Centrist Dems: The Timing of Our Bullshit Is Everything

Although establishment Democrats say they're dipping their toes into the populist waters, they're not ready to take the plunge quite yet. It is simply too early to campaign on such policies as Medicare for All or enhanced Social Security.

After all, it's not the day-to-day pressing problems of their constituents that concern them. It's the optimal timing of their populist message to give them the best chance of winning more power for themselves in the 2018 midterm elections. If they demand too much for us too soon, their own personal chances might be damaged.

So right now, these affluent politicians are perfectly content to stand by and watch the Trump administration destroy itself, and by extension, the country and the entire world. Senate Majority Leader and career pol Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) blithely told Politico that there will be plenty of time to "hammer on" Democratic proposals next year. The fierce urgency of now simply does not apply within the smug Clinton/Obama wing of the party.

As the GOP suffers self-inflicted wounds on health care and Trump gets bogged down by an FBI probe of his ties to Russia, many in the party believe they should not risk getting in the way, at least not for now.
“It’s less important what our national message is right now, given that Donald Trump is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room,” moderate Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.) told POLITICO.
“Quite frankly, the less we have to say about it, the better.”

Translation: let the oxygen-deprived masses eat Russian teacake as politicians feverishly fund-raise off all the fear they are instigating. Who needs to be socially or economically proactive at a time like this? Certainly not the oligarchs who profit every time there is a manufactured crisis. There's plenty of time for the next periodic onslaught of bullshit and empty campaign promises. 

The task ahead for Democrats, then, may be to bait Trump into swinging and missing on bread-and-butter economic issues just as he did on health care, while simultaneously plugging their own plan.
For now, Democrats are happy to stay on the sidelines while Republicans stumble through health care, tax reform and other red-meat issues.

Translation: the task ahead for Democrats is to act the part of good cops in the reality show which now substitutes for governance. Heaven forbid that they hoist their carcasses off the sidelines and enter the fray, demanding universal health care coverage. Heaven forbid they pay attention to the will of the people: liberals and conservatives alike are yammering for government sponsored single payer health care like never before.

The share of the US population saying that the government should be responsible for ensuring health care for everybody has increased to 60 percent, up nine points in just the last year. More than eight in 10 self-identified liberals believe that health care is a basic human right and should be guaranteed by government. And the fact that one in three Republican voters now believes it too is particularly striking.

As Ryan Cooper writes, 

The AHCA is extraordinarily unpopular because it takes coverage and subsidies away from people, and a majority believe that it should be the government's responsibility to make sure everyone is covered. Fundamentally, Medicare is very popular, a fact only partially covered up by generations of red-baiting and duplicitous austerian propaganda. If Democrats had simply bulled ahead with a single payer-esque plan in 2009, instead of the comlicated and heavily means-tested ObamaCare, they almost certainly would have done better than they actually did in the 2010 election.

But the heck with what's good for the American people, who are prematurely dying at near-record rates. Ask not what is good for you and your family. Ask instead what is good for the leaders of the Democratic Party.

And then ask yourself whether this exclusive party of wealthy lackadaisical spectators even deserves to exist any more.

Adventures in Hillaryland

I wrote a critical response to a New York Times column (originally and grotesquely titled Hillary - Free At Last!)  by Nicholas Kristof, who recapped his softball interview with Clinton at last week's Women in the World Conference. 

After my comment about the ignored class war was published, myriad digital tongues emerged from the ethosphere to castigate me for my blasphemy, and for my failure to properly appreciate all the good things that Hillary, her ultra-rich friends and donors, and our great transnational corporations have been selflessly doing behind the scenes for me and for all the other bitter and jealous have-nots of America. One disgusted Times reader actually demanded to know if I am a Russian.

