Joe Biden Is As Depraved As Ever

So a president creepily calls an eight-year-old girl whom he just met "Baby," and then further demeans her by ordering her to stop worrying her pretty little head about ever catching Covid, and other children ever catching Covid, or even about her parents and other children's parents ever catching Covid. 

You're forgiven if you thought that I was talking about Donald Trump.

But since it was Joe Biden's exhibition of creepiness and mendacity and sexist disdain, delivered in that over-familiar grandfatherly way of his, the whole world is feeling ever so much better now. Or so the gushing corporate media informs us.

Video of Biden's comforting bald-faced lies to young Leyla Salas at a CNN town hall Tuesday night quickly garnered thousands of "likes" and countless glowing media reviews.   

Her mother Jessica addressed Biden:  "As we’ve been talking about coronavirus, which is very real and scary and it’s especially scary for children who may or may not understand. My children Leyla, 8, here and my son Mateo 7 at home often ask if they will catch COVID and if they do will they die. They are watching as others get the vaccine, and they would like to know when will kids be able to get the vaccine.”

Biden telegraphed the aggressive lie he was about to tell the child by prefacing it with the usual condescending flattery beloved of hucksters and politicians from time immemorial: "Leyla, beautiful name!"

With that obligatory gaslighting out of the way, Grandpa Joe got away with a whole series of whoppers.

“We haven’t even done tests on children as to whether or not certain vaccines work or not or what is needed. You’re the safest group of people in the whole world, number one. Number two, you’re not likely to be able to get exposed to something and spread it to mommy or daddy. And it’s not likely that mommy and daddy will be able to spread it to you either. So, I wouldn’t worry about it baby, I promise you. But I know it’s kind of worrisome.”

My own two-year-old granddaughter recently caught Covid from her Daddy, who caught it at work because his job does not allow him to work from home. The spreading of this virus occurs in thousands if not millions of other families every single day.

The whole point of Biden's act of shameless lying to a little child is to get the schools reopened so that Mommy and Daddy can get back to work and won't have to rely on paltry government relief checks while they inconvenience their bosses with their chronic absences from work. For the leader of a party which so prides itself on its devotion to "facts" and "science," Biden is certainly not living up to the standards of what the liberal class  calls the "reality-based community." Of course, when liberals criticize Trump and the Republicans for their own ignorance and stupidity, they're also willfully ignoring the truth that Trump and the Republicans are mainly feigning their own ignorance and stupidity as a sick way to impress a voting base that they, in turn, condescendingly assume are stupid and ignorant.

It's a vicious cycle and a closed feedback loop. The relentless performance of ignorance and stupidity at the very highest levels of the media-political complex does (unlike their wealth) have the effect of trickling down on the audience. This result is desirable for them, not so much for us. Think, for example, if Biden's reassuring lies make children and the adults who love them now think that they're so impervious that they don't have to wear masks any more.

Biden, a much more seasoned politician than Donald Trump could ever hope to be, is able to hide his disdain for people by flattery, cajolery and "harmless" teasing. He topped off his shameless lies to Leyla by joking, "Oh, you're getting old. You're in second grade!"

This avuncular joshing only serves to trivialize the girl's extremely rational and fact-based concerns. Maybe somebody can tell Biden that children have a pretty good sense of when they're being lied to and don't much care for good-natured and insincere teasing from adults that they don't know. There's something creepy about strangers feigning intimacy with your kids. I know it always made my maternal hackles rise. I suppose Leyla and her mom could be somewhat grateful that at least social distancing etiquette precluded Biden from grabbing their shoulders or - god forbid - sniffing their hair at the CNN town hall.

Biden's depraved idea that kids, working parents and teachers are somehow miraculously immune from Covid also was broadcast at his last debate with Trump, when in calling for schools to re-open, he preposterously said: "And by the way, all you teachers out there — not that many of you are going to die, so don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Come on."

This cavalier remark, coming as it did within the hailstorm of Trump's own preposterous lies, garnered zero pushback in the corporate media. It is apparently acceptable to Joe Biden that a certain percentage of educators do die from Covid in the interests of capitalism. This is the same kind of depraved thinking that makes a certain amount of civilian fatalities (euphemised as "collateral damage") acceptable in our endless wars of aggression.

Looking back over the transcript of that final debate with Trump, I'm reminded that Biden also framed the Black Lives Matter movement in a truly bizarre way, claiming that wealthy Black people get stopped by police as often as poor Black people do, and therefore we should not demonize any wealthy people.

"It's about having the ability to be free from violence as you're accumulating wealth," he actually said. It's not, apparently, about having the right to be free from violence as you're walking down the street and not making any money out of simply living.

That twisted, market-based neoliberal logic also was manifested at this week's CNN town hall with Biden's strange rationale for not forgiving $50,000 in student debt through executive action. Falsely claiming that he doesn't have that authority (although he does, he says, have the right to cancel $10,000 of a person's debt) he then went on to warn that Ivy League grads would only unfairly bilk the government on loan forgiveness largesse and thus steal funds from Pre-K programs.

 It's the same old, same old kind of means-testing rationale that dooms social programs for people who need help. Conservative politicians erect strawmen, such as Reagan's famous Cadillac welfare queen, to justify cuts to programs. This argument is also currently being made to reduce the amount of Covid relief, for fear that too many wealthy undeserving people and other cheats will score government aid.

