Desperate Dollar Democrats

Russophobia and Hillary Clinton's blame game tour must be losing a little steam, because the anti-Bernie Sanders concern trolls are back. Too many people are still Sanders supporters, and that's making the party leadership a tad nervous.

So the New York Times has been performing its own due diligence with several prominent articles in recent days gently "raising questions" about the legitimacy, if not the basic sanity, of the Bernie faction. On Sunday, the newspaper groused on its front page that Democratic "militants" are making it so hard for the Wall Street faction to achieve the real goal: winning. The Times version of a Democratic militant is somebody who is crazily demanding health care for everybody.

In effect, that makes the majority of the United States one big pitchfork-wielding mob, given that eight in 10 Democrats want single payer insurance, and three out of 10 Republicans do. Therefore, "hippie-punching" is being elevated to a whole new level by the increasingly desperate Neoliberal Thought Collective of which the Times is such a faithful mouthpiece.

As Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin inform their readers:

 Democrats are facing a widening breach in their party, as liberal activists dream of transforming the health care system and impeaching President Trump, while candidates in hard-fought elections ask wary voters merely for a fresh chance at governing.

The growing tension between the party’s ascendant militant wing and Democrats competing in conservative-leaning terrain, was on vivid, split-screen display over the weekend. In Chicago, Senator Bernie Sanders led a revival-style meeting of his progressive devotees, while in Atlanta, Democrats made a final push to seize a traditionally Republican congressional district.

All that centrist Democrats are saying to voters is, please, give the superior knowledge class of the plutocracy one more chance to do right by you. All they want is to govern you as responsibly, as freshly as a sprig of plastic-wrapped mint. The Berniecrats, on the other hand, are just a ragtag bunch of tent revival militants smoking a lesser herb. Sound familiar?

Since that particular article didn't go over so well within the reader commentariat, the Times has now proceeded to play the age card. "Is Sanders, At 75, Too Old for 2020? His Fiercest Fans Say No" is the headline of the piece written by Yamiche Alcindor.

This headline contains two implicit messages: yes, of course Bernie is too old, you dolts! And you progressives who agree with his policies can't possibly be serious, mature voters. You are "fierce fans" who operate with your emotions rather than with your rational minds and your own agency. You see Bernie not as a politician in a representative oligarchy, but as a Mick Jagger-type rock star in a democracy who will instantaneously grant your most whimsical wishes.

With their idol turning 79 in 2020, some fans of Senator Bernie Sanders who had gathered for the second annual People’s Summit were thinking wistfully about the next progressive hero who could take the presidential baton: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts might make a good next leader, though she at times appears too cautious.

The subliminal message: you're smoking way too much hash. Grow the hell up.

The Times did not mention that many Sanders supporters have increasingly been urging him to forget about reforming the Democratic Party from within, and instead help them form a brand new party. But as Sanders explains to Nina Turner in this Real News Network interview, he is still taking a wait and see approach. He's actually acting pretty cautiously and conservatively for such a "radical" politician.

Here's my published comment on Alcindor's story:

 In general, all politicians on the national stage are "too old." And too rich, and too esconced in near-permanent power to have any earthly idea how their putative constituents are struggling just to get by.

The divide between the centrist Democrats and the more progressive Sanders faction has as much to do with class and ideology as it does with age. And given that the rich are living longer, chronological age becomes moot. When you're a multimillionaire member of the Senate, for example, you have all the affordable health care you could possibly want.

The average age of the Democratic House leadership is 72. Unfortunately for us, the GOP leaders in that body are slashing the social safety net with youthful abandon: they're in the prime of their misbegotten lives, averaging out at just 42 years of age.

Eighteen of the 33 Senators running for re-election in 2018 will be 65 or older.

Even Elizabeth Warren will be close to 70 should she choose to seek her party's presidential nomination. In order for younger people to succeed at electoral politics, we have to get the money out. We should also impose term limits on congress critters, so that younger, poorer candidates have a fighting chance to get elected locally and then eventually run for president before their Medicare kicks in.