It's getting bad -- oops, I mean divisive -- out there, people. Being affluent and stuck in those stages (denial, depression, anger) of Hillary grief must be such a dreadful thing. I'll write more about the cult of MccCarthyite Mourners later in this post - but first, I'll let Summit Founder Tina Brown explain the purpose of the confab in question on its official website:

The three-day Women in the World Summit, held at New York City’s Lincoln Center, presents powerful new female role models whose personal stories illuminate the most pressing international issues. They range from CEOs and world leaders to artists, activists, peacemakers, and firebrand dissidents. The Summit’s vivid journalistic narratives, high-impact video, and fast-paced staging have made it the premier platform to showcase women of impact. Increasingly, Women in the World also includes the participation, onstage and in the audience, of men who champion women.
Past participants have included Hillary Clinton, Christine Lagarde, Angelina Jolie, Diane von Furstenberg, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, Tom Hanks, Malala Yousafzai, Oprah Winfrey, Barbra Streisand and many more amazing and inspiring women from all over the world.

A couple of truly memorable quotes from this year's "celebs and luminaries" page really stood out for me.

"None of us can do everything, but each of us can do something." -- Meryl Streep.

"There's a lot of estrogen in this room!" -- Katie Couric. 

Even though it's billed as a conference by, for and of females, the hosts always invite a few A-List men to the proceedings in order to prove that one can be male, hunky, powerful and feminist all in one package. This year's hotties were Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Kristof's fellow Times columnist and liberal interventionist Thomas Friedman.

Why not? The Times helped foot the bill for the show, after all, with other costs defrayed by the $350 price of admission along with generous donations from Toyota and a whole host of corporate sponsors. The luministas all dutifully posed on the red carpet in front of the car manufacturer's corporate logo: Let's Go Places!

So it was only natural that Kristof would be granted the first one-on-one interview with Hillary Clinton since the election, right? He begins his column with the requisite bathos:

 In the most wrenching, humiliating way possible, Hillary Clinton has been liberated. She is now out of the woods again, and speaking her mind.

As I noted, the original title of his piece was borrowed from the gospel song of enslaved people called Free At Last, which Martin Luther King also made the centerpiece of his iconic I Have a Dream speech. So in retrospect, it appears that wiser heads at the Gray Lady prevailed, and reslugged the Kristof column a more seemly Free to Speak Her Mind.

This was an apt choice, because there were relatively few women of color either on stage or in the audience of the Women in the World summit. As Antoinette Isama, a journalist who attended the event, writes:

As I walked in to receive my press pass, the production of event amplified the posh David H. Koch Theater with bright lights, a Women In The World Boutique, a lounge courtesy of Toyota and free refreshments and munchies courtesy of Pepsi (lol). It was a corporate company’s dream to rub elbows with an occasion such as this—because women rule the world, right?
Before the conversation between Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, with Katie Couric called “How To Raise A Feminist” began, there was an a cappella rendition of the unofficial theme song of the Women’s March accompanied by a montage of pink pussy hats. From the welcome speech by the Summit’s Founder and CEO, Tina Brown, it seems like the march, where millions of women gathered in D.C. and around the world in solidarity to stick the middle finger to patriarchy and Trump was the main theme to reflect on throughout the Summit.

Isama says that when she looked around the press section, she noticed that she was the only black reporter among a sea of white faces. Ditto for the wealthy attendees in the audience.

My experience at the Women In The World Summit pretty much confirmed why I don’t go out of my way to attend events like this. I don’t understand the point of having these grand and fancy events for [white] women to pat themselves on the back, singing several renditions of kumbaya through the tired tropes of heart wrenching and dramatic stories that come from women of color who participated. I would think, especially in our intense climate around the world, that it would be imperative to utilize this moment to drive folks to keep taking action and actually doing something instead of being reactionary.
Access was another huge issue for me. If I didn’t have the privilege of obtaining a press pass, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to attend. The first time I even heard this event was a thing was last year—and this has been a yearly event for 8 years now. There was a price range for tickets, where the highest priced at $350. So I had to ask myself—with the lack of people of color in the actual audience that I managed to see, who’s the intended audience for this? It may not be for people like me.

