The Only Thing Between Trump and the Golden Pitchforks

After two years of urging Democrats to patiently await the results of the Mueller investigation before even thinking about impeachment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved the goalposts on Monday.

As she sees it, the report is only a prelude. It is merely a template, or book of clues which Congress must carefully examine in order to finally arrive at The Truth. So much for Robert Mueller III being the avenger and final arbiter of the fate of Donald Trump.

It's almost as though Pelosi is pulling an Obama, who back in 2009 told a group of nervous Wall Street bankers that "I am the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks," tacitly assuring them that they would not face criminal prosecution under his benevolent watch.

Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in the land, is the only thing standing between a blustery and very paranoid Trump and the golden pitchforks of the liberal pundit and political class, more and more of whom are demanding that impeachment proceedings begin. This is especially true of those running for president and who are in dire need of fuel to fire up the voters. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have yet to catch fire in the polls, and are among the impeachment advocates. Of course, since they sit in the Senate, and it's the House that has to get the ball rolling, their calls for impeachment require no further effort or political capital on their part.

As for Pelosi, her neoliberal bipartisan agenda trumps bringing Trump to any form of justice. For starters, she is anxious to get the Trump-backed corporations and the Democratic Party-backed corporations together in a closed room to arbitrate drug prices without any input from the actual House of Representatives. A drawn-out impeachment process would just take all the energy away from enriching the oligarchy in the bipartisan manner to which it has become accustomed.

And since Pelosi had also refused to bring George W. Bush to justice for his illegal torture and surveillance programs, and for lying us into a war that killed, maimed or displaced millions of people, bringing Trump to justice for playing a mob boss and thwarting the Mueller investigation would seem kind of petty, wouldn't it? This is especially true since Pelosi herself was secretly briefed on Bush's torture program in 2003, and did nothing to expose or stop it.

And that would make her seem kind of complicit in war crimes, wouldn't it?

Well, not according to Pelosi. She said she was only following the secrecy rules. She is no Chelsea Manning-style whistleblower. The fact that Republicans attacked her on the torture issue did the bipartisan trick, too: it brought loyal Democrats to her immediate defense, just as the Democratic "witch-hunt" against Trump brings the GOP to his immediate defense.

Unaccountability is built right into the permanent American power structure. The rulers rely on the Constitution and other arcane rules whenever it's convenient, not because it's right. When it's not convenient, then they don't. That is the main function of the Duopoly: theatrics and grandstanding in public, and disdaining the public good and the public's wishes in private.

Fast-forward to 2019.

Politico reports:

"We can investigate Trump without drafting articles," she said during a call with House Democrats.... We aren't going to go faster, we are going to go as fast as the facts take us."

"It is also important to know that the facts regarding holding the President accountable can be gained outside of impeachment hearings," she wrote earlier Monday afternoon in a letter to House Democrats.

This should throw cold water on the continuing hysterical insistence by the Golden Pitchforks crowd that Donald Trump is a secret Russian agent and guilty of treason. I don't think that even Nancy Pelosi has reached the level of corruption that would allow her to desultorily hunt for facts about how, exactly, Vladimir Putin is actively ruling our country and ruining our democracy.

Her inaction should be all the proof the Russophobes need to relinquish their fantasies once and for all. But now that they've created their own alternate reality, inconsistencies and plot-holes are so easy to ignore. The play is the thing, as Shakespeare once observed.

Therefore, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, typical of the Golden Pitchforkers of the Plutocracy, writes:

So all the “fake news” was true. A hostile foreign power intervened in the presidential election, hoping to install Donald Trump in the White House. The Trump campaign was aware of this intervention and welcomed it. And once in power, Trump tried to block any inquiry into what happened.
Never mind attempts to spin this story as somehow not meeting some definitions of collusion or obstruction of justice. The fact is that the occupant of the White House betrayed his country. And the question everyone is asking is, what will Democrats do about it?
But notice that the question is only about Democrats. Everyone (correctly) takes it as a given that Republicans will do nothing. Why?

Translation: We will keep spinning the Russiagate fairy tale and foist all the blame for the Democrats' failure to hold Trump accountable for "treason" on the usual GOP suspects, who do not believe in "American Values." This is like a prosecutor who refuses to indict a suspect because he doesn't have an ironclad guarantee of a conviction. It's akin to the Obama administration refusing to prosecute Wall Street bankers because it is too complicated and institutions must never be allowed to fail. 

