Feeling the Heartbern

 *Updated below.

Hope you had your gallon jug of Mylanta handy for the capitulation:

To be fair, Bernie Sanders has succeeded in getting the Democratic machine to at least give lip service (for purposes of convention unity P.R.) to such initiatives as free public college tuition for working and middle class families, an increase in the minimum wage to $15, and reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act. He failed abysmally at getting them to recognize that Palestinians are human beings possessing basic human rights. He failed to convince them to turn against Party Leader Obama and oppose ratification of the brutal corporate coup euphemized as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

And the endless wars, of course, will continue. Bernie didn't even try at anything close to pacifism. War is the essential glue holding all the bipartisans together.

So.... about that "revolution."

  According to Bernie Sanders, no world event will be more important than electing Hillary Clinton president in November 2016. There will be as few as possible disruptions at the party convention in Philadelphia later this month, because the hope balloon has already been popped. That promise of "taking this fight all the way to the convention?" Gone the way of the rotary phone and the used car salesman.

Hillary was her usual grimly gracious self at today's rally in New Hampshire. She allowed that Bernie's "passionate advocacy hasn’t always made him the most popular person in Washington. But you know what? That’s generally a sign you’re doing something right.”

Not that Hillary and her minions in the press ever thought Bernie was actually doing anything right by espousing Medicare for All and other "happy dreams." Until he capitulated, he and the "Berniebros" were smeared with a whole paintbox  full of slimy colors, ranging from racism to sexism to delusion to radical extremism to utopianism. Now that's all in the past, and Hillary, too, is embracing rainbows and puppies and unicorns. She's even honoring you with her generous willingness to accept your paltry $27 donations to supplement the billion or so she's raked in and will continue to amass from Wall Street and the polluters of mass destruction.

Applause, applause. (although a few Bernie Sanders fans did walk out in protest.)

To paraphrase the Empress-in-Waiting, we have to build those bonds of mutual respect between the police state and the oppressed masses.  Hillary used the smarmy passive tone in describing the epidemic of shootings by cops: “the tragedy, the tragedy of black men, and women and children killed in police incidents.”

Murder becomes a "police incident" in which innocents simply "get killed." 

(The neoliberal status quo is starting to squeeze my gut in a vise. Taking my first slug of Mylanta.)

 And, she went on, we must take back "our democracy" from the wealthy special interests of which, for purposes of manipulating populism in the service of elitism,  the Clintons are currently to pretending not to be a part.  Last time, the pandering was directed against vulture capitalist Mitt Romney. This time, it's Trump, who to Hillary's benefit, is Romney on crack and steroids with a side of racism and narcissism topped off by the froth of a dull-normal IQ.

To be fair to Hillary, she did speak one sentence of great universal truth today: "Talk is cheap."

And Bernie's body language said it all. As Hillary began speaking, he immediately began wiping his brow (or was it his eyes?) with the white handkerchief of surrender. There was no heat wave in New Hampshire today.

Congeal the Bernary!

Sorry to cut this post so short, but I'm starting to feel the churn. For lunch today I'm having another double shot of Mylanta with an Alka Seltzer chaser.

* I thought I had agita, but it's nothing compared to the indigestion suffered by New York Times columnist Andrew Rosenthal. While regular people (or should I say independent voters of all ages and millennials) are upset about Bernie's endorsement of Hillary, Rosenthal is miffed that it wasn't "inspiring" enough.

It didn't quite reach the over-the-top levels of Barack's own soaring oratory last week, but neither was it unenthusiastic to the ears of most (regular) people who heard it.

Rosenthal bitched just a few weeks ago about Bernie not getting off the pot, and now that the Vermont senator has finally dumped his concession, Rosenthal is complaining about the quality of the offal. He whines:

Bernie Sanders went off for a month to contemplate life after the revolution, and this was the best he could come up with? “Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that.”

So said Sanders at a rally in New Hampshire on Tuesday, where he appeared on stage with Hillary Clinton as an ally for the first time. As big events go, it felt pretty small, with Sanders waving his arms around and offering up his usual list of shouted slogans.

His real concern is that Sanders doesn't have the magical power to force his fans to vote for a deeply loathed candidate. Bernie fans aren't proper little lemmings, it seems.

So still very much stuck in my digestive disorder metaphor mode, I published this reply to Rosenthal:

The New York Times's heartbern just won't go away, will it?

Long after the "flailing arms" and the "shouted slogans" and the rallies are naught but wispy white-haired memory clouds floating high above the Green Mountain State, the elite pundits will still be reaching for their Mylanta, thinking of all the democratic horror that might have been... had they treated Bernie with any respect to begin with.

The outrage of Medicare for All, the nightmare of free college tuition, the threat that there would be no Trans-Pacific Partnership to enrich the corporations even more than they already are, still linger like bad acid reflux, judging from all the "sore winnerdom" displayed by the pundits lately.

Bernie-bashing seems a bit moot at this point, wouldn't you say? Or will you still be demanding "What does Bernie want?!?" a decade from now?

 Actually, I thought Sanders was almost too enthusiastic in his endorsement of Hillary Clinton. He shouted so much that he was forced to wipe the sweat (or was it tears?) from his face with a symbolic white hanky the moment she finally got her turn to faux-enthusiastically praise her faux-nemesis.