Oh, but despite all her own hardships and devastation, Hillary Clinton is finally free, people! Kristof quotes her as saying:

 "I just had to make up my mind that, yes, I was going to get out of bed, and, yes, I was going to go for a lot of long walks in the woods. And I was going to see my grandchildren a lot and spend time with my family and my friends. They have rallied around me in an amazing way.”

What - she thought Chelsea and the grandkids were going to snub her because she lost the election?

So now that she's finally out of her shell and free to speak "bluntly," Hillary Clinton's version of honesty is to continue blaming her loss on misogyny. The more successful a woman is, the more likely she is to be a victim of those who "unconsciously" resent people like her, she told Kristof. And she stayed stalwartly honest and true to the other official reasons that she lost: the Russian "plunder" of her campaign emails and the FBI investigation into her use of a private internet server.

Russia’s hacking of campaign emails “was a more effective theft even than Watergate,” she said, adding: “We aren’t going to let somebody sitting in the Kremlin, with 1,000 agents, with bots and trolls and everybody else, try to mix up in our election. We’ve got to end that, and we need to make sure that’s a bipartisan, American commitment.”

The most telling symbol of Hillary Clinton's freedom, according to Kristof, is that she is once again using "Rodham" as her middle name. Free at last, free at least, Great God almighty she's free at last.

Now, realizing that the New York Times reader commentariat is chock-full of Clinton supporters, I was as politely sarcastic, or sarcastically polite, as possible in my own published comment. which I think dovetails the classist aspect of the summit with Antoinette Isama's critique of its "colorblind" racist undertones. The current debate of classism v. racism is a false one, in my opinion, because neoliberalism relies on both for its continued survival. Plutocrats and philoanthrocapitalists love to showcase a certain select few black and brown people on the public stage, because it allows them to deny there is even such a thing as the class war. It shows citizen-consumers how liberal and magnanimous and socially responsible they are as they suck up even more of the globe's wealth for themselves.

The Women in the World summit series is nothing if not virtue-signalling writ large.

So here is my "controversial" comment (for once, mine was the first one submitted yesterday, so anyone interested in reading all the responses to it can easily find them lby selecting the "oldest" option.)

"Clinton acknowledged that Democrats need to do a better job reaching working-class Americans, but she added that part of her problem was that many voters were already struggling with tumult in their lives, 'and you layer on the first woman president over that, and I think some people, women included, had real problems.'”

Too bad that hardly any working class women were actually there to hear Mrs. Clinton's wise and heartfelt words. That's because  six out of every 10 American voters don't even have $500 in savings and thus couldn't afford the $350 cost of admission to the event, held in a glitzy venue which billionaire arch-conservative David H. Koch so humbly named after himself.

The millions of women working two or three part-time service sector jobs couldn't even get time off to be inspired long distance, via live-streaming, by Clinton and other media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley personalities.True, corporate sponsors including PepsiCo, P&G and AT&T did subsidize some tickets to the live event. But. like everything else in this Land of the Free, it was a high-odds lottery.

Yes, many Trump voters are misogynistic. Yes, Comey did Hillary wrong.

Still, to listen to her explain to a theater full of plutocrats that she lost struggling voters because of her "success" and gender feels only slightly less insulting than once again lumping them into her Basket of Deplorables.

But anyway, let us rejoice that she's out of her shell and free to finally be herself.

Several dozen readers reacted, some supportive and some critical. I'll only include the real doozies, just to show that liberalism does indeed seem to be inexorably moving to the right. And since comments were shut off before I could respond, I will include my reactions to these utterly enjoyable responses as well.

Ed Chang, NYC:  Wow, totally unfair. Just because you are unable to make it to the party doesn't mean that the guests are uncaring about your needs. I mean do you want Hillary to start touring Walmarts around the country? Is that really the best use of her time? Or, alternatively, speak to a high profile group of people who may be able to donate to her causes and at the same time get a high profile write-up in the Times, as well as a video archive of the entire event on YouTube? It's simply more efficient to do the latter.

Sadly this is more proof of the jealousy some women feel towards more successful women, hence the election loss.

