Angels and Demons Come Out To Play

 Former President Barack Obama compared anti-genocide protesters to rude Trump supporters Thursday night as they repeatedly interrupted him and Joe Biden and Bill Clinton at their $26 million schmoze-fest as Radiio City Music Hall.

As one audience member shouted that they have blood on their hands, Obama - rather than addressing the accusation or defending himself and his two fellow war criminals - scolded: "You can't just talk and not listen. That's what the other side does."

 This was according to a press pool report of the paid-admission-only event, where the cheapest nosebleed seats went for $250 and where  even remotely accessing to the live-stream cost viewers $25. 

According to Obama, no matter how outrageous the behavior of their leadesrs may be, now matter how much death and destruction these powerful leaders spread throughout the world, the only permissible response of the citizenry is abject silence. Protest is not civil, and civility trumps everything else. If you want to be a loyal Democrat more than you want to be a free-thinking humanist, then you will pretend that Clinton, Obama and Biden are angels and that it is only the "other side" (Trump) who is the demon.

The Catholic Marxist critic Terry Eagleton had Obama and Company absolutely pegged when he wrote in "On Evil" that

"The United States, unusually among nations, is angelic and demonic at the same time. Few other nations combine such high flown public rhetoric with that meaningless flow of matter known as consumer capitalism. The role of the former is to provide some legitimation for the latter....

"Rather as Satan combines angel and demon in his own person, so evil itself unites these two conditions. One side of it - the engelic, ascetic side, wants to rise above the degraded sphere of fleshliness in pursuit of the infinite. But this withdrawal of the mind from reality has the effect of striking the world empty of value. It reduces it to so much meaningless stuff, in which the demonic side of evil can then wallowl"

This is another way of puttinng the specious "lesser evil" rationale for holding one's nose and voting for Democrats rather than Republicans, who more verbally and loudly  wallow in the dark side.

That Obama would attempt to silence a person speaking out against the US-financed mass murder and starvation of 30,000 Palestinians is just one more indication of his being, as the late Glen Ford posited, the more effective evil."

While Donald Trump wallows in his own assigned role of being the devil incarnate, sacrilegiously selling $60 Bibles to defray his legal expenses while his slimy son-in-law Jared Kushner openly scopes out Gaza oceanfront property to add to his real estate portfolio. the Democrats chide Israel in public even as they finance its genocide, thus making all of Jared's obscene dreams come true, sooner rather han later.

Not that Joe Biden is above self-deprecatingly embracing his demonic "Dark Brandon" persona. Last Saturday, to mark "National Puppy Day," his campaign was marketing blankets emblazoned with the cartoon image of Biden with glowing read orbs in place of eyes.  I guess the idea is to toughen up all those whimpering little doggies out there so they can grow up to be just like Biden's German Shepherds and get away with two dozen biting incidents before finally being banished from the White House.

And nothing screams "Get Off My Lawn!" to disrespectful protesters and annoying neighborhood kids like a yard sign featuring a smalevolently grinning Joe Biden decked out in red aviator sunglasses.

They're even selling a Joe Biden coffee mug whose eyes glow bright  crimson as soon as you pour hot liquid into it. Because, folks, Biden is red hot and Donald Trump is nothing but a limp white fleshly noodle with less of a campaign war chest than Biden.

For some mysterious reason,  I have been getting five or six spam emails every day from the Biden campaign. This is because, the Act Blue money laundering outfit explained, I had supposedly donated to Democrats in the past. But since they only have  my email address and call me "folks" or "friend"  - or when they come from Obama a derisive but very cool "Hey!" - instead of by my name, this is an obvious con. The last politician I gave money to was Bernie Sanders, back in 2016 when I still believed in him, so they could have gotten it from him. 

I have not unsubscribed because I was curious about the "messaging" to voters. These fund-raising appeals to "grassroots voters like me" have one main theme. Give $3 or $25 or buy some Biden bling. It is the only way to keep Trump out of the White House. The spam contains nothing about what Biden wil do for you to make your life better. A few of them did offer a chance to win a ticket to Radio City Music Hall, if I would fork over $25 first.