It's a variation of "the whole class must be punished" if the culprit does not come forward. And since the culprit in our neoliberal oligarchic system is alternately an outright figment of the fevered reactionary imagination or the reigning principal of the school himself, the punishment and the beatings of the powerless by the powerful will continue. Until, perhaps, the powerless revolt.

Another example of Biden's twisted reasoning for not giving people nice things in order for them to even survive in a time of unprecedented crisis is his refusal to order single payer health care for the treatment of pandemic victims.

During the primary campaign, even in the face of polls showing at least 80 percent Democratic support for Medicare For All, Biden doubled down on his own opposition. That Italy was then reeling from a Covid outbreak and its hospitals were overwhelmed was all the proof Biden needed to conclude that Italy's single payer system does not work. He actually correlated universal health care and guaranteed coverage with the actual disease. He insisted that Italy's humane payment system had an adverse effect on the pandemic.

How is this fallacious nonsense any different from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott blaming liberal wind turbines for his state's devastating winter weather crisis and humanitarian catastrophe?

Unlike Joe Biden, I am not a medical expert who, by the wave of a magic wand and shameless lying to a child, can make Covid go away. So I will not speculate whether he suffers from clinical dementia.  But judging from his half-century as a right-wing politician relentlessly trying (and often succeeding at it) to out-Reagan Ronald Reagan himself, I think it's safe to say that this man is as depraved as they come.

Impeachment In a Can

For one brief shining moment on Saturday, the Trump show trial actually threatened to turn into the real deal, with testimony from real human witnesses to enhance the speeches. The disturbing film footage of the Capitol riot, complemented by Trump's own spittle-inflected incitement voiceover, should have been a prima facie case for unanimous conviction. But that would have meant that the acquitting GOP senators' own lust for power and fear of Trump took second place to meting out justice.

Then, just as suddenly as the Democratic impeachment managers moved to extend Impeachment 2.0 into a case that even the most hardened Republican would be forced to squirm through, they folded. It seems that the Senators of both sides of the Duopoly have so much love in their hearts that they simply could not bear to miss Valentine's Day at home. Also, with such a prolonged exercise in justice that human witnesses and other supplementary evidence would entail, Joe Biden would be thwarted from his sublime reaching across the aisle and making friendly deals with some of the same 47 GOP senators who had just voted to acquit Donald Trump, giving their tacit stamp of approval to an attempted coup.

Now, to be fair, an extension of the trial would also have opened the door for Republicans to call their own witnesses. Nancy Pelosi, for example, would have been raked over the coals, forced to answer why she didn't request beefed up police protection for her members on that fateful day, despite plenty of warnings of mob violence. It also would have opened up the dreaded Hunter Biden can of worms.

Therefore, the public is being asked to empathize with the Democrats' political dilemma and to actually believe that justice will eventually prevail once the Dems get around to congressional investigations into the insurrection - after of course, they pass Covid relief, accomplish immigration reform, address the climate catastrophe and "do" health care.

In other words, politicians on both sides of the aisle will give each other cover as they try keep their respective rancid cans of worms glued firmly shut until they finally rust and crumble into the memory hole of nothingness.

 And meanwhile, the media will do its own part of making the story about all the "breakout stars" of Impeachment Theater, and how the show trial was, at its very essence, their audition for higher office.

"Though impeachment is an inherently political process," as Politico dishes in a piece about the latest manufactured group of rising stars to entertain and seduce and distract the viewing public,"elected officials typically don't like to admit that working as a manager can come with electoral benefits. They were required to walk a careful line when making the case that Trump incited a mob at the U.S. Capitol. Still, strategists from both sides of the aisle acknowledged their roles likely furthered their careers."

Not that the legacy stars didn't also have their moment in the sun. Nancy Pelosi theatrically "crashed" the post-acquittal press conference of Democratic impeachment managers to deliver yet another bravura performance of a "scathing" indictment of Republican cowards, while demurring that "it had not been my intention to come for this press availability."

Since the show must always go on, the national corporate media are either already camped out at Mar-a-Lago or en route in order to cover the widely anticipated opening act of Donald Trump's Revenge Tour  Refusing to cover him is not an option for the press, because their clicks and ratings have dropped so precipitously since he left office. Film of an empty podium at his gilded Florida palace is bound to attract more eyeballs than the latest White House press briefing, Since Biden Spin Doctor Jen Psaki has asked that reporters submit their questions in advance, the better for her to answer them truthily and transparently, there is no longer even that element of unscripted surprise and comedic improv so essential for the maintenance of good ratings.

While the corporate media performers are attempting to stave off the boredom and tedium of not having Trump fill their empty spaces, they're promoting daughter in law Lara Trump's quest for a North Carolina senate seat and drumming up publicity for daughter Ivanka's own moves to oust Marco Rubio in the Florida senatorial primary. Because no matter how tainted, political dynasties must never be allowed to die. 

In other news, a study by the esteemed British journal Lancet reveals that fully 40 percent of all Covid deaths in the US could have been prevented. These deaths are not only attributable to the incompetence and corruption of the Trump administration, they are the direct result of the free-market neoliberalism of the last 40 years, not to mention the colonial and imperialistic roots of American society itself.

One of the Lancet group's prescriptions, sensibly enough, is the implementation of single payer health care in the United States. But it can't even get a theatrical floor vote in the Democratic-controlled House. And Biden has infamously vowed to veto such a measure, commonly known as Medicare For All, should it ever reach his desk.

There are too many rusted cans in the landfill known as American democracy to count. And don't even get me started on the worms.