Down with the Oldigarchy.

http://blog.quorum.us/the-115th-congress-is-among-the-oldest-in-history-1

(Incidentally, the Times just announced that it has radically changed its commenting system. No more pre-publication human moderation, no more waiting for your remarks to be printed, no more preference given to elite green check commentators: a Google algorithm shall set you free, and most articles will now be open to comments. An explanation, of sorts, is here).

People's Summit

The Real News Network is broadcasting a livestream of this weekend's People's Summit. You can watch it here.

Bernie Sanders was scheduled to be the keynote speaker tonight.

Update -- Bernie's entire speech:

 

Jeremy Corbyn's unexpected, de facto victory in the U.K.'s snap election has given added impetus and new optimism to stateside lefties, to say the least. The Guardian reports,

Bernie Sanders was among those to praise Labour’s result, saying it showed “people are rising up against austerity and massive levels of income and wealth inequality,” while left-leaning members of Congress said the victory would have major implications for the future of Democrats.

The question of course remains whether the "Democrats"  will also go enthusiastically left, embracing such programs as Medicare for All, or whether they will continue indulging their obsessive-compulsive Russophobic Disorder to their own ultimate detriment.

Calling Doctor Freud

My biggest "takeaway" (I do hate that word) from James Comey's testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee is that Donald Trump equates being president with being the CEO of the biggest corporation in the world.  Either that, or his demand for "loyalty" from the FBI director shows that he equates being president with being the godfather of the global mafia.

And in a perverse sort of way, Trump would be absolutely right about both job descriptions. His problem is that he doesn't stay in his proper place. Presidents have heretofore acted as super-salesmen and propagandists for the plutocracy, dutifully using their private armies (the CIA and Special Ops) without bragging and Tweeting about them. Previous presidents have carefully kept their individual psychopathies away from public view, for the most part.

In some Freudian-slipped remarks at a pre-inauguration press conference on Jan. 11th, Trump bragged to the whole world:

"As president, I could run the Trump organization, great, great company, and I could run the company—the country. I’d do a very good job [at both], but I don’t want to do that."

He doesn't want to do a good job at both, because he views the country and his company as one and the same thing: a mega-merger for the ages, if not the greatest hostile takeover the world has ever seen.

Two months into his presidency, Trump was still persisting in his job description. He again called the United States a "company" during a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel before, again, belatedly correcting himself.

As far as James Comey is concerned, has there ever been a more slippery character in the canon of Washington political theater? Now seemingly forgiven for having helped destroy Hillary Clinton right before voters went to the polls, he has morphed from villain to All-American hero, a multimillionaire golly gee willikers Boy Scout in a six foot seven frame. He pulled off the awesome stunt of forcing the Democrats and Republicans to act in the lockstep bipartisan manner so beloved of the Washington neoliberal establishment. 

He openly admitted having head-faked Trump by waving the discredited "urinating prostitutes" dossier in front of his face during the transition period as a subtle way of telling the president-elect that the Intelligence Community (another loathsome phrase if there ever was one) has what Chuck Schumer called six ways from Sunday of getting him to behave. He openly admitted to carefully transcribing every Trump conversation - a practice he never bothered with under his previous bosses, Messrs. Bush II and Obama. He openly admitted leaking these transcripts to the New York Times and other outlets - even though they are now so "classified" that he simply could not in good conscience share all the salacious contents with the American public on national TV.

Even so, Comey humble-bragged about the exhilarating freedom he now enjoys as a private citizen to destroy Trump by calling him a liar on national TV. This career prosecutor, steeped in the intricacies of criminal law, lays out a prima facie case for obstruction of justice and then sanctimoniously demurs from calling Trump's behavior criminally offensive. He is not enough of an expert.

