Commentariat Central: Mewling Neocons Edition

Here's a quartet of recent New York Times comments by yours truly:

Maureen Dowd, Girl Talk At Trump Tower, Oct. 1.

Synopsis: Dowd casts Trump and his buddies as 13-year-old girls prematurely saddled with menopausal hormones, and thereby outdoes Trump himself in insulting females of all ages:

Every minute of every day, Trump debunks that old “science” when he shows that the gossipy, backbiting, scolding, mercurial, overly emotional, shrewish, menopausal one in this race is not the woman.

Trump is surrounded by a bitchy sewing circle of overweight men who are overwrought at the prospect of a distaff Clinton presidency.

Cool, but watch out for the usual Clintonoid non sequitur. Never mind the teeny-boppers and the withered old witch-hags. Because like a bad case of teen acne, here come those "bimbo eruptions" again:

As former Clinton consigliere George Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir: “She had to do what she had always done before: swallow her doubts, stand by her man and savage his enemies.”

Usually women candidates have the so-called virtue advantage, but Hillary does not because of her reputation for being shifty.

Cue the Meow Mix cat food commercial. My published response:

We come not to neuter Trump, but to spay him.

Forget the standard nip and tuck in the nether regions for this misogynist who spews his vitriol as freely as a tomcat sprays his whatever from his wherever. Trump needs the full invasive procedure, without the anesthesia. If he couldn't be bothered to do debate prep, then why should we bother with surgical prep? Let's take Trump at his word and show him that he can, indeed, be treated as unfairly as he currently only imagines he is.

Unfortunately, because Maureen is compelled to yet again drag Hillary Clinton into her Trump operating theater, we never quite see the end of the procedure. I suppose the rationale is, when writing a catty piece about male cattiness, a catty polemicist simply cannot resist.

To Maureen, Hillary is pure catnip. What starts out as kneading the keyboard quickly pivots into the unsheathing of the claws. Trump licks his wounds just like an embarrassed but unharmed gib caught falling off his luxury perch. Enter Hillary, once more portrayed as the coldest,cattiest creature of them all, what with her purrfect plotting against the "bimbo eruptions."

Maureen has effectively neutered her own anti-GOP, anti-sexist argument. It's one more example of false equivalency. Trump and his catty clowder of chowderheads are bad in their way, Hillary is bad in hers. Who's the lesser evil, and who's the evil lesser?

Enough of this cheap reality show supplanting democracy.

We are citizens. Hear us yowl!

***

 Paul Krugman, Trump's Fellow Travelers, Oct. 3.

Synopsis: No, Krugman isn't red-baiting Trump from the right again. But it's close. In this pro-Hillary go-round, the Conscience of a Liberal chides Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell for not joining a fickle fleet of Republican ships deserting the sinking rat. He again blames the mainstream media for the unbelievable closeness of the race. He again ignores the job-destroying and and wage suppressing globalization and the corporate coups known as free trade. He again ignores the class war and income disparity and a crappy Democratic candidate. He instead holds up war criminal Paul Wolfowitz as a model intellectual conservative profile in political courage for deserting the sinking rat. I knew that Krugman had sunk low, what with all his catty Bernie-bashing this year. But this was a brand new low. Even for him.

My published response:

Krugman writes that "you have to give people like, say, Paul Wolfowitz some credit for political courage."

No, you don't. As one of the architects of the Iraq invasion, he should actually be hauled into an international court to answer a whole litany of charges, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Endorsing the better presidential candidate should absolve him of nothing. It's actually scary that he is supporting Clinton, because it's a sign that he might wield influence. He has, after all, served both Democrats and Republicans since the 1970s.

As a founding member of the odious neocon think tank Center for a New American Security, he urged Bill Clinton to ignore the UN Security Council and get rid of Saddam Hussein. He authored a document called the "Defense Planning Guidance" while working for Dick Cheney. It says the US can take unilateral military action whenever it feels like it.

 He is neither a "conservative" nor an "intellectual." Hillary should reject his endorsement forthwith. He's as dangerous as Trump, if not more so. His tortured thinking has led to the deaths of thousands of American troops and the deaths and displacement of millions of innocent Iraqis.

Trump is only the latest, most glaring symptom of the American pathocracy.

So yes, let's defeat him. And once Clinton is elected, let her know in no uncertain terms that we won't tolerate neocons anywhere near the White House, ever again. End the wars.