Biden's Rescue: Mean, Meandering, Moronic

Joe Biden's idea of bigness and boldness is inexorably and neoliberally shrinking.

Those $2,000 checks going out to every American on Day One? Once Donald Trump had belatedly approved a second round of checks after Christmas, bringing the total amount of the two rounds issued during his administration to $1800, the amount of the third round was quietly reduced by Team Biden, lest people start getting too greedy and expecting more than their share.

 And now, lest people expect even more of their reduced share, Team Biden has agreed that this third reduced round of checks should be means-tested, with only those people making less than $50,000 entitled to get the full amount.

So despite all the laudatory media coverage (here and here for example) that has the Democrats finally - finally! - learning their lesson from the inadequate stimulus legislation of 2009 and the futility of negotiating in good faith with Republicans, Joe Biden just cannot help himself. He will continue negotiating with himself, a/k/a his own inner Republican.

The upshot is that we will be getting less cash pandemic aid from Biden than we did from Trump, given that the new president has shown zero enthusiasm for regular relief payments going out to people - not only for the duration of the pandemic, but for as long as the economic sequelae of the pandemic last. All indications are that these economic sequelae will last for years if not for entire lifetimes and even extend into future generations. Because those small businesses are never coming back. Those service jobs are never coming back.  Rents and home purchase prices are never coming down, because private equity vultures are seizing all that distressed property and artificially increasing the value, making shelter even more of a commodity and investment source of extractive income for the wealthy, rather than the basic human protection from the elements that it traditionally was. 

If there is one thing that the Democratic Party strives for, meanwhile, it is to be seen to be doing the right thing. Thus the careful, obfuscatory language of the New York Times lede about Biden's "rescue" package:

Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration barreled ahead on Wednesday with a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package, even as they signaled a limited williingness to scale back direct payments to Americans in hopes of attracting Republican support. Voting mostly across party lines, the House adopted a budget that included President Biden's sweeping pandemic aid plan, laying the groundwork for Democrats to push it through, if necessary, on a simple majority vote, without Republican support.

 That paragraph is, of course, pure doublespeak. At the same time that Team Biden is barreling ahead, they're magically pulling back. It's the old Michael Jackson political moonwalk trick all over again, just the way Barack Obama used to dance it out of both sides of his mouth. Maybe if the corporate media keeps calling Biden's crumbs for the masses his "sweeping pandemic aid" plan loudly enough and often enough, the public will get a mental picture of the army of brooms in The Sorcerer's Apprentice swooshing away all the cares and worries and suffering of an entire population in one gigantic fell swoop. Maybe the public will not notice that the Democratic plan is naught but a worn-out dust rag. And even if they do notice, maybe they'll nonetheless be abjectly grateful that Biden's crumbs certainly are more palatable than the jug of arsenic being proffered by those nasty old Republicans. 

Therefore, time is of the essence, and Biden wants to move quickly to prove his housekeeping skills, literally sweeping his original promise of $2,000 checks for every US resident right under the proverbial rug. 

“We can’t walk away from an additional $1,400 in direct checks, because people need it,” Mr. Biden told the House Democrats, according to the people, who detailed the conversation on the condition of anonymity because the discussion was intended to be private. “I’m not going to start my administration by breaking a promise to people."  

But, doing that old Michael Jackson routine again, Biden added in a sly whisper that he is perfectly okay with reducing the actual number of people included in his promise. Some needy people are more needy and deserving than others. All needy people are not created equal.

The Times uncritically adds, 

It was part of a two-track strategy that Mr. Biden and Democrats are employing to speed through the relief package: Show Republicans that they have the votes to pass an ambitious plan with only Democratic backing, but offer to negotiate some details in hopes of gaining Republican support.

Again, with the sports metaphor. The Biden Rescue Plan sounds like a hybrid athletic event which combines curling with speed-walking, with lots of brooms and little stones shaped like cartoon bombs and arm-flailing and frenetic expert commentary to keep the crowds riveted on all the slo-mo action.

So while you're nodding, nearly napping, suddenly there comes a tapping from the Senate chamber door, and who pops into the Times article but new Majority Leader Chuck Schumer,  alliteratively garbling :“We're going big and bold. We cannot dawdle, we cannot delay, we cannot dilute, because the troubles that this nation has and the opportunities that we can bring them are so large.” 

That just about sums it up, sports fans. What possible good are troubles if we cannot bring opportunities to them? 

Also - how many stimulus checks could Chuck Schumer shuck if a Chuck Schumer could cut checks?  

While you're pondering that, weak and weary, here's another choice bit of stimulus from Chuck to help sweep your blues away:

Marge & Darrell & Ted & Alex

 Just because Congress now resembles a typical American high school, what with all the armed federal troops protecting the premises from armed adolescents posing as elected reps and credentialed support staff, doesn't mean that the typical cliques and petty scandals and rampant cheating cannot go on as usual. Politico has a new gossipy piece up, dishing about the six distinct frosh cliques already forming in the lower House: the hardcore Trumpies, the Republican Resistance Fighters, the Texas Six, the anti-Squad Force, and Friends of the Squad. They're mixing, they're mingling, they're trashing each other in the very best Heathers tradition.

