De Bait Nite: The Hangover

If you want a blow-by-blow account of last night's GOP whatever-it-was, you have come to the wrong place.  Yes, I kept the TV tuned in to all five-plus hours of it, even the Pee Wee wrestling match intro featuring canned survival food-seller Rick Santorum and a few others whose names escape me at the moment. 

But I took readers' advice and read a book about how we can't afford rich people at the same time as I semi-watched the debate. I also played a few games of Bejewelled on the iPad and mentally interposed the exploding gems with the heads on the stage in a futile effort to stay riveted.

I knew that I had to indulge in a couple of survival skills when CNN commentator Brooke Baldwin referred to the Reagan Library as "hallowed ground," and Wolf Blitzer rudely interrupted a relatively intelligent point Anderson Cooper was trying to make to announce that Donald Trump had just exited his limo and was entering the building.

There's got to be a morning after, and truth be told, only a few memories remain. (If you thought I'd be taking notes on the show, think again.)

Some highlights:

Jeb Bush thinks brother George kept us safe. He also wants to put Margaret Thatcher's mug on the $10 bill. Donald Trump did not make any disparaging remarks about Maggie's mug, nor that of any other female for that matter. 

Carly Fiorina makes Hillary Clinton actually look like the Mother Teresa her campaign team is trying to market to the voters. Fiorina never smiles. She looks directly at the camera as she calls for mass killings of people for the sake of her personal friend, Bibi.

Although Donald Trump didn't make fun of the looks of any female, it sure looks like the GOP cohort still stands united in its hatred of all women and its fetishistic defense of fetal parts, which apparently are being sold on the open market right next to the breakfast cereal.

As one of the few people on the stage who don't have blood on their hands due to the wars they voted for, Donald Trump may still have effectively condemned thousands or even millions of people to death with his off-the-cuff remark that the baby of one of his employees developed autism overnight after receiving vaccinations. 

Ben Carson, M.D., allowed that Trump might have a point about getting too many vaccines at once, but advised him to do further reading. Carson sounded like he whiffed a huge dollop of ether before coming onstage.

Jeb Bush admits that he smoked dope while a preppie and apologized to Mom Babs for his perfidy. He didn't apologize to his mom for not nominating her mug for the $10 bill. Ben Carson nominated his mom, and so did a few others whose names escape me. A few even went totally socialistic and nominated Rosa Parks.

Mike Huckabee, whose only platforms are anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage, praised the polio vaccine. He was apparently unaware that the first polio vaccine was developed with the help of fetal tissue research.

De Bait Nite

Something weird has been happening lately over at already-weird CNN. It's gone from being the War On Terror propaganda network to being the War For Terror propaganda network. It's morphed from scaring people about ISIS creeping across the borders to murder us all in our beds to thrilling people about Donald Trump creeping into all of our beds by way of his relentless presence on our video screens. 

Even the terror promos are eerily similar, right down to the drumbeat-heavy Doomsday soundtracks. When you don't see Jihadi John glaring at you, you see Donald Trump glaring at you. There's even a countdown clock to make it even scarier.

If you happen to watch tonight's debate from the alleged safety of your bed, you will probably watch the dumbness oxymoronically streamed over your smart device. I don't think this has anything to do with Trump being easier to take on a smaller tablet than on an over-sized wall screen. And it's not just the false sense of security you feel from cowering under the covers as you clutch your gizmo. I think it has to do with the convenience of being able to click back and forth from watching the festivities to checking out the various live analyses of the festivities. It is incumbent upon you to compare your reactions to those of the corporate pundits also watching in unreal time. Do you believe your own lying ears that these clowns are sociopaths, or do you trust the experts telling you that Donald Trump is semantically winning by a landslide, and that hurling vitriolic word salads is tantamount to an intellectual zinger of historic proportions?

Even if you have intelligently cut your cable cord to protest both the outlandish price and the outlandish content, CNN is generously providing tonight's show for "free" over the Internet, waiving the usual fees and sign-up rigmarole:

The cable network announced it will lift that paywall from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. the night of the debate and feature the live stream on its homepage. The move is meant to "showcase the value of 'TV Everywhere'" — the name CNN gives to its streaming service. 

CNN's Andrew Morse, who heads the network's editorial operations in the United States, told Mashable the company is banking on giving its streaming feature more exposure. He told the website CNN is not concerned about losing ratings, because he believes people with a cable subscription will continue watching on traditional TV. 

"I think if you have a TV and you're sitting in front of a TV and you have a cable subscription, you're going to watch the debate on TV," he said. "If you don't happen to be sitting in front of the TV, it's historic moment that we think people are going to seek out."

If I do take the hyped-up bait and watch the "debate," I will probably view it on regular TV. (Month after month, I've been swearing that this is the month I'll finally cancel cable. And then every month some event makes me change my mind. This month, it is the Pope's visit. My "provider," Time-Warner, is even adding a special Pope Channel to bait me as a continuing customer. And I am ashamed to admit that I am taking de bait.) Of course, whenever I watch "the news" I do so while obsessively playing Bejewelled on my iPad. My attention span is shot to shit by all the smart devices littering up my life. I suspect that I am not alone.

