Exonerate Ethel Rosenberg

* 1/20, updated below.

What with the Russian flu raging within corporate journalistic circles, you probably haven't heard too much lately about the movement to clear Ethel Rosenberg's name.

Ethel and her husband Julius were executed by the United States government on June 19, 1953, three years after their conviction for conspiracy to commit espionage. Contrary to myth, they were neither charged nor convicted of treason or even actual espionage; conspiracy was considered easier to prove by zealous prosecutors. Although Julius did pass on certain documents to the Soviets (not, as legend also still has it, secrets of the atomic bomb) Ethel herself was never part of any spy ring. She was, however, an avowed Communist just when the Cold War was heating up. The government used her as leverage in an attempt to get Julius to crumble and confess and name names. She remained staunchly silent until the very end, when she was electrocuted in Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York shortly after her husband.  

The Rosenbergs left behind two orphaned sons, Michael and Robert, just six and ten years old at the time of their parents' executions. 

Not only was Ethel Rosenberg not a spy, her conviction was based on false testimony of witnesses including her own brother, who finally recanted decades later as he neared death. Prosecuting the case was future Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn - who ironically enough, later became a mentor to Donald Trump. Ironic, given how Trump is now himself being accused of Russian stoogedom by Democratic leaders and their partners in the corporate media.

The Red Scare was so intense that Harry Truman passed on commuting the sentence despite overwhelming evidence of prosecutorial overreach presented to him. He, President Eisenhower and even the presiding judge went so far as to directly blame Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for the Korean War. Eisenhower also turned down numerous petitions for clemency and refused to stay their executions. And on the day that both were strapped into the electric chair, his aides actually had to dissuade him from hitting the links to play his favorite sport. Optics were a "thing" even back in the Red Scare 50s.

Robert Meeropol (formerly Rosenberg -- the names of the two boys were changed by their adoptive parents to protect their privacy) has appealed to President Obama to exonerate his mother. Senator Elizabeth Warren and others also joined the cause when results of an investigation by Seton Hall University Law School, released just last month, show just how depraved the government's actions were in bringing her to trial. A long-suppressed FBI memo from June 1950 categorically states that evidence against Ethel was insufficient to bring any charges against her. She was merely a pawn.

US government propaganda disseminated throughout the mainstream media over the several years that the "crime of the century" case played out ensured that the American public was sanguine about putting the Rosenbergs to death. When carefully polled, the vast majority proclaimed themselves fully behind the official callousness. By then, the Rosenbergs had been convicted not only of conspiracy -- in the court of public opinion they were considered guilty of outright treason. Plus, it really helped that most people liked Ike and his carefully crafted avuncular image very, very much.

(As a very young child, I myself was convinced for quite some time that Eisenhower was my grandpa. How could he not be, with that kindly smiling Kansas face looking and talking directly at me from the TV set?)

  But as Lori Clune outlines in her book Executing the Rosenbergs, this was not the case elsewhere. Worldwide, massive and sometimes violent protests against US government persecution of the couple were carefully kept out of American media accounts.

 The State Department kept deliberately hidden a cache of international press reports, appeals for mercy from foreign dignitaries, and cables from panicked American diplomats seeking guidance on the case.  Clune accidentally came upon clues to their existence during the course of her unrelated investigation into high-profile security cases involving Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The massive dossier of over 900 State Department documents she uncovered proves that, despite continuing propaganda to the contrary from our current leaders in the media-political complex, damage to America's reputation abroad hardly started with the election of Donald Trump. "American Psychosis" was also the unanimous official diagnosis from much of the rest of the world during our first Cold War more than 65 years ago.

"They (the documents) show that protests extended from Argentina to Australia, from Iceland to India, and from Switzerland to South Africa," writes Clune. "On a dozen separate occasions the American ambassador to France himself wrote to complain about the government's handling of the Rosenberg case. We may never know why the State Department hid these sources.... Whoever was responsible decided in this case that the need for secrecy trumped any desire for government transparency."

Plus ca change, etc. 

The Rosenberg Fund for Children is running an online petition asking President Obama to formally exonerate Ethel before he leaves office. We should know his decision, or lack thereof, by noon tomorrow at the very latest.

Update:
 

Statement of Robert and Michael Meeropol, sons of Ethel Rosenberg

January 20, 2017
In August 2015, The New York Times published our Op-Ed calling on President Obama to exonerate our mother, Ethel Rosenberg. It was a response to the release of government material a month before, showing the prime trial witness against our mother – her brother David Greenglass – repeatedly and adamantly stated under oath before the Grand Jury that he never spoke to our mother about espionage. That testimony, coupled with the enormous body of other independent evidence, made it clear that the government manipulated witnesses and created a false case against our mother, to put pressure on our father to cooperate in the politically motivated investigation of his actions.
 

The outpouring of support we received from our Times essay spurred us to forge ahead with an exoneration campaign. Its aim was to move the President to publicly declare that our mother’s conviction was unjust and her execution was wrongful, while also educating the public about the dangers of unchecked government power, especially in times of heightened concern about national security. Although we didn’t achieve the first goal, we were extremely successful with the second.
 