 Politico doesn't go so far as to report that voting is already underway for the winners in various "most likely to" categories for the 2021 congressional yearbook. But here's my own inside scoop:

Class Clown: The heavy favorite to win in the crazy department is, of course Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the Q Conspiracy Queen of Georgia. When Marge isn't calling for the assassination of House Headmistress Nancy Pelosi, she's chasing fellow freshman Cori Bush down the hall shouting racist epithets. She's in no danger of being expelled for uttering her terrorist threats quite yet because, democratic institution that it is, it would take two thirds of her colleagues to kick her out. And quite a few of them, especially the Anti-Squad and the Texas Six, are almost as zany as she is.

Richest Frat Rat: California's Darrell Issa dropped out of Congress High in 2018 to spend more time with his money, but now he's back on campus to reclaim his Right-ful place as the richest jerk ever to grace Hallowed Hall with his presence. Worth as much as half a billion bucks, Darrell ran for a seat in another Golden State district which was recently vacated by convicted felon Duncan Hunter. Issa barely beat a Democrat who was even more conservative than he was, largely because his opponent bragged to voters he would not support Joe Biden because he is too liberal. I have no insider info yet as to whether Darrell will resume his career as a lowly 68 year old freshman gazillionaire, or whether he still packs the seniority clout he'd amassed when he precipitously left Hallowed Hall only two years ago. Besides, his theft of a Maserati and a concealed weapon conviction back when he had just dropped out of real high school have apparently been expunged from his official record. 

Creepiest Campus Creep: Ted Cruz always reminded me of the child-stalking predatory preacher played by Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter.

But he has long since advanced from performing his depraved Dr. Seuss bedtime filibusters for the prevention of the prevention of cruelty to all living things. His senior prank this year has been the radical aiding and abetting of Donald Trump's attempted coup.

Best Put-Down Artist On Campus: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Alex to her friends, AOC to everyone else ) in full view of her 10 million Twitter followers very publicly just humiliated Ted Cruz, spurning his oafish and very disturbing advances to crash the Wall Street frat party of day traders with him. AOC wouldn't be caught dead with Ted, for the simple reason that Ted already tried to have her murdered once.  She is still understandably traumatized by the Siege of January Sixth, on top of trying to recover from the "violence" of comedian Jimmy Dore calling her out for her M4A #Force the Vote wimpiness. AOC certainly didn't achieve her hard-won slot in Hallowed Hall trouncing creepy BMOC Joe Crowley only to then let Creepy Ted sic his Proud Boys and Bugaloo Bois goons on her. Reddit, forget it. These games must stop. But her deluge of pithy tweets must never end.

So there you have them: Marge & Darrell & Ted & Alex starring in a movie about a motley crew of politicians, hailing from swing and non-swing districts alike. Don't forget to vote for the ones you hate, the ones you love, the ones you love to hate and the ones you hate to love. Your vote, as always, will mean absolutely nothing because it will never even be counted. Only your clicks will count, and your personal data will be duly collected the better to efficiently target you with a deluge of ads that never stop. 

It's all a show to keep you either lulled to sleep and spurred into a state of relentless and helpless rage.  Pass the popcorn, and try not to choke on it as you are regaled with the outlandish triple feature plot of Divided America, the New Dawn of Democracy and United We Oligarchs Stand.  

Meanwhile, it is very important not to confuse Marge & Darrell & Ted & Alex with a less flamboyant but much more powerful clique of "moderates" who are all piling into bed together to try and convince their audience that austerity for the masses of people is cool and adult. If you don't think that Mitt Romney and Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis have the power to swing Joe Biden into agreeing that cutting federal pandemic aid by two-thirds is a titillating S&M turn-on, then you not only don't know plots,  you are not very skilled at suspending your innate power of disbelief in the interests of unity and soul restoration.

We've seen how this particular show ends hundreds of times before. The performers outstare each other, multiple platitudes are mumbled, nothing much happens, and then they all go home to multiple dwelling places. through any number of revolving doors.

Pathocrats Against Covid Cash Relief

 The one factoid that gives me the faintest glimmer of hope that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will do the right thing and not make a filibuster-protecting deal with Mitch McConnell is that the former is up for re-election next year. Fear for his own political hide is the only antidote to his life-long disease of slavish fealty to Wall Street. The wrath of New York voters is the only thing that can or will ultimately nudge Schumer in a direction more favorable to the masses of American people who already were immiserated by 40 years of bipartisan neoliberal austerity before the Covid-9 pandemic delivered the coup de grace.

Chatter about a primary challenge to Schumer, possibly by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. only adds frosting to the hope-cake.

But, but, but...  Enter the useful idiot/bad cop of the ultra-slim new Democratic senate majority, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who won't have to face the voters again until 2024. He, not Schumer,  is actually now the most powerful Democrat in the upper body of  Congress, because he wields the power to stymie the so-called nuclear option that the Dems can use to ram through a new pandemic relief package without one single Republican vote. He, along with McConnell, wants to retain the filibuster to ensure that the Senate doesn't become "just another House of Representatives."

Manchin is especially opposed to sending $1400 in new direct cash aid to Americans. Before his party won those two Georgia seats earlier this month, he opposed ending the filibuster because doing so, he said, "would blow up the Senate."

The maintenance of this arcane institution inhabited mainly by millionaires is more important to Joe Manchin than the care and maintenance of the 330 million citizens of America.