Other than that, it's all about the fear and fomentation of same just in case you haven't  developed it independently yet. Their records also show I have not yet contributed, although 239 people in my town did, today alone! I should be ashamed, not to mention feeling left out of the in-crowd.

They are asking people to hop on the money bandwagon in support of a cartoon character with a cynical grin and glowing red eyes. And if I don't, Trump will win, and it will be all my fault.

Fortunately for me and I suspect for many others,  these political marketeers are themselves the cartoon version of the nuns in my Catholic School, who were much more effective gaslighters.

And unlike the mass protests of Occupy Wall Street and the protests against the George Floyd murder, neither Democratic nor Republican politicians have yet found a way to co-opt the anti-genocide protests. They can't very well do photo-ops with their own victims. These mass killers and career warmongers are not about to co-opt either themselves or the predatory capitalists that they work for.

Saving Democracy By Killing It

The New York Times reports that the Biden administration is dispatching a whole "army of lawyers" on a special mission to aggressively seek and destroy any and all challengers to the unpopular incumbent's continued reign in the White House.

What - you still thought that democracy included giving voters an actual choice on Election Day? To the contrary. Anybody still operating under the delusion that our form of government is anything but a fascist oligarchy should be getting a cruel wake-up call with this latest news. Not only are they acting like the dictators that they accuse Donald Trump of wanting to be, they are flaunting their own authoritarianism right out in the open. No matter to them that they are also flaunting their abject fear of the voting public right out there in the open.

Not for nothing does the Times headline characterize such anti-genocide candidates as Cornel West and Jill Stein as "threats" - literal enemy combatants of the World Order.

These and other upstarts are, according to the article, "peeling away" votes that Joe Biden presumes that he, and he alone, rightfully owns. If this tired old flaying-alive nonsense doesn't plant an image in your head of a puckered rind being pulled off an old lemon whose pulp is revealed to be covered in toxic mold, then I guess you're not as much into horror as I am.

According to one of Biden's lawyers, the aim of the anti-peeling op is to police the usurpers and pretenders to ensure that they are playing by such rules as jumping through all the artificially narrowed ballot access hoops in the proper, normative order. If they should accidentally graze the top of the pole vault bar with a pinky finger, or trip over one of the many tripwires that the corporate Democrats have placed on the obstacle course, "we will hold them accountable."

Or as the Times more primly puts it, 

Gaining access to the presidential ballot is a complicated and expensive process for candidates, particularly for those not affiliated with a party, even a minor one. Laws vary from state to state, with some requiring merely a fee or a few thousand signatures, and others requiring tens of thousands of signatures gathered under tight deadline pressure, along with other administrative hurdles.

The lead legal warrior trying to purge the ballots of all challengers is former White House Counsel Dana Remus, currently a partner in the Covington and Burling white-shoe law firm. She is married to a State Department undersecretary for security who previously ran financial security for the Capitol One bank. Remus once clerked for right-wing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion that overturned Roe v Wade last year.

When, several years prior to that notorious ruling Alito was accused of misogyny by columnist Dana Milbank for allegedly making mean faces at the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg behind her back, Remus defended him against the charges of sexism, gushing in a letter to The Washington Post that her former boss "is a good man, who serves every day with humility, dedication, and incredible intelligence and insight."

It's really incredible how misused and overused the word "incredible" has become in polite, fawning discourse.  Whenever I hear it uttered by a famous or powerful person, my bullshit detector goes into full gear. An alternate interpretation of Remus's statement is that Alito's alleged respect for women and his integrity and brains are beyond belief. Her glib statement is simultaneously meaningless and non-credible. Ditto for the projectile belching of all the U.S. politicians and media stenographers who regularly proclaim themselves "unbelievably heartbroken" about the genocide in Gaza.

The State of the Union Is Deranged

 Joe Biden wasted no time setting the belligerent, paranoid tone in his State of the Union address to Congress on Thursday night.

"Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop in Ukraine, I assure you he will not," he thundered.

Whereupon his fellow belligerents erupted in cheers and thundering applause. You might have gotten the impression that they were cheering for Putin. They were definitely cheering for World War III, as Biden hearkened back to the good old days when Adolf Hitler brought the whole country together and the war economy boomed, putting the final nail in the coffin of the Great Depression.