I would have preferred that he keep his promise of "taking this fight all the way to the convention"- if only to make the confab seem a little more exciting. The suspense is gone, the uncorked wine drunk (and upchucked) before its time.

Hillary's greatest, most truthful line in her grimly gracious speech: "Talk is cheap."

The Violence of the Elites

While the ruling establishment cries that its beloved country is falling apart, what with police officers shooting citizens, an Army veteran shooting police officers, and people taking to the streets in protest across the nation, the leader of the free world still has his own capitalistic priorities very much in order.

Dallas or no Dallas, police brutality or no police brutality, crisis or no crisis, there was no way in hell that President Obama was going to cut his war-mongering trip to Europe one day shorter than he already had to.

Belying the New York Times' headline that he is "brooding over the interminable wars of his presidency," a very ebullient Obama boarded a state-of-the-art naval destroyer in the sunny Mediterranean to inspect the troops and gloat over American exceptionalism. No matter that people were being tragically and graphically gunned down stateside on live TV. As Mark Landler drily reports:

“That’s pretty impressive,” Mr. Obama said to Petty Officer Second Class Garrett Nelson, after the sailor told his commander-in-chief about the accuracy of a five-inch, 54-caliber gun mounted on the ship’s foredeck. “That’s better than I do at skeet shooting.”

Mr. Obama’s advisers fought to keep this stop on his five-day trip to Spain and Poland, even after he decided to cut the trip by a day and return home on Sunday to deal with the deadly shootings in Dallas. Sightseeing in Seville, as the president had planned to do, was easy to skip; surveying the military hardware in Rota was not.

You see, there is state-sanctioned violence for profit, and then there is the unsanctioned violence that doesn't make nearly enough money for the very rich and the very powerful. (OK, except for the gun manufacturers and their NRA lobbyists.) Before returning home to "deal with" Dallas, Obama had to complete some very important deal-making in Europe on behalf of military contractors and manufacturers. A thousand more permanent troops in Poland, the retention of more than 8,000 troops in Afghanistan, and the addition of 500 more pairs of "boots on the ground" in Iraq are just the parts they're bothering to tell us about.The fact that an Afghanistan war vet shot an Iraq war vet in Dallas - bringing the war back home - seemingly didn't even enter into their thought processes.

Henry Giroux describes the pathological idiocy perfectly:

In the increasingly violent landscape of anti-politics, mediation disappears, dissent is squelched, repression operates with impunity, the ethical imagination withers, and the power of representation is on the side of spectacularized state violence. Violence both at the level of the state and in the hands of everyday citizens has become a substitute for genuine forms of agency, citizenship, and mutually informed dialogue and community interaction.

(snip)

 What we are observing is not simply the overt face of a militarized police culture, the lack of community policing, deeply entrenched anti-democratic tendencies, or the toxic consequences of a culture of violence that saturates every day life. We are in a new historical era, one that is marked a culture of lawlessness, extreme violence, and disposability, fueled, in part, by a culture of fear, a war on terror, and a deeply overt racist culture that is unapologetic in its disciplinary and exclusionary practices. This deep seated racism is reinforced by a culture of cruelty that is the modus operandi of neoliberal capitalism–a cage culture, a culture of combat, a hyper masculine culture that views killing those most vulnerable as sport, entertainment, and policy.

Landler of the Times, meanwhile, provides us with the near-parodic preferred narrative that the elites do want disseminated:

 Throughout this trip, Mr. Obama has confronted the reality that the United States is engaged in military operations around the world. At a NATO summit meeting in Warsaw, he announced that American troops would lead a battalion stationed in Poland to deter an aggressive Russia. The destroyer in Rota is a pillar of a missile-defense program that Mr. Obama has stuck with despite the tensions it raises with Moscow.

This illustrates the typical unaccountability of the "deciders." Obama traipses over to Europe and is shockingly confronted by the military bases and high tech weaponry that suddenly sprang up all by themselves without any elite intervention whatsoever. And of course, the aggression is conveniently couched in terms of "defense," despite the fact that Russia is not currently making any moves to take over the world. But it might want to, someday, so Obama has accordingly and provocatively announced a trillion-dollar upgrade of the American nuclear weapons arsenal. But there will be no government jobs program for the chronically unemployed, no government single payer health care system, and no new taxes on the coddled rich.  

And alleged US enemies, including Russia and Iran, are taking notice that the land of the free doesn't exactly practice what it preaches. There are hysterical untrained traffic cops ordered to fill their cities' coffers from ticketing poor motorists driving decades-old vehicles with broken taillights, and then there are the militarized shock troops playing with all the leftover and surplus gear that the Pentagon always throws away in favor of newer, prettier, more lethal toys.

This is the already legendary picture being seen round the world today, confirming the race and class-oppressive oligarchical system that still insists upon calling itself American democracy:

(Jonathan Bachman, Reuters)

But golly gee, says Obama, isn't it just terrible that too many people in the Homeland "feel like" they're getting picked on by trigger-happy, under-trained cops. Isn't it awful that guns are getting into the hands of the mentally ill, for whom no government-subsidized treatment is forthcoming. But he'll make room in the busy schedule to head on down to open-carry Texas to lecture the Black Lives Matter movement some more. 

Then he'll go directly to Congress and demand an immediate multibillion-dollar aid package for cash-strapped cities, including funds for psychological police recruit vetting, hiring and intensive training.Then he'll put the kibosh on those private equity vultures getting their claws on public pension funds and otherwise exploiting and injuring American municipalities. (Only kidding: he will do no such thing.)