 

***

Paul Krugman, The King of False Equivalence, Oct. 4 

Synopsis: PK again gives favored whipping boy Paul Ryan another (ugh!) 50 lashes with his wet neoliberal noodle:

Ugh. Ryan is not, repeat not, a serious, honest man of principle who has tainted his brand by supporting Donald Trump. He has been an obvious fraud all along, at least to anyone who can do budget arithmetic. His budget proposals invariably contain three elements:

1. Huge tax cuts for the wealthy.
2. Savage cuts in aid to the poor.
3. Mystery meat – claims that he will raise trillions by closing unspecified tax loopholes and save trillions cutting unspecified discretionary spending.

My comment:

 Paul Ryan couldn't survive in politics without Democratic complicity. The DCCC has never backed progressive challengers in his purple district, which Obama actually won in 2008. Why do you suppose that is?

Ryan might be a fraud, but he's a useful fraud. He's personable and he's young and he's telegenic. While he may devote his whole life to punishing poor families, he loves his own family so very, very much. Even the president has praised him for being a fine, upstanding family man.

When the GOP lost its "safe" NY-26 seat in a special 2011 election, Bill Clinton approached Ryan at the annual Pete Peterson Catfood Confab for Elite Greedsters to offer some friendly advice on "reforming" Medicare in a less extreme way than had originally proposed by Ryan. An open mic picked up their conversation:

Clinton: "I'm glad we won this race in New York. But I hope Democrats don't use it as an excuse to do nothing."

 Ryan: "My guess is it's gonna sink into paralysis, is what's gonna happen. And you know the math. I mean, It's just -- out there. But you gotta start this. You gotta get out there. You gotta get this thing moving."

Bill promised to give Paul a buzz.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/paul-ryan-and-bill-clinton-chat-backstag...

My guess is there's gonna be some friendly triangulation among Bill and Paul and the Dems in the not-too-distant future. After all, Hillary has promised to put Bill in charge of "fixing the economy."

Fasten your seat belts.

***

Nicholas Kristof, A Blot on Obama's Legacy, Oct. 6 

Synopsis: The title of this column has now been changed to "I Am Very Afraid I Will Die Tonight." - no doubt because the original doesn't fit with the concerted mainstream media Obama-burnishing campaign, now underway with a vengeance. 

Before you get all excited and think that Kristof's column is about Obama's abysmal domestic record, his coddling of Wall Street banksters, or his push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or is a broadside against the president's pathological drone policy, think again. Kristof is upset because Obama hasn't yet declared World War III by way of a "humanitarian" escalation of the war in Syria. He actually uses a child who Tweets to him in English to sell a new war to the American public.

As far as I'm concerned, the president's refusal to bomb Syria in 2013, once he'd determined that Assad did not, in fact, kill his own people with Sarin gas, was actually a rare profile in courage for him. And even though I am certainly no fan of Obama, I think that I will actually miss him once Hillary moves in and wastes no time displaying her Bush-like neocon qualities from behind the safety of her security detail and a fawning, war-hungry press corps.

My comment:

Kristof has got it exactly backwards. Obama's reticence to start a full-scale war in Syria is not a blot on his legacy, but rather a mark of rare statesmanship amidst all the war-mongering hysteria being fomented by the media-military complex.

When will we ever learn, Kristof ironically asks from behind the safety of his computer screen, as he disingenuously fails to remark upon lessons apparently unlearned from the debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. How will little Bana, whom Kristof shamelessly uses as a prop in his liberal interventionist propaganda piece, benefit if Obama does his bidding to bomb bomb bomb Syria as an act of aggression toward Russia? Perhaps the columnist missed the Senate testimony of Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford last month, in which he warned that a no-fly zone would be tantamount to declaring war on both Syria and Russia.

Hillary Clinton is all for a no-fly zone. So be patient, Mr. Kristof - the real blot on the landscape may be yet to come.

 Too bad Obama can't get a third term like the Clintons.

Coming Soon: A Hybrid Neocon Third Term

Subterranean Berniebro Blues

Stop the presses! A "leaked" audio of Hillary Clinton schmoozing with rich people last February about underemployed youth who are sadly stuck in Mom and Dad's basement is making the rounds of the Internet. It's being touted as proof positive that Clinton despises lefty millennials as much as she abhors righty deplorables.