Biden's theme of the night is that fascism is coming to America in the form of Donald Trump. So it was all the more grotesque when he strayed from his script in an attempt to out-Trump Trump on the border crackdown.  If he can't beat the Republicans at their own bigoted game, then he will join them. In fact, he will outdo them in his fear and hatred of the Other.

He certainly proved his tough-guy right-wing mettle Thursday when he engaged with Marjorie Taylor Greene. He certainly shocked a few liberals when he called the alleged Venezuelan killer of a young U.S. woman an "illegal." It was especially jarring when he promptly returned to his script and pronounced himself disgusted that Trump had accused migrants of "poisoning the blood of America." 

He, Joe Biden, respects the humanity of those dastardly illegals!

So that "gaffe" didn't prevent the media from praising his performance. He was totally on fire. He was feisty and he was folksy. He was Joe Being Joe! These are just the kind of qualities required when telling a litany of lies about how great America is, and how "heartbreaking" it is that Israel is using Biden's love-bombs to actually kill people.

Like the fairytale ogre who fattens up his victims before slaughtering them, Biden announced at his stand-up routine he is sending a military flotilla to the coast of Gaza in order to build piers for the offloading of food. Since he is simultaneously sending hundreds of bundles of ammunition and other deadly hardware to Israel - arriving at lightning speed compared to his food delivery stunt - it will be such a tragedy when the starving Palestinians who are still alive at that point will even have the strength to crawl through the rubble to get at the supplies. 

One even wonders if the Israeli armed thugs posing as an army will shoot at the ships and US troops to prevent the aid from being delivered. One also wonders whether Joe Biden will nevertheless still defend Israel's right to "defend" itself.

"History is watching" was the refrain Biden kept bellowing out during the speech. History was watching then, it's watching now, and it will watch in the future. This is not surprising when you consider that Historian-For-Hire Jon Meacham reportedly composed much of the speech.

Because of the Standardized History Bible, Biden was also able to preposterously declare that the Capitol riot of January 6th was the darkest American day ever. It has apparently supplanted Nine Eleven as the greatest holy day of paranoid apocalyptic obligation. 

But miracle of miracles! History has further decreed that even though Donald Trump (whom he did not name) is the greatest threat to America, America has enjoyed such a recovery that people don't even realize it, until Joe Biden, or Meacham, dubs his presidency " the Greatest Story Never Told." Historical Revisionist-in-Chief Joe Biden declared that despite the fascist threats both abroad and at home and existing in his own administration, America has never been better.

I won't bore you with his whole litany of lies, such as his boast that he cut child poverty in half. He did not mention that child poverty has actually increased since the expiration of Covid-era social spending legislation. To that end, he modestly vowed that every child in America will learn to read by the third grade.

The third grade? What a modest, all-American goal. Is History watching or even paying minimal attention to the gibberish flowing from Biden's lips?

What Biden could have meant was that he hopes every American will continue to read at a third grade level for the rest of their lives. That way, neither they nor History will notice all of the political gaslighting going on. They will also lack the skills to read any of Meacham's hagiographic history books. 

You Can't Reform Capitalism

Instead, if you're an unpopular neoliberal president running for re-election, you will at least want to be seen as trying . Therefore, in lieu of winning hearts and minds by changing his own mind about Medicare For All, Joe Biden cynically aims to make you forget all about his old campaign promise to at least include a public insurance option in his health care agenda, Who needs that sort of namby-pamby consolation prize when you can join him in privatizing Medicare and Medicaid by calling it an all-out war against greedy corporations?

Since Joe Biden prides himself on being an absolute killer of a genocidal wartime president, the least he can do for the folks back home is to get the eugenics craze up and running at full speed. The fact that his Centers for the Prevention of Disease Control just officially made the Covid  isolation protocols go away, Biden will make it opaquely plain at this Thursday's State of the Union speech that he aims to transform your health care into a full scale cutthroat competition You see, the problem with the American health care industry is not that it's even called an industry instead of a universal program for the public good. It's not that even insured citizens are going bankrupt at record numbers when they get sick. It's not the unaffordable premiums, co-pays and deductibles..