(No, Ed, we wouldn't want Hillary to catch cooties from a Walmart greeter. Plus, I must compliment you on the nice use of one of my favorite neoliberal buzzwords: efficiency.)

Mary Ann Donahue, NYS:  To Karen Garcia ~ I am disappointed that you, you who are well informed and well spoken would reduce Hillary Clinton's basket of deplorables comment to the oft repeated damning sound bite. Taken out of context, it distorts the understanding and compassion that Clinton conveyed in the full text of her remarks.
Here is the last paragraph just to remind people who are so eager and willing to diminish her that she is a woman of rare intellect, insight and work ethic. We would be a better nation if she had been elected.
""But the other basket -- and I know this because I see friends from all over America here -- I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas -- as well as, you know, New York and California -- but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end.Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.""
Thank you Hillary.

(I know, I know, there's a special place in hell for me and all women who didn't support Hillary. It's sad but true that the "deplorables" part of her full remarks is the one that will go down as one of the of the more tone-deaf recorded remarks in all of political history. Just as Clinton professed concern for the downtrodden at the Koch Theater event, she  made her previous infamous remarks at another venue catering the extremely wealthy donor class. Additionally, she showed her true neoliberal hand when she asserted that struggling people only "feel" that they have been let down. They have been shafted, screwed and cheated in actual fact. They do not suffer from an emotional problem, they suffer from a poverty problem and hunger problem and a jobless problem.)

Stephanie Sommer, St. Paul: Ah, the politics of resentment roars its ugly head once again. Her success isn't the cause of others suffering. Its not a zero sum game. Moreover, her policies would have addressed so much of the suffering you mention, and that is exactly why conservatives hate her.

(Her policies did not include Medicare for All or a $15 minimum wage or world peace or restoration of Glass-Steagall. The suffering would have gone on, the neoliberal dream would be alive and kicking, whether she was president or not.)

arbitrot, Paris:  Methinks Ms. Garcia is projecting her own guilt from the campaign, when she regularly expressed her displeasure with Sec. Clinton as opposed to another authentic hero, Sen Bernie Sanders.

Not that Ms. Garcia voted for Donald Trump, or even Jill Stein. I assume she pulled the lever for Clinton if only faute de mieux.

But I'll bet even Maureen Dowd did that.

Clinton didn't lose the 2016 election. Just a few too many self-righteous, woolly-headed, and downright politically naive Democrats did by trying too hard to cut Clinton down to their size.

("arbitrot" must possess magical thinking skills way across the ocean, purporting to know how I voted. And this is not the first time that my critiques of Democrats automatically turn me into Maureen Dowd. I always have to chuckle when this happens, because it is so sexist. Ever notice how women who write opinion pieces are often characterized as shrill, catty and bitchy?  And what's with the woolly-headed insult? I assume and hope that"arbitrot" implies that I'm stupid, and not that other meaning of the pejorative.)

David L. Jr, Mississippi:  Until your ardent desire to help the poor is trumped by your understanding of how they benefit from a growing private sector, your analytical absurdities will persist. Also, because you and Bernie Sanders often talk up Scandinavia: Scandinavians had greater levels of equality BEFORE their social democracies were built. Doesn't this tell you that it likely has more to do with culture than economics? Indeed, Nordics living in America outperform Nordic citizens themselves!

And David Koch is hardly conservative, whatever the media claims. There's nothing conservative about the man at all. He supports conservative candidates and then funds groups that pressure them into taking extreme anti-government economic positions, which aren't really "conservative" so much as revolutionary. He loathes their social views. While I disagree with him, I refuse to permit your implication that socialists care more about paupers than libertarians, which is false.

You really despise incorporation, don't you? Corporations built the modern world. Without them, it wouldn't exist. They didn't develop in the Islamic world; or in China, where hereditary bureaucrats oversaw state monopolies -- the one place where private companies did take hold in Asia, Japan, was a smashing success. Stratification is a product of the difference in ability as well as circumstances. Trying to level society in the name of an abstract idea is a recipe for disaster. You'll derogate anyone who succeeds in life.