Some 60,000 concerned individuals added their names to our petition asking President Obama to act. Artists, activists, public intellectuals and elected officials were among the many, high profile people who supported our effort. A class of eighth graders in West Virginia championed the effort by gathering petition signatures and producing a video aimed at the President, about the parallels they saw between the play The Crucible and Ethel’s case.
 

The exoneration campaign was covered extensively and favorably by many of the most respected and far-reaching media outlets around the U.S. and internationally. These included 60 Minutes, NPR’s Morning Edition and Here and Now, and The Boston Globe.
 

With even Fox News publishing a report highlighting the grave miscarriage of justice in our mother’s case, it’s clear we succeeded in moving the needle on the public’s understanding of how the government wronged our mother, and why, dramatically.
 

We received thousands of moving and poignant communications from people who supported the effort. Many who contacted us have first-hand memories of our parents’ trial and execution. They described how their lives were forever affected by our parents’ case. They also recalled the fear and outrage they felt at that time, and are experiencing once again in our current political climate.
 

From the 90-year-olds who sent us shaky, handwritten letters, to the middle schoolers who posted about the campaign on social media, everyone who supported this effort demonstrated a deep commitment to holding our leaders accountable that we found inspiring. In their final letter to us just hours before their execution, our parents wrote that they, “were comforted in the sure knowledge that others would carry on after us.”

The campaign to exonerate Ethel Rosenberg has proved our parents correct in their belief that after they were gone, others would continue to resist repression and fight for justice. We consider that a victory.

Freeing Chelsea Manning

Give credit where due and kudos to Barack Obama for doing the right thing by commuting whistle-blower Chelsea Manning's cruel and unusual prison sentence -- even if he did the right thing more out of political calculus than out of any sense of human empathy. 

Maybe some savvy reader can tell me why Chelsea Manning must be imprisoned for four more months: is it really the molasses-like military bureaucracy, or is it because Obama still wants to "send a message" that, just because a president softened up just this once doesn't mean that individuals exposing war crimes and Deep State corruption will be tolerated in the future.

Going over military heads and cutting red tape and freeing her sooner might be a tacit admission that Manning's brutal, excessive punishment -- including being stripped naked and placed in solitary confinement for over a year -- has been tantamount to torture.

 Obama is not about to admit any such thing. So it's four more months behind bars for Chelsea Manning, who had the courage and audacity to release information proving that the military lied about war crimes and deliberately conspired to underestimate the number of civilian casualties in the Iraq War. The only things she "endangered" were the reputations and careers of various culprits both in and out of uniform. Tellingly, the helicopter pilots who gratuitously shot and killed a group of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters reporters for no other reason than sadism were never brought to account. They got off on the usual "fog of war" defense.

It's also tempting to suspect that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's offer to turn himself in to US authorities in the event of Manning's commutation was an offer that Obama simply couldn't refuse. If I were Assange, though, I'd wait until Manning is safely out of sight of the prison gates before leaving the always-tenuous safety of his own de facto prison of the Equador embassy in London.

Obama is deservedly famous for being an introspective, calculating kind of guy. So he probably carefully weighed all the pros and the cons of showing a little mercy to Manning. Another factor in his decision likely was not wanting to have the eventual successful suicide of an imprisoned LGBT community member on his hands. And he knew how bad the "optics"  would have looked had he let Chelsea Manning rot in prison while pardoning James Cartright, the retired general convicted, but never jailed, for lying to the FBI about leaking classified information to the press. Obama probably weighed the feeble dissenting cackles  of war hawks against the raucous, righteous outcry of progressives -- whose votes the Democratic Party desperately needs if it hopes to regain even a small portion of the thousand elected seats that it's lost during the Age of Obama.

And above all, there's his own precious legacy for Obama to worry about. Something good has to counterbalance the fact that he is the only president in history who has been at war every single day of his tenure. As he flits off to the golf course and the hundreds of millions of dollars in book deals and speaking fees, he doesn't want to be simply remembered for never closing Gitmo and for dropping 26,171 bombs on Planet Earth in just the past year alone.

The president's admittedly good deed of commuting Manning's draconian 35-year sentence is still a comparatively feeble gesture, given that it was his administration that ensured in the first place that she would get sentenced to 10 times the incarceration of any other person ever convicted of leaking classified information. It doesn't take away from the fact that the Obama administration prosecuted more whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act than all other administrations combined.

But thanks, President Obama. The rarer the humanitarian gesture, the more precious it is.

MediTrump For All

Since Donald Trump's idea of "insurance for everybody" doesn't entail a true government-sponsored single payer health care system, we're racking our brains trying to figure out what he could really mean.

The racking is probably futile. Because whenever you're promised that the "final strokes" are being put on a fantastic mystery product to be unveiled any day now, you should pretty much assume you're about to be scammed, if not whipped. And since Donald Trump's whole life has been one big exercise in hucksterism, you should pretty much also leave out the pretty much.