It is cowardice and complicity,and yes, it is obstruction of justice in its own right. It is so much easier to accuse one side of the Duopoly of not adhering to "American values." It saves the corporate Resistance the trouble of examining their own consciences and acknowledging their own roles (2016 Bernie Buzzkill) in enabling the election of Trump.

These Democratic pitchforks come custom-equipped with nice, soft protective cushions over their shiny, well-oiled tines. Liberals come to scare and enrage Trump, and to be ostentatiously disgusted by him. They don't want to really hurt him. He is too valuable a commodity and diverting media personality.

My comment on Krugman (held by the newspaper's censors for 10 hours prior to publication):

If Speaker Pelosi believed that Trump is a traitor to his country, she'd be pushing impeachment. She's averse to it because she knows Trump is just your ordinary homegrown mobster who's "not worth it."

 She thinks it's safer to run out the clock till Election Day. as we're regaled with a steady procession of piecemeal investigations and subpoenas that Trump will (true to form) obstruct every step of the way.

Enough of Russiagate. It feeds his paranoia. He used his campaign as a marketing opportunity, and dealing with the Russian mob was just one of his many scams.

 Where's the corporate media outrage over his veto of the congressional bill to stop the US-enabled genocide in Yemen? Where's the angst over the US meddling and attempted coup in Venezuela, or his economic assault on Iran, or his continued caging of refugee children at the border?

As for the GOP, when did they ever "believe in" anything, except serving their paymasters? They're not scared of the corporate Dems, who serve their own paymasters. They fear only true progressives like Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren - who, to her great credit, was the first liberal senator to utter the "I" word.

 Republicans win because they co-opt populism in the service of elitism. Trump's way too skilled a comic diversion to relinquish. Add to him the hucksters of the Evangelical "Greed is God" cult, and they haven't got a qualm in the world. Ethics? What ethics?

Speaking of ethics, lack of same is very much a bipartisan affair. 

Pelosi used the same language of collegiality and cooperation in 2006, when widespread public antiwar sentiment cost Bush the lower House. She grotesquely equated justice with pettiness. In her world, it's always better to ostentatiously extend olive branches to war criminals and forget about the war dead and the trillions of wasted dollars.

As the New York Times reported, 

She said the GOP, which frequently excluded Democrats from conference committee hearings and often blocked attempts to introduce amendments, would not suffer similar treatment.
“Democrats pledge civility and bipartisanship in the conduct of the work here and we pledge partnerships with Congress and the Republicans in Congress, and the president — not partisanship.”
She also extended an olive branch to Bush on the war in Iraq, saying she plans to work with him on a new plan but will not support the current strategy and supports beginning redeployment of troops by the end of the year.
Pelosi also said she supports the idea of a bipartisan summit on the war.
“We know, ‘stay the course,’ is not the way,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi said she received a brief, early-morning call from Bush, who invited her to lunch on Thursday.
“We both expressed our wish to work in a bipartisan way for the benefit of the American people.”

She mildly scolded Bush for his authoritarian language the same way that she now mildly scolds Trump for his. It's not even Nerf-brand toy pitchforks that Nancy Pelosi wields. It's a few slimy strands of overcooked spaghetti.  

When she keeps repeating that her goal is to benefit "the American People," her definition of people is the United States Corporate Empire, limited to the very rich, the very militaristic and the very interconnected.

Here's another response to Krugman's claim that Republicans have no American values. This one was written by my alter ego, "Nicky Sardo," and also held overnight by censors: (many "regular" commenters besides me have been similarly and regularly exiled. In keeping with the Unaccountability Code of Values adopted by the American ruling class and their media propagandists, the Times ascribes its censorship practices to the vagaries of a top-secret algorithm.)

There is at least one American Value that the Republicans sincerely believe in. And that is the value of the almighty dollar. Billions and billions of them, to be precise, all parked tax-free in the pockets of a few tycoons who own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population combined.

 They also believe in vote suppression, particularly in Southern states with majority Black populations. They accomplish this with their Unholy Trinity dogma: voter ID laws; incarcerating record numbers of Black people and then denying them suffrage based upon their convictions; and gerrymandering.