As Conor Friedersdorf observed in The Atlantic, Obama actually hews pretty closely to the conservative rhetoric of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas whenever he talks about racism. And Obama is rarely criticized by liberals when he frequently espouses "political correctness" and compromise with one's oppressors as a substitute for direct social action.

But back to Landler of the Times, ironically forging ahead with the government-manufactured "news analysis" presented as straight reporting:

Small wonder, then, that Mr. Obama was in a reflective mood on Saturday when a reporter asked him at a NATO news conference about the nature of war in the 21st century — and, specifically, how he felt about the likelihood that he would be the first two-term president to have presided over a nation at war for every day of his presidency.

Speaking with striking candor for a public setting, Mr. Obama said: “As commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world, I spend a lot of time brooding over these issues. And I’m not satisfied that we’ve got it perfect yet.” But he added, “I can say, honestly, it’s better than it was when I came into office.”

This is Obama in his contrived media role as pensive philosopher king. Let us celebrate the fact that he was so strikingly candid in front of a group of sycophantic reporters and a small personal army of security guards. He ever so 'umbly admitted that he is not perfect, although he is a lot more perfect than any of his predecessors. Especially George W. Bush, who continues to live in the lap of luxury in the same city that saw so much violence last week. Obama, of course, had refused to prosecute him and his neocon pals for invading Iraq on false pretenses and killing millions of people and torturing who knows how many. Nonetheless, he will never hesitate to lecture both the cops on the street and the protesters on how to get along together for the sake of American exceptionalism. When he vowed that "justice will be done" in Dallas, he unfortunately was not referring to the former president.

On the contrary: Bush will join Obama as an honored guest at Tuesday's interfaith service honoring the slain police officers. 

Landler again:

 Mr. Obama characterized his approach to war as a hybrid: committing limited numbers of American troops to conflict-ridden countries, but working with those countries to develop their own armies and police. He drew attention to an announcement at the Warsaw meeting that NATO would begin training Iraqi troops inside the country. (The alliance had already been training them in neighboring Jordan.)

As evidenced by the large number of "green on blue" attacks in Afghanistan, this community policing approach has worked out about as well over there as it has over here. As evidenced by the quagmire of Vietnam, helping other countries by sending in "advisers" is only one of the first steps of mission-creep and open-ended war. And ka-ching goes the beat of late-stage capitalism's malignant heart.

 “What I’ve been trying to do is to create an architecture, a structure — and it’s not there yet,” the president said. The difficulties of working with unreliable partners is “probably going to be something that we have to continue to grapple with for years to come.”

Ah, the semantics of war and death. Call it a building project, perhaps worthy of the Pritzker Prize. But also warn that the constant building is going to cause inevitable collapses and collateral human damage. Those non-union construction workers and corrupt inspectors make a plutocrat's life a living hell. But there's still enormous profit to be made with all that endless "grappling" with the consequences of your own shoddy policies and standards.

 Mr. Obama said chronic, low-level counterterrorism campaigns could have a debilitating effect on society. “This different kind of low-grade threat, one that’s not an existential threat but can do real damage and real harm to our societies, and creates the kind of fear that can cause division and political reactions — we have to do that better,” he said.

This is the same guy who recently accused Donald Trump of being an irresponsible fear-monger. Of course, Obama is as much as admitting that his own "limited" drone assassination program causes fear, division and political reactions. He has to do better in order to get people to accept their own dooms.

For Mr. Obama, who was a lawyer, the shadowy legal status of this hybrid form of warfare is another heavy burden. That, he said, helped explain why the White House issued a report two weeks ago disclosing estimates of the civilian casualties from drone strikes.

“What I’m trying to do there is to institutionalize a system where we begin to hold ourselves accountable for this different kind of national security threat and these different kinds of operations,” he said.

It only took him seven years to begin to pretend to hold himself accountable for Murder, Inc. Therefore, he is hastening to "institutionalize" his renegade killing policy for the sole craven purpose of absolving himself from any personal responsibility.

Landler hilariously concludes, 

Mr. Obama also looked on the bright side. There are fewer wars today between states, he said, and no wars between great powers. That is a testament to institutions like NATO, he said, and a reason that Russia’s revanchism was such a big concern at the summit meeting.

As Mr. Obama enters the final six months of his presidency, his approach to war clearly remains a work in progress. But he insisted that — whether it was drone strikes, the surveillance programs of the National Security Agency, the long effort to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay or the training of soldiers of other countries — he had tried to bring 21st-century warfare out of the shadows.

Stay on the sunny side, always on the sunny side, stay on the sunny side of life... and death.

Now, it's on to Dallas to lecture those pesky Black Lives Matter folks. 

 

***

The New York Times ran a rather smarmy editorial on Sunday, politely requesting that Obama be a tad more accountable about his drones of death. Compared to  more than 1300 reader responses to Maureen Dowd's Sunday column on how Hillary Clinton has "contaminated" Obama and his minions with her email scandal, the drone editorial only gathered 111 comments. Faraway death and destruction just aren't as riveting as political intrigue and the fortunes of the elites, I suppose.

Here are my published comments to the drone editorial (the second one is actually a reply to a reply):

For all that Americans care that politicians and bureaucrats have given themselves the hideous right to summarily execute people, it's not likely that the administration is sweating this one out.