It's that the government-subsidized insurance behemoths should be fighting more among themselves for every last denial of benefits and every last nickel that they steal from your pockets.  

As reported by Politico, Joe Biden will use part of his State of the Union speech this Thursday to announce the creation of a (drum-roll, please) brand new Task Force to study  and root out the roots of the corporate greed they apparently have only recently discovered exists in this country. 

This task force is the next best thing and the only alternative to single payer, government-run medical insurance. The idea is that once Biden's task force studies the problem, it will then have the chops to gently chide the insurance predators into  playing in a new Free Market Olympics for the fostering of capitalistic good will and understanding on the killing fields. Which team will have the best results in narrowing provider choice and cutting costs (and services) in the end? Citizens will root and cheer and vote for Team United Health Team, Blue Cross and all the others.  Which team can valiantly raise the bar on the pole vault and make it harder  to give fans the care they need? If life can't be a constant battle, then what good is it?  

From Politico's breathless preview:

The move comes as President Joe Biden seeks new ways to show voters he’s cracking down on the so-called corporate greed that he has increasingly blamed for high prices — a message he is expected to highlight during his State of the Union address on Thursday.

Biden’s approval ratings on the economy have been dragged down by voters’ concerns about the rising cost of living despite the otherwise robust post-pandemic recovery. And a recent KFF poll shows that 80 percent of voters say it is “very important” for candidates to talk about health care affordability.

Since the person whom Biden is tasking to lead the force also heads the HHS division orchestrating the stealth privatization of Medicare by insurers under the "advantage" rubric,  one wonders if this allegedly novel ask Force is simply another way of putting lipstick on a pig. When Biden calls them greedy, he means it as a Gordon Gekko-like compliment.

And don't look for Biden to issue a price control  or freeze order, either. The problem is not high prices at the grocery store, or rising rents, you see. The problem is a lack of transparency from grocery chains and landlords. If they were only more honest about the many ways that they cheat and bilk you, you would be satisfied, according to the Biden White House.

These are not only supremely stupid people, they think you are as supremely stupid as they are. But look over there: Biden is dropping a few surplus meals-ready-eat packages for bthe starving Palestinians to compete for. He is only trying to bring free market competition into an open-air prisonm after all.

R.I.P. Aaron Bushnell

 Maybe if U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell had set fire to the Israeli embassy instead of setting fire to himself, his act of protest against the genocide in Gaza would have gotten more attention  from the establishment media machine. As it was, the first instinct of a cop arriviing on the scene was to draw his gun instead of grabbing a fire extinguisher or a blanket with which to smother the flames. I guess the cop feared that without gunfire,  the fire might spread to some pretty valuable real estate in the vicinity.

The police reaction and the ensuing media silence on this tragedyare simply reflective of the fact that the the powers-that-be consider the destruction of property to be far worse than the destruction of human beings.  This also applies to the destruction of oneself in an act of political protest.

 And when it's a military service member who self-destructs so spectacularly to protest against a genocide in which he potentially would be ordered to participate ,it renders thr masters of war and their media lackeys completely speechless.  Their own cowardly acts of self-censorship speak for ithemselves; to the extent that outlets like the New York Times have covered the tragedy, they have done so in as perfunctory and repressed a style as they can indecently manage.

 "Man sets self on fire in front of embassy " is pretty much the gist of it. It's rendered as pathetically humdrum a stunt as the  latest disturbed White House fence-jumping or at least no more remarkable than a particularly gruesome traffic pile-up.

"Move along, folks," the media cops on the beat seem to chide those rubbernecker readers. "Nothing to see here."

It's especially awkward for them as Election '24 is in full gear. Genocide Joe would find it especially difficult to shamble up to eh podium and slur out his thanks to Airman Bushnell for his service and his sacrifice. And his standard closing line of "God protect our troops" would neither fit the occasion nor contribute to the kind of  for-profit patriotic fervor that he's always aiming for. 

And it also wouldn't do for Biden to bring up suicide of any kind during this election year, when deaths of despair in America are at their highest level in years -  despite his boasts of  an economy so booming that only MAGA Republicans are mired in the slough of American life,. They are so cynical when  a Democratic future obviously beckons to one and all.