It proves no such thing; Clinton actually urges her wealthy donors to pity the poor basement-dwellers, who "feel" as if they have no ladder of opportunity out of their depths. And as for the other "big reveal" in the audio, that Hillary is a self-declared centrist drifting between center-left and center-right, is actually something that she's admitted to her whole political life. 

Here's what she said about the Baristas in the Basement:

 Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future. I met with a group of young black millennials today and you know one of the young women said, “You know, none of us feel that we have the job that we should have gotten out of college. And we don’t believe the job market is going to give us much of a chance.” So that is a mindset that is really affecting their politics. And so if you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing. So I think we should all be really understanding of that and should try to do the best we can not to be, you know, a wet blanket on idealism. We want people to be idealistic. We want them to set big goals. But to take what we can achieve now and try to present them as bigger goals.

 I've been getting kind of sick and tired of this whole basement-dwelling stereotype for the Lost Generation. It diminishes the agency of people at the same time that it perpetuates the common neoliberal trope that suffering populations are emotionally disturbed rather than rational responders to a crisis caused by unfettered capitalism and record income inequality.

In her fund-raising speech, Hillary simply echoed the anodyne rhetoric of Barack Obama and other "New Democrats" who like to play Doctor Freud when assessing such social outrages as police brutality. Those black communities "feel like" they're getting picked on whenever one of their members is assassinated for no apparent reason. The solution is for better community relations. Cops and citizens should get along as though they were equals, just as privileged elites should understand the "mindsets" of the young, the restless and the hopelessly naive.

She reveals the standard propaganda ploy at the end of her spiel to her wealthy backers: package the very minor initiatives that would benefit regular people as  "bigger goals." In other words, her governing strategy will be to keep their foolish hopes alive. She'll crank the bullshit meter up as high as it will go.

Another reason that the "Berniebros in the Basement" trope is so damaging is that it dog-whistles to the well-off that the working class and the unemployed are "the other." They're somehow threatening. They might take to the pavement. And so it's no coincidence that a dark creepy cellar is also the favorite mythical haunt of terrorists building their bombs.

 Here's FBI Director James Comey and his Homeland honchos warning Congress of the scourge of pajama-clad bad young people holed up in their basements. Extremism is extremism, whether it comes from those demanding a living wage or whether it comes from what Comey calls "terror tumors" metastasizing in the first circle of domestic hell:

It's comforting for the Neoliberal Thought Collective to relegate the young people they're feebly trying to woo to the nether regions. It sure beats planting the idea that they could or should take to the streets in direct actions against the repressive free market system that has replaced democracy. Wallow in the basement, come up to vote, then get back down there where you belong. There's a tornado on the horizon named Donald Trump, so you'd best take cover.

 And take Hillary's advice, donors! Please refrain from insulting the kids right to their faces. Acknowledge their idealism even as you ever so subtly denigrate them behind their backs.

The Baby Boom generation of aging leaders and moguls, of which Hillary is an integral part, probably remember the 60s Bob Dylan hit, Subterranean Homesick Blues, all too well:

 "Johnny's in the basement mixing up the medicine / I'm on the pavement thinkin' about the government."

Basement + Free Thought = Terror. Lock the cellar door, elites, and throw away the key. If they don't submit willingly, you can always provide a little guilt-tripping gaslight to change hearts and minds.

And millennials: adjust your eyes to the darkness if you ever hope to find those rickety ladders of opportunity. Self-medicate if you must; it will help perpetuate the elites' propaganda that young people are drugged-up slackers who want a lot of free stuff, like education. And don't ever forget to vote. It is your solemn duty as a consumer-citizen.

 Look out kid
They keep it all hid
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don’t wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals
Don’t wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don’t work
’Cause the vandals took the handles.

The Fault In Our Political Deathstars

 Had enough of the pornographic soap opera masquerading as the presidential election yet?  

 Replace the fat-shamed Miss Universe saga with the real Universe. Instead of wallowing in Donald Trump's mean-spirited stupidity, soar to the tragic glorious heights of two star-crossed lovers. Ditch the soap opera and revel in some space opera.

Maybe you missed this with all the dredging-up of the sex scandals of some pretty loathsome characters: A spacecraft named Rosetta finally consummated her long-distance relationship with her comet paramour. As so eloquently described by the New York Times's Kenneth Chang, it almost makes us forget the tawdry bathos supplanting American democracy.

 It's a story of truly Wagnerian proportions: (cue optional soundtrack.)

Rosetta, the first spacecraft to orbit a comet, is dead, setting down in a final embrace with its companion of the past two years.