(I can't even.)

 Lisa, Charlotte: And when all is said and done, Karen, you and the rest of Bernie's crowd own Trump. I won't insult you by pointing out he silliness of arguing that she should not have been speaking in a venue founded by David Koch. Lots of people did not like Hillary for lots of reasons. But surely you can't argue that her candidacy was in any way equivalent to Trump's because reality does not agree with you. I'd argue that this should have been blindingly clear to a person of your knowledge and intellect.

(I was wondering when somebody would finally blame me and the Berniebros for Trump. It's one of their favorite tropes. Who knew we had so much power?)

JS: I've seen her speak, free, to huge audiences in the poorest venues. Here she speaks and is heard around the world. A leader needs to do both, and she has, but only a woman is criticized in this manner, and that has to stop.

(Several readers accused me of picking on Hillary's greed just because she's a woman, and neglecting to ever criticize other politicians, such as Barack Obama, for doing the exact same money-grubbing. They obviously have never read my blog or previous Times commentary. And I have to ask, would Lucrezia Borgia be getting this kind of defense from modern liberals, with her XX chromosomes also becoming a protective shield from accountability?)

Michael Joseph, NYC:  Karen, you seem almost to take it as a personal insult that there are different classes in America, that corporations target certain populations, and that affluent people also have certain rights. I find it insulting that you would castigate all middle-class supporters of Hillary as plutocrats, that you assume a single-minded fixation on class constitutes some kind of "vision" or gives you moral superiority, and that you dismiss with a condescending sniff any injustice or tyranny "Yes, many Trump voters are misogynistic" that isn't Marxist-based. You exhibit the same limiting "foundational certainties" about class that the Trump people do, only from the opposing perspective. Both belief sets seem mired in the same 19th century ideologies that proved so disastrous for the 20h century.

(OK, I'll try to stay in my assigned place from now on.)

njlea, Seattle:  How much do The Con Don and Robber Barons - and their arm candy - spend on clothes, McCarthy?

What an out-of-touch comment. She is the most admired woman in the United States and one of the most admired women in the world. Women like other women to dress well. She is actually very conservative.

Are you Russian?

(No, but my paternal ancestors were. Catherine the Great gave them political asylum after they were persecuted in their native Germany on the basis of their religion. The clan, mostly independent farmers, later went back to Germany after one of the later czars, I think it was Alexander, tried to draft them into the armed services. So I guess you'd better squeal me out to PropOrNot, or if that fails, maybe alert the ICE goon squad.)

Open Thread

Trump's Violent Instincts Get Glowing Reviews

It's not Donald Trump's ego that's turned out to be his Achilles heel. It's his maudlin heart. And the mainstream media are swooning with the revelation that the much-maligned president isn't so bad after all. How could he be, when he sentimentally ordered a massive Tomahawk missile attack on Syria in revenge for the gas attack deaths of 85 people, including two dozen children?

No matter that Trump just signed an executive order drastically reducing the number of Syrian refugees he will allow into the US. When he sees dead Syrian babies on TV, his grandfatherly instinct is to kill more babies, to show that he is a more virile baby-killer than Assad or Al Nusra or Al Qaeda, or whatever terrorist group is actually responsible for the latest chemical attack.

Trump's emotional response to suffering babies does not extend to the hundreds of little ones being killed by American bombs raining down on Mosul, Iraq. But to be fair, he probably didn't even see those graphic images, given that US corporate media haven't been airing them, and Congress hasn't been too bothered by them. After all, the bipartisan leaders have got RussiaGate to distract them as well as to mold us into compliance.

Trump is known to be a CNN addict, and CNN has been running the graphic images of the Syrian gas victims in a near-constant closed feedback loop for maximum public opinion-molding. It helped enormously that on the day after the gas attack, the cable channel also began running Northrup Grumman's family-friendly stealth bomber ads (see my last post) -- twice during the one after-school hour that I could bear to watch. Since the military-industrial complex has to keep making and selling weapons to make their investors happy, they've taken to marketing high-tech war directly to struggling families, whose children's employment prospects would be otherwise bleak without the prospect and acceptance of constant global violence.