CNN knows this, and is hyping up the debate for all it is worth. And it is worth many, many, many billions of dollars. The cable outlet is reportedly charging 40 times its normal rates for ads running during the debate. A 30-second spot usually costing $5,000 will go for $200,000 tonight. Not quite Super Bowl territory, but getting there.

Jake Tapper (whose adenoidal delivery always makes me want to rip my cable cord right out of the wall) is the lead moderator of tonight's extravaganza. He admits that he is more interested in sparking a fight among the contenders than in holding their feet to the fire. 

Not for nothing have I been referring to the Eternal Campaign of Cluttered Mindlessness as "Neoliberal Death Match" over these many months. As the L.A. Times' Steven Battaglio writes,

 If the commercials promoting CNN's Republican primary debate Wednesday make it look like a highly anticipated pay-per-view boxing event, it means they're working.
"That was the idea," CNN President Jeff Zucker said last week. "This is Round 2 of a heavyweight bout."
Or the second episode of a wildly successful hit show. CNN anticipates its largest audience ever when Donald Trump, Jeb Bush and nine other contenders meet Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. It would achieve that plateau by getting 75% of the 24 million viewers who watched the first GOP debate of the 2016 presidential race on the Fox News Channel on Aug. 6, the surprise must-see TV event of the summer.

And from the New York Times:

 “Jake Tapper is going to do whatever he can to get the candidates to go after each other,” said a strategist advising one of the candidates, who declined to be named delivering what could be seen as a criticism of the network. “If somebody is knocked out, CNN will be happy. In the first debate, the moderators controlled the candidates; in this debate, the candidates will have to moderate themselves.”

 Though the moderators say they will look for opportunities to let the candidates interact, they may have to tread carefully to avoid appearing as instigators. The network garnered some criticism in 2012 for its handling of several memorable debate moments.

The piece refers back to John King baiting Newt Gingrich on his history of marital difficulties, and Candy Crowley fact-checking Mitt Romney in unreal time. No mention is made of the fact that the two Green Party candidates were prevented from creating a real ruckus during one Rombama Show by being handcuffed to chairs at an undisclosed police location so that the staged theatrics could continue without actual democracy cluttering up the script.

Although CNN apparatchiks insist that their version of Neoliberal Death Match will be more staid than the sports arena venue of the last bout, tonight will be every bit as much of an unreality show:  

A CNN construction crew also built, from scratch, the elaborate scaffolding that elevates the debate stage to eye level with Reagan’s Air Force One, adding grandeur and history to the already striking backdrop.

It will be Mr. Tapper’s first time moderating a presidential debate. Just days before the event, Mr. Tapper appeared relaxed and confident as he took a break from the preparations.

But, he admitted, part of the thrill of the debate is that even he, scripted questions and all, does not know what will happen.

“It’s difficult to control my 5-year-old son,” Mr. Tapper said with a half-laugh, “much less a 55-year-old governor who thinks he should be ruler of the planet.”

Hehehehehe. Grandeur, meet surrealism. History, meet comedy.

David Uberti of the Columbia Journalism Review is not amused:

The framing is mystifying at best. Trump’s spontaneity and vulgarity make him more compelling than his counterparts in the GOP race, to the point that CNN’s own journalists have openly remarked about the glut of media coverage. Trump’s politics-as-entertainment is inherent to his campaign. But rather than holding an important discussion that happens also to be captivating, CNN’s pre-debate promotions have openly framed Wednesday’s contest as entertainment. They are fueling an already out-of-control wildfire: The debate is not just a live event to highlight differences between presidential contenders, but rather a title fight between Trump and the world.

As Nan Socolow so pithily responded in her comment on the New York Times article,

A cluster of dunces up there tomorrow night on the wannabe POTUS Second Republican Debate stage - provided by CNN with The Gipper's Boeing Air Force One the backdrop of the "intimate" venue, adding "grandeur and history" to the Second Two-Tiered GOP Primary Debate of this campaign 2016. As we recall the monumental goofs and memorable moments of previous Republican debates, we will be looking forward to a few of the candidates falling into the California tar pits of also-rans tomorrow night. This is the pinnacle of American tragicomedy. Fifteen Conservative Tea Party declared candidates bashing each other like sock-puppets delivering sound bytes to one another for a couple of hours while the American couch potato heads scarf down doritos, cheez-doodles and other finger-lickin' good junk snax, washed down with neon colored sodas and faux waters in plastic bottles. It is - as first-time Presidential Debate moderator Jake Tapper avowed - thrilling that we don't know what will happen. Maybe there will be a "you're no Jack Kennedy" moment. Maybe an explosion or implosion of a few leading contenders. This is high drama among the Republicans and we have no idea when the first of the primary debates on the Democratic side will occur. CNN is the dubious beneficiary of this "combative spirit". What about all the Americans who can't afford cable-tv? How will they receive the news of tomorrow night's debate? Maybe they have more worries in their lives than the Debate Watchers.