Radio signals from Rosetta flatlined at 7:19 a.m. Eastern after it did a soft belly-flop onto Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at a speed of two miles per hour, slower than the average walk.

For the last few minutes, people at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, watched their computer screens mostly in silence, but with some nervous chatter. When the radio signals ceased, they applauded and hugged in a celebration that was part joyous, part somber.

It took Rosetta 12 years, but she finally got her guy. And she died right in the act. But it was so worth it:

 Of course she was European. It mattered not a whit that Comet 67P himself is a bit on the misshapen side, resembling a rubber duck with a painful skin condition. This apparent anomaly was likely caused by two comets colliding a long time ago, and getting stuck together forever. So the consummation was sort of a threesome. Like I said, totally European and avant-garde. Squeamish conservatives in the United States never would have tolerated or funded this particular scientific expedition, what with their defunding of NASA in between their prayer breakfasts and righteous visits to porn websites and legalized buckfests. The media-political complex has enough on its plate at the moment, thank you very much, what with pornography now the main topic on The Trail.

Furthermore, the anti-NASA/science crowd might be afraid of being compared to Rubber Duckman. On his surface, he is as hard as a rock. But inside, there's nothing but fluff and dust. And what's even worse, he's as doomed as Rosetta. He's headed straight for the sun. Take that, climate change denialists!

  The story of Rosetta and her Comet Duck Prince is a fairy tale come true, straight from the land of the Brothers Grimm, and thus cannot be tolerated in a country founded by fire and brimstone Puritans. In the exceptional USA, Congress has defunded our own government space program, even as it's being outsourced to private industry at a steady clip. This year alone, $40 million has been removed from several NASA initiatives, including development of the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD)

So those billionaires jockeying for position on the first manned flight to Mars had better beware. Although the idiots and anti-science zealots in Congress might think they've  outlawed LSD, the program they're so gleefully scrapping would actually allow a Mars rocket to slow down enough to land safely on the surface of the Red Planet. Without this safeguard, the plutocratic space tourists will never know what hit them. It won't be anything close to the balletic pas-de-deux on display last week from a space rock far, far away.

It will more resemble last week's horrific New Jersey train wreck, caused at least in part by a corrupt, reactionary governor's reduction of funding for maintenance and repairs to the transportation infrastructure. Chris Christie is even blackmailing his state's most vulnerable citizens for what little improvement he is offering. There's more than one way to go off the rails, as explained by the Daily News's Jason Silverstein:

New Jersey’s Trump-loving Republican governor has frozen $100 million in aid — by executive order — until the state’s public employees agree to his demand of cutting $250 million in their health benefits.
The governor’s office said he was forced into the heavy halt by “the Legislature’s inability to responsibly identify realistic revenues and health care cost savings.”

Christie would rather get rid of the estate tax than fund pensions and safely maintain the public transportation system. How else will filthy rich heirs and heiresses come up with the money to privately travel to Mars and build their own exclusive space colony, once they've helped finish off Planet Earth with their polluting wage-slave factories, exploding oil trains and pipelines, and private jets?

And once the rich people are on Mars, guess who gets to feed, clothe, and keep them alive for the duration? That's right: it's the same old socialized risk and privatized gain racket that's been keeping them healthy, wealthy and selfish for countless generations through their off-shored tax havens and the countless tax loopholes provided for them by the groveling likes of Chris Christie.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Futuristic (credit, MarsOne)

So on second thought, forget about restoring funding for that Low Density Supersonic Decelerator. First, we have to figure out a way to decelerate the greed of the pathocrats and close the most extreme wealth gap in modern history.

The philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno had the whole rotten system pegged half a century ago: "The fact that the extended arm of mankind can reach out to remote, empty planets, but is unable to establish eternal peace on its own planet, is a striking proof the absurd direction in which the social dialectic is moving."

Debate & Switch Open Thread

Free-for-all time. Talk about the debate, or something more pleasant if you're avoiding the most momentous sporting event in the history of Citizens United.

Suggested drinking game: take an extremely tiny slug whenever somebody utters one of the following words, phrases or sounds: bipartisan, reach across the aisle, terror, lie, cheat, steal, God-given, godforsaken, invest, tough/hard choices, commander-in-chief, yuge, bigly, cough.

Personally, I'm still trying to recover from the top-trending mawkish photo of the week and the accompanying blather from media stenographers who believe that "bipartisan" is actually a positive instead of a negative.