And speaking of the subconscious, Comey's dramatic bodice-ripper account of his fraught private dinner with the Groper-in-Chief - he later told colleagues he never wanted to be alone with Trump, ever again - gains new meaning with revelations that he was once accosted as a teenager in his own suburban home by the infamous Ramsey Rapist. So Comey is apparently very sensitive to the vibes put out by serial predators.

His narrative has garnered for him empathy, if not admiration, from every woman who has ever felt intimidated by her boss.  It has also deprived Hillary Clinton of one of the main scapegoats for her election loss.

And just one more speculation before I quit: would there even be a #RussiaGate had Hillary prevailed?

I think not. After all, James Comey also unhelpfully mentioned that Vladimir Putin is an ecumenical abuser. Vlad wasn't just gunning for Hillary; he can't stand either side of the American Uniparty. He's not out to destroy the Democrats, who are already doing a pretty good job of destroying themselves.

The appeal of a liberal 21st Century Inquisition does have its limits, especially in the wake of the punishing bipartisan Age of Austerity. Voters will be apt to stay home when their only choice is between Donald "Berlusconi" Trump and the neoliberal McCarthyites of the Surveillance State.

Links

I haven't had time for original posting this week, so here are a few links to tide you over. If you'd like to comment on any of these, or on any other topic of interest to you, please feel free.

One Yemeni child is dying every 10 minutes and cholera cases have surpassed the 100,000 mark since the disease first broke out barely two months ago. This country is being blasted to smithereens by billions of dollars' worth of American and British weaponry sold to the Saudi royal family.

Even so, all Western eyes are being properly directed toward the soap opera known as As The Comey Worm Turns. From the ubiquitous countdown clocks to the special theatrical trailer scripted by the newly rehabbed ex G-Man himself, today's Senate Intelligence Committee hearing was being hyped as the blockbuster hit of the summer. If only the cable companies had been given more notice by the producers and directors of this political melodrama, I'm sure they would have upgraded it to a Pay-Per-View consumer experience.

Donald Trump chillingly boasts of despotic Saudi Arabia's infrastructure investment in the United States, and an unprecedented kleptocratic mass privatization of our public roads and public works and public services. Still, as we are persistently and forever reminded by the major media, the real crisis is that James Comey was afraid to be alone with Trump at sumptuous dinners while Yemeni children are starving. The pressure was simply unbearable.

Brits Go the Polls: The Tories are predicted to win. And why not, with savvy Obama campaign guru Jim Messina once again advising an ultra-conservative incumbent candidate? Somebody's got to manipulate the masses and preserve the Neoliberal Project and forever wars for posterity, after all.

All the News That's Fit To Suppress

You might think that a Washington protest rally with only about two dozen participants wouldn't get much media attention. But since Saturday's event was organized by an anti-Trump, anti-Russian astroturf operation called March for Truth, funded by a group of plutocrats, "intelligence community" alumni, neocon war hawks, and centrist Democratic Party operatives, you would be thinking very incorrectly indeed.

Because of the importance of the big-money backers of Resistance, Inc., the New York Times plugged the "march" on its Facebook page before giving the small-ball event some truly big league coverage in the A-section pages of its Sunday edition. For without relentless publicity, how are we, the rag-tag citizens of America, supposed to remember that Russian Meddling in Our Democracy™ is the crisis of the century?

And with the Times' cooperative failure to reveal the names of the big players behind the scenes, the Powers That Be can cling to the illusion that they still actually have the power to mold public opinion, redirecting our angst from quotidian economic concerns to ginning up a patriotic fever for war against Russia. It's not for nothing that the newspaper also unceremoniously dumped both the public editor and the whole public editor desk last week. Accountability is so yesterday.

So we never learn from reading the fawning Times piece by Nathalie Nieves that one of the main organizers of #March For Truth is a writer and "activist" named Andrea Chalupa, who recently Tweeted, with no proof, that "WikiLeaks is a proven front for the Russian government."  Her sister, Alexandra, has been exposed as the probable developer of the discredited McCarthyite website PropOrNot, which published a blacklist of some 200 independent news organizations scurrilously accused of being "unwitting" agents for Vladimir Putin and stooges for Donald J. Trump.