Just be careful not to wet the bed with your fake bottled water as you watch the schlock horror. Also watch out for Dorito breath and telltale orange fingerprints on your touch screen. Be especially wary of stray popcorn kernels. Those things are even deadlier than terrorists bearing knives and the political/media knaves selling them.

All Politics Is Global

The destructive politics and policies of global turbo-capitalism are coming home to roost.

The spirit of Tahrir Square and the worldwide Occupy movement has been captured in the rise of the Syriza and Podemos parties, and most lately made manifest in the Labour Party victory of the socialist Jeremy Corbyn in Great Britain and the rise in the polls of liberal independent Bernie Sanders in the United States.

And don't forget the global moral and political influence of Pope Francis, soon to set foot on our shores to deliver a powerful and well-deserved kick to the Neoliberal Project's well-padded ass.

The old saw that all politics is local still holds true, of course, as long as you define "local" in the grotesque, flat-earthish Thomas Friedman way. People the wide world over are delivering stinging rebukes, with varying success, to the scourge of globalization.

By a nearly half million vote margin, the members of the Labour Party handed a huge victory to Jeremy Corbyn, who the socialist writer Tariq Ali has described as his party's "most left-wing leader ever." He explains,

The Thatcherite Blair/Brown twins agreed to share power thus creating two power-hungry factions with no political differences except that Tony Blair hungered for both power and money. He gave us the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, while Gordon Brown was oblivious to the vulnerabilities of financialised capitalism and spent billions of taxpayers’ money bailing out banks that might have (after paying the depositors) been best left to croak. Both bureaucratised the Labour Party by neutering the party conference, reducing it to a tacky version of the US Democrats. All show, no substance. They denuded constituency Labour parties of the right to select their own prospective parliamentary candidates. This was the only way they could transform a large chunk of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) into a collection of over-promoted office boys and girls together with bandwagon careerists.

It's only a short hop, in this age of globalization, from the canyons of Wall Street to the City of London. Obama political operative Jim Messina, who currently helps run the Hillary Clinton campaign, was also instrumental in the re-election of austerian British P.M. David Cameron. Neoliberalism, just like the money it worships, knows no national boundaries, either geographically or politically.

The people of Great Britain are rejecting what is known as Blairism, the ideological twin of "New Democrat" Clintonism. This direct offshoot of Reaganism/Thatcherism purported to soften the right-wing nihilism of the Neocons and Randians by adding a thin patina of "social responsibility" to the global greed agenda. 

As Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy lay out in Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction, Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair and Democratic President Bill Clinton closely collaborated on a kinder, gentler version of supply side, trickle-down economics: what the authors call the "second wave" of neoliberalism, which still continues under the plutocrat-friendly regimes of Cameron and Obama. This is Reaganism/Thatcherism rendered palatable for public relations purposes through a more socially progressive agenda. It is still rule by the Market, but rule by the Market with government programs to boost "individual entrepreneurship." It still promotes selfishness, but with the higher purpose of selling selfishness as a universal right. (What Obama and other New Dems tackily call aspirational "ladders of opportunity" and "a level playing field.")

Steger and Roy write,

(Blair and Clinton) hoped that their "purified" product - a socially conscious market globalism - would propel the entire world toward a new golden age of technological progress and prosperity. Such "modernized" second-wave neoliberalism had a tremendous impact on the political landscape of the post-communist 1990s.... United in their approach to liberalize trade relations and integrate national economies into a single global market, Clinton and Blair would eventually take credit for the "Roaring Nineties" - a decade of economic boom.

Thanks to the deregulation of global finance and the job-destroying, wage-suppressing corporate coups disguised as free trade deals, the bubble burst all over the world. Only the oligarchs recovered. Of the trillions of dollars in household wealth lost in the Great Collapse of 2008, the top One Percent glommed up more than 90 percent of the recovery.

 Cornyn's victory is a resounding popular rejection of Third Way neoliberalism, or Blairism, possibly to be paralleled here in the US by a Democratic primary rejection of Clintonite Hillary.

It's a rejection of the pernicious globalization that won't rest until it destroys the planet and all the living things that dwell on it. The voters have repudiated the flim-flam notion that the endless growth of capitalism, even growth tempered by what centrists call "social responsibility," is just what the doctor ordered. They have just said nada to the record wealth inequality engendered by the cancer of neoliberalism. They have said No Mas to too big to fail and jail banks getting bailed out, and regular people getting screwed.

Since Blairism and Clintonism are veritable ideological twins, I think it's safe to say that the Corbyn victory is also coming soon to an American theater near you. It's called Feeling the Bern. (It has been delayed by about seven years, due to the mass hypnosis inflicted upon voters by Barack Obama, who ran on a brilliantly phony populist platform and then governed like a neoliberal on steroids. To paraphrase Tariq Ali, he is the very essence of All Show, No Substance.)

Of course, given the entrenched deep state comprising the Pentagon and the CIA and the NSA and all the other shadow agencies we know little to nothing about, a total rejection of corporatism will be much harder to accomplish here in the One Exceptional Nation. It is Jeremy Corbyn, with his anti-war, anti-imperialism stance, who puts the real social back into socialism.