Polls show that a majority of us are fine with the assassination program. In one A.P. poll, only 13% of respondents declared themselves strongly opposed. Nearly half said it's O.K. to unleash Hellfire missiles from the aptly named Predator and Reaper drones even when there's a chance that innocents will also die in the process.

Let's face it: what we Americans don't know, (and what we aren't allowed by our government to see in all its bloodiness) definitely will hurt us. Those unnamed and unknown drone victims have family and friends. They leave behind orphans who might understandably become radicalized enough to join ISIS and other groups which never would have existed in the first place without American aggression.

We must acknowledge that our own government is a terrorist state in the eyes of those "other people" who are afraid to even send their kids to school, what with the drones constantly buzzing above their heads. We must acknowledge that our government is not "keeping us safe" by killing hundreds (or thousands) of people for no other reason than that they can.

State-sanctioned murder is state-sanctioned murder, whether it's accomplished by trigger-happy untrained cops on our own streets, or by remote-control unaccountable technocrats in remote "tribal areas."

And the follow-up to a reader asserting that I am well-meaning but naive about the realities of war:

 Richard,

1. Despite the fact that Bush invaded Iraq on false pretenses, as evidenced most recently by that exhaustive British report, you automatically assume that Americans are the "good guys."

2. The drone strikes in question are being conducted in countries with whom the US is not at war. The whole definition of war has become so loose as to become meaningless. The world is now a battlefield, and all the people in it are potential targets based upon some magic formula. I believe that the term that CIA Director John Brennan used is the "disposition matrix." The "casualties of war," are dehumanized through an Orwellian sci-fi term dreamed up by an unelected bureaucrat.

3. The White House report, written by NSA Director James ("we don't collect your emails") Clapper, is suspect on its face. The numbers don't match with the body counts of other independent (and reputable) organizations. His glib explanation for the lack of details is that it would be just too hard for the USA to helicopter down and pretend to be forensic pathologists. They don't know, and they don't want to know. And they get away with it, because most American citizens don't much care either. It's telling, for example, that the big brouhaha over Hillary's emails rarely mentions that she herself signed off on a few drone strikes using her unsecured system. It's the medium that concerns people, not the lethal message.

And finally, I fully realize that I am in a distinct pacifistic minority.

Deliberate Indifference

By Elizabeth O'Meara Adams

The brief legal definition of deliberate indifference is "the conscious or reckless disregard of the consequences of one's acts or omissions. (lectlaw.com)

An internet search on “deliberate indifference” will bring up many links, most of which are related to jail populations, but also some in relation to school and work environments.

But based on the definition above, I see deliberate indifference as the core issue within our government and powers that be. From this deeply ingrained attitude does the bulk of government action (and inaction) take place. The current election cycle has brought this to the forefront, seen most recently in the Democratic Party’s platform, which refused to lift the cap on Social Security and supports the TPP. The Democratic Party used to be called the party of the people, but it can only be that if the definition of “people” is the Supreme Court definition, which conflates corporations with living, breathing, suffering human beings.

Deliberate indifference is so deeply ingrained in the United States, inequality in all aspects of U. S. life just gets worse and worse. And the absolute worst outcome of this inequality has finally been brought to the open for all to see. It is a deliberate indifference that is more obvious and much more lethal. It is that of the criminal “justice” apparatus: the apparatus that incentivizes arrests to fill jail cells, keep the coffers full, and otherize human beings who have non-white skin.

The videos we have seen, thanks to unimaginably brave witnesses, are showing anyone not afflicted with cognitive dissonance how utterly fucked up our nation is. And these crimes against our citizens did not just start taking place since the advent of social media.

The deliberate indifference starts with the initial contact over a minor infraction, which wouldn’t have taken place had the person been Caucasian. It continues to the next level with the use of lethal force. And then the second shot. And the third. And the fourth.

And it continues even further with the startling lack of medical attention. If shooting another human being to hell doesn’t say someone doesn’t value another life, leaving them to certain death does. Disregarded at the beginning of the encounter, discarded like a piece of trash at the end, these people are paying the ultimate price for society’s failure to give a damn.

• Forcing a woman out of her car, threatening to taser her, and slamming her head on the ground during a stop for failing to signal a lane change. #SandraBrown #DeliberateIndifference
  
  
• Taking the time to handcuff a cooperative unarmed woman while her boyfriend bleeds out during a stop for a broken taillight. #PhilandoCastile #DeliberateIndifference #CPR #EMS
  
  
• Shooting an unarmed man in broad daylight, as he runs away from you, and not calling EMS or attempting CPR while he bleeds out. #MichaelBrown #DeliberateIndifference
  
  
• Worrying more about getting in trouble than providing life-saving help to an innocent man whom you just shot. #PhilandoCastile #DeliberateIndifference
• Using deadly force on a man selling CDs and not initiating life-saving measures. #AntonSterling #DeliberateIndifference
  
  
• Americans should be “troubled” by the videotaped murders by police, but we are “horrified” by the “senseless” murders of police officers. #DeliberateIndifference #TargetedDronesKillInnocentBrownPeople
  
  
• When you are harming someone who is not harming you, you are judge and jury. When you do nothing to save his/her life, you are executioner. #DeliberateIndifference #BlackLivesMatter

***

Elizabeth O'Meara Adams is a nurse-practitioner residing in Northern California. She volunteered as a Nevada caucus leader for Bernie Sanders and wrote about her experiences here and here.