To take the cruel sting off the sadism of Manchin's thinking, other useful idiots of the plutocracy are only too glad to lend their own expertise to Austerity In the Time of Plague. Economist Larry Summers, chief architect of the Clinton-era deregulation of the finance system that led directly to the meltdown of 2008 - but who nonetheless remains a respected "expert" and serves as an informal but powerful adviser to President Joe Biden, preposterously warns that direct cash aid to struggling people would "overheat the economy" in tandem with the tragic possibility of blowing up the Senate. What he really means is that billionaires would start to sweat profusely at the prospect of poor people pocketing the equivalent of a car payment, almost a whole month's rent, or a pile of paid heating oil receipts.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and other centrist pundits parroted the neoliberal talking point that direct cash aid would come at the expense of the unemployed - who are conveniently counted in statistics only when they have lost a job or been laid off fairly recently and/or continue to actively look for work. The non-working or the disqualified working poor, who include retirees on Social Security, the disabled, and underpaid, part-time, gig and otherwise precarious workers, are simply not counted in this manufactured, divide-and-conquer category of the "deserving unemployed." They are deemed disposable elements of society, because they are either unwilling or unable to sufficiently boost the profits of the owning class through their labor.

Joe Manchin is incensed at legislation calling for a new round of $1400 checks, sputtering that not only would such bare-bones cash assistance "blow up the Senate," it would even have Franklin Roosevelt himself spinning in his grave.

“I don’t ever remember F.D.R. recommending sending a damn penny to a human being. He gave ’em a job and gave ’em a paycheck. Can’t we start some infrastructure program to help people, get ’em back on their feet?” he seethed.

Manchin ignores the fact that there was no pandemic during the Great Depression, and that Congress was just recently and physically stormed (if not quite blown up) by a mob, at least some of whom had lost businesses and other income as the direct result of the relief-absent pandemic lockdowns imposed by state and local governments.

Perhaps the most ridiculous argument against the direct cash aid is the accusation that people don't even need the money. They'd only selfishly save it, the narrative goes, instead of "stimulating" the economy with it.  Plus, even though they might need the cash now, they might not need it in another couple of months. So says "moderate" Republican multimillionaire Senator Susan Collins (not up for re-election until 2026) who wants to take a wait and see approach as to whether people will actually follow through on their impolite threats to starve to death.

The thought of desperate people holding on to part of their ill-gotten relief money until the next time that the kid needs a doctor, or an unexpectedly high utility bill arrives in the mail, is sending the reps of the obscenely wealthy into their own epidemic of conniption fits. The way these pundits and politicians moan and groan about it, there are millions of potential recipients out there who already are so flush with cash they won't know what to do with these sudden windfalls. Some of these unsuspecting and unwilling recipients will even be made to feel too guilty about getting money that they neither want nor need!

The way the austerian concern trolls insanely spin it, millions of people finally getting enough to eat for the first time in months will not send another group of people back to work. Therefore, we might as well let them starve if they can't serve capitalism. Never mind that the checks would not even go to people earning six figure incomes.

When it comes to the wealth-hoarding plutocratic class, this projection of their own greed onto hordes of straw-men is all they've got. Their arguments strain credulity, even among the normally credulous.

"I think those checks are an abomination," the conservative American Enterprise Institute's Michael Strain hysterically kvetched to the New York Times.

You may remember Michael Strain as the pathocrat who once was given a platform by the Times's David Brooks to suggest that if people are poor and they have no money and no job, then they should just hop on a bus and move to wherever the nonexistent jobs are. And then employers should be allowed to pay them sub-minimum wages until they can "prove themselves." And if sub-minimum wage isn't enough to live on, the middle class refugees can always take out a loan.

They don't care how ridiculous they sound, because idiocy in high places is such a lucrative, all-American enterprise. Just ask Donald Trump.

The Unbearable Rightness of Bipartisan Being

I don't know what was worse about the latest inauguration: the shameless display of plutocratic preening among the honored attendees, or the corporate media's fawning coverage of same. I hesitated even to open the New York Times this morning for fear of all the sugary projectile vomitus hitting me in the eye.

The church-attending, the candle-lighting, the cemetery-visiting, the coy mask-slipping and the glad-handing among the wealthy and powerful leaders of our country looked, from my vantage point out here in the sticks anyway, like nothing less than one of those notorious Covid super-spreader events for which the Trumpies were so soundly and rightly castigated when they were in power. Michelle Obama was hugging everybody in sight, while Barack went right for his cohort's ears in order to whisper whatever sweet nothings these people whisper to one another when they reunite. And why not? They all probably completed their own vaccine regimens weeks ago.

I wasn't actually paying very close attention to the spectacle and Joe Biden's speech because I was on the phone with my son, who'd just tested positive for Covid-19 on the very same day that he got his first vaccination. He had finally been designated by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as a deserving front-line worker/first responder. It's a relief that, for now anyway, he seems to have a mild case. And that's doubly good because although he contracted the virus in the line of duty, he has been allotted only seven days to quarantine and recover, and to use his own sick time to do so. 

So if I'm not offering my traditional analysis of the latest president's latest overpraised maudlin speech, it's because it's the least of my worries right now. I suspect it is also the least of the worries of 330 million of my fellow citizens, one in three of whom have been directly affected by the pandemic.

When I finally clicked on the New York Times this morning, it did indeed resemble a big puddle of sugary vomit floating in a giant gold-plated toilet bowl. All the celebrities were there in an interactive map, and so was their designer fashion. Michelle Obama wore a silk face mask, color-coordinated with her royal magenta coat and high boots. Bernie Sanders was decked out in such adorable mittens to go with his signature scowl and cheap face mask. It took two whole Times reporters to broadcast this particular bit of earth-shattering news to the truth-starved readership.