Still, masochist that I am, I'm torturing my brain trying to figure out what Trump could possibly have up his magician's sleeve for his U.S. citizen-subjects. Since the first requirement for any Trump plan is that it be short and sweet, preferably reducible to a promise and a slogan or a soundbite, here's some speculative Dystopia to get all racked up about:

Every American consumer-citizen will receive in the mail, within 30 days of the inauguration, a pre-approved personal I.D. card bearing the benign smirking image of Donald J. Trump. Just looking at his face should make you feel great again. But just in case it doesn't, you will enjoy the immediate freedom to use your TrumpCare card in a variety of (about two) different ways.

Every hotel, resort, and real estate holding bearing the Trump name will be outfitted with a walk-in clinic. There, you can present your card for a discount on check-ups and eyeglasses and prescriptions whose lower prices the new president will negotiate personally. If all goes as planned, you'll be able to enjoy even greater savings once your meds no longer have to undergo double-blind studies and stringent testing by a soon-to-be purged Food and Drug Administration.

And don't worry if there aren't any Trump properties with Trump clinics near you yet. His sons and heirs will use public money to construct them. They will concurrently orchestrate fire sales, forced buyouts and hostile takeovers of existing properties and medical practices in the interest of your great-again health care. If Trump builds it, you will most definitely come. Because annual checkups will be mandatory. Since all 17 U.S. "intelligence" agencies are now privy to your personal information, the United States of Trump will be duly informed if you don't take advantage of his benevolence in a very timely way.

But to be fair, and to help Trump avoid any appearance of a monopoly or impropriety or a conflict of interest, you will also enjoy the option of using your Trumpcard to score a discount as a medical tourist to any off-shored health care of your choosing. This is America, after all, and the illusion of choice and freedom must be maintained at all costs.  Donald's kids are already finalizing deals with the airlines and the cruise ship lines to get TrumpClubMed started. 

 Nazi Germany's Strength Through Joy program of healthy holiday-making for workers might be the perfect propaganda model for them, as well as the perfect scam. Under that populist initiative, regular Germans were supposed to go on discounted international state-sponsored cruises -- with the added health benefit of feeling ever so much better once they were safely and securely back in the Fatherland. What the Nazis didn't tell the Volk was that those taking advantage of Hitler's travel beneficence would be disproportionately middle class, white collar workers and government flunkies. Most working people just couldn't afford all that joyful strength.

Therefore, Hitler decided to placate the poor and construct a seaside prototype of a Trump hotel complex, which he trumpeted as "the biggest resort on earth." Unfortunately, the massive construction, designed to cram in 20,000 vacationers at a time like so many sardines was never completed. By the time they'd been power for five years, the Nazis were doing Strength Through War.

So that was then. And Trump, like Adolf before him, keeps insisting that he is a man of peace despite his professed desire to blow up any pathetic Iranian craft coming anywhere near our beautiful destroyers. So for all we know, Donald Trump may be joyfully envisioning a MediTrump Consortium of Hospitals performing both Trump-brand knee and hip replacements for workers now forced to put off retirement until 75, as well as Trump-brand total body part replacements for wounded veterans. Notwithstanding the recent court-ordered demise of Trump University in a secret settlement, also stay tuned for the Trump Medical School chain, with student loans for budding doctors issued through the First National Bank of Trump, formerly known as the U.S. Treasury Department. Graduates will have the choice of working off their loans at unpaid internships lasting ten years before going on to public-private practice at an approved Trump Clinic.

Since Democrats holding their anti-Trump rallies have been gleefully goading Trump to come up with a better health insurance plan than Obamacare, they will certainly end up getting punked. Because when the "something better" in their neoliberal world does not, and never will, include Medicare for All, we are bound to get presented with something much, much worse.

Ironically, just like Barack Obama before him, Donald Trump actually was for single payer government insurance before he was against it. But you know what they always say: We must not let the perfect be the enemy of what's good for the oligarchy.

From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of... Norway?

You read that right - the United States Marines have just landed in the historic city of Trondheim, the former capital during the wild and crazy Viking era.

photo credit, Ned Alley, NTB Norway

For the first time since Hitler assaulted much of Europe in World War II, the American military is setting up a "rotational" base in the Scandinavian nation as a sign of chest-thumping strength against an allegedly threatening Russia. Not even during the Communist era of Cold War expansionism did Norway, always a fiercely independent social democratic country, ever invite any foreign military power to help it defend itself against a potential enemy. As a matter of fact, the Norwegian government signed an agreement with the Soviet Union immediately after World War II promising, after it joined NATO, that it would never allow foreign troops to be permanently stationed on its own soil.

 The Marine contingent of some 300 troops flew in on Monday from comparatively steamy Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, and will learn how to shoot guns on skis, among other sporty winter war games.

The New York Times reports that regular Norwegian citizens, while a bit nonplussed at the sight of Marines in jungle camouflage trudging through the January snow, are more than a little paranoid these days. First, there was the annexation of Crimea and the unrest in Eastern Ukraine. And everybody's been glued to a wildly popular Norwegian TV series called Okkupert, a dystopian futuristic political thriller in which the country is occupied by Russia. Very coincidentally, there have also been imaginary sightings of  Russian submarines off the western coast, their periscopes popping up from the frigid waves like slimy Loch Ness Monsters.