A Whole New Level of Bearing Witness

The live-streamed video of the aftermath of yet another police shooting is disturbing on so many levels. It also displays a remarkable act of human courage under literal fire.

Recordings of deaths-by-cop by concerned bystanders are becoming ubiquitous. Memorialization of state-sanctioned violence against mainly black and brown people is a valuable public service, prodding our moribund "justice" agencies, politicians and news organizations to start counting the dead and demanding accountability.

But Wednesday's live Facebook stream of a motorist dying in Minnesota after being shot in a routine traffic stop brings citizen journalism and bearing witness to a whole new level. Watch it here:

Diamond Reynolds, the victim's girlfriend, dispassionately recounts to her viewing audience the events leading up to all the blood. Rather than attending to her loved one, identified as 32-year-old Philando Castile, she directs her full facial attention toward her camera as the man lies bleeding to death next to her. 

The medium has temporarily displaced the terrible reality. Only the cop, pointing his gun at her through the open car window, acts emotionally distraught. Reynolds, the passenger, is the one who behaves calmly and respectfully, obeying the hysterical cop's orders to keep still, her hands on the wheel. Perhaps she realized that if she attempted to give aid to the bleeding man, it would have been construed as reaching for a gun herself and resulted in her own execution. She was likely acting out of pure self-preservation. She'd obviously taken "The Talk" on how to behave around cops while black to heart. Nonetheless, she persists in her triple role as a mate, a citizen-journalist, and a social justice advocate.

“Please, officer, don’t tell me that you just did this to him,” she said. “You shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and registration, sir.”

It's only after she's removed from the car, her cell phone camera pointing grotesquely up at the clear blue sky, does the personal reality seem to hit her, does she begin to break down and wail, and cry, and mourn.

Once she is placed in the police car, she resumes her calm journalistic narrative to the outside world. Shock, denial and adrenaline combine to enable another surge in her powerful self-possession. Perhaps not yet realizing the gravity of the victim's condition, she is remarkably lucid about the details, recording for posterity the physical characteristics of the shooting officer, the number of shots fired, her physical location, her need for a ride home. Her cell phone simultaneously acts as a cold conduit and as a powerful extension of her own human body.

It's as though she can't allow herself to fully and safely confront what just went down without the aid of that extra electronic eye, that extra electronic larynx.

The cell phone and social media are now a black person's lifeline. The film doesn't lie. History can no longer be revised.

Declarations of Codependency

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. 

If there's one positive thing you can say about the ruling class, it's that they usually err on the side of taking care of their own. As much as some of their peers smash things up, there's always a ready supply of Elite Miracle Glue to put them together again.

Political appointee James Comey of the FBI performed his own mess-cleaning role on Tuesday by issuing an ass-covering non-indictment indictment of Hillary Clinton. He accused her of "carelessness" in the handling of her correspondence as she acted out her own politically-appointed part as Secretary of State. But because she is a duly recognized member of the Class, there will be no charges, trial or jail time. That kind of justice is reserved for the little people and for government whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning. Comey admitted that the scope of the FBI probe was kept as artificially narrow and piecemeal as her corporate-sponsored presidential platform itself.

He as much as admitted that the FBI "investigation" was political window dressing:

The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014. It is highly likely their search terms missed some work-related e-mails, and that we later found them, for example, in the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server.
It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.

So despite obstruction of justice on the part of Clinton and her minions, no charges of obstruction of justice will be forthcoming. As commenter Scott W observed in a New York Times comment, Richard Nixon must be writhing with jealousy in his grave.

Comey continued,

 We have conducted interviews and done technical examination to attempt to understand how that sorting was done by her attorneys. Although we do not have complete visibility because we are not able to fully reconstruct the electronic record of that sorting, we believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection with that sorting effort.

All-righty then. As long as you don't actually intend to kill somebody during your drunk-driving adventure, no charges will be leveled if you're rich enough and powerful enough. Paris Hilton must also be writhing with jealousy, after having had to spend a couple of days in jail for her DUI in which absolutely nobody was ever harmed.

Hillary's only "crime," if we read between Comey's lines, is that she may have endangered the security of other members of the Establishment. Bad actors like Vlad Putin could have gotten hold of some embarrassing stuff, due to Hillary's irresponsible penchant for privacy and paranoia throughout her global travels. Important people may still end up looking bad. But that is certainly no felony if you are a rich and powerful person yourself.

 And like the feckless Daisy Buchanan before her, Hillary was immediately whisked away from her own hit-and-run to both political glory and legal safety.  High above the clouds and then high before the crowds, she had Barack Obama to give her some much-needed cover. (Bill Clinton, the ever-unreliable antihero of this saga, has been temporarily banished from the stage in the wake of his purely social private airplane tryst with Comey's boss, the politically-appointed Justice Doyenne Loretta Lynch.)

Despite (or because of) what should have been the embarrassment of a nationally televised FBI tongue-lashing, Clinton and Obama put up a brave orchestrated front, staying together for the sake of the never-ending Party. To deflect any potential audience disgust at the Clintonian antics, Obama strove mightily to aim the popular wrath toward the most loathsome strawman-in-the flesh rich guy ever to be dreamed up by the Ruling Class:  Donald Trump.