  They also believe in denying poor white and black and brown people a decent education. Trump himself once boasted that he "loves the uneducated." Because if you keep people down long enough, they'll vote for Republicans out of ignorance, fear, desperation, resentment of "the other" - or they'll be too broke, apathetic, sick or disgusted to even bother to vote at all. And failure to vote is usually a default vote for a Republican, unfortunately.

 Whether Trump is an actual traitor is beside the point at this point, because Americans have been shafted by unfettered neoliberal capitalism for decades now. Forget about Putin and the Russians. We have the Kochs, the Adelsons, the Mercers, the Wall Street banks, the consolidated media spewing corporate propaganda and rich men's wars at us 24/7. The fact that they still invite us, even beg us, to vote is proof that democracy is pretty much a delusion.

The Eternal Fairy Tale of Russiagate

Since many of humanity's most enduring myths and legends are thought to have their origin in humanity itself, we can't expect the Russiagate saga to die any time soon either. It makes lots of money, spinning straw into gold for franchise owners and investors by the hour, by the month, by the Thousand and One Nights and A Night.

 It also seems to fill a great psychological need for the spinners, who still quaintly describe themselves as journalists. Were it not for the fact that their military/surveillance state-serving narrative edges us ever closer to confrontation with a nuclear-powered Russia, among other less-weaponized sovereign nations, I'd just say let them have their delusional fun while they can.

I haven't yet read the whole Mueller report, not even close - but I have glanced at the various interpretations of it. Whenever I see a headline with the words "Ten Things You Need To Know About the Mueller Report Right Now!" or " Fifty-Two Takeaways From the Mueller Report," my psyche goes into self-protective shutdown mode. I search in vain for other interesting or threatening things to learn about, such as Trump's barely-noticed veto of the Congressional resolution to stop the US-enabled Saudi genocide of Yemenis.

So it's mainly been through some magical process of osmosis that  I've absorbed the gist of Mueller's pricey report. To wit:

Richard Nixon has been vindicated!  Anything is legal if you're president. To paraphrase Donald Trump himself, when you're a president, you can do anything. You can grab the country by the short hairs and it's gonna let you. Mueller, who has sadly devolved from Father of Our Country into Absentee Deadbeat Dad, apparently as much as admitted that Trump cannot be prosecuted for obstruction of justice because presidents can obstruct justice all they want. And if they can act stupid or paranoid or emotional or spoiled rotten while they're at it, it's all the better for them. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. (I knew there was a reason that the report was released on Maundy Thursday, a/k/a the Last Supper eve of the crucifixion.)

Plus, as Zephyr Teachout lays out in Corruption in America, when you're an oligarch, you can do anything, such as buying Congress and the Supreme Court and changing the corruption laws in America. Under our current system of legalized crime, the only thing that could get Trump prosecuted is his being caught personally accepting a bag full of cash in exchange for a veto or an executive order.

This legal restriction of corruption to quid pro quo, Teachout writes, was codified by the Citizens United and McCutcheon vs FEC Supreme Court decisions, which dictated that political donations are protected political speech, and not bribery. The redefinition narrows the scope of political corruption only to explicit deals. 

"It reclassifies influence-seeking as normal and desirable political behavior. It purportedly avoids difficult problems of definition. It attempts to wring the moral content out of the term corruption and tell a story about corruption that is consistent with a world populated by self-interested actors."

Since liberal pundits and politicians cannot reverse this process, absent a social democratic revolution (the prospect of which they loathe even more than they pretend to loathe Trump) they must revert back to fairy tale mode. The money and the arms must continue to flow to the military-industrial complex and its Wall Street/Silicon Valley investors. An Enemy Outside which "sows dissent" must always be conjured up to keep the domestic populism down. Therefore, they will keep spinning their propaganda straw into gold while there is still a viable world and a well-appointed newsroom or broadcast studio to spin it in.

So what else, besides six and seven figure salaries, explains the lasting appeal of the Russiagate folklore franchise to careerist news personalities and stenographers?