  And then came the ultimate fright: the election in the United States of Donald J. Trump. Propaganda depicting him as a Kremlin stooge apparently travels very fast, and very far, apparently respecting no national paranoid boundaries.

As per usual, whenever militarism and authoritarianism rear their ugly heads, it's been the lefties who are putting up the biggest stink about the Marine okkupation. From the Times:

Morten Harper, a leftist member of the local assembly that governs the area housing the military base, said the Marines’ arrival was ensnaring Norway into the United States’ “power struggle” with Russia.

“We see an ever more tense foreign policy situation,” he said. “If there ever was to be a major conflict between the great powers in the future, this makes us a more likely bomb target.”

Norway's defense minister soothed critics by promising that the Marines are only there for a trial period of six months and can be asked to leave at any time in what she termed an "open-ended" agreement. Now, where have we heard that reassuring story before?

Although  plans for the Norwegian deployment have apparently been underway "for some time," according to the 350-year-old regional newspaper Adresievessen, the transformation of the Norwegian Home Guards into an American Marine base was never even presented to the local citizens for informational purposes, let alone considered a matter for public debate. Many people were thus reportedly taken aback by the sight of 300 heavily armed soldiers struggling through the snow, dragging their suitcases. Some of them were still dressed in lightweight fatigues highly unsuitable, to say the least, for the harsh weather conditions of this sub-Arctic region in January. Talk about a new cold war!

Still, the local newspaper editorialized that while "it's frightening that Trump will be the boss of these soldiers," residents should rest assured that a few hundred Marines aren't tantamount to the beginning of World War III.

Maj. Gen. Niel Nelson, according to RT, was similarly nonchalant. "We've been going to Norway for 25 years," he groused. "So I don't really know what all the hype is all about."

He's undoubtedly right: the hype is a little late. As reported by the Norway Local, the US military already has completed the digging of deep tunnels into the Norway mountains for the storage of its tanks and other armaments. The American incursion has been an open secret.

Meanwhile, American media are not reporting on protests against the US military by Norwegian citizens. According to one local newspaper, residents were confronting the Marines directly, handing out fliers "to say a definite no" to what they consider a stealth occupation. (this article is available in English via Google translator.)
 
"I do not want our children and grandchildren to grow up with the same fear and the threat of bombs and war, we have lived with," said peace activist Jens Frøseth.

Foto: Håvard Haugseth Jensen

None of the scanty news reports I've seen about Monday's Marine landing mentions that there are vast deposits of oil lurking beneath the icy Barents Sea, with some estimates amounting to fully one-third of the earth's remaining reserves. And the country's Arctic territory is warming up at an ever-quickening pace, becoming ever more accessible to plunder and predation. Norway already is the eighth largest crude oil exporter in the world. So somebody's got to protect the multinational oil cartel which doesn't/mustn't/shouldn't include Russia. Right?

As a matter of fact, only the plot of the TV series Okkupert (I believe it's available for streaming in the US) revolves around oil. But in a twist, the Russians have joined forces with the European Union to invade Norway, a non-EU country, and the (Trumpian) United States has withdrawn from NATO. And wouldn't you just know it, the leftist Norwegian Green Party is kind of the bad guy in the story, having just come to power and stopped the production of oil, enraging the whole gas-guzzling world. The propaganda stage would thus seem to have been set for the true-life Marines by the magic of make-believe. Isn't it always the way?

So as ever, whenever you have questions about what the Military-Industrial Complex is up to any given day, in any given location, simply follow the money. Skål, and Ka-Ching!

Friendly USMC Publicity Photo Furnished to the Local Norwegian Newspaper

Obama's B.S. On Insufficient B.S. - Conclusion

Much as I dread it, I feel it is my duty to follow up and complete last week's piece on President Obama's regrets over his faulty propaganda skills. So here's my analysis of the rest of the 60 Minutes puff piece interview which aired on Sunday night.  (As a testament to the ever more fascistic job description of our nation's chief executive, the title of the show refers to him not as the president, but as the militaristic commander-in-chief.)

The program starts out with all the heart-rending pathos that a corporate media powerhouse can muster: a nine-year-old clip of adorable little Malia Obama kvetching about Candidate Daddy's limited culinary skills and personal sloppiness. See - he was just like us then, and at his core, he's still just like us now!

Fast forward to some revelatory highlights in his Big Exit Interview. It turns out that despite regrets over his deficient propaganda skills, he can still scapegoat with the best of them:

And I will confess that, I didn’t fully appreciate the ways in which individual senators or members of Congress now are pushed to the extremes by their voter bases. I did not expect, particularly in the midst of crisis, just how severe that partisanship would be.