Dredging up that booming, stammering, down-home, G-droppin' style we haven't heard since he last played the populist against private equity vulture Mitt Romney, Obama (who is now reportedly plotting his own career in venture capitalism) was in full lesser-evil mode. As New York Times columnist Frank Bruni  put it, he didn't just ask that we vote for Hillary. He commanded us to vote for Hillary in "a testimonial that was both gushing and epic."

 You see, the media wants you to know that it's Obama's ruling class legacy - not the survival of the working class and the underclass - that's actually on the line here:

Then you look up toward the end of your second term to behold a Republican presidential nominee who is cynically exploiting racism and xenophobia to put the White House within his own reach. He’s not merely your adversary; he’s your antithesis. And his victory would do more than endanger your policies. It would question the very moral of your journey, the very bend of the arc you frequently invoke.

That’s what Barack Obama confronts right now, and that’s why he hit the campaign trail on Tuesday, appearing onstage with Hillary Clinton in North Carolina and proclaiming without reservation that “there has never been any man or woman more qualified for this office” than she. That’s why he’ll say words like those again and again, with the same fire, in the months ahead.

For the nation’s first black president, Clinton isn’t just the better candidate. She’s the better America. She wins and he holds on to his rosiest convictions about what he and his presidency symbolize.

As I responded to an unsigned Times editorial politely requesting more "clarity" from Clinton regarding her carelessness:

 The televised spectacle of the Clinton campaign rally in the immediate aftermath of James Comey's scathing assessment of her competency was downright surreal.

The North Carolina crowds chanting "I'm with her! I'm with her!" and President Obama proclaiming Hillary to be the most qualified and "tested" presidential candidate who ever lived was like something out of a Fellini film.

It's only the continuing atrocity of the Trump candidacy and his Nuremberg rallies that's making Hillary look even remotely morally acceptable to many voters. Because who would ever have thought that a major candidate being lambasted by the head of the FBI for serial venality and recklessness could be tempered and even subsumed in the news cycle by that other major candidate - who, it is obvious, has yet to reach his own outer limits of sociopathy?

It's a sad time in the USA, when the two nominees are competing mainly to see who can win or deflect the most negative media attention. Comey rips Hillary to shreds on character and judgment, while the Speaker of the House rips Trump another new one for yet another sick outburst of racism.

The Clinton-Trump death match could well be the kiss of death to the corrupt, money-driven duopoly. Now might be the optimal time for those third and fourth parties to fill the vacuum.

The only spoilers in the mix are Trump and Clinton themselves.

Forget about whether America is great, greater or greatest. We want our democracy back.

The Dark Night of the Drone Presidency

Just when millions of Americans were starting to do their patriotic thing by getting out of town, firing up the grill, and festooning the landscape with the Red, White and Blue, the government finally released its long-awaited report on the innocent people it has killed with its drones.

The only thing more cynical, cowardly and depraved than the pre-4th of July dumping of the report is its deeply dishonest content.

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has spent years counting the drone dead, the Obama administration's figures (between 64 and 116 civilian fatalities in more than 400 missile attacks in several non-war zones over a seven-year period) represent only about a tenth of the actual victims. Several independent organizations have put the real body count of innocents at a minimum of 800, with some estimates going as high as 2,000.

Still, just as law enforcement officials and victims' families are always grateful whenever a serial killer teasingly discloses where at least some of his many bodies are buried, so too is the American Civil Liberties Union appreciative that the administration is finally taking tentative baby steps toward "transparency." It's just too bad that all that the White House has chosen to disclose are the cold, callous numbers of its own choosing. No names, no dates, no details, no human suffering are included in the report. It's as freakishly cold as a snowstorm in July.

"The public has a right to know who the government is killing," as ACLU Deputy Director Jamal Jaffer mildly put it. "And if the government doesn't know who it's killing, then the public should know that."

But here's the thing. The public doesn't much care about Those Other People getting killed Over There. An AP-GfK poll conducted last year showed that only 13 percent of Americans are unequivocally opposed to Obama's drone assassination program. And 75 percent said it's even fine to execute a US citizen without charge or trial, if the government believes that he or she has joined a terrorist organization. Six in 10 Americans say it's O.K. to kill suspected terrorists in general. And nearly half still think that killing suspected terrorists is acceptable even when there's a good chance that innocent civilians will also die in the process.

So Barack Obama should just relax. There was really no need to sneak-dump his loathsome white paper at the start of a holiday weekend, when the public was paying little to no attention. He could have waited for the Democratic National Convention in the birthplace of liberty next month to enthusiastically brag that his administration kills people by the thousands. If the polls are correct, most delegates would probably treat it as an applause line.

 People in "tribal areas" are considered fair game and inherently lacking in basic human rights -- just as other historically stateless people, such as Jews and Roma, were considered disposable not so very long ago. All it takes are a few hotshot lawyers and bureaucrats to pronounce any atrocity legal. Then, operatives  can plead that they're "only following orders" to "keep you safe." And the citizens who elect the politicians can comfortably hold their own selves blameless and powerless. As long as there are elite Ivy League-trained experts who have our own best interests at heart, we're comfortable with our bystander status. It's a passive acceptance of an institutional pathology based upon fear and misplaced trust.

And they call Donald Trump a fascist and a xenophobe? He's simply one of the more glaring symptoms of the disease. He just uses viler words to describe the vile policies which are already in effect under the opaque gloss of refined, liberal political language.