  The late fairy tale interpreter and Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz gives us a clue about what could be going on in their heads and those of their fans:

Actually. you can interpret a myth or fairy tale with any of the four functions of consciousness. The thinking type will point out the structure and the way in which all the motifs connect. The feeling type will put them in a value order (a hierarchy of values) which is also completely rational. With the feeling function, a good and complete fairy tale interpretation can be made. The sensation type will just look at the symbols and amplify them. The intuitive will see the whole package in its oneness, so to speak; he will be most gifted in showing that the whole fairy tale is not a discursive story but is really one message, split up into many facets. The more you have differentiated your functions, the better you can interpret because you must circumambulate a story as much as possible with all four functions. The more you have developed and obtained the use of more conscious functions, the better and more colorful your interpretation will be.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, the best-known spinner of the nightly Russiagate fables, is not about to give up her Scheherazade role. She's made a fortune and a career out of connecting the dots on charts to explain how various low-level or innocuous meetings of Trump operatives with Russian operatives have amounted to one great overriding plot, with the grand overarching motif that Donald Trump is a Putin agent. The more details and dot-connections she can offer, the more believable that she makes her yarn become.

 Her "intellectual" approach feeds into the competing feelings of inchoate Trump-hatred and powerlessness within the psyches of her audience of millions. We know, we just intuitively know, that the foreign agency of Trump must be true, especially when the message is constantly being split up and spun off among so many different expert storytellers in our six major media conglomerates. The more that the story can go round and round (circumambulation) the truer it becomes, and the more colorful the embellishments that can be added all the time. It gets so complicated that the plot holes and even the original plot gets fuzzy with time. It is a continuous closed feedback loop. And like climate change itself, it is proving very hard to stop, now that it has achieved a life of its own.

Robert S Mueller III, loyal establishment player that he is, is playing right along with the Russiagate franchise.The contrived existential threat of Putin-meddling is in the intro to his report. He was hired for a specific reason. Trump, painted by the media and now by Mueller as a con man and a stooge, might have dodged a personal bullet, but the country has not. The country, with at least 800 military outposts around the world still must be taught to fear a country with a grand total of nine. 

Be afraid, be thrilled, be very afraid, be very thrilled. Because those Russian internet trolls who planted a couple hundred Facebook ads and walked around the United States wearing Trump masks to fake protest rallies are not only still at large, they are lurking under the Freedom Bridge to US Election Nirvana. They are plotting, right now and as Rachel Maddow speaks, to pull you down and drown you on your way to vote in 2020.

The Discreet Charm of the Never-Bernies

How can wealthy liberals, anxious to protect their fortunes and their heirs from the predations of the poor, destroy Bernie Sanders without being seen as destroying Bernie Sanders? That is the delicate question.

The current tactic is the playing of the hypocrisy card. With revelations (by Sanders himself) that he is now a millionaire, thanks to his book sales, his fellow millionaires and not a few actual billionaires point to this fact as being "problematic."

It is especially "thorny" because Sanders is acting so damned "prickly" about it whenever the topic of his new membership in the One Percent Club is brought up - say, about every 10 minutes in the video chat rooms known as cable news shows and in the pages of such elite gossip rags as the New York Times.

"Good-natured" ribbing from late night pseudo-comedians is an integral part of this new front in the  destruction crusade, with the New York Times breathlessly reporting on Wednesday that Jimmy Kimmel observed that Bernie appears to have spent none of his fortune on personal grooming or couture.

The same article quotes Stephen Colbert, fresh off his London junket fawning over Michelle Obama in the latest leg of her book tour, as drawling:

“Yesterday Bernie Sanders released 10 years of his tax returns. Finally, now we can get the answers to all of our Bernie-related financial controversies. Like whether he writes off mothballs as a business expense or a snack.”

The Times is once again doing what it arguably does better than any other corporate media outlet: it is engaging in a personal destruction crusade in such an arch, knowing, nuanced way that it does not seem to be engaging in any personal destruction crusade at all. 

The problem which the Gray Lady and her corporate media cohort now face is that Bernie has gone mainstream, and most important of all in their world, he has more cash on hand than any of his Democratic rivals. It's certainly a long way from the good old days of 2016, when all the Times had to do, personal destruction-wise, was to alternately ignore Bernie and deride him. It's even a long way from last year and early this year, when the propaganda tropes that he is not liked by women and black people went nowhere fast, given that public polls have shown the exact opposite to be true.

So now it's on to how Bernie Sanders is causing such great angst among the altruistic liberal rich that they might even be inconvenienced by a dreaded Brokered Convention next year.