It also helped enormously that the enormously popular war hawk Hillary Clinton went on TV on Thursday to urge the bombing of Syrian airfields in retribution for the gas attack. Nobody, not even Trump, can apparently resist doting grandma Hillary Clinton and the war-hungry neocons. Keep saying that Russia is the enemy, and enough people will eventually believe that her own horrible policies didn't cost her the election.

So practically overnight, Trump has gone from being liberal anathema to a humane commander in chief. He is doing exactly what Hillary wanted to do.

"Trump's Heart Came First," gushed one of today's approving New York Times pieces, comparing Barack Obama's own unmanly unwillingness to cross his own red line to The Donald's sudden pragmatic bravery. Never mind that Obama had bombed Syria ever since, with a whopping 26,000 of them dropped last year alone. The media narrative had Obama acting with his superior brain, with a veneer of decorum and modesty. But as Mark Landler writes, Trump is a more unpredictable, visceral kind of guy:

President Trump has always taken pride in his readiness to act on instinct, whether in real estate or reality television. On Thursday, an emotional Mr. Trump took the greatest risk of his young presidency, ordering a retaliatory missile strike on Syria for its latest chemical weapons attack. In a dizzying 48 hours, he upended a foreign policy doctrine based on putting America first and avoiding messy conflicts in distant lands.

Mr. Trump’s advisers framed his decision in the dry language of international norms and strategic deterrence. In truth, it was an emotional act by a man suddenly aware that the world’s problems were now his — and that turning away, to him, was not an option.

It's a far cry from 2013, when Barack Obama was considering his own vengeful mass attack, until his brain overcame his emotions and he desisted, performing one of the few independent and courageous acts of his entire war-torn presidency. But while Obama was still mulling over his options, Citizen Trump had tweeted in emotional ALL CAPS to his predecessor:

Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump)

AGAIN, TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER, DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA - IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING!

Sep 5, 2013 · Twitter

According to the UK's Telegraph, a few of Trump's missiles went astray overnight and killed four children. 

But don't worry about World War III, soothes the liberal explainer website Vox, because this illegal act of aggression was really meant as nothing more than a Sunday school sermon delivered by the moral arbiter of the world. Quoting a "liberal interventionist" from the Council on Foreign Relations, reporter Zach Beauchamp explains:

“Trump's statement makes it clear [that] US cruise missile strikes are for enhancing [the] international norm against chemical weapons use, not protecting Syrian civilians,” (Micah) Zenko tweeted.

The implication here is that Trump has no desire to launch any more strikes unless Assad uses more chemical weapons. If Assad sticks to his normal tactics, and kills children with explosives rather than banned chemicals, then the United States will leave him alone. This attack will, it seems, be a one-off — or at least part of a relatively small battery of punitive strikes.

But limited strikes, historically, don’t always stay limited. We have no idea if this will actually stop Assad from using banned weapons, or what Trump would do if he did. And a sense of “ownership” of the Syrian civil war afterward could lead to even further US escalation.

“Tonight's strikes may deter Assad, compel Russian cooperation with US interests, [and] not lead to deeper US military involvement,” Zenko tweeted. “However, if these rosy scenarios do all occur, it would be almost unprecedented in US military interventions dating back to [1975].”

Not mentioned was the inconvenient truth that Wednesday's chemical attack could have been a false flag operation, much like the one in 2013 described by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. That Assad is the instigator of Wednesday's chemical assault, rather than, say, CIA-funded militants, is taken for granted. So if the false flag scenario is true, the real culprits will only be encouraged to conduct even more lethal operations. They've discovered Trump's true Achilles heel: that his instincts substitute for critical thinking skills. He is as incurious as George W. Bush.

So Trump has miraculously pivoted from bitter vetch to tasting as American as apple pie. Even his hypocritical critics are finding it hard to curb their suddenly unhealthy appetites for him. Because nothing brings the rich and powerful plutocrats of the media/political complex together better than war. Ka-ching goes the beat of their maudlin little hearts.