Obama doesn't blame the money in politics unleashed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. He doesn't blame the psychopaths of finance capital or the billionaire Koch Brothers for the extremism. He blames those danged voters clinging to their guns and religion. The poor frazzled congress critters are pushed to their sadistic extremes, not by their own corruption and greed, fueled by the corporate lobbyists who set the agenda and write the laws. They're pushed to extremes by the powerless, ignorant regular people back home in the sticks who persist in voting against their own interests. Yes, Obama can scapegoat and punch down with the best of them. And thus does he follow up his regrets over his failed propaganda with still more failing propaganda. (Jeeze, am I beginning to sound like Trump, or what? Sad!)

And now, since this is CBS, whose CEO last year bragged how totally awesome Donald Trump has been for its profits, Steve Kroft forgets about stuff that might be important to regular people in the sticks. He immediately pivots right to Donald Trump's tweets and the Meryl Streep imbroglio:

Kroft:  He said Meryl Street is an overrated Hillary flunky.  I mean, what's going on?

Obama: You know, you’re going to have to talk to him. But here’s what I-- here’s what I think. First of all, I think everybody has to acknowledge don’t underestimate the guy, because he’s going to be 45th president of the United States. The one thing I’ve said to him directly, and I would advise my Republican friends in Congress and supporters around the country, is just make sure that, as we go forward certain norms, certain institutional traditions don’t get eroded, because there’s a reason they’re in place.

Rather than press Obama to define these norms and traditions (are they the CIA? the American hegemony? the continued comfort of the ruling class?)  and since he couldn't get Obama to bite on the moldy Meryl Streep imbroglio cheese, Kroft helpfully normalizes Trump by pointing out at least one thing that both presidents do have in common: their manly love for the elite Institution of Golf.

And since politics is at its capitalistic essence a rich man's sport, he asks Obama if he ever wished he had a Mulligan. (Trigger warning to readers: the following segments are rather severely condensed/translated in the interests of space, time and deconstruction--so please do refer to the original CBS transcript and video, linked above, for the official version of the spurious officiousness.)

Obama: Golf analogy -- well, yeah, Healthcare. gov. It didn't work for awhile, so we lost a little momentum. Management below par... or make that far above par, caught in the bunker, sinking in the decorative pond, and not making the cut.

Kroft: Oh, okay, whatever. Now on to foreign policy. (Here, Kroft plays a 15-month-old clip of himself bullying Obama about why he wasn't starting more wars, which was definitely hurting his image among hungry war profiteers. The whole world views an America in retreat, goddammit! What about war on Syria? The Saudis, the Israelis, the Republicans all view you as weak, weak, weak!)

Kroft: Now it's 2016. Two words: red line. You didn't have to say that.

 Obama: Well, yeah --

Kroft: I don't want to make a big deal about it. But red line, red line, red line, red line, red line. You didn't have to say it. But you said red line, red line, red line.

Obama: Yeah, but --

Kroft: Red line, red line, red line, red line, red line.

Obama: I -- but that -- 

Kroft: Would you take it back?

Obama: Well, I but --

Now that he's established that he will always put on a muscular show of bullying elected officials who don't completely grovel before the interests of the military-industrial complex and its Wall Street investors, Kroft gets in a few mild digs over Obama's belated passive-aggressive repudiation of illegal Israeli settlements.

 And finally it's time for the frothy dessert portion of the interview that we've all been waiting for:

Kroft:  What's it like living in the White House with all those perks?

Obama: Michelle pretty much couldn't stand it. Bubbles and all. But she thrived at it.

Kroft: So is the marriage OK? Inquiring prurient minds wanna know.

Obama: As far as I know. Heh, heh, heh.

Kroft: So you gonna do the ivory tower equivalent of puttering around the garden?

Obama: Sleep and puttering.

Kroft: Not going to Wall Street and make a lot of money?

Obama: I'll be investing in different capacities.

Kroft: How will we remember you ten years from now?

Obama: You know, I don't think you know now. Known unknowables and all. But known knowns are our energy future and setting the bar for the notion is that it's possible to provide health care for people. Increments you can believe in.

And you know, you gotta develop a thick skin this job. Not many people know that we even have to buy our own toilet paper in the White House. We pay for everything except the plane and the bodyguards and the walkie-talkies.

And with this whole Russian hacking thing, it is just incredible that some people (a/k/a Trump) actually think that Putin has more credibility that our own Deep State does.

Kroft: So how much White House swag you gonna take with you? You like your new crib?

Obama: It's a nice enough home. It's temporary. You know, it's not crazy big but at least there's enough room for a treadmill and some workout equipment in the basement.

And so ends Obama's Last Interview. As you can see, he is indeed just like the rest of us, wondering where to cram all the furniture when he's forced to move and downsize after a job loss and eviction.

But lest you be too concerned about his future cramped living quarters, his definition of "not crazy big" is 8,200 square feet, eight bedrooms and nine bathrooms. He's going to need one extra room just to store all that toilet paper.

Topsy-Turvy Duopoly

The fact that Donald Trump is a very dangerous man shouldn't distract us from the naked truth that corporate Democrats and their surrogates are trying their damnedest to overthrow his election by every slimy method at their disposal. By aligning themselves with the de facto fourth branch of government alternately known as the Deep State, the Surveillance State and the Intelligence Community, they're actually accomplishing the feat of attacking a right-wing demagogue from the very far right.