Don't Worry, Honey, Nobody's Gonna Prosecute Anybody for War Crimes

Our Man Holt

It's all about her:

Monday’s debate is not the only way Clinton hopes to restore a sense of inevitability to her candidacy, but the audience will dwarf those at rallies. “She takes it very seriously,” said (Communications Director Jennifer) Palmieri. “She’s going in front of tens of millions of Americans, maybe even 100 million Americans, to persuade them why she needs their vote.”

There they go again. Ask not what Hillary can do for our country. Remind voters, over and over and over again, that it's the country which owes her their votes. I highly doubt that anybody needs to be persuaded of her profound neediness at this stage of the game.

As a testament to its confidence in its candidate's debating skills, the campaign is imperiously announcing that it will be up to moderator Lester Holt - not Hillary - to toss Donald Trump's mendacious word salad down the food disposal. The Clinton-friendly Guardian obligingly takes the onus off Hillary right in the headline: "Habitual Liar Trump must be curbed in presidential debate." Ask not that Clinton herself call him to account. This is a woman who is highly accustomed to being waited upon. Don't ask her to curb anything. She presumes she has media chauffeurs like Lester to do that.

"Right ho, Jeeves," I imagine her pouting to Holt. "Carry on, my man. Please do bail out your Bertie like a good chappie and remove this vermin from my presence, wot?"

The Guardian puts it only slightly less condescendingly:

Clinton’s concern stems from Trump’s fast-and-loose rhetorical style, which has been attacked by newspaper fact-checkers but proved devastatingly effective on TV, first against his Republican challengers in the primary and, more recently, in a candidate forum on national security in which he was allegedly allowed to airbrush his past support for the Iraq war.
“She will respond when he misrepresents her own record, but given the historic nature of how much Donald Trump lies, it cannot be only on her,” Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri told reporters by phone on Friday.
“If the moderator is not willing to stand up and challenge lies, [then] to not do that is to give him a very unfair advantage”.

Trump did not live up to the Code of the Plute-sters by airbrushing his support for the Iraq War. He should have hurled great big globs of oil paint on the canvas like Hillary Clinton did. In the drawing room. With a knife.

If Team Clinton gets its way, the marathon session of Trumpian lies and moot fact-checking will reward her with neither the time nor the space to get a word in edgewise. She can just stand there and save her precious breath and roll her eyes before delivering a few canned talking points at the end. Not only will she play hapless Bertie to Holt's brilliant Wooster, she's even positioning herself as Fay Wray to Trump's King Kong, with Holt acting the part of the intrepid rescuer.

 It seems to me that as a war hawk whose claim to fame is "muscular" national security experience, she'd be able to fight her own rhetorical battles on a debate stage with an aged orangutan.

She's setting herself up as her own straw-woman before she even gets started. Let the sexist attacks fly. Let the sympathy vote be milked. 

Playing Holt and Trump off each other: is that Clintonoid triangulation, or wot?

Whatever the theatrics and the outcome of the first debate, we can already predict the spin. Both sides will claim victory as they simultaneously claim that they were bullied, by their opponents and by the media alike.

If the voters have little to do with this process now, other than being cowed and bamboozled into serving the needs of their favorite plutocrat, you can only imagine how the ultimate winner will treat them come November.

And no matter the vitriol being hurled between their Pater and Mater and their staffs of high-level servants and publicists, heiresses Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton both display a regal sangfroid about the staged nastiness. You see, it's all totally for show. Only the little people are conned into choosing a side to fulfill their dreams of belonging and participating in democracy, if only as bit players for a relative minute.

"We were friends long before this election, [and] we will be friends long after this election," she (Chelsea) said. "Our friendship didn't start in politics, it certainly is not going to end because of politics. I have tremendous respect for Ivanka."

One really must respect the chutzpah of an enormously wealthy woman who helped her Daddy swindle people out of millions of dollars in a Baja California real estate scam. Of course, Ivanka and other Trump spawn settled out of court, with all terms remaining strictly confidential.

Because when you're a dynasty, you're just like a bank. You're too big to fail and you're too important to jail. 

Neoliberal Death Match 2016 isn't a literal fight to the death between two plutocrats, of course The life spans of the wealthy are actually increasing as the wealth divide increases to epic proportions.