And as ever, the Invisible Guy in the Sky is totally on the side of state-sponsored American terrorism. Because the USA only commits humanitarian slaughter and bloodshed in order to end inhumane slaughter and bloodshed and promote peace and harmony throughout the world it has destabilized.

CNN takes total unabashed credit for inspiring Trump's violent instincts with its graphic TV images.

Marketing Death to a Sick America

Wherever there is pain and oppression, the lords of predatory capitalism will always find a way to profit from it. 

Are you a poor black kid who can't retrieve your wayward football from the unkempt yard containing Cujo's rabid litter-mate? In your kind of neighborhood, you obviously don't seek help from a responsible adult. You definitely don't want to call the cops. So you just close your eyes and fantasize that you're the super-hero designer of Northrup Grumman's stealth bomber. Your lost football will then magically float back to you just like an unmanned Predator drone. Because let's face it: you live in a Perma-War economy now, and the Trump administration is taking money away from poverty programs and giving it to the Pentagon. But please don't despair, all you poor and hungry children of America, because the Military-Industrial Complex is here to help. What a "turbulent world" needs is not more education and medical care and social programs. It needs more spying and destruction and maiming and killing. And so it's only natural that Northrup Grumman would take Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech and made it their very own.

Are you a working class refugee hopelessly hooked on opioids? Astra Zeneca is here to help - not by building rehab facilities, of course, but by pushing an anti-constipation drug designed specifically for junkies like you. Of course, the actor who plays the junkie on TV doesn't look like an actual junkie. In fact he is very hot. He is not only hale and hearty, he wears a hard hat and appears to be the boss on a major construction site. So the subliminal message here is that it's not the Oxy or the heroin that's holding you back. Those drugs are good for you, build up your muscles better than steroids. Your main problem, dude, is your embarrassing inability to have a bowel movement. So get "unplugged" and dream the dream of a full-time job.  Maybe you can even hallucinate piloting a stealth bomber while you're sitting on the toilet. Oh, and always indulge your addiction responsibly.

Are you a black or brown person who fears that you will one day get shot during a routine traffic stop or sentenced to solitary confinement for possessing a small amount of dope? No need to block highways or stage sit-down strikes or meet with politicians. Instead, always have an ice cold can of Pepsi at the ready as the weapon of choice to render your oppressor harmless. Or better yet, allow white super-model Kendall Jenner to do the honors for you, with a Bob Marley imitator crooning in the background for some added social justice ambience. And the world will live in perfect harmony forever as people slurp their sugary drinks and develop diabetes... which might sadly go untreated because there is no universal health care in America. Maybe Astra Zeneca can help. Or maybe you can join the military and bomb other oppressed people in turbulent countries far, far away from America the Beautiful.

Why bother with the messiness of Black Lives Matter, when #ResistanceInc is the cool way to go? We mustn't let the class war rear its ugly head. It might disturb the oligarchs, who only want to help through the magic of marketing more death to desperate people barely holding on in the end stage of Capitalism. 

The first rule of free market neoliberalism is to create a crisis. The second rule is never let it go to waste.

When Gut-Think Replaces Journalism

New York Times columnist Charles Blow has channeled his inner George Bush with his latest column. 

Just as Bush knew deep within his gut that Iraq's Saddam Hussein was hording weapons of mass destruction, so too does Blow instinctively know that Russia has meddled in the American electoral process. Despite the lack of direct proof, "this is not a debatable issue. This is not a witch hunt. This has happened."

No matter that "we are still not conclusively able to connect the dots on the question of whether there was any coordination or collusion between members of Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russians who interfered in our election to benefit him, but those dots do continue to multiply at an alarming rate."

With not a hint of irony, Blow complains that all the subterfuge, deflection, finger-pointing and misdirection are preventing liberal pundits like him from finding within the dot pattern whatever it is they want to see. They know, deep within their guts, that criminal collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is there. It just has to be. 