You'd almost think that they were repudiating democracy (such as still even exists) itself.

So you have to ask yourself: Just who, exactly, is the fascist thug in this mix? The whiff of beer hall putsch disguised as a Champagne brunch is wafting up the Potomac.

While the "socially liberal" oligarchic faction pretends to battle the sadistic oligarchic faction (step right up and buy our chic pink Pussycat hats for the big anti-Trump march, ladies!) ordinary people schlepping to their temporary service gigs will get caught in the crossfire. 

 The ruling class racketeers on both sides of the Uniparty are ignoring social and economic problems in favor of joining forces to scapegoat a third oligarchic faction named Vladimir Putin. They accuse him, with little to no evidence, of personally ordering the "hacking" of the presidential election and costing Hillary Clinton her prize of Empress of the Free World. By gluing the national attention, once again, to an Enemy Over There rather than toward the very real class war enemies over here, they're doing nothing less than preparing our hearts and minds for World War Three. Thousands of NATO (American) troops are massing on the Russian border even as we speak. From The Guardian: 

But their arrival was not universally applauded. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “We perceive it as a threat. These actions threaten our interests, our security. Especially as it concerns a third party building up its military presence near our borders. It’s [the US], not even a European state.”
The Kremlin may hold back on retaliatory action in the hope that a Donald Trump presidency will herald a rapprochement with Washington. Trump, in remarks during the election campaign and since, has sown seeds of doubt over the deployments by suggesting he would rather work with than confront Putin.

But on Thursday Nato officials played down Trump’s comments, saying they hoped and expected that he would not attempt to reverse the move after he became president on 20 January. 
 That prediction was reinforced by Trump’s proposed defence secretary, James Mattis, and his proposed secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who backed Nato during Senate confirmation hearings.

As we have (apparently not) learned from history, it will be much harder to get out of a war than it will be to start one. And given that both the USA and Russia are nuclear weapons powerhouses, this could indeed be the war to end all wars. By whispering in Trump's ear that his alleged pal Putin has been spying on him, the "intelligence community" and their political enablers are trying to provoke (or blackmail) him into going along with plans for corporate hegemony put in place by the "defense industry" long before his shocking victory over Clinton. It seems to matter not a whit to Democrats that military men like Mattis are supposedly not allowed to lead the "Defense" Department out of a very real concern that we might end up with a domestic military coup.

How to persecute a persecutor who flits from idea to idea to idea with no regard for facts or respect for "norms?"  How do you solve a problem like Maria? Many a thing they know they'd like to tell him (and they have certainly tried to "brief" him, given his reputed short attention span.) How do you catch a wavy comb-over on the sand?

And he's been warned, as Chuck Schumer so elegantly put it on national TV, that the Deep State will exact its revenge "six ways from Sunday" if Trump doesn't go along to get along... with his actual life.

So while the liberal corporate Democrats are aligning with the unaccountable authoritarian surveillance/war state and attacking Trump from the right, those of us with a more socialist perspective find ourselves in the weird position of defending Donald Trump from the left via our criticism of liberal overreach.

For example: why on earth would a Democratic president be gifting Trump with such unprecedented extensions of the Authoritarian State if liberals are really so terrified of him? Obama quietly signed off on creation of a global/domestic propaganda bureau just before Christmas. Its unprecedented scope and funding would make even Joseph Goebbels green with brown-shirted envy. And in his most recent weekend dump on his sprint to the finish-line, Obama signed a terrifying order allowing the NSA to begin sharing all our personal email and telephone communications with all 17 police state ("intelligence community") agencies, including the CIA and the FBI. 

Given the current Democratic establishment's posturing over FBI Director James Comey's own alleged coup against Hillary Clinton, you'd think they'd be enraged by Obama's action. However, this latest blockbuster of a power grab has basically gone under the radar, thanks to the current epidemic of Russophobia making all the important people break out in a total body rash. So, do be sure to read Glenn Greenwald's piece on it at The Intercept if you haven't already done so.

Meanwhile, I have a sinking feeling that people are still making the mistake of underestimating Trump. He will no doubt use the ongoing manufactured mass hysteria to his own distinct and powerful advantage. After all, if even thinking people believe that he's got a valid point about being persecuted by a corrupt surveillance state, he's won half the public relations battle already.

Although some if not most of the comparisons of Trump to Adolf Hitler are overblown, there are eerie similarities in the political climates of both Weimar Germany and End-Stage Capitalistic 21st Century America. People are out of work or underpaid. Xenophobia is simmering while global demagogues suddenly made hate not only politically correct, but something to be encouraged. Democratic political systems institute austerity for impoverished people in order to pay off onerous IMF/World Bank debt and bail out banksters and CEOs, while billionaires off-shore their record wealth in hidden tax-free accounts. Income disparity soars to unprecedented levels.