Democratic boss James Clyburn, meanwhile, went full Jesus Christ and bragged that unaccountable war criminal George W. Bush, flouting social distancing in this grand new era of bipartisan being, approached him right on the inaugural dais  and praised him for destroying the Sanders candidacy and for pushing the faltering Joe Biden down the throat of America.

“George Bush said to me today, he said, ‘You know, you’re the savior, because if you had not nominated Joe Biden, we would not be having this transfer of power today,” Mr. Clyburn told reporters on a call after the swearing-in ceremony on Wednesday. Mr. Clyburn’s endorsement of Mr. Biden in the Democratic primary in South Carolina in February was credited with rescuing a campaign that had faltered badly in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“He said to me that Joe Biden was the only one who could have defeated the incumbent president,” said Mr. Clyburn, who chatted with Mr. Bush on the inaugural platform before the ceremony and took a selfie with the former president.

All the plutocrats, who so humbly and bipartisanly took their rightful mighty place on the Capitol facade of their own warped brand of democracy, sure showed those terroristic rioting deplorables who so brazenly defaced the sanctity of the institution last week, didn't they? The usurpers were suitably vanquished as a "palpable sense of normalcy and relief" enveloped Washington, itself encased by miles upon miles of razor wire and occupied by 25,000 National Guard troops.

 As Lady Gaga trilled, our flag was still there. 

Welcome back to "Trump: the Prequel."

This Is Exactly Who America Is

 Donald Trump's big mistake is that he did not delegate the authority to smash democratic norms to his lawyers and various underlings so as to achieve plausible deniability. Throughout history, United States presidents have largely escaped widespread public opprobrium both at home and abroad via their studied personal absences from the scenes of actual crimes.

Richard Nixon was done in by the smoking gun of his tapes. Trump was done in by the smoking gun of his big fat mouth and his Twitter feed. When the ultimate sacrilege of the storming of the Capitol by his supporters came down, his various partners - who include both his right-wing pals and the liberal enablers who have profited mightily by substituting their contrived shock and outrage at Trump for providing any meaningful pandemic relief for the masses of people - cannot rid themselves of him fast enough.

His right-wing pals in the oligarchic establishment are cutting off the money spigots, and the neocon wing of the GOP is cutting off their political and emotional support. His Democratic enablers are impeaching him for a second time and fund-raising like mad as they attempt to elicit public sympathy for the physical danger they faced sheltering in place, and for the bodily fear they say they still experience, This fear in high places is already opening the doors for more social repression and more liberal McCarthyism to take up where #Russiagate left off.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested this week that Congress form a new commission to "rein in" the media in order to combat misinformation, the right erupted in anger. But there has been nary a peep from the establishment "left" about the censorship threat. If liberals and progressives think that our elected officials will stop at squelching the speech of Q-Anon conspiracy theorists and their ilk, they should probably think again.  Outlets (see, for example, this puff-piece in Jacobin) perhaps should also think twice about canonizing AOC the same way they once canonized Barack Obama, who later attained the dubious distinction of running one of the most secretive and repressive administrations in recent history.

Unlike Donald Trump, though, Obama did not make the mistake of tweeting and bragging about his right to target the very same perceived enemies, which include journalists, whistleblowers, immigrants, Muslims, and anti-police brutality protesters. When the nation's Democratic governors enforced a coordinated crackdown on Occupy camps in late fall 2011, Obama was conveniently out of the country on a trade junket. He did not unilaterally decide to assassinate thousands of people with his drones, but rather contrived a  Disposition Matrix with the CIA and enlisted his attorney general to write erudite legal opinions to give him the necessary cover for assassinating people. 

When the now fully rehabilitated George W. Bush gave his O.K. to mass surveillance and torture, he had his own team of lawyers write secret manifestos euphemized as "opinions." Thus do credentialed experts like John Yoo not only escape opprobrium and accountability, they are given regular platforms on cable news and the New York Times  from which to virtuously pontificate on Donald Trump's serial assaults on democracy and the rule of law, but at the same time "consult with" Trump on ways to skirt the law. No matter that declaring an atrocity to be legal doesn't miraculously make it morally right. They wear their historical precedents as shields.

Nevertheless, liberal interventionists and neoconservative warmongers alike are not only proclaiming themselves "woke" to the racism in this country, they are also congratulating themselves for the "courage" to label Trump and his base as fascists. Critics have pointed out, rightly, that American fascism erupted with a real vengeance during Reconstruction and the implementation of Jim Crow - under, of course, all the usual legal niceties and opinions written by the well-credentialed in order to give all kinds of inhumane horrors like lynchings and mob violence that all-important gloss of expert respectability.

Fast forward to 2021, and the newly Woke Elites are talking a lot about the Trump era being our own Weimar Republic. Fascism is suddenly all the fashion, but not the kind that they'd be caught dead wearing themselves, of course.

 They're certainly not talking so much about the American Jim Crow laws against miscegenation being one of the main inspirations for Nazi Germany's own September 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of most of their human rights.

The New York Times, even in its own contemporaneous coverage,  glossed right over the passage of those draconian edicts by headlining its article "Reich Adopts Swastika As Official Flag" and framing the Nuremberg Laws around Hitler's reaction to a group of anti-fascist protesters who'd torn down the swastika-emblazoned flag from a German ship docked in New York, and the ensuing diplomatic kerfuffle when a low-level New York City judge named Louis Brodsky dismissed all charges against the culprits. It was not the Nuremberg Laws themselves that the Roosevelt administration initially condemned. It was the fact that an upstart judge exceeded his job description and compared Nazis to pirates. Secretary of State Cordell Hull actually sent Hitler a letter of regret.