Times reporter Jonathan Martin engaged in some good old fashioned shoe leather reporting as he pounded the pavement on both coasts to plumb the plutocratic depths of the "Stop Bernie" movement 

Parachuting down to Flyover Country for a day or an hour is, let's face it, nothing but lazy stenography. The rich love to read about themselves and not about some deplorable out of work factory laborer, even if the literature is not always as flattering to them as they might like. It was the rich, the class which could afford to buy books in the 19th century, who helped make Thackeray's satiric Vanity Fair, for example, the enduring bestseller that it came to be. And what 21st century PBS fan wouldn't kill to live in the snooty Downton Abbey?

Anyway, satiric critical portrayals of the venal rich sometimes have a way of turning such conniving grasping characters as Becky Sharp into admirable heroines whenever the corporate entertainment world gets hold of them. When Vanity Fair was made into a TV movie in 2004, for example, Reese Witherspoon magically transformed her into a plucky, adorable, rags-to-riches ingenue. Did I mention that Witherspoon had also recently played a celebrity softball-pitcher at one of those spunky, rags-to-riches Michelle Obama book tour appearances, where front row seats go for thousands of dollars a pop?

Anyway, I digress.

Martin's faux-satiric characterization of Bernie Sanders fans as "an unwavering base" of "fervent supporters" who endanger party unity had the desired effect of eliciting nearly 3,000 outraged responses from readers who are still smarting from the newspaper's cavalier treatment, three years ago, of both themselves and their candidate. These responses seem designed to be an "I told you so" cathartic moment for the nervous rich, proving once and for all to the sensitive elite class that Bernie Sanders supporters are, in fact, a fervent and unwavering mob... and so veddy, veddy unreasonable and dangerous.

Secondarily, Martin's surface-snide portrayal of the rich donor class as selfish pearl-clutchers and canape-gorgers who are  terrified of Bernie's "avowed socialism" seems designed to plant the very tiniest seed of doubt into the minds of progressive readers. Never mind that Bernie is no socialist, but rather a de facto FDR Democrat who sees nothing wrong with wars or the arrest of Julian Assange or with a better-regulated capitalistic system in general. If you can only plant that seed in these early days, it might even sprout and thrive by the time any actual voting takes place a little under a year from now.

Comparing Sanders with Trump is still tops on the "Stop Bernie From Eating the Oligarchy!" agenda. Martin posits that Bernie is just as paranoid as Trump, probably because Bernie (rightly) believes that the Democratic Party and its media sycophants are aiming for his personal destruction.

The main weapon, therefore, that centrist corporatists plan to wield against Sanders is Trump himself. Even the Sanders campaign acknowledges that beating Trump is their top priority, before passage of a single payer health care bill and other policies can even be seriously discussed. The wealthy backers of the party are taking solace in the fact that, just as he did in 2016, Sanders has vowed to support the eventual nominee. Which, if they have anything to say about it, will not be Bernie Sanders. It is only his promise to be an avowed player that permits him to stay in the game. Thus, his calculated silence on the Julian Assange arrest. He is silent even though it was WikiLeaks which revealed that the corporate Democrats were really out to get him in 2016.

So, there's this important nugget in the Times's cautionary tale:

“Bernie Sanders believes the most critical mission we have before us is to defeat Donald Trump,” said Faiz Shakir, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager. “Any and all decisions over the coming year will emanate from that key goal.”
Or, as former (my bold) Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri put it: “One thing we have now that we didn’t in ’16 is the uniting force of Trump. There will be tremendous pressure on Bernie and his followers to fall in line because of what Trump represents.”

If the anguished wealthy liberal donor class needs a slogan, here's a suggestion for them: 

Never Bernie! Never Trump! Always the Plutocracy - Always!

When you finally wake up the golden drops of their beneficence trickling down upon you after they nominate one of their own in a super-delegate-rigged second ballot, they tacitly confide to the Times, you'll realize just how abjectly grateful to them that you truly are, and should have been all along.

Blasphemy In the Church of Nine-Eleven

Nancy Pelosi‏Verified account @SpeakerPelosi

The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must be done with reverence. The President shouldn’t use the painful images of 9/11 for a political attack.

4:20 AM - 13 Apr 2019

• 13,147 Retweets
• 65,771 Likes
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20,228 replies13,147 retweets65,771 likes

 

 

1. 1. Nancy Pelosi‏Verified account @SpeakerPelosi Apr 13
      

      As we visit our troops in Stuttgart to thank them and be briefed by them, we honor our first responsibility as leaders to protect and defend the American people. It is wrong for the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to fan the flames to make anyone less safe.