Indeed, the Times has engaged in a virtual coverup of the #March for Truth astroturf group's provenance. Nieves' article mostly consists of interviews with a handful of "just plain folks" who were ostensibly demanding the truth about TrumPutin complicity. (Nieves has to grudgingly admit, however, that most of the couple-dozen participants had really shown to protest against other things, like Trump's war on the environment) Still, she valiantly offers that such cool celebrities as Debra Messing have given money to "the cause" - thereby tacitly legitimizing the effort with that all-important Hollywood gloss.

We must look to the#March For Truth website for supplemental facts. (To give Nieves credit, she provided a link) All you really need is a Google and a dream to figure out what the Times doesn't bother telling you.

Perhaps what is most revealing about this astroturf movement is the involvement of so many Hillary Clinton donors and operatives, including the Chalupa sisters just mentioned. This involvement gives further credence to the largely ignored tidbit in the book "Shattered" that #RussiaGate was, in fact, the brainchild of the failed Clinton campaign itself. 

Some of the "partners" listed on the #March for Truth website:

Town Hall Project: founded by former Iowa Clinton campaign field organizer Jimmy Dahman. To its credit, this site and its app have enabled people to easily find the congressional town hall nearest them to agitate for all manner of progressive things, including single payer health insurance. To his own discredit, though, Dahman is choosing to emphasize Russophobia rather than the fact-based fear of getting sick while uninsured or underinsured. 

 "Across the country, constituents have flooded town halls to let their representatives know that they want impartial investigations into Russian interference in our elections," Dahman rather falsely brags on the March For Truth website.

Pantsuit Nation: a Hillary Clinton Facebook-originated fan group, whose founder, Libby Chamberlain, is now being harshly criticized for personally cashing in on the first person hard-luck stories of poor and minority women she collated. Therefore, Pantsuit Nation has expanded its tarnished brand into some lucrative Russia-blaming to help keep the dream alive.

Swing Left: founded by Ethan Todras-Whitehall (writer/teacher), Joshua Krafchin (marketer and entrepreneur) and Miriam Stone (brand strategist) They appear to be an honest trio of citizens just looking for congressional redistricting who now find themselves "veal-penned" into the RussiaGate franchise. This is ironic, given that the DNC had studiously ignored them, and the pro-Clinton Daily Kos had even once accused them of being Russian agents. The name Krafchin had apparently made the Russophobic hairs on the back of Democratic Party necks stand up. But now that Swing Left has been patriotically vetted, it's all good.

The Opposition - this is just another news aggregation site for anti-Trump stories. Since no actual names are listed on this blog, inquiring minds want to know: is it Hillary prop, or not?

  Stand Up America -  Founded and bankrolled by failed multimillionaire centrist carpetbagger Sean Eldridge and directed by Jessica Adair, who most recently served as Hillary Clinton's Women's Vote director in Nevada. DJ Koessler, head of Clinton's digital ops in Brooklyn HQ, is the digital director. Sean Quinn, digital strategist, formerly worked for Anne Lewis Strategies, a Democratic Party fundraising firm, whose own director previously worked in the Bill Clinton White House. This #March sponsor is so incestuous that it deserves its own diagram on Muckety.

Rise To Run:  this is one of several mystery sponsors of March of Truthiness that are so dark and so shadowy that they don't even have anonymous websites, let alone listing any human beings on them. Somebody had better check to make sure this isn't a KGB plant.

Stand Up Republic - Founded by Evan McMullin, former clandestine ops officer at the CIA and later a Goldman Sachs banker before he ran for president as an independent conservative. Co-director is Mindy Kaling (nee Finn), who worked on the Bush and Romney campaigns. Their fervid, jingoistic statement on joining the Russophobic Resistance Fighters is a real keeper:

"Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn founded Stand Up Republic to help Americans stand up in defense of the fundamental principles that have made this country the true home of liberty and a source of hope for many around the world. Stand Up Republic will build and organize a grassroots movement in defense of liberty, equality, and truth in America. Our priorities will be to uphold the Constitution and defend the democratic norms and institutions upon which the protection of our basic rights depend.

