to the Trump presidency.
The real unexamined issue is the existence of the CIA itself, which has operated as an unaccountable rogue state since its inception nearly three-quarters of a century ago.
How big a monster is it?
Well, when President Harry Truman said he never lost a minute's sleep over his atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but rued the day he created the CIA in 1947 through the National Security Act, you get the picture. Right from the very start the agency has operated without the "moral code" the Senate now pretends to insist upon for its leader. It has operated far outside the rule of both domestic and international law, toppling foreign governments and killing leaders and "meddling" in the elections of war-torn Europe and beyond.
So to ask Gina Haspel whether she's developed a moral compass since her benighted torturing days is like asking Jack the Ripper if he has a good bedside manner.
Merle Miller: Mr. President, I know that you were responsible as President for setting up the CIA. How do you feel about it now?
Truman: I think it was a mistake. And if I'd know what was going to happen, I never would have done it....the President needed at that time a central organization that would bring all the various intelligence reports we were getting in those days, and there must have been a dozen of them, maybe more, bring them all into one organization so that the President would get one report on what was going on in various parts of the world. Now that made sense, and that's why I went ahead and set up what they called the Central Intelligence Agency.
But it got out of hand. The fella ... the one that was in the White House after me never paid any attention to it, and it got out of hand. Why, they've got an organization over there in Virginia now that is practically the equal of the Pentagon in many ways. And I think I've told you, one Pentagon is one too many.
Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don't just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there's nobody to keep track of what they're up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they'll have something to report on. They've become ... it's become a government all of its own and all secret. They don't have to account to anybody.
That's a very dangerous thing in a democratic society, and it's got to be put a stop to. The people have got a right to know what those birds are up to. And if I was back in the White House, people would know. You see, the way a free government works, there's got to be a housecleaning every now and again, and I don't care what branch of the government is involved. Somebody has to keep an eye on things. And when you can't do any housecleaning because everything that goes on is a damn secret, why, then we're on our way to something the Founding Fathers didn't have in mind. Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix. And if what happened at the Bay of Pigs doesn't prove that, I don't know what does. You have got to keep an eye on the military at all times, and it doesn't matter whether it's the birds in the Pentagon or the birds in the CIA.
Since the Senate never even put its own legal rubber stamp on the creation of the CIA, the supposed accountability that Gina Haspel and her agency owe to our publicly elected representatives is just so much fiction, and it always has been. Housecleaning? Sure, if you count giving war criminals and other miscreants a lick and a promise, or if your idea of hygiene is sweeping dirt under the rug. The only cleaning up our elected officials ever seem to do is cleaning up on the fund-raising circuit, or in whatever realm of legalized bribery the Supreme Court has seen fit to allow.
As the great socialist muckraker Upton Sinclair once so saliently observed, our two political parties are nothing but "the two wings of one bird of prey."
So I predict Haspel's eventual, albeit as narrow as decently possible, confirmation, with much hand-wringing and pragmatic posturing. Blue Dog Democrats will vote her in to placate their Trump Country bases and the more "progressive" Dems will say Nay, particularly if they have their eyes on the Oval Office. If and when one of them does win the highest office in the land, he or she can pretend the hand-wringing (or wing-fluttering) never even happened. We must look forward, not back, as Gina Haspel either continues her unaccountable ways or retires to much fanfare and a generous pension and a gig on cable "news" shows and an advisory role in some awesome Hollywood spy movies and TV series glorifying the CIA.
So far, according to CNN's "whip count" for Haspel, the vast majority of Senate Democratic birds are still undecided, with only the hawkish Joe Manchin of West Virginia declaring himself firmly in favor. Bernie Sanders has sliced his own waffle right down the middle, tweeting soggily and jingoistically: "We need a new CIA director who is committed to the rule of law and will heed the advice of U.S. military leaders who vigorously oppose torture and uphold the values that have made us a great and respected nation. Ms. Haspel is the wrong choice to lead the CIA." The other progressive Senate lion, Elizabeth Warren, declares herself a No or a "Likely" No.