To hear the politicians tell it, our military heroes and martyrs have all willingly and valiantly killed or died for us. Never do the masters of war tell us the real truth: that the vast majority of people join the military to escape poverty, either actual or threatened. That is because wages have been stagnating for decades. A military job means guaranteed food, lodging, job training and guaranteed, cost-free health care.  Recruiting efforts, largely done in high schools in poor districts, take great care sell the benefits and to downplay the physical and mental risks.

The first place I learned about Aaron Bushnell's death was in the right-wing, sensationalistic Daily Mail. The headline in its follow-up story today was. predictably enough, aimed at arousing outrage against lefties burning Israeli flags in a vigil outside the embassy, and glorifying the airman as a martyr. It is the same kind of stereotypical language the media uses when they cover Muslim jihadists fomenting mayhem in the Middle East just for the crazed fun of it.

But surprisingly enough, the body of the Daily Mail article contains interviews with Bushnell's neighbors and plenty of background and photographs.  Even though it's buried deep within the body of the story, it even quotes a psychologist warning that to the extent that the establishment media will cover the self-immolation in any depth, it will be a smear job, calling into question Bushnell's mental health. Absent any radical tidbits, The Times and its cohort  probably will continue to ignore the story.

Besides, they're too busy covering Joe Biden's campaign appearance on a late-night NBC talk show while studiously ignoring the scores of anti-genocide protesters gathering outside 30 Rock. They're too busy analyzing whether Joe's genocide will hurt his chances in today's Michigan primary - where, we're told, only his victory will prevent the Second Coming of Trump.

They figure if they just ignore Bushnell's death, it will go away. So let's make it impossible to ignore. Otherwise, his death will indeed have been in vain.  

Biden's Holy Wars

Christian fundamentalism is the unbroken thread winding its slinky way throughout the history of the United States.  It writhes on to this very day, above the surface among right-wing factions, and more or less below the surface among liberals who purport to be more rational. This more enlightened, more occult liberal version is either approved or ignored  by the mainstream media.

Joe Biden is a conservative Catholic, whose hardcore religious fundamentalism often escapes the traditional bounds of liberal discretion. He is certainly not immune to the hardcore religious dogma which has kept the colonialist, repressive, inquisitorial mindset alive in North America for upwards of 400 years.  He, like most leaders, has used his religion as a moral excuse for inhumane policies ranging from his longtime opposition to abortion,  via the Hyde Amendment, to his full- throated support of the antisocial austerity policies espoused by the Reagan inspired Democratic Leadership Council he helped to found in the 1980s.

But nowhere is Biden's religious fundamentalism more apparent than in the thick coats of pious gloss he applies to his proxy war on Russia and his fanatical support of the State of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians trapped in occupied Gaza.

Biden went  full fire and brimstone last week when that godless heretic Donald Trump committed  his shocking sacrilege against NATO, even going so far as to invite the great satan Putin to invade the member-states who don't plunk their fair share into the collection basket. It was one of many times recently that Biden has  referred to his NATO not as the European arm of the military-industrial complex, but as a "sacred" fraternity united against undemocratic (read: godless) Russia.

Biden's entire re-election campaign revolves around the enemies without and the Public Enemy Number One and "existential threat" to the soul of our nation within: Donald Trump.The liturgy known as Russiagate is the required catechism. 

Although the dictionary defines the word "sacred" as "dedicated or set apart for the worship of a deity," or "something or someone  "worthy of religious veneration," Biden certainly has a facile way of hurling it about.

"We have a "sacred obligation to our military families," he sermonized last spring, "because there is nothing more sacred or more American."

But on another occasion he argued that "there is nothing more sacred than the right to vote," a right which is enshrined in "the sacred Constitution."