We invite all Americans committed to these timeless truths to join us today in this hallowed cause."

Party Majority - This sponsor of #March for Truth is definitely not interested in campaign finance reform. We must, they say, take full advantage of campaign finance law as it exists, not as "we" might hope it to be. Grassroots SuperPac ia not an oxymoron! But even so, this sponsor of Truthiness lies by omission in refusing to list even one single name of a person or an address on its website. Dark is Light. Ignorance is Strength. Money is money.

Rock the Vote -- "We're smart. We're passionate. We're badass. We get the job done."

 This group says its duty to democracy is to line up "cultural leaders," celebrity endorsements and fundraising concerts. Look how well that worked out for Clinton in Cleveland at the Beyoncé gala.

Rock the Vote is run by former Chicago Democratic ward heeler Carolyn DeWitt, who has previously arranged DNC convention entertainment, groomed Democratic surrogates for media appearances, and coordinated messaging between the Democratic Party and Barack Obama's Organizing for America staffers. It was founded and bankrolled by Virgin Records mogul Jeff Ayeroff.

Oppstn.Org: Cool, edgy cyperspeak for "The Opposition," this is just another mainstream media aggregation site which "curates" anti-Trump articles and then rather dishonestly bylines them all with "By The Opposition." It thus turns out that linked corporate monstrosities like NBC-Comcast magically morph into The Opposition. 

Although he doesn't list his own name on his Oppstn site, Executive Director Jason Uhl does out himself on the #March for Truth sponsor page. A search reveals 16 different Jason Uhls on LinkedIn, none of whom appear to have a journalism background, nor even minimal stenographic credentials.

Meanwhile, Truth March fans are urged to Tweet and Facebook all their friends with quotes from such paragons of democracy as Obama Kill List creator and Bush torture-defender John Brennan:

Give It a Rest, Hillary

Hillary Clinton's latest excuse for losing the election to Donald Trump is that nobody could have survived on her pedestal of awesome inevitability.

"I was the victim of the assumption that I would win," Hillary Clinton deadpanned in the latest episode of her perpetual Blame Game Tour.

That's like complaining you've been fired based upon the unreasonable expectation of your boss that you'd show up for work. That's like complaining that after you fell in an Olympic relay race you'd bribed your way into, it was all the fault of the greedy officials who let you on the track as well as the stupid rubes who bet on your victory.

I take full responsibility, but nothing is ever my fault. Hear me roar, whined Hillary to her well-heeled Silicon Valley audience. She presented her hosts with a complimentary bottle of an alcoholic concoction she called Rodham Rye. The stage was thus set for some sloppy softball mellowness to help make the vitriol go down.

"Goldman Sachs paid me!" she squealed in delight at one point during Wednesday's interview. But the fact that she also spoke to camp counselors balanced the whole thing out. Also too, she helped hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden. Plus, men get paid for the speeches they make.

 Also miffed that Trump is stealing the media-blaming limelight from her, Clinton accused the press of treating her use of a private email system "as though it were Pearl Harbor." She obviously didn't get the irony of that remark, given how she acted like a Kamikaze pilot during her presidential campaign. She bombed in one suicidal campaign appearance after the other.

She also had the nerve to rip the Democratic National Committee, which had bent over backwards to rig the nomination in her favor through, among other things, limiting the number of debates with Bernie Sanders and ensuring that their scheduling interfered with football playoffs and national holidays and weekends so as to attract the fewest viewers possible.

"I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party," she fumed, whereas Donald Trump got all his precious data handed to him on a silver platter. Harrumph.