It's the center ring of the circus act which disguises the class war of the rich against the rest of us. Why else put all the pressure and the pre-emptive blame on a highly-paid journalistic servant? If Trump and Clinton fumble, it certainly won't be their fault. And they never perform without their safety nets.

It's all on Lester Holt, acting the dual roles of ringmaster and butler.

From Agence France-Press (sacre bleu!)

The journalist, a 35-year television veteran with 16 years under his belt at NBC, has selected three topics for the debate: America’s direction, achieving prosperity and securing America.
The 90-minute debate will be organized into six 15-minute segments, with two dedicated to each of the topics.
Holt will be the only person on the set with the two candidates. He has not revealed how he is preparing for the face-off, the first of three presidential debates ahead of the November 8 election.
The much-anticipated first debate is expected to draw tens of millions of American viewers. The two remaining debates, on October 9 and October 19, will be moderated by other journalists.
Holt, known for his calm and courteous manner, and a bass player in his spare time, probably will have uppermost in mind the recent flap caused by one of his NBC colleagues. (Matt Lauer).

It wouldn't do to be anything other than calm and courteous during a multicourse dinner party, especially when a couple of sensitive rich people will be asked about achieving prosperity as they sip their designer water. The unflappable, Woosterish, multimillionaire Lester Holt is supposed to break the ice and balance the trays and spill the beans without spilling any actual champagne. All this smooth service is to be provided with an earpiece in each ear so that he can hear the breathless fact-checkers above the clinking cacophony.

 Wealth is such a delicate topic. The rich do hate talking about their money and their war profiteering and their deals while they profess to care about the lesser people for purposes of further self-enrichment. Unless they're Donald Trump, of course. His fans love him because he exposes his fellow miscreants as well as himself. He makes himself one of the hoi polloi even as he brags about ripping them off. They don't care how much he lies or how ignorant he sounds, as long as they can wallow in a billionaire's mud-mind and feel some secure hate in the process.

Hillary Clinton has yet to find a way to let people in to her own cosseted world. It's the pathetic neediness - for privacy and for power. She simply doesn't share very well. She feels that she is owed and she can't hide it, even as she campaigns for the votes of increasingly distressed people.

And if Lester Holt invites her to apologize for her recent deplorable "basket of deplorables" remarks to the millionaires of the Cipriani Club, I suspect that she will respectfully decline: 

 "It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them."-- P.G. Wodehouse.

Neoliberalism's War on Youth

This is as good a synopsis of the ideological scourge of neoliberalism that I've heard, particularly as it pertains to youth.

Henry Giroux on RT's Watching the Hawks:

Henry also has a hard-hitting piece up on Tikkun that's well worth a read. As editor Michael Lerner writes in his intro to the essay,

...Our Network of Spiritual Progressives’ championing of a Global Marshall Plan seems suddenly “unrealistic” so that even Bernie Sanders did not mention it or even acknowledge the potential power of countering the strategy of domination and militarism with a strategy of generosity. Giroux helps wake us up to the way this militarization of our assumptions, or what I’d call the triumph of domination thinking, is an important element in allowing the distortion of our politics, our educational system, our media, the increasing militarization of local police forces,, the criminalization rather than celebration of whistle-blowers like Snowden who reveal the crimes of our government and “intelligence” (actually political police) forces,  our sense of what kind of television should be winning more Emmys than any other (Game of Thrones, with its violence and sexual depravity and sexist assumptions is only the tip of the iceberg) to go unnoticed or not seen as part of a larger pattern. Giroux correctly identifies all this as a pathology–another way of waking us up to a social reality that leads us both to repentance and to finding appropriate strategies to counter.

Gaslighting the Lost Generation

Now that she's corralled establishment Republicans and various moguls of the military-surveillance complex, conservative Democrat Hillary Clinton has decided that she needs the Bernie Sanders voters after all. So she's enlisted the liberal corporate press to crack the whip at all those whippersnappers out there who are crazily bucking the grand American tradition of voting for the Lesser Evil. They're even refusing to listen to Uncle Bernie's pleas, refusing to heed his exhortation that "our revolution" has to start with the election of Hillary and the repudiation of the "protest vote."

What a deplorable bunch of selfish free-thinkers. Their failure to get with the electoral program makes them as bad as Hillary's basket of deplorable white trash, even though they might be Black or Brown.

"I have never hated millennials more!" tweeted Clara Jeffery, editor of Mother Jones magazine, about the polls showing that youth aren't loving Hillary. (Either the real lefty labor rights organizer Mother Jones is rolling in her grave, or her corpse has undergone a miraculous postmortem conversion to centrism.)