Biden, as a Catholic school pupil during the Cold War, was always taught to say his rosary for the conversion of Russia. He learned all about the miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, who appeared to three Portuguese peasant children in 1917, around the time of the Russian revolution, to expressly warn them about a communist i menace so catastrophic that the children  were instructed by the mother of Jesus to only divulge the details to the Vatican, which was to keep the documents under lock and key almost a century. And Biden also learned that the anti-Muslim crusades were not a series of land-grabbing  atrocities carried out over a period of over 200 years, but rather virtuous pilgrimages for the saving of non-believing souls. How do I know this? Because I attended a Catholic elementary school, too, and this was the relentless propaganda that was drummed into me. It was a curriculum and catechism devised and decreed by the Vatican. Some pupils outgrew or disowned this dogmatism. Others, obviously, have not.

So it comes as no surprise, to me anyway, that the two enemies that Biden has chosen to fight are Russia and the Muslims that centuries ago reconquered the Middle East from all manner of European usurpers. It explains why Biden is a self-described Christian Zionist with an unwavering loyalty to the state of Israel, the formation of which officially expelled Palestinians fom the "holy land" in 1948. As a devout, fundamentalist Catholic, he believes that when the end of the world comes, he will be bodily resurrected into heaven directly from Zionist-controlled Jerusalem.

When it comes to war, Biden gets downright medieval in his rhetocic.  His crusade to expand and strengthen NATO to all of Europe and even beyond, his exhortation to the whole world to join forces against Russia is not only a throwback to the Cold War. It's a throwback to Pope Urban II's exhortation in 1095 to nobles, knights, clergy and peasants alike to join in a militant pilgrimage to Byzantium, ostensibly to defend a Greek monarch against the Turks -  but really while they were at it,  to reconquer Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Palestine from Islamic rule.

Pope Urban got around the Church's official aversion to war and murder by redefining what was to become more than two  hundred years' worth  of "crusades" against Muslims  - multigenerational long pilgrimage in which participating European  volunteer-combatants would be absolved of all their sins and guaranteed a place in heaven.

George W. Bush made liberals cringe when he cast his invasion of Iraq as a "crusade." Biden thus far has not verbally succumbed out that retrograde mindset by using the "C" word himself regarding his ideological wars. But he and his fellow hawks are always striving to overcome the Vietnam Syndrome described by neocons, in which our "sickly inhibitions" against war damage whatver war effort is currently underway.

For example, just as Tucker Carlson allowed Putin to tell his side of the story, the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny conveniently died in a Siberian prison - right before his wife was taking the stage at a NATO confab in Munich. Right as the House of Reps was balking at sending more money and weaponry to Ukraine. 

Right as the fate of political prisoner Julian Assange, exposer of Crusader Bush's war crimes, is being decided in a British court.

Just as "Genocide Joe" insisted that he witnessed the beheadings of Israeli babies by Hamas, Pope Urban II before him had urged genocide by atrocity propaganda. He  told his troops of pilgrims that Muslim "savages" were eviscerating their (non-existent) Christian slaves just to see how far their intestines could be  spread upon the ground. The pope also inspired his target audience with the specter of mass sexual assaults by Musliims upon on Christian women. Urban prissily did not go into specifics explaining that talking about the horror would actually be worse than the actual horror. . Of course, Pope Urban didn't have a New York Times to spread the graphic unproven  details for him.. Plus, most people were not that literate back then.

Enlightened liberal fanatics like Biden just can't seem to help embracing the same kind of mythical, mystical past they accuse the "deplorables" of clinging to.

The sacralizing of war and all kinds of ,cruelty is how they justify  their crimes to themselves.. It's what lets all of them  sleep at night.

 It also what makes Biden risk his own re-election for the sake of a religious fundamentalist idea, even it it means the second coming of Trump. Biden seems to be holding on for the second coming of Christ. Until then, his faith turns America iinto a pariah state in the eyes of the world.

We must face the likelihood thathe truly does believe that Israel's murder of 30,000 Palestinians and counting is simply a matter of righteous self-defense.

As Jeff Sharlet observes in his excellent history of American fundamentalism, "The Family.""