But the real paranoid coup de grace of her performance at a California technology conference was her rambling attack on "Americans" who must have helped "the Russians" to meddle in her campaign. “I think it’s fair to ask, how did that actually influence the campaign, and how did they know what messages to deliver?” she said. “Who told them? Who were they coordinating with, and colluding with?”

After conjuring up an epic image of a thousand grotesque anti-Hillary bots and trolls cavorting about in cyberspace, she then paradoxically went on to call Trump a "very reactive personality" and questioned what, exactly, he means by the word "covfefe." It must be a secret coded dog-whistle to Vladimir Putin. That is the only possible, rational explanation. She was, after all, speaking at a Code Conference.

You can watch her whole spiel in the clip below. You are guaranteed to cringe in your seat as the litany of blame evolves into an ear-splittingly off-key crescendo of bilious self-pity.

If more than a few minutes of unbridled narcissistic victimhood are too much for you to bear, however, then I highly recommend the troll-hunting scene from Peer Gynt as a more healthful substitute. It absolutely captures the essence of where this woman's head is at:

Meanwhile, Hillary's more understated understudy Chelsea Clinton went on TV herself to trill that the dashing of stupid people's unreasonable expectations about her mother was actually "an unexpected blessing."

Chelsea said that although she's been told by outsiders that her family once planted petunias and tomatoes together when she was a tot, she has no independent memory of this event. All she can remember of her childhood is the hours of homework and the piano lessons that transformed her into the overachieving adult she is today.

Chelsea says she is imagining the childhood she might have had as she watches Bill and Hillary in their dotage dig in the dirt with her own daughter in a DNA deluge. "It was such an unforeseen gift that my daughter was giving me to see my parents in that way," Chelsea smirked to the ladies of The View.

As long as Hillary Clinton keeps telling us over and over and over again that she is doing O.K. despite her persecution complex, maybe some of her psychotic magic will start rubbing off on us too.

Long walks in the woods, organizing our closets, blaming Russians, guzzling the Chardonnay and the Rodham Rye like there's no tomorrow might help us forget all our unreasonable assumptions about there even being a tomorrow.

Skol. Hiccup. And then gag me with a Covfefe.

Inflating the Hate

Although reported hate crimes have indeed been creeping up in the era of Donald Trump, they have yet to reach the levels in the years immediately following the 9/11 attacks of 2001. There has, however, been a sharp increase in anti-Muslim attacks since Trump's election.

These are the findings of  California State University-San Bernardino's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.  Director Brian Levin has compiled statistics showing that reported hate crimes - defined as attacks based upon race or ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, religion or disability -  increased last year by an average of 6% in the largest American cities surveyed.

Viewed separately, however, the increases during the presidential campaign year were 20% in Chicago, 24% in New York City, 15% in Los Angeles, 50% in Philadelphia - and a whopping 62% in Washington, D.C. Levin says its still too early to study hate crime data during the first few months of Trump's actual administration. The FBI will not release its own 2017 data until November.

Even before Trump started getting nonstop television coverage at his hate-spewing campaign rallies, the hate crimes were starting to increase in the United States. Levin reports that religion targeted crime had already increased dramatically beginning in 2015, reaching its highest level since reporting began in the early 1990s. By 2012, the percentage of crimes motivated by religious bias had already tripled from 2002. The actual number of these crimes was listed at 1,244 incidents for 2015, an increase of 30 from the previous year.

Levin cautions that the reporting of hate crimes is inherently fraught, given discrepancies in definition and the lack of cooperation in reporting them from various individual police agencies across the United States. Participation in the reporting system is purely voluntary. One jurisdiction's hate crime can be another jurisdiction's garden variety violent crime.

Relatively few hate crimes are committed directly upon people. Only 15% of them constitute violent assaults causing severe bodily injury to human beings. Most of them are vandalism-related crimes against property, which have skyrocketed in recent years. Most perps prefer to operate under cover of darkness, leading to the conclusion that hate criminals are abject cowards.