The plutocracy and the mass media owned by it are trying to discredit Corbyn just as they are trying to discredit Bernie Sanders here. But there is no turning back the global populist rejection of neoliberalism.

People are too sick and tired to just lay down and take it anymore.

Whether politicians like Corbyn and Sanders bear out the "pendulum theory" of self-correcting politics, and pull their respective nations back from the abyss, remains to be seen. The power of the national security state and the war machine and the oligarchy and the media stenographers may make a true reversal next to impossible.

 Sanders, who recently acknowledged that he would continue Obama's drone assassination policy and war on terror, is a hawk in comparison to the pacifistic Corbyn.

 And then, there's always the distinct possibility that American voters will reject the ill-effects of neoliberalism by voting for Donald Trump over Sanders, should he become the nominee.

As Morris Berman pessimistically wrote in Dark Ages America,

Given the emptiness, alienation, violence and ignorance that are now pervasive in this country, it is hard to imagine where a recovery would come from. The self-correction theory is at least partly based on the popular reaction of an informed citizenry. In this regard, the nature of the American populace today is not a source of inspiration or hope." 

(Needless to say, the New York Times trashed Berman's book for its "grumpy-lefty" Bernie-esque exposure of American dysfunction. This was in 2006, back when the Times was still championing the Iraq War and all things exceptionally American. This was back when torture was still "enhanced interrogation". Reviewer Mitoko Rich thought it terribly unpatriotic of Berman to not only question George Bush's motives, but to postulate that 9/11 constituted blowback against American imperialism. Fast forward to Perpetual Presidential Campaign substituting for substance, and I think we can agree that nothing has changed at the Grey Lady, or even worse, at the anti-Corbyn empire known as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.)

I'll say this, though. Can you imagine anything more pessimistic and depressing than Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush leading in the polls right now? Can you imagine if the last Pope hadn't resigned and we didn't have Francis around to condemn unbridled capitalism as "the dung of the devil?"

 I will take my crumbs of Enlightenment optimism wherever I can find them. 

Revolting Stuff at the Grey Lady

If you've been following the readers' comment sections of the New York Times lately, particularly those on the Public Editor's page, you'll have noticed a mass outpouring of complaints critical of the paper's Bernie Sanders coverage. It's the closest thing I've ever seen to a spontaneous intellectual revolt against a major newspaper by the reading public.

The reader complaints are essentially twofold: the Times coverage of the Sanders campaign, compared to that of Trump and Clinton and Bush, has been scanty, buried deep within the inner pages of the newspaper; and, that the rare examples of prominent coverage have been derisive and/or dismissive, caricaturing Sanders as a wild-haired socialist who cannot possibly win the Democratic nomination. (regular Times commenter Rima Regas has compiled a pretty comprehensive, well-sourced overview.)

So, at the request of Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, newly-appointed political editor Carolyn Ryan has finally responded to the accusations, saying that while she "respects the passion of the Sanders supporters," she thinks they may be overlooking much of the coverage.

Right off the bat, Ryan mischaracterizes the complainers as Sanders supporters.  Although many of them are, this has nothing to do with cheerleading for a candidate. This has to do with how the largest news organization in the world is falling down on the job, failing in its duty of basic journalistic integrity.

Ryan provides a laundry list of every Grey Lady Sanders article ever written, without noting the placement and without comparing the volume to pieces on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, which have been, by the paper's own admission, much more numerous. Ryan concludes,

​The Sanders campaign stands out, in my experience, for its fervent energy and organization. But one of the​ strategies of ​Sanders supporters is to ​relentless​ly​ agitat​e ​for more ​​favorable​ coverage​ ​from The Times and other outlets. ​

 We are mindful of their critiques and listen to ​their concerns, and often point out stories to them that they have overlooked.But ultimately we have to use our journalistic judgment​ and serve a broad readership​, by cover​ing​ the entire field of candidates, and not ma​k​e decisions in response to lobbying campaigns.I’m puzzled by the tone complaints and I cannot say that I agree with them.

 The reader responses to her response were pretty much as you'd expect. Here's mine:

Carolyn Ryan's response is the gold standard for whenever hoi polloi dare to complain. She chides us for our "tone," and caricatures us as a mob of Sandernistas who don't recognize quality and fairness when we see it.
She could have just boiled it down to "harrumph!"
Silly me, not to appreciate that the NYT has captured first, foremost and better than anybody else what it considers to be the "essence" of Bernie Sanders. It reminds me of David Brooks's response when readers complained about his use of the word "mutts" to describe bi-racial and multi-ethnic people. In essence, it was more feigned befuddlement coupled with advice to get over ourselves.
It's like the response of TV critic Alessandra Stanley when readers reacted negatively to her characterization of Shonda Rhimes as "an angry black woman." (Stanley was just being "arch" and if readers didn't get her irony and wit, then too bad.) 

Carolyn Ryan has just cringingly described her campaign reporters as her elite stable of "thoroughbreds." No surprise therefore that she seems to view those complaining about the Bernie Sanders coverage as a bunch of nags. Not a whinny attitude if you want to keep your readers.