So, the Orwellian language used by the Obama administration to obfuscate state-sanctioned Murder, Inc. is probably unnecessary, given the profound public apathy Americans harbor for their fellow human beings in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and elsewhere, those who live under ceaseless threat of getting reduced to "bug-splat" by the aptly-named Predator and Reaper drones buzzing over their heads on a near-constant basis.

Rather than characterize the extermination of suspected militants (defined by the US government as all Muslim men in the prime of their lives) in the traditional racial terms, the Obama administration talks about the drone deaths in chilling, market based corporate-speak.

The words "best practices" are used to describe gruesome, state-sponsored murder a total of three times in the white paper, signed by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper. Since Clapper has a history of perjury - he once denied under oath that the government collects everybody's emails - it's one more reason to take this report with multiple mountains of grains of salt.

And as for those wide discrepancies between its own body counts and those of independent organizations, the administration boasts that it simply possesses "better refined and honed" methods of measuring death than do mere mortals and journalists, who often rely on "untrustworthy" information from victims and victims' families, as well as from alleged terrorist organizations themselves. Moreover, the definition of "combatant" (as opposed to an innocent bystander) can be anything that the American government chooses it to be. It could be a person with the bad luck to engage in a roadside stop-and-chat about the weather with somebody on Obama's Kill List. Anyone in the vicinity is a potential target in the eyes of the United States government.

But what does it even matter to them? Immediately after bragging about its own superior refinement and honing skills, the assassination bureau hastens to cover its own ass by pleading both cowardice and ignorance:

Although the US Government has access to a wide range of information, the figures released today should be considered in light of inherent limitations on the ability to determine the precise number of combatant and non-combatant deaths given the non-permissive environments in which these strikes often occur. The US Government remains committed to considering new, credible information regarding non-combatant deaths that may emerge and revising previous assessments, as appropriate.

Translation: They neither know nor care whom they kill. And they don't want to know. They are a limited liability corporation with limited intellectual and moral capabilities. Nobody can be held accountable for anything, given those pesky "non-permissive environments." Obama and Co. are not that stupid. They know that people getting droned against their will are not likely to react by laying out the welcome mat for American pathocrats posing as forensic pathologists.

As Ezio Mauro writes in Babel, this is the principle of "irresponsible innocence."

If what is technically possible is also legitimate, then what is effective becomes appropriate - and it does not matter whether it's legal or not. Long-distance action, made possible by new technology... creates a gap between the agent and their actions, and, along with the loss of visibility of this link, responsibility is lost too.... The aseptic gap between the decision to strike and the death that follows it reduces the moral weight of action, purifies it in its essence, disempowers and neutralizes it, reduces the action to technical perfection.

And so, six months before he leaves office and with his legacy on his mind, President Obama appended to the DNI report his own special (and unenforceable)  executive order, institutionalizing his right, and the right of all future presidents, to invisibly kill at will. Speaking like a mob boss or protection racketeer, he cynically pretends to care about the civilians rendered into pink mist by his drones. Potential victims ("vulnerable populations") will thus be rendered compliant to his national interests. He's perfected the art of the subtle threat. Ingratiating himself with weaker crime families, he's making them an offer they can't possibly refuse:

Minimizing civilian casualties can further mission objectives: help maintain the support of partner governments and vulnerable populations, especially in the conduct of counterterrorist and counter insurgency operations; and enhance the legitimacy and sustainability of US operations critical to our national security. As a matter of policy, the United States therefore routinely imposes certain heightened policy standards that are more protective than the requirements of the law of armed conflict that relate to the protection of civilians.

Obama adds that civilian casualties are a tragic but unavoidable consequence of the United States exercising its rights wherever it feels like exercising them -- in the interests of its own exceptionalism, of course. But he will nevertheless "promote best practices that reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties, take appropriate steps when casualties occur, and draw lessons from our operations to further enhance the protection of civilians." 

Best Practices Gone Awry

 
(Never mind that his own DNI just admitted that actually going into these "tribal areas" to do post-mortem investigations is not on the best practices agenda, due to the American military's ass-covering "inherent limitations.")

Obama said that "where appropriate," condolences will be offered and cash payments made. And beginning in his last year in office, further reports on the number of drone strikes will be be released, minus any salient details that might endanger national security. (asses in high places.)

And last but not least, just because Obama is finally deigning to admit that innocent people are getting killed doesn't mean that the victims or survivors can actually sue or prosecute him, or anyone else, over the wrongful deaths and injuries. Or, as he puts it in his aseptic Orwellian legalese:

This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents or any other person. 

The New York Times, which prominently displayed Friday afternoon's release of the drone death report on its homepage, had buried it under a tiny header by the next morning. Its fleeting juxtaposition with a newer Saturday piece, called "Obama After Dark,"was probably deemed a tad jarring, if not in gruesomely bad taste.

Far from delving into the dark world of technocratic homicide, however, the newer story by Michael Shear dishes about Obama's "precious hours alone." The infotainment-hungry public is told that the drone president consumes exactly seven lightly salted almonds per each sleep-deprived night. When he isn't obsessing over minutiae, he's playing Words With Friends on his iPad or waking up his minions from their own slumbers. We also obliquely learn that he and Michelle have separate bedrooms, although she will occasionally "pop in" to his After Dark Man Cave for a "visit." (Needless to say, at the time I'm writing this, the Playboy After Dark story is trending at #1 in reader views.)