Therefore, they fight subterfuge with innuendo, misdirection with distraction. RussiaGate is duly exposed as a hall of mirrors.

"There is something there, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is," Blow jokingly continues. "And unlike some others, I find no glee in the prospect of something amiss."

How quickly Blow pivots from knowing deep within his gut that "this is not a debatable issue" to it being the mere prospect of something not quite right. If he is that un-gleeful about his innuendo-spreading, I'd recommend an immediate appointment with a sympathetic professional.

Perhaps Blow could begin with a therapeutic reading of philosopher W.K. Clifford who wrote that "it is wrong, always and everywhere, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Either that, or take a remedial crash course in Journalism 101.

As Stephen Law writes in the philosophy journal TPM Online, people like Bush and Blow who "just know" things despite possessing no evidence to back up their assertions are using the same technique employed by so-called psychics who claim to commune with the dead on a regular basis. They get away with it, because of course there is always the possibility that they are correct, that they can see things that mere mortals cannot. If Bush and Blow sincerely believe in what they say, then who are we to doubt their sincerity and their good faith?

  So as to further deflect rational thinking, Blow next complains about the "prurience" of the content-consuming American public. Unlike the high intellectual capacity of his own instincts, the gut of the rabble is not prudent enough to digest innuendo. They simply lack the intestinal fortitude to believe in the cult of Hillary Really Won This Election.

Having duly instilled doubt and confusion into the brain-centered minds of his gutless readers, Blow's editorial gaslighting finally comes to a blessed end. He feebly attempts to cover his own rear end as he smarmily admits:

At this point this is all conjecture. First we must clear the hurdle of finding out exactly what happened and who was involved. That could take months, if not years.

We must now decide how to process the mounting suggestions of impropriety.

Charles Blow seems to be suffering from a very painful case of mental constipation. He has imbibed so many undigestible weasel-worded dots that the "mounting suggestions of impropriety" seem stuck in the middle of his mind-gut. He offers neither evidence nor solutions. All he can emit in his  column is one more futile Clintonoid blast of editorial gas.

As I wrote in my published Times comment on his piece, 

There's plenty of real, solid evidence against Trump, evidence that in a just society would have sentenced him to prison decades ago. But rather than admit that he is merely the end-product of a corrupt political system, that he's a lot like those too big to fail corrupt financial institutions that get bailed out time and time again, we pursue McCarthyism in the name of neoliberal predatory capitalism.

Enough with instinctive journalism. It's time not only for a gut check but for a reality check.

Open Thread/Links

In the spirit of the folly day....

The New York Times finally admits that RussiaGate is a cheap spy thriller knockoff. It's nevertheless published one of those handy catch-up guides for distracted viewers who might have missed a few episodes in what they call this "bizarre Washington drama." It's comprised of the usual Tweets and echo chamber reports from such reliable corporate actors as CNN and, of course, itself.

  But the Handy Guide mysteriously omits the latest plot twist, in which Wikileaks reveals that the CIA itself could have been the original hacker/leaker of the DNC and Clinton campaign email caches. The spy agency has a Marble Framework tool, which enables it to install and hide source malware and make it appear as though cyberattacks are originating from anywhere else but Langley, Virginia.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Team Trump is struggling mightily to regain control of "the narrative." They're all pretty upset about being relegated to the supporting actor/villain category. Trump has the nerve to call it a witch hunt, while the hunters are sticking to their original story that their own epic unpopularity is due entirely to Vlad Putin personally planting the virus of discontent into 320 million otherwise happy American brains. Anybody daring to criticize the Democratic Party or the Security State or Permawar or Wall Street or inequality is secretly thinking in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Donald Trump himself was so rattled by the spectacle that he fled the Oval Office before signing some executive orders he'd gone to all the trouble of touting during a signing ceremony spectacle in the Oval Office.

In another bit of comic relief, a White House "ethics" report dumped on Friday night reveals that the Trump family members and cronies in charge of the government are even more obscenely rich than we thought. Welcome to the Oligarchy.

Correction: добро пожаловать к олигархии.