Expecting the New York Times to fairly treat an FDR-style candidate running in the interests of working and poor people would be like expecting the Queen to invite the servants to join her for dinner. The Times, along with all establishment media relying on the dollars of corporate and plutocratic advertisers, is not about to bite the sensitive hand that feeds it. Bernie Sanders is not the first, nor will he be the last, victim of this kind of neoliberal bias at the hands of the media-political nexus.

Speaking of food, I had almost forgotten that this is our great national holiday of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste! Then an email alert from the Times reminded me. Food critic Sam Sifton is sharing his 9/11 "recipes of remembrance."

As you ponder the 3,000 lives lost on that day, The Times wants you treat yourself to some steak frites with Bearnaise sauce (not to be confused with those lumpen Freedom Fries). Do not, of course, chew over the millions of lives lost and uprooted in the continuous illegal wars of American aggression stemming from that terrible day as you swill white wine and comfort yourself with binge-watching Narcos on Netflix from the safety of your luxury digs. Mayor Rudy Giuliani urged us to go shopping after the disaster. Sam Sifton wants you to keep stuffing your faces as you party like it's 9/11 all weekend long:

Rate your recipes after you've cooked them, and leave notes on them, and send them around. We want a big party here. Bring some friends.

As always, we'd like you to let us know if you have any problems with our technology, design or prose. We're at cookingcare@nytimes.com. And I'm on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook if you want to show me your food. #NYTCooking! Have a great weekend.

Now that you've finished quietly barfing over that little interlude, let's get back to the political stuff. The lines between the mass media and government/political parties/donors are growing increasingly blurred. Just days ago, Times Executive Editor Dean Bacquet tellingly dished to the Washington Post (the source of that awful "thoroughbred" quote) that Carolyn Ryan will be moving from running the Washington Bureau to running "one heck of a campaign" within a campaign from New York City, money capital of the world and therefore Campaign Central.

The presidential campaign, admitted Bacquet to the WaPo's Erik Wemple, "is not really a Washington story." Plus, it would be too hard for Ryan to cover both "Trumpfest" and the day-to-day news coming from the Capitol, the White House, and the Supreme Court. 

 “The reality is that the Obama second term — he’s not going quietly,” says Ryan, noting that the paper needs a Washington bureau chief who can pay heed to the president’s last months in office. (Baquet addressed the same dynamic, only with a touch of internal-memo hyperbole, as he highlighted the “continuing story of the epic struggle surrounding President Obama’s final months in Washington.”)

They don't even try to hide the fact that they are propagandists first, news reporters second.The president will be treated not as a public servant accountable to the public, but as some kind of mythic hero in a Manichean battle between good and evil.

Since, as researchers Martin Gillens and Benjamin Page have demonstrated, the wealthy get what they want in the way of legislation from the politicians whom they fund, doesn't it stand to reason that they also get what they want from the media they own? What they seem to want is an alternate reality, far removed from the lives and the travails of regular people. No wonder that their manufactured reality has no room for the likes of Bernie Sanders and his populist agenda.

They don't even try to hide their dismay over the rising fortunes of the Sanders campaign. In another digital front-page Times piece published on Wednesday, panicking Wall Street Democrats mulled recruiting a malleable candidate to replace the tanking Hillary Clinton. Their adherence to the plutocracy couldn't be more brazen: 

It is not just Mrs. Clinton’s weakness in the polls that has generated talk of other alternatives, but also the strength of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is routinely drawing huge crowds at campaign events. That has been disconcerting to Democratic officials who believe that Mr. Sanders, a socialist, is so liberal that his presence at the top of the party’s ticket in 2016 would be disastrous.

“If party leaders see a scenario next winter where Bernie Sanders has a real chance at the Democratic nomination, I think there’s no question that leaders will reach out to Vice President Biden or Secretary of State Kerry or even Gore about entering the primaries,” said Garnet F. Coleman, a Texas state lawmaker and Democratic national committeeman.

The corporate press resides not in the Fourth Estate, but in a luxurious guest house on a virtual gated estate called Oligarchic Acres, Feudal States of America Inc.

The Royal Prosecutor, the Scribe, and the Feudal Lord (Anonymous, 13th century)

Chuckles and Checkers With Hillary

To combat an inexorable slide in the polls, Hillary Clinton and her team of marketers are using a two-pronged approach to resuscitating her campaign. To be even more metaphorically specific, they are using a plastic cannula to shove canned air through both nostrils of an oxygen-deprived patient.

The first prong of the Clinton cannula: just days after refusing to apologize for her private email server, she has apologized. By email, of course. Because delivering a Nixonian Checkers speech on live TV is just so yesterday.

 From Hillary Clinton's email blast:

 It's important for you to know a few key facts. My use of a personal email account was aboveboard and allowed under the State Department's rules. Everyone I communicated with in government was aware of it. And nothing I ever sent or received was marked classified at the time.

As this process proceeds, I want to be as transparent as possible. That's why I've provided all of my work emails to the government to be released to the public, and why I'll be testifying in public in front of the Benghazi Committee later next month.