The target of much criticism from the left for her bland scolding of Donald Trump over his own incendiary Tweet against Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Pelosi has since announced she will ask for another security review by the FBI and Capitol Police to determine how Omar, her family and her staff can be best protected from a sitting president of the United States. She has also belatedly suggested that his original offensive tweet, with a photo of Omar interposed with a graphic of the flaming World Trade Center, "be taken down."

Omar's remarks about Islamophobia at a conference last month were recently ripped out of context by a right-wing agitator, then enhanced by Rupert Murdoch's tabloid New York Post, and finally grotesquely inflamed by Provocateur-in-Chief Donald Trump. What Trump actually presides over is not so much the government as it is the xenophobia and racism which has always been an integral, albeit usually verbally suppressed, part of the American ruling class agenda.

 And that very much includes the United States military, whose Civil War army was reconstituted and professionalized for the express purpose of enforcing the mass expulsions and exterminations of native American populations. To this day, military weapons and other hardware, such as the Apache helicopter, are named after Indian tribes. Osama bin Laden was code-named Geronimo prior to his extrajudicial sneak execution as Barack Obama began preparations for his re-election campaign.

 So Trump just happens to be the most vocal and vicious (and for the more discreet ruling elite, the most embarrassing) spokesman for this dark part of the American psyche, not arriving on the scene until some some 300 years after the Puritans first erected their own model shining City on the Hill off a foundation of corpses of the native populations of New England, whom they exterminated both through their diseases and their wars.

So the cowardly and tepid response of Pelosi and Democratic Party leadership to Trump's not-so-veiled incitements to racist violence against Omar in particular and Muslims in general, should thus be put into historical context.

Pelosi in her Tweet avoided directly addressing his threats against Ilhan Omar by diverting the issue into a bizarre sermon whose theme is that any discussion  of the Sept. 11th attacks should be akin to prayer - a "sacred memory" - to be chanted only with the approved words and contained within the walls of the established cathedral. This deflection is nothing new. The horrific act of mass murder began its transformation into a cult, founded and led by the political-media complex, almost from the day it happened. The attacks had to be fetishized in order to avoid discussions of its root cause, which was blowback by former CIA asset Osama bin Laden, revenge against the US militaristic/capitalistic meddling and plunder in the entire Middle Eastern world and the militarization of Israel by its US partner, funder and enabler.

 The physical site of the lower Manhattan attack has been transformed into a national shrine and museum. The 2,753 victims have been canonized as martyrs.

The attacks became the impetus for even more US meddling, with the ensuing full scale military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and still-ongoing bombings of at least seven other majority-Muslim countries, including Ilhan Omar's native Somalia. More than a million people have died, been maimed or displaced by this overkill. The 9/11 attacks also became the perfect excuse to criminalize dissent and whittle away the civil rights of both US and global populations. They spawned a whole new Department of Homeland Security and transformed the  country into what journalist Todd Miller aptly calls Border Patrol Nation. This year, the United States Congress has allocated more money to the permanent war machine than it did during the bloodiest year of the Iraq War.

Long before the September day in 2001 "when everything changed," of course, Islam was being demonized by Western leaders, and their corporate news media and Hollywood propagandists. Islam has regularly been equated with fundamentalism, extremism and terrorism for decades. As the late Palestinian author Edward Said explained in the introduction of the 1997 edition of his book "Covering Islam," Muslims became especially convenient scapegoats after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the wake of the bombing by Libyan terrorists of the Pan Am flight above Lockerbie, Scotland, and the first bombing of the World Trade Center and other attacks, the simple utterance of the word "Islam" in the West became a means of attacking Islam. 

This, in turn, has "provoked more hostility between self-appointed Muslim and Western spokespersons. 'Islam' defines a relatively small proportion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world, which numbers a billion people, and includes dozens of countries, societies, traditions, languages, and of course an infinite number of different experiences."

This is exactly what Ilhan Omar was talking about in her speech last month,  correctly observing that the actions of "some people" on 9/11 paved the way for the perpetual criminalization of an entire religion as practiced in myriad ways by over a billion people worldwide.