"Our attempts to shunt fundamentalists into the outer circle of kooks and haters and losers and left-behinds, undemocratic dimwits who do not understand the story the rest of us have agreed to live by. Our refusal to recognize the theocratic strand running throughout American history is as self-deceiving as fundamentalism's insistence that the United States was created a Christian nation."`

Sharlet writes in his book that the National Prayer Breakfast, begun as a yearly event during the Eisenhower administration, and at which every president siince has delivered a religion--themed speech  actually got its start as an anti-labor, anti-New Deal movement in the 1930s, as a nifty means to promote capitalistic greed and wealth inequality in the name of Jesus. The annual event also serves as a back-channel for foreign leaders - including foreign despots who are officially personae non grata with the State Department -and influential business people to wheel and deal in  safety and comfort, to be a part of the religious experience. The only requirement is a personal acceptance of Jesus.

For his own part, Biden did not disappoint the war profiteers in the audience. At oone point in his speech, he actually seemed to conflate the United States with the body of Jesus Christ:

"But we’re the beacon to the world.  The entire world looks to us.  That’s not hyperbole. 
"
This is an idea.  This idea was made real before the soul became flesh, before this dream became a fact.  It was prayed for, it was hoped for, it was believed in.  That’s the story of America."

Biden alluded to the famous passage from the New Testament's Gospel of St. John: "The word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory as it were the only begotten son of the Father, full of grace and truth."

I rest my case.

Unforgettable

Who cares if Joe Biden thinks that he took tea with Marie Antoinette at the Kremlin just the other day? Who cares if he forgets bombing countries with whom we are not actually at war? 

The president is, after all, nothing but a simulacrum or figurehead of power. The real power is invested in his representatives, who represent the corporations and billionaires who own the place.

To show that Biden as a personage doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of these malevolent schemers, loyal pundits like Paul Krugman are falling all over themselves bragging that despite their high intelligence, they forget the year that their own mother died.  So how dare the special prosecutor take the name of Biden's dead son in vain as an example of how senile the president is? I mean, who in their righteous mind hasn't forgotten when they were the vice president of a whole country, o even whether they still might even might still be the vice president of the United States?

Here's my take on ForgetGate. Biden, drawing upon his past feat of graduating near the bottom of his law school class but at a press conference decades later advancing himself to summa cum laude status, was simply perpetrating another con on a different panel of inquisitors. Only this time, he thought he could score points by dminishing himself. Granted that he is diminished, he chose to exaggerate his brain fog as a criminal defense strategy.

 The trouble was, his testimony was a bit over the top, even for him, even a bit sarcastic. He  was acting very passive-aggressively toward his interrogators.

It sure saved hhim the trouble of invoking the fifth amendment against self-incrimination. He probably figured the special prosecutor would simply do a wink-and-nod and release a brief report stating that the theft of classified material did not rise to the level pf a prosecutable crime.

This is the Old Boys Club, of which Biden has been a proud member iin good standing for nearly half a century!

It backfired on him, of course. When you're running for re-election, it's much more preferable to be charged with a crime than to be labeled senile. Just ask Donald Trump, who is so busy with myriad court cases that he barely has time to hold a campaign rally. And if he is off the campaign trail, he has less opportunity to exhibit his own senility.  Dementia and crime are canceling each other right out, in Trump's case. It also helps him when the Supreme Court seems poised to to demolish the Democrats' "lawfare" shenanigans to keep him off the ballot.

I still think Biden will drop out right before or even during the Democratic convention this summer.  That way, the corporations and billionaires, either in  person or via their paid superdelegates, can nominate his successor by undemocratic acclaim. If they have an ounce of sense, this is what they will do. And that is a big "if." The task will be to keep their rusting windup toy well-oiled with medication and well-scripted to stay on message for several more months. First lady Jill will never be far away in a futile effort to swat away any elder abuse allegations along with those pesky "Genocide Joe" epithets hurled against her hubby.

Putting Joe into the retirement home for Aging War Criminals will be delicate undertaking not least because they will also have to find a way of retiring Kamala Harris from the ticket. So I assume they will nominate a woman for either their number one or number two. I am currently betting on Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. She could well salvage the state for the Dems if only she can convince the anti-Biden Palestinian bloc that she is not also in Israel's pocket. That is another big If.

 And Joe Biden will get an unforgettable sendoff for putting the country before his incredible career of championing genocide,  writing racist crime bills, putting more immigrants into solitary confinement and deporting them than even his xenophobic predecessor did.