I know this is a complex story. I could have -- and should have -- done a better job answering questions earlier. I'm grateful for your support, and I'm not taking anything for granted.

Compare the tone to candidate Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech of Sept. 23, 1952: 

I have a theory, too, that the best and only answer to a smear or an honest misunderstanding of the facts is to tell the truth. And that is why I am here tonight. I want to tell you my side of the case.

 I am sure that you have read the charges, and you have heard it, that I, Senator Nixon, took $18,000 from a group of my supporters.

Now, was that wrong? And let me say that it was wrong. I am saying it, incidentally, that it was wrong, just not illegal, because it isn't a question of whether it was legal or illegal, that isn't enough. The question is, was it morally wrong? I say that it was morally wrong if any of that $18,000 went to Senator Nixon, for my personal use. I say that it was morally wrong if it was secretly given and secretly handled.
And I say that it was morally wrong if any of the contributors got special favors for the contributions they made.

The second prong of the Clinton campaign's cannula is to combat accusations that she is too stiff and contrived. Therefore, her spokespeople have formally announced that all future scripts will not only be spontaneous, they will also be compassionate and funny.  Hilarious Hearty Hillary will be coming soon to a political theater near you.

To help sell the image of the kinder, more humorous Hillary, her campaign operatives have enlisted the aid of the corporate media establishment, which trumpeted the announcement in one great, big, spontaneous blast.  

I couldn't figure out whether  New York Times Hillary beat reporter Amy Chozick was being stealthily satiric with her article, or whether she might be suffering from a bad case of Post-traumatic Constant Hillary Coverage Stress Disorder. First, there was this accompanying photo:

 Notice the jaw-clenched dude to her right, obviously a Secret Service agent, who could not look more miserable if he tried. He actually seems to be suffering a bad attack of gas. And then there's the guy right next to him who appears to be asleep on his feet. Are these really the optiminal optics for the re-marketing of Hillary as a combination of Mother Teresa and Joan Rivers?

And then there are the clueless words of the campaign operatives themselves. Chozick writes,

Asked about a moment they regret, Ms. Palmieri paused and then quickly settled on the ope the campaign used to corral reporters at a Fourth of July parade in New Hampshire that became a symbol of Mrs. Clinton’s distance from the small-town celebration. A less intrusive rope had also been used to control crowds at other events.

 The Brooklyn headquarters, on the 11th floor of a high-rise, bustled with activity heading into the Labor Day weekend. Young people, sitting on bean bag chairs, worked on their laptops and cellphones. Bags of Hillary-branded snacks, like beet chips, were arrayed in front of a volunteer hall of fame collage.

Less intrusive ropes (invisible tripwires, maybe?) to keep out the masses and snooty Hillary-branded snacks for insiders are excellent selling points for any plutocratic candidate forced to pose as a populist.

Quick on the heels of the rebranding story came yet another piece from Ms. Chozick about an upcoming Hillary TV appearance. The original blurb to the story read: "Mrs. Clinton is expected to appear on 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show' on Thursday in hopes of reaching female voters who do not consume traditional media."

And therein lies the problem. The Times and the rest of the media-political nexus view us not as readers, thinkers, and engaged citizens, but as mere "consumers" who devour, or sniff, whatever content is placed in front of us. All they think they need is the right ad campaign for all to be right in the Feudal States of America.

It's time that Hillary and the Times got with the times and realized that the days of fooling most of the people even some of the time are long gone. The slow demise of democracy as illustrated by the selling of Hearty Hilarious Hillary is not funny. It is just plain tragic in a pathetic, maudlin kind of way. Kind of like this:

Labor Daze

They don't call us working stiffs for nothing. 

Granted, Labor Day in the USA is pretty much a public relations gimmick designed to make politicians feel better about giving the shaft to labor on the other 364 days of the year. President William McKinley, who only last week finally got his Alaskan mountain deservedly yanked out from under him, needed to placate the Pullman workers whose strike his federal troops had just lethally shut down. So he gave workers an extra day off instead of a raise and benefits and protections from the oligarchic police state.

 But when celebrity New York Times liberal columnist and economist Paul Krugman uses the occasion of Labor Day to totally ignore working people and instead write about Donald Trump's comparatively sane take on the economy, I think it's safe to assume that as far as the political-media complex is concerned,  working stiffs are not only experiencing rigor mortis. They've been entombed without so much as a cheap grave marker.

Call me naive, but I figured that on today of all days, the corporate press would take a break from the relentless Trump coverage.  Of course the day is still young as I write this. Maybe by sundown, Trump will have taken a backseat, and there will be articles on mattress sales and the price of sirloin and the crowds at the beaches.

(Update: Time Magazine broke down and covered Bernie Sanders marching in a picket line in Iowa in solidarity with workers at a corn processing plant. All is not lost!)