Following closely on the heels of champion Berniebro shamer Paul Krugman, the New York Times's Charles Blow got into the annoying act today, urging young people not to "throw their votes away" on third party candidates. (This election year marks yet another in the long tired series of the "this is not the right time for third parties" saga of fear-mongering in the service of the oligopoly.)

In addition, young people have allegedly succumbed to the dreaded False Equivalency bug that's been going around. It's causing brains all over America to insanely despise both candidates. No matter that Trump and Clinton are despised for very different reasons. In liberal pundit world, it is verboten to take issue with Hillary's history of war-mongering and attacks on the social safety net when Trump is out there, bellowing out his ignorance with a bullhorn.

Blow sniffs,

 I know immediately that they have bought into the false equivalency nonsense, and additionally are conflating the casting of a ballot with an endorsement of a candidate’s shortcomings.

So Clinton's disastrous votes for war and crusades for regime change and private $650,000 speeches to the banking mafia are reduced to mere "shortcomings" - whence we get a hysterical blow-by-blow litany of why a vote for a third party candidate is tantamount to putting your stamp of approval on police brutality and racism.

If Hillary loses, it's all your fault. If you're not "With Her" you're against her, much as you were against Bush's neocon wars for freedom. Ask not what Hillary can do for you, ask what you can do for Hillary. Remember - the slogan is "I'm With Her." She is not necessarily With You.

Shame, shame, shame on America's Lost Generation, saddled with functioning brains and college debt and a bleak future of dead-end jobs and few prospects. Don't you know that voting against your own economic interests is still better than voting for the economic interests of Donald Trump?

To supplement fear of Trump as the primary reason for millennials to vote for her, Hillary went on Between Two Ferns today. Talented actor Barack Obama has been able to skillfully co-opt political satire for his own ends by making himself a star performer in the genre, so she obviously thought she could follow in his show biz footsteps by gamely allowing the fun to be poked right to her face rather than behind her back.

It was awkward. She hasn't quite found her comedic timing this late in her career. I have a feeling that rather than winning the hearts and minds of millennials, she's only repelled them further by being as inept about parody as she is about her emails.

The professional passive-aggressive alternate shaming of and pandering to the Lost Generation contains the implicit insulting message that they are naive, selfish, shallow, and malleable.

  So how about, instead of shoving the Lesser Evil gospel down our throats, pundits explored the root class and income inequality causes of mass disaffection?

Rather than deploring the alleged amorality, bigotry and ignorance of the electorate, the pundits might instead call for better funding of public education and restoration of the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting.

Of course, teaching students to read and think critically is precisely what the Establishment doesn't want. And now manufactured ignorance is coming back to bite them with a Trumpian vengeance. The masses, both educated and uneducated, are proving themselves impervious to the concern-trolling and gaslighting cons. After being played with and tortured for so many years, they're way beyond being receptive to purring lectures from the fat cats.  As a matter of fact, the tactic is having the exact opposite effect. The more that the elites needfully knead their typing paws, the more that they rub up against their audience and hiss and yowl, the harder the electorate closes their ears and eyes. 

And people don't want to hold their noses in the voting booth. They don't want their rights and their dreams to be stifled. They want to breathe.

As Bertrand Russell wrote in Free Thought and Official Propaganda,

If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. For example, the art of reading newspapers should be taught. The schoolmaster should select some incident which happened a good many years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should then read to the school children what was said by the newspapers on one side, what was said by those on the other, and some impartial account of what really happened. He should show, from the biased account of either side, a practised reader could infer what really happened, and he should make them understand that everything in newspapers is more or less untrue. The cynical skepticism which would result from this teaching would make the children in later life immune from those appeals to idealism by which decent people are induced to further the schemes of scoundrels.

Although newspapers are a moribund breed, Russell's advice applies just as well to cable news and the Internet. We should read from a variety of sources, not just those in the business of selling comforting confirmation bias.

The preaching of the neoliberal pundit class does not educate or elucidate. It simply aims to gaslight and guilt-trip struggling and oppressed people. Credulity is the enemy. Misinformation is the currency of the two big business political parties, which exist mainly to enrich and empower themselves and their plutocratic donors.

What Russell wrote nearly a hundred years ago holds just as true today: "Preaching and exhortation only add hypocrisy to the list of vices."