What we don't learn is whether Obama stays up past 2 a.m. playing a whole series of online games called "Obama in the Dark." Players can log on for free to help Obama rescue Scooby Doo from a haunted mansion full of invisible monsters, join the intrepid prez in a scary ghost town battle against unseen forces, or even help him find his way out of a spooky cemetery full of cartoon ephemera. (I am not providing any direct links to the game sites themselves, because who knows what malware might lurk within.)

But assuming that you have good antiviral protection, what better propaganda and suitable good clean innocent fun for all ages could you ask for? Start the kids early on the educational programs that will help to manufacture their consent for whole lifetimes full of exceptional American adventurism. 

To add to the appeal, these games are every bit as amateurish as the Best and the Brightest who always end up occupying the highest seats of power.

(This is simply a YouTube tutorial, not the actual cheesy game.)

Bernie Politely Asks Dems To Play Nice

It could have been worse. The New York Times could have waited to dump  Bernie Sanders's prayerful op-ed until the long holiday weekend. That it has received such pride of place in the middle of the week, in bold headlines, even rising (albeit temporarily) above Thomas Freedom Friedman's latest elite whine, is proof positive that the Establishment no longer considers Bernie much of a threat.

They decided to humor the guy by reprinting the gist of his stump speech and most important, allowing him to drop a couple of subtle hints that he's supporting Hillary Clinton against Doctor Greater But Less Effective Evil.

Commenter Jay-Ottawa condensed the Sanders op-ed in his usual pithy fashion:

Hey, gang! Bernie's talking on the NYT op-ed page this morning. Allow me to give you the executive summary coming through his bullhorn.

BERNIE: "As I've said repeatedly in all my campaign speeches, this economy sucks. The rich keep getting rich; the rest keep getting poorer. Allow me to reel off the statistics measuring how far the 99% has nose dived (because people just love to hear me rant about the problem). These developments are terrible, terrible, terrible.

"Therefore, don't vote for Trump because he'll lead us into an American version of Brexit. What we've got to do, instead, is make the global economy more fair, be nice and all that. That's why I'm sticking with the Democratic Party and Hillary.

"Anyway, as I ought to say at this point, here's what I intend to do to correct the horrors of globalism:

[silence … his op-ed space seems to have run out at this point….]"

Sanders slugged his op-ed: Democrats Need to Wake Up. If he were more forthright, he would have called it Democrats Need To Divest From the Corporate Oligopoly, or even Democrats Should Just Go the Hell Away and Make Room for a New People's Party.

But that would have been a bridge too far, and might have endangered Sanders's high placement on some of those coveted Senate Committees, where he can play the part of Loyal Opposition to the Clinton White House and to the Republicans who are now flocking to her, right and left far-right.

Still, he made his fear-mongering quixotic plea to the fearless, clueless, careless and heartless Empress-in-Waiting:

Let’s be clear. The global economy is not working for the majority of people in our country and the world. This is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite. We need real change.

But we do not need change based on the demagogy, bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiment that punctuated so much of the Leave campaign’s rhetoric — and is central to Donald J. Trump’s message.

We need a president who will vigorously support international cooperation that brings the people of the world closer together, reduces hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war. We also need a president who respects the democratic rights of the people, and who will fight for an economy that protects the interests of working people, not just Wall Street, the drug companies and other powerful special interests.

(snip)

 In this pivotal moment, the Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left behind. We must create national and global economies that work for all, not just a handful of billionaires.

As of this writing, there were nearly 1500 reader responses to Bernie's column. From "Josh," here's the top-rated comment:

 Bernie, we've read your campaign speech. We progressives agree with your direction. Now please offer policy solutions. Now please work to get support in the houses. Now please campaign to get the right people in at the state and local levels. Now please start drafting legislation. Don't lose the momentum you've built. Your critique of our system is totally accurate. If Hillary is perceived by many as 'fake', you are perceived as a critic that is good at finding flaws but not so good at fixing them. I hope that both of you prove your opponents wrong.

I sneaked mine in toward the back of the pack:

 Bernie, get a clue. When Clinton's Democratic Party platform reps refuse to include the goal of true universal health coverage and refuse to take a stand against the Trans-Pacific Partnership even in what is ultimately a meaningless document, all the editorializing in the world won't sway their allegiance away from Global Oligarchia and into the realm of the common good.

No matter how you slice it, dice it, dress it or poach it, a rotten egg is still a rotten egg. Not only does it still taste awful, it's bound to make you sick.

Bernie: with millions of votes and millions of dollars in small donations, you have amassed some extremely powerful political capital. To continue wasting it on a corrupt political machine which has thwarted, reviled, and dismissed you and your voters at every turn, it's a slap in their faces to continue to associate yourself with Democrats any longer. They'd just as soon grind you to dust as look at you.

Why not take Jill Stein up on her offer and run on the Green Party ticket? I know, I know - you don't want to be a "spoiler." But the Libertarian Party is already polling high enough to be included in the debates, and Stein is now at seven percent, and climbing. Why not make it a four-way race?

Our "official" choice between a neo-fascist loon and a money-grubbing warmonger is not only no choice at all, it's voter blackmail.

So if we start the revolution without you, Bernie, so be it. About 90% of us have nothing left to lose.