 Meanwhile, if you're tired of the labor coverage or lack thereof and if you subscribe to Hulu Plus, they're streaming some classic but forgotten films on working stiffs from the Criterion Collection. Last night, I watched "The Proud Valley" starring Paul Robeson. It's about an African-American sailor who somehow winds up in a Welsh mining town during the Great Depression to work with the locals. Robeson, who suffered more than his share of abuse in his home country based both on his race and his politics, refused with good reason to work for the American film industry, where parts for black people were largely confined to servants, slaves and tap-dancers. The movie, made on the eve of Britain's entry into World War Two, is a weird blend of Marxist musical and nationalistic fervor. The scene of the mine collapse is a classic in cinematography. Of course, "The Proud Valley" is rarely shown in this country. For one thing, there are no racial distinctions or dog-whistling tropes in the film. David Goliath, the character played by Robeson, is immediately assimilated as an equal into the community. For another thing, it celebrates labor and solidarity and communalism. Very un-American, to say the least.*

I, for one. am going to celebrate the rest of this Labor Day by not laboring any further on this blog. I plan to watch more working stiff films on Hulu!

Meanwhile, here is my published comment to Mr. Krugman, in which I refused to mention D.T. at all because the very thought of him on this day of all days gives me such unpleasant tremors:

The GOP candidates are so nuts that when you go to the Democratic (!) National Committee website, you find a whole page outlining the five worst ideas of each and every one of them. As Mr Krugman says, their supply side economics gospel was debunked as pure smoke and mirrors long ago.

  I looked in vain for information on a DNC agenda, but it appears that there isn't one yet, at least on the official site. The party line is more shooting bloated GOP fish in a barrel, and then announcing that there will be only four Democratic debates before the first primaries.

 This doesn't fly, particularly on a day set aside to supposedly honor the American worker. Although the rate of unemployment is indeed down, the labor participation rate is the worst it's been in more than 30 years, and wages, especially for minimum wage workers, have continued to plummet. More than half the teenagers who went looking for a job this summer were unable to find one, yet the New Deal-inspired Job Corps program for youth has been cut in each of the past six years under a Democratic administration.

 Most of the new jobs, for all age groups, have been in the low-wage service sector.

Instead of arguing over which GOP plutocratic candidate can best screw us, let's start making some noise about what really works for the economy.

How about, just for starters, a government jobs program, a guaranteed national income, and true universal health care?

Happy Labor Day, everybody!

 *Update Number Two: Reader Robert Sadin shares more on the true-life enduring relationship between Paul Robeson and the Welsh miners:

Robeson’s association with South Wales dates from 1928 when, whilst performing in ‘Show Boat’ in London’s West End, he met a group of unemployed miners who had walked to London to draw attention to the hardship and suffering endured by thousands of unemployed miners and their families in South Wales.

Robeson visited South Wales many times between 1929 and 1939, singing in various towns including Cardiff, Neath and Swansea. In 1938, he sang to the 7,000 people who attended the Welsh International Brigades Memorial at Mountain Ash to commemorate the 33 Welshmen who had died in Spain. He told the audience “I am here because I know that these fellows fought not only for me but for the whole world. I feel it is my duty to be here."

When Robeson became a victim of McCarthyism in the 50s and his passport was revoked, members of the Welsh chorus portrayed in the film helped exert successful pressure on the Eisenhower administration to reinstate it.

Robeson had also just been the main government target in the Peekskill, New York riots of 1949. It was a wild and scary case of what today we might call Trumpism, or American fascism. Arch-conservative businessmen and politicians ginned up some right-wing populism and rumors about Robeson and his lefty friends, pitting poor unemployed whites against Communists, socialists, Jews, and black people. State police were sent to keep order, and either stood by or participated in the orchestrated mayhem themselves. The mob (dressed in business suits instead of white robes) even lynched Robeson in effigy. You can watch the late folksinger-activist Pete Seeger, another target at the Peekskill concert, reminisce about the riots on Democracy Now! 

This ugliness either runs in cycles, or it never really went away in the first place.

The Selling of American Inhumanity

How can you tell when the New York Times is about to feed you a gigantic dose of bullshit? Whenever they use the passive voice in a headline, that's when the warning bells should start clanging in your brain: "Caution: Propaganda Hazard Ahead."

Today's dose, slugged "Many Obstacles Are Seen to U.S. Taking in Large Number of Syrian Refugees," seems designed to convince you that it would be a horrible idea for the United States to accept Syrian refugees on our precious shores.

A shadowy group of leaders and politicians and defense industry think-tankers, feeling the urge to push back against the mass sympathy and outrage engendered by the iconic photo of a dead three-year-old, has dictated to obliging Times reporter David M. Herszenhorn the myriad reasons why the European refugee crisis should not be an American problem.

Beware the Terroristic Hordes

Shielding the anonymous purveyors of official cowardice and personal unaccountability, Herszenhorn immediately quotes unnamed "critics" as calling the 14 Democratic senators urging President Obama to give asylum to more Syrian refugees "the Jihadi caucus."

Then he immediately pivots to defending a caring -- but helpless and hand-wringing -- Obama administration against these terrible straw men critics who shall not be named:

The criticism, which Obama administration officials say is baseless because of screening procedures asylum seekers undergo, was a powerful measure of the lack of political will and the practical obstacles that have hampered the United States’ ability to intervene more directly in what has become a full-blown migrant crisis in Europe.