The Southern Poverty Law Center began compiling news reports of bias attacks immediately following the election of Donald Trump. Out of 1,094 incidents, 315 were directed at immigrants, 221 at African-Americans, 112 at Muslims and 26 against Trump supporters.

For its part, the Council on American-Islamic Relations reported 2,216 bias "incidents" in 2016 (an increase of  57% from the previous year) and 260 actual crimes (a 44% increase from 2015). The most recent was an arson attack last night on a Muslim-owned convenience store in San Antonio, Texas.

The general consensus among the news media is that Donald Trump has made it safe for Americans to act out their aggressions again. The Memorial Day weekend news was replete with one horrific hate crime after the other. Most notable was a deranged white supremacist slaughtering two Good Samaritans trying to defend a hijab-wearing woman on a Portland, Oregon train.

Of course, the hate was simmering, if not bubbling over in regular volcanic eruptions, long before Trump began braying out his message to the nation with the delighted assistance of profit-driven cable "news" channels. Donald Trump is just one of many facilitators in this Land of Peace and Plenty - especially now that's he's been gifted with the bully pulpit of 140 Tweeted characters direct from the Oval Office Emporium.

So, the very same media-political-war complex whose longstanding motto is "if it bleeds, it leads," is now purporting to be shocked, shocked there is so much unsanctioned, freelance violence going on around here. We were supposed to keep our hatred under wraps and allow our betters to vicariously satisfy us with violent entertainment. Now that people are taking such matters into their own hands and daring to emulate and to take the Trump Reality Show so literally is cause for great alarm.

The establishment seems to be losing its power to keep the citizenry contained.  As Peter Gay writes in The Cultivation of Hatred, the function of national political leaders historically has been maintaining civic docility, obedience and above all, distraction.

If one could capture children, students, apprentices, even criminals in the silken chains of guilt feelings,if one could fabricate submissive love for authority figures, the heavy artillery of harsh punishments could be profitably replaced by the subtler and cleaner methods of psychological warfare. The bourgeois conscience was a fraud waiting to be unmasked.... humanitarian style, anxious to bring pugnacity to heel, was only a cover for economic greed, political self-interest and imperialistic lust for domination.

People are gazing upon their bellicose leaders and simultaneously refuting them and emulating them. The nostrum "Do as we say and not as we do" is losing its appeal, given how both Trump and his bellicose predecessors from both parties did nothing to assuage the free-floating anxiety and anger unleashed by the most extreme wealth inequality in modern global history. Only a very thin line separates the so-called homegrown terrorists of America from their mirror-image compatriots of ISIS. As Pankaj Mishra writes in Age of Anger: A History of the Present,

Trump and his supporters in the world's richest country are no less the dramatic symptom of a general crisis of legitimacy than those terrorists who plan and inspired mass violence by exploiting the channels of global integration. The appeal of formal and informal secessionism - the possibility, broadly, of greater control over one's life - has grown all over the world. The response of rulers is more fear mongering against Others.

Primitive regressive role model that he is, Donald Trump provides the perfect excuse for lashing out, at anybody and everybody. In the words of Peter Gay:

 The liberal temper is so precarious because it is steadily under pressure from more primitive demands--for quick decisions, simple answers, forceful action, above all instant gratification. The threat--for most, the promise of--regression lurks everywhere. Most people find that hitting out, whether calculated or spontaneous, yields greater satisfactions than holding in, at least in the short run; smiting the other's cheek is more delightful than turning one's own.

Trump is the living antithesis of the liberal aggression so long controlled and hidden beneath vicarious violent entertainment on the one hand, and empty platitudinous happy-talk on the other. He is the opposite of a safety valve.

His boilerplate critique of the Portland train stabbings could not have been more anodyne. "Unacceptable," he grudgingly Tweeted a full two days after the attack, adding the obligatory thoughts and prayers required of all bomb-dropping presidents whose assigned task is urging people to do as they say, and not as they do.