  A later New York Times article assured readers that the Nuremberg law forbidding Jews from hiring Aryan household help did not apply to Jewish-Americans doing business in the Reich.

But let's not totally pile on the Paper of Record, which did not yet even exist during the colonial era when the frenzy of corporate land-grabbing and extermination of native human beings proceeded, in tandem with the kidnapping and enslavement of African people, in full fascistic fashion.

Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report aptly calls last week's Capitol riot a "white settler uprising." Fascism has not sprung fully-fledged from the small brain of Donald Trump. Not by a long shot:

White mobs and armed groups have been inflicting violence against the non-white presence in their colonial settler state ever since their ancestors arrived on these shores. The Puritans – a colony-in-arms — had all but completed the mission of racially “purifying” New England within a century of setting foot at Plymouth Rock. Far more Native Americans were killed by massed, armed settler civilians than by uniformed armies of the British Crown or the young U.S. republic. Whites in the slave states of the U.S. South were a people perpetually in arms in “defense” against slave rebellions, with every able-bodied white man obligated to aid in suppressing real or threatened Black revolts. Hundreds of Blacks were massacred in the wake of Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion. 

Speaking of presidents, let's not forget the dude on the almighty dollar bill, Father of Our Country George Washington.

Before he fought the Brits and won the revolution despite his own ineptitude in battle, Washington was a slave-owning real estate speculator with a sick hunger for more riches no matter what the human cost. He was every inch the precursor of Donald Trump, only with a powdered wig instead of a comb-over. He relied on his base of aggrieved white settlers and failed farmers and small business people fleeing the East coast for native American territory to do his dirty work for him as much as Trump has relied on his. Washington flouted British peace treaties with the Indians as much as Trump flouts the "norms" of our own neoliberal system. 

Extracting from written correspondence of Washington and sundry of his  plutocratic pals, historian Peter Cozzens writes about the pre-Revolutionary class system, circa 1774, in his biography of the great Indian leader Tecumseh: 

The royal governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunsmore, who himself coveted Indian land for personal profit, had no expectation of peaceful denouement. Frontier subjects, he wrote the Crown, despised treaties made with Indians, "whom they consider but little removed from brute creation." So too did the Virginia aristocracy. With the spring thaw in 1774, surveyors representing George Washington, Patrick Henry and other Tidewater elites staked large claims along the Ohio River. Waving away the royal edict against land grabs as "a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians," Washington told his personal surveyor not to worry.

With the surveyors came settlers willing to wage their scalps on a scrap of land.

So the original meaning of Patrick Henry's clarion cry, "Give me liberty or give me death" seems to have been "Give me the liberty to plunder and get rich and I'll give you the freedom to sweep up my crumbs and kill and die for me in the process."

Some things never change.

Forget AOC's special commission on reining in disinformation. We need a commission on disseminating the truth and not hiding it, as officials and the aristocracy and ruling elites have striven to do probably since hominids first figured out how to get up and walk with two legs and developed the ability to think with autonomous brains.  We need a well-stocked library in every neighborhood. We need courses in history, philosophy and the liberal arts much more than we need STEM curricula to prepare us for the low-wage precarious jobs of the future.

Our ignorance is their greatest strength. Always has been, always will be. 

Some Thoughts On the First Amendment

 The First Amendment only prevents the government from censoring speech. It does not require private companies to provide a platform for all comers to exercise their rights to free speech. Twitter, Facebook and other media firms and publishing outlets are well within their legal rights to kick Donald Trump and other bad actors off their platforms.

The danger occurs when these giant media monoliths partner with the government in order to impose this censorship. A case can, in fact, be made that our corporate ultra-consolidated media and and our corporate-captured and owned government are one and the same entity. At the very least, they are partners in the exact same oligarchic enterprise. Ironically, for all the talk of Trump being a fascist, one of the key elements of fascism is the melding of government and corporations. This true coup against democracy long preceded his election to the highest office in the land. In fact, this coup is what enabled his rise to political power in the first place.

Therefore, the expulsion of Donald Trump and his followers from these private platforms, these unaccountable platforms which have forged unhealthily close ties to the CIA and the Democratic Party, might feasibly lead to the silencing of any voice that the "establishment" or the "ruling class" or the "deep state" or whatever you want to call the permanent structure of money and power, decides that it doesn't like.

Never mind the spectre of "trickle-down" censorship. This censorship is already occurring. Google, for one, has been exposed as using its secret algorithm to suppress search results on the Internet. A secretive group calling itself "Prop Or Not" arose in 2016, publishing a list of some hundred blogs and media outlets purported to be under the control of the Kremlin. There's more than one way to suppress content other than imposing outright censorship. There are smear campaigns and intimidation tactics galore to get undesirable voices to shut up, be cancelled or just ignored.

The failed Trump-enabled putsch at the Capitol last week could be just the newest, niftiest incentive that these powerful people need to clamp down on unpopular or "divisive" rhetoric and protest movements in the name of "national security." They clamped down with a vengeance after 9/11, with the Patriot Act. How ironic that Trump cultists' favorite name for themselves is "patriots" who are trying to "take our freedoms back" from the very architects of the Patriot Act.