Such obstacles, including an American public weary of overseas initiatives after more than a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, remain formidable, even as heart-wrenching photographs of dead children this week focused the American conscience on the Syrian crisis as never before and prompted renewed calls for more aid.

Anonymous administration officials cravenly foist the blame for their own paranoia and psychopathy onto a hard-hearted public "weary of overseas initiatives" -- as though feeding and clothing and sheltering people is equivalent to bombing them to death.

 Pleas for more aggressive American-led rescue measures seem all the more futile given the failures to reach a consensus on the country’s own immigration problems, made vivid in the simmering debate over policing the border with Mexico and calls by a leading Republican presidential candidate to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants.

President Obama is not even going to try to do the right thing because he is afraid of what Donald Trump might think. Trump might call Obama a loser if he starts acting all mushy and sentimental. And that will never do during the president's last 500 days when he is trying mightily to burnish his legacy as the Drone President of Warpeace.

 “Even if there were a green light from the Russians and the Chinese, the appetite for yet another military adventure in Syria is very, very limited among the American public,” said Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow and expert on international institutions at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I think in this case, the administration is correct, the situation is so incredibly complex among the combatants, there’s very little evidence that United States or Western intervention would make anything better.

Again, humanitarian aid and the granting of asylum to suffering people is cast as a "military adventure" by one of the Times article's few named sources. (the only quoted government official is a Republican congressman) Stewart Patrick represents the shadow government hiding within an elite ruling class think tank funded and staffed, in large part, by the defense and oil industries. So the Obama administration is going to throw in the towel on asylum, even as it continues to bomb the hell out of Syria and other Middle Eastern locales and continues to spend $68,000 an hour operating the war planes targeting ISIS.

Choosing to help people instead of bombing them and starving them right out of their countries has "moral consequences," Patrick gravely dictates, adding that these choices and consequences should be Europe's problem and not that of the American ruling class and war machine. (quaintly called "the public" for purposes of propaganda and bloody hand-washing.) Besides, the US already throws a few dollars at hungry people, so please just leave them alone already.)

Each year, the United States grants residency permits to as many as 70,000 refugees from around the world, most referred by the United Nations refugee agency, which helps administer asylum requests. Only a small fraction of those have been Syrians, in part because the process typically takes up to two years, and the numbers of Syrians referred to the United States only began to increase after the start of the war four years ago.

While the State Department has said it plans to increase the number, to perhaps 1,800 by next year, it would be of little more than symbolic value given the more than four million Syrians in need of shelter.

 Taking in 65,000 Syrians, as the 14 senators had urged, is virtually impossible under the existing asylum process, which requires lengthy background checks. The small number has opened up the United States to charges of hypocrisy as it has implored European allies to accept more.

Blame it on the snails of the bureaucracy, not on the politicians. Besides, since the refugees are probably going to die anyway, why even bother? 

But Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania, who just returned from a trip to Europe, said he found America’s allies there unable so far to coordinate an effective response.

“It is incumbent on the United States to be of greater assistance, yes, but the Europeans also have a responsibility here,” Mr. Dent said. “Our European partners have a much harder time exercising leadership. They don’t want the refugees. They don’t want the migrants. At the same time, I don’t know what they are prepared to do to bring about greater stability in the countries where there are problems.”

So, a member of the Party of No has engaged in a fact-free finding mission and found the Europeans not up to his moral expectations. What else is new? If you want to act like a heartless bastard, the best tactic is to point out that the other bastards are even more heartless and inept than you are. Even though they are not: European countries, particularly Germany and even austerity-ravaged Greece, have been welcoming the migrants with open arms.

  To give it the obligatory balanced veneer, the article concludes with two former government officials gratuitously allowing that maybe the United States could do a bit more, like sending the Navy to rescue people in its ships so as to avoid any more drownings. But it would be so, so hard to coordinate landing points and such. (even though all they really need is a compass and a phone and maybe Google Mapquest.)

As I wrote in my published comment to the Herszenhorn article, "Their excuses proliferate as wildly as their obscene military budgets and their weapons of mass destruction. Vetting the applicants would take too long and cost too much money, they say. We have our own immigration problems, they whine. (Never mind that DHS is running privatized concentration camps for Central American mothers and children, hideously euphemized as "family detention centers.")

I concluded with a link to the International Rescue Committee -- where people who are not as jaded and unfeeling as our leaders and their propagandists would like us to be can go to get more information on how to help the refugees.

The IRC, which has so far gathered more than 13,000 signatures from American citizens on a petition demanding that the US Government do more to help the relief effort, notes that this country has only accepted 1,413 Syrian refugees since the civil war began five years ago. Germany, meanwhile, is willing to accept 800,000 this year alone.

President Obama, for his part, did find the precious time Friday to sign a new billion dollar arms deal with the beheading-happy Saudi king, the better to efficiently kill even more hundreds of innocent Yemenis. Because killing is easy, lives are cheap, and Obama has a legacy to burnish and a foundation to fund.

Ka-Ching Goes the Beat of My Cold, Cold Heart