As for Donald Trump, inveterate entertainment consumer and purveyor that he is, his own personal xenophobia did not sprout full-fledged from the murky depths of his personality disorder. He probably, for example, saw the 1994 Hollywood blockbuster, True Lies. Its star villains, notes author Zachary Karabell, are stereotypical Arabs "complete with glinty eyes and a passionate desire to kill Americans" who must, in turn, be killed by the sexy intrepid American hero, played by future GOP California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

As Edward Said observed, "Covering Islam is a one-sided activity that obscures what 'we' do, and highlights instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are."

Ilhan Omar was initially celebrated by the Democratic Party because she so perfectly fit its identity politics agenda as a cosmetic antithesis of Trump: she is a woman, she is Black, she is an immigrant, and she is a Muslim. If only she could have stayed in her appointed place as an exotic statue instead of criticizing the right-wing government of Israel - on top of having the effrontery to be one of the most progressive members of Congress. As such, she puts lie to the propaganda that Muslims live in a medieval, anti-feminist world. The corporate wing of the party, led by Pelosi, is not progressive and it fully supports the right-wing government of Israel. While pretending to be all-inclusive and anti-bigotry, this corporate wing has fully colluded in waging the forever wars on Muslim-majority countries. Pelosi never blinked an eye at Barack Obama's drone assassination program, which specifically targeted Muslim civilians as incipient terrorists simply by virtue of who they are and where they live (unprotected "tribal areas").

Pelosi therefore must have found it easier to castigate Trump for blaspheming  the "sacred memory" of 9/11 than to castigate him for implicitly threatening Ilhan Omar's life. It took her three whole days to even factor Omar's well-being into her narrative. Her main gripe was that Trump abused the sacred memory by making it all about himself and his political future. 

Although she didn't spell it out, Pelosi also implied in her April 13th tweet that the carefully unmentioned Omar had also abused the sacred memory by juxtaposing her own religion next to the US Imperium's virtual state religion and holy day of obligation, which became the very basis for attacking Omar's religion and its various adherents, the vast majority of whom are peace-loving people.

The Church of Nine-Eleven was constructed by the war-mongering capitalist elites for the sole propaganda purpose of ramping up war and plunder, cynically repurposing the victims and first responders into patriotic martyrs and human shields, even as some of these same first responders went to war to die for the sole profit of corporations. And, even as sections of the 9/11 Commission report implicating the Saudi government were kept secret for many years. The volunteer troops fighting the oligarchs' wars were then used by the Obamas and other politicians to shame the economically struggling population at home into "sharing the sacrifice" as jobs were lost and punishing austerity was imposed after the 2008 financial collapse. 

 Pelosi's tepid tweet sends the hysterical message that it is reckless, rank heresy for Trump to openly and verbally admit that he hates Muslims, Mexicans and all dark-skinned people.

Her sub-Tweet, gushing about her own visit to a US military base in Germany,  which is still semi-occupied 75 years after the end of World War II, says it all. When she writes that the military protection of "the American people" is her first priority, keep in mind that the de facto definition of "the people" and their national security is the corporate state, which armed forces must protect around the clock and around the globe if their plunder is to proceed apace.

As Edward Said wrote:

"The tendency to consider the whole world as one country's imperium is very much in the ascendancy in today's United States, the last remaining superpower.... Such an idea of rightful Western dominance is in reality an uncritical idolization of Western power. "

Keep in mind that Said penned those words in 1997, before 9/11 "changed everything." The ascendancy has already reached its peak and it has nowhere else to go but down.

Thus, for Pelosi and for her fellow imperialists, it is likewise heresy for a progressive elected representative like Ilhan Omar to bring too much attention to herself, to her maligned religion and her war-torn native country, to her fellow immigrants and refugees, and to bipartisan hypocrisy. The ruling class does not want the American public to get the idea that the United States kills and expels and robs people for any reason other than humanitarianism, or that other countries hate us not for our "freedoms", but for our crimes.

Pelosi might be getting this year's Profiles in Courage award from the Kennedy dynasty, but it's really Omar who deserves an award for her serene courage under immense, unrelenting pressure. In the days since Trump's incendiary tweet, she has received even more death threats, and Trump himself has escalated his Twitter attacks on her.

Even so, her mind is on the plight of others:

Ilhan Omar‏Verified account @IlhanMN

This country was founded on the ideas of justice, of liberty, of the pursuit of happiness. But these core beliefs are under threat. Each and every day. We are under threat by an administration that would rather cage children than pass comprehensive immigration reform.