 The left wing becomes the whipping boy of both right-wingers and corporate centrists. "Moderate" leaders in both Weimar and America barred leftist candidates from public discourse and coverage before the elections, of Hitler and Trump respectively. Intellectuals and pundits nearly all prophesied, regarding both Trump and Hitler, that such an extremist clown would never last. They yawned when Hitler became chancellor. They similarly predict that Trump will be impeached and kicked out of office before the year is over.

All it took for Hitler to gain sole dictatorial power after a series of perfectly legal democratic victories was one traumatic event: the burning of the Reichstag in his first year as Chancellor. He was able to unite all of Germany against one scapegoat. You guessed it: Communist Russia. Jews had always been the enemy, but blaming the arson on a Marxist, with absolutely no evidence, was pretty much the same thing in Adolf's fevered little brain.

All it might take for Trump to, if not seize dictatorial power, at least enjoy a mass uptick in his public approval ratings and the strengthening of his personality cult, would be for a terrorist attack or other catastrophe to occur within our borders. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have certainly paid forward some of the most extreme and violent executive/deep state powers in American history for him to play around with and shoot up with his own designer steroids. Americans have been programmed all too well to see threats and dangers wherever we're told to look.

It certainly hasn't helped the weakened Democratic Party's cause to continue demonizing both the Sanders/Warren wing and the independent leftist media as being just as dangerous and extremist as Trump. They're ironically employing the same tactics as Joseph Goebbels did in Nazi Germany. In their fevered campaign of equating fascism with socialism, they are only stifling dissent and solidifying further our pre-existing condition of obedience, repression, and fear. 

Influential centrist pundit Jonathan Chait is a case in point. As Timothy Shenk describes Chait's "dead center" Cold War 2.0 straw-manning worldview,

Chait has been less successful at interpreting the left, which in his analysis becomes an undifferentiated mass of rabid Marxists, politically correct ideologues, and postmodern academics. Rather than attacking these distinct factions at their strongest points, he lumps them together as products of the illiberal left, and then takes fire at the caricature he has drawn. “Marxist theory does not care about individual rights,” his readers learn, while, “Political correctness borrows its illiberal model of political discourse from Marxism”—as if Marxist theory and political correctness are buddies who meet up for drinks to plot the demise of free speech.

 Such topsy-turvy "right is left, and left is right" centrist propaganda tactics have historically not ended well.

Obama's Biggest Regret: Insufficient B.S.

A media goodbye which rivals even Ronald Reagan's funeral for overkill and hagiography is rapidly reaching its apogee. Or, if you cynically wish, its low point. Because this Sunday, Barack Obama will claim that it was mainly his own faulty propaganda which prevented regular folks from happily accepting their nasty, brutish fates under the plutocrat-serving neoliberal policies of the Duopoly.

In a tantalizing preview of a self-eulogy promoted as his last presidential appearance on network television, Obama tells 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft that if only his bullshit had flowed a little more slickly, the citizens of America would be satisfied and Donald Trump would never have been able to co-opt their grievances and pain.

Obama is also pitifully proud of the fact that he was able to keep his pants on during his entire eight-year tenure -- as though "major scandals" don't include such things as droning people to death at his whim, preaching austerity and urging people to "share the sacrifice" via his deficit reduction "Catfood" commission, deporting more Latinos and prosecuting more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined, imprisoning refugee families, bombing seven different countries, force-feeding Gitmo hunger-strikers at a prison he'd promised to close, and siding with Wall Street bankers over people losing their jobs and their homes and dying ever younger in the process. 

Obama's inability to "get stuff done" is such a shock to him personally, given how his initiatives have largely been conservative and market-based. Look at Obamacare, for crying out loud, the biggest gift to the predatory health insurance cartel in history. He even secretly scuttled the public option to placate those nasty old Republicans and a passel of Blue Dog Democrats. And then they wouldn't even consider his last Supreme Court nominee, the most conservative law-and-order high court candidate ever suggested by a modern Democratic president.

Don't people get that Obama is a truly nice, smart guy who only aims to please rich and powerful people on behalf of all of us?  Why did people vote against their own interests, a/k/a  the interests of Obama's and Clinton's socially liberal donors? Why couldn't people envision their future ladders of opportunity and level playing fields 20 years from now as clearly as Obama could? 

Obama is the epitome of elite liberal victimhood. Nonetheless, he nobly offers to accept some of the blame for his party's implosion --  not by admitting his deliberate chronic failures to match his words and campaign promises with ensuing deeds, but by acknowledging his failure to bury the electorate in a large enough avalanche of sweet-smelling bullshit:

Steve Kroft: You couldn’t even get a (Supreme Court) hearing.

President Barack Obama: But we couldn’t even get a hearing. Trying to get the other side of the aisle to work with us on issues, in some cases, that they professed, originally, an interest in, and saying to them, “Hold on a second. You guys used to think this was a good idea. Now, just because I’m supporting it, you can’t change your mind.” But they did.And what that did, I think, made me appreciate. And I’ve said this before. But it’s worth repeating. Because this is on me. Part of the job description is also shaping public opinion. And we were very effective, and I was very effective, in shaping public opinion around my campaigns.