We have to stay vigilant, especially as it now appears that there are plenty more dirty hands than Donald Trump's involved in last week's massive breach. Latest reports indicate that forces within the Pentagon itself may have been involved, and that it was Congressional leaders who balked at National Guard troops guarding the capital as a preventive measure because of the "bad optics" such militarization of the halls of "democracy" would broadcast.

Even as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moves in a high state of emergency to impeach Trump for a second time for inciting a riot, her lieutenant James Clyburn tamps down expectations for swift justice by calling for a hundred-day delay in sending the lone impeachment article to the Senate for trial. This delay would ostensibly allow President Biden to put the Senate to better use enacting his economic agenda.

We'll soon find out what that agenda will be. Early indications are that conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin will be the party's designated fall guy, or bad cop, for continuing Democratic inaction on a sweeping pandemic relief package. The bright spot is that more and more of us can detect ass-covering whenever we see it.

The key word is vigilance (as opposed to the top-down orchestrated vigilantism in service to a billionaire we saw last week.) We have to keep covering the ass-covering and speaking out like there is no tomorrow. 

If our elected leaders really do care about the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States, they'll emulate FDR, who stopped American fascism right in its tracks in the 1930s with the New Deal legislation.

Give people money. Give people health care. Give people jobs. With their dignity restored, maybe they won't feel so aggrieved and so prone to fall under the spell of another cult leader charlatan like Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the private media companies arrogating to themselves the power to squelch speech should be broken up and the entire Internet should be made a public utility. That way, the entire public and its court system - not the billionaire tech CEOs - would be the final arbiters of the First Amendment.

Oh, and let's also consider restoring the Fairness Doctrine and legislate broadcasting in the public interest.

Tall orders for sure, but why stop at just one solution to the "friendly fascism" that's been operating in this country for most of our lifetimes?

The Bright Side of the Breach

My observation here the other day that Donald Trump had two more weeks in which to wreak havoc turned out to be quite the understatement, huh?

Like many people I watched yesterday's events unfold on TV, in my case the free stream from CBS News, whose commentators made their own elite priorities absolutely clear right from the get-go. And those priorities were disgust at the destruction of "sacred" property and concerns about how "the rest of the world" would react to a mob storming the capitol, as though America were some kind of third world Banana Republic.

"This is not who we are," moaned many a bubble-encased pundit and elected official.

The sight of that Andrew Jackson throwback lounging in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, feet on her desk and scratching his crotch, did, I confess, elicit a little bit of schadenfreude. It would have been better if he posed eating some of her designer ice cream with his fingers. But as our betters always like to admonish us, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

CBS personality Norah O'Donnell, bless her heart, did her very best to blame the siege on Russia. But to his credit, even former CIA official-turned-#Russiagate pundit Michael Morell wasn't having it. This, he proclaimed, was pure Trumpian homegrown terrorism. 

Not that I'm saying that these homegrown terrorists who are terrorizing both our elected officials and their media lackeys are therefore our friends. But at least somebody is finally striking unaccustomed fear into their self-satisfied cores.

Witness the inaction of the Capitol Police, who in at least one incident, literally seemed to invite the mob right into the Hallowed Halls, opening the gates and even posing for selfies when not being chased up the stairs by the teeming masses. No longer can our congress critters rely upon and trust their armed guards to protect them from... you know, actual people and their constituents. The only actual people that the Capitol Police have traditionally ousted from the building are climate activists, disability rights activists dragged out of their wheelchairs, Code Pink antiwar protesters and other social justice advocates. If the Capitol Police had seen crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters converging on the building, the tear gas canisters and sound blast cannons would have out in full force. It would have been over in five minutes instead of five hours.

Here's my theory. Security officials sympathetic to Trump thought the protesters they allowed into the building would have behaved a little bit better than they did. The storming got just a wee bit out of hand. The original plan might have been to let a dozen or so garishly costumed "patriots" into Senate chambers during the election hearing for a quick pro-Trump photo-op before security quickly moved in and pretended to drag them away.

So now that it's gotten totally out of their elite control, our elected officials face a choice. They can either tamp down social unrest by giving people health care, a guaranteed basic income, eviction relief and a federal jobs program. Or, they can declare all 300-plus million American citizens their sworn enemies and punish them with more austerity, more social media and press censorship, and more prisons. Right now they're flailing and still worried mainly about losing their precious - and very contrived and very tattered - global reputation as the bastion of democracy and human rights.

Even Donald Trump, who once infamously and pretty accurately claimed that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, might not get away with this latest stunt. For there's an unwritten rule among organized criminals of all kinds that you must never s--t where you eat. Trump just pooped all over the very same people who control the government's purse-strings, who bankrolled his military and his border wall while covering their own complicit butts by tsk-tskiing his boorish manners and pretending to punish him over his alleged romance with Putin. It's still up in the air whether they really mean it this time and will remove him from office (even ex post facto) thus denying him his retirement package, his life-long Secret Service protection and all the other perks enjoyed by former presidents.

Speaking of whom, it's a sad day indeed when unindicted war criminal George W. Bush, responsible for millions of deaths of innocents in his illegal war, can actually appear beside his fellow miscreants Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and condemn Trump for instigating domestic violence right in the elites' own back yard.

A page has turned, and we must look forward and not backward - but just not in the way that these presidents and congress critters mean whenever they exculpate themselves from accountability.

The tide has turned. For once, they are afraid of us. The only thing we have to fear is their fear itself.