11:18 AM - 13 Apr 2019

Initial Thoughts On the Julian Assange Arrest

The right-wing nature of the corporate Democrats was on full display today as many liberals are openly celebrating the brazen arrest in the wee hours, USA time, of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange within his legal sanctuary of the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Investors in the #Russiagate propaganda franchise may have been embarrassed and their narrative debunked, but the damage it has done survives. Here's the top-rated reader comment from the New York Times article on Assange's arrest, on one charge of criminal conspiracy to hack a computer:

A Russian propaganda tool, that's all he is, and Wikileaks as well. Assange has severely harmed the United States and other western democracies at the bidding of Russia. Read Wikileaks if you don't believe me, try to find anything other than information harmful to the west. Wikileaks may have started as a legitimate sunlight tool, but was early on compromised and subverted to Russian interests.

This person and the nearly 800 liberal readers who approved this comment apparently believe that we should not be aware of the false pretenses under which the US invaded Iraq, and that we should have remained blissfully and serenely unaware of the film footage which showed American helicopter troops shooting journalists and civilians to death, just for the sheer sadistic fun of it.

I don't know what frightens me more: the Trump administration, or the fake #Resistance to it.

Here's my own published Times comment:

The press should not be breathing its sigh of relief that the Assange indictment is limited to an accusation of conspiracy to commit computer hacking, rather than charges of publishing stolen material. It seems that journalists covering this story and printing the leaked or stolen docs were worried that they'd be called as witnesses in this case and might even be deemed culpable themselves by our authoritarian, right-wing federal justice department.

But what is to prevent the lawless Trump administration from prosecuting the New York Times or any other media outlet with a similar "hacking" conspiracy in the future, based on a similarly evidence-free accusation that said outlet was not only the publisher of stolen documents but the actual thief of same? We're in the digital age now.

If you're celebrating Assange's arrest today on the grounds of some kind of vindication of the victimized Clinton campaign, you're siding with the authoritarian Trump regime and tacitly agreeing that the First Amendment isn't worth the parchment it's written on.

This has nothing to do with Julian Assange's personality or his motives. This has to do with the death of what is still left of both domestic and global democracy.

 Be careful what you cheer for. Your reliable sources of information are not as safe from the dangerous Trump regime as you might think they are.

The Times had approvingly noted that Assange was not charged, as many had feared, under the draconian Espionage Act, which could drag everybody who cooperatively published WikiLeaks documents down with Assange, but only with "egging on" Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence private, to download them.  If the media think they;re off the hook, they should have another think coming. 

There are some silver linings to Assange's arrest. First, the US and global corporate media will be forced to admit where their true allegiances lie. Will they start raising a stink about Chelsea Manning's cruel imprisonment for refusing to implicate Assange? Will they cover the story if Assange's rights to habeas corpus and a speedy trial are infringed upon, or worse, if he is "extraordinarily renditioned" to a CIA black site prison? Assange at least has the benefit of being a high profile figure, unlike hundreds or even thousands of previous nameless and faceless "enemy combatants."

 Second, Assange will presumably finally receive the medical and dental care that he needs. His life was definitely being shortened the longer that he stayed holed up in his virtual embassy prison.

 Third, any trial will require evidence. Although the Trump campaign itself has carefully been exempt from the indictment, which stems from alleged 2010 activities during the Obama administration, propagandists might actually have to admit that there is yet to be any concrete evidence that the DNC and Clinton campaign computers were "hacked" - either by Russia or by anybody else. The documents could simply have been downloaded and then leaked. The Clintonites, remember, refused to grant the FBI access to their servers, instead using a private security company to make their claims of Russian culpability.

Fourth, it forces public attention on legalized bribery as practiced by the US government and the International Monetary Fund which it controls to enforce its privatization and austerity regimens on poor countries. The current far-right corrupt government of Ecuador sold out Assange to the United States and the United Kingdom just weeks after receipt of a hefty IMF loan.

Assange could very well end up a free man. Extradition to the United States is not even a done deal, with some British media outlets like The Guardian already editorializing against it. Justice has been known to prevail at times, especially when the whole world is watching, and especially when much of the world is already adamantly opposed to Donald Trump and all he stands for.

This isn't over.