But there were big stretches, while governing, where even though we were doing the right thing, we weren’t able to mobilize public opinion firmly enough behind us to weaken the resolve of the Republicans to stop opposing us or to cooperate with us. And there were times during my presidency when I lost the P.R. battle.

Since CBS at this point cuts off the promo of the full interview, we'll have to wait until Sunday night to discover just what specific times in his presidency Obama is talking about. This is assuming, of course, that Steve Kroft presses him for details and Obama isn't allowed to veer off into more bathos about Michelle and the troops and the kids and the dogs and the dogs crapping in the Lincoln Bedroom and other sweet-smelling bullshit.

Judging from the pre-eulogy teaser, it is painfully obvious that Obama is either oblivious or cynical. Given his much-vaunted intelligence, I would guess the latter. He probably knows full well, in his heart of hearts, that if we had Medicare for All, Republicans would not even be daring to whisper about repealing it. That's because they wouldn't be able to co-opt resentment and use it as a divide-and-conquer weapon. The expensively and inadequately insured population would not be attacking the "undeserving" poor Medicaid recipients who are not required to pay costly premiums and deductibles. There'd be no 30 million people deliberately exiled from health care staying silent rather than harassing their congress critters on behalf of their fellow citizens deemed to be more privileged than they are.

"All against all" is how we roll in this neoliberal political system created by the movers and shakers of the two right wings of one duopoly. Divide-and-conquer is the real propaganda tool which political leaders utilize time and time again to keep the rich comfortable, and the poor and middle class either apathetic or pitted violently against one another in a constant battle for sheer survival.

The Democratic wing "lost" this time because resentment and pain can no longer be tempered by false hope. And probably next time the Republican wing will "lose" because that's the normal cyclical tendency; from frying pan to fire and back again to scorched frying pan.

 And maybe a miracle will happen, and the remaining ashes of any legitimacy they still possess will go the way of the funerary urn.

Notice how Obama himself frames his failure in "public relations" in terms of one elite faction at war with another elite faction. He and Steve Kroft are members of the same class, the media-political complex. They're having a private conversation that, through the magic of TV, we're allowed to witness. But we are not allowed to participate or contribute to it in any meaningful way. We're supposed to take it for granted that a bunch of experts and technocrats were "doing the right thing" and these busy bees with credentials had simply neglected to tell us proles about their total awesomeness. If only we'd known, we would have stormed Washington in support of... what, exactly?

It seems never to have occurred to Obama that the "folks" whom his propaganda campaign failed to reach were out in the streets in 2011 protesting Wall Street greed and wealth inequality, and that his police state and his Democratic governors summarily broke up the Occupy camps in one week-long orchestrated campaign of state-sanctioned violence.

Yes, Republicans are and always will be nihilistic sadists. And as long as basic insight and awareness and empathy continue to be deliberately scrapped from its own agenda, the Democratic Party will never recover. The utter lack of respect for the intelligence of American citizens displayed by Barack Obama in just the interview clip above is what is truly shocking and scandalous.

 When one-quarter of all American children are going to bed hungry, he wants us to think that all we need is a more comforting bedtime story.

Please don't let the door hit you on the way out, Obama. Good night, and good riddance.

****

On my own personal and self-serving behalf, meanwhile, I am proud to announce that today marks the sixth anniversary of Sardonicky. 

Here's a reprise of my very first post, entered on Jan. 13, 2011. (Remember the good old days when all good liberals were so shocked and appalled at Sarah Palin? Little did we guess about the fright-fest that was truly in store for us. "Caribou Barbie" has actually improved with age, though, because now she's bipartisanly warning us about Trump's crony capitalism and blaming Obama for the "Mexican Muslim" airport shooter.)

Out, Out Damned Spot! 

Blaming Sarah Palin for the Tucson Massacre is just as unfair as blaming Lady Macbeth for the mayhem at Inverness Castle.  All these two maligned ladies did was lay out the weapons: Sarah, her cross-hair graphics and Lady M, a few carelessly placed daggers.  Subtle hints do not a murderess make.

Along with their histrionics and lust for power, both women have a fixation with blood. Palin, subdued from her usual frenzied harangues, looked like a robot on tranquillizers  as she You-tubed herself into the queen of the martyrs and the victim of “blood libel” of the biased liberal lamestream punditocracy.  To give her credit, I doubt she knows the anti-Semitic origin of the phrase, but the blood part likely was what appealed to her.  And Lady Mac was  totally obsessed with blood, even to the point of sleepwalking and being unable to wash the imaginary stains from her hands. Sarah, of course, also had difficulty scrubbing her website clean of the infamous Cross-Hairs map.  It had already gone viral all over cyberspace. “Out, out damned cache!” could be heard echoing through the valley, according to Wasilla lore.
The Lady Sarah really doth protest too much, methinks, and all the sanguineous references in the world can’t mask the fact that this anti-mother/mama grizzly has ice water running through her veins and a stony heart totally lacking in the warmth of human kindness.