Plan B From Outer Space

Since flattery and cajolery and insipid appeals to patriotism haven't convinced Joe Biden to just go away, Democratic Party bigwigs have now advanced to their idea of a Plan B. 

They're proposing, with less than two months before their nominating convention, to put the gloss of democracy on a really cool alternate selection process.

Party boss James Clyburn of South Carolina is calling it a "lightning primary" an idea which veteran party operative James Carville took up with a column in Monday's New York Times.

Since time is so short and Donald Trump is Enemy Number One, you  didn't actually expect a real primary, where ordinary slobs are actually permitted to vote, did you?

On the contrary. The new version of primary is when former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama get to anoint an octet of worthy Biden replacements to appear at a quartet of town halls on various worthy corporate-sponsored cable channels. Clinton and Obama would be the "facilitators" of these events. To be democratic about it, they  would consult with the nation's twenty-odd Democratic governors to arrive at the final cut of contenders. The actual voting would be done by the pre-selected party delegates after discussions both public and private.

Carville wiggles out of the party's Kamala dilemma by stressing that yes, of course the current vice president would be included among the lucky eight. What more perfect way to get rid of her without appearing to be racist and sexist?

For that matter, what more perfect way of getting rid of Joe Biden? First, they gave him a big premature group hug of an endorsement, thus blocking any challengers. Then, when it is too late to allow real democracy back into the mix, they encouraged a premature debate with Donald Trump. When Joe's ballyhooed knockout punch failed,  they acted all shocked and chagrined that the old geezer had gone senile on them.

Elder abuse is not just in the purview of Jill and Hunter Biden, not by a long stretch. And not only that: the old geezer turns out to be such a mean, cornered, snapping wolverine of a geezer that he's turning into a Donald Trump clone himself, what with bragging in one interview that since he rules the whole world, he alone can defeat his strongman brother under the demagogic skin.

Carville's essay, meanwhile, is nothing if not disingenuous. In the colorful Cajun-speak that this veteran of Clintonism he is known for, the latest item on the party's tasting menu reeks of a nest of bloated rats overdosing on their own swamp gas.

"We’re going to nominate a new ticket in a highly democratic and novel way," the essay wheezily boasts. "Not in the backrooms of Washington, D.C., or Chicago."

Town halls — high-stakes job interviews for the toughest job in the world — would surely attract television and cable partners and generate record numbers of viewers. Think the Super Bowl with Taylor Swift in the stands. The young, the old and everyone in between will tune in to see history being made in real time.

That's quite a stretch, even for a moribund party that still thinks that the show, the spectacle and the "story-telling" are all that the electorate wants or needs. There will be zero discussion from them on such niceties as federal rent control legislation, single payer health insurance, Supreme Court term limits, disease abd oanemic control and climate legislation. Blind allegiance to war and genocide are definite musts, though.

Of course, their contrived emergency timetable also  means that some people will just have to be disgruntled about the "hard choices" which must be made on behalf of Pragmatism. Cue the neoliberal thought collective!

Town halls will give Americans a fresh look at Ms. Harris and introduce them to our deep bench of smart, dynamic, tested leaders. In addition, Democratic delegates will get to further grill and stress-test these leaders in public and private meetings before a formal vote of all the delegates at the Democratic convention.

And naturally, Carville hastens to add, "we've got some folks at the fringes, God love 'em" who will not be invited to the town halls. He was too chickenshit to mention that names Jill Stein, Cornel West and probably Bernie Sanders even though he has remained silent about his good friend Joe Biden. 

 This nifty selection process will, if it comes to fruition,  be a variation on the 2020 primary theme, when Selector Barack Obama convinced all the contenders trailing Bernie to drop out en masse. Elizabeth Warren stayed in so as to bleed progressive votes away from Bernie. And thus was Joe Biden crowned. The pandemic and lockdown were just the frosting on the cake for the Party.

Carville's parting shot in his op-ed was to give a shout-out to "my friend Rahm Emanuel" who is credited with inventing the neoliberal slogan "never let a serious crisis go to waste.," even though Winston Churchill probably said it first.

As Naomi Klein outlined their method in "Disaster Capitalism," it matters not whether the crisis is manufactured by the very destructive culprits who claim to want to put it all back together again.

We've seen this horror movie too many times before to get scared by i, let alone take their script seriously. It'd be laughable, were not the United States of America and Europe (a/k/a NATO) not in Washington this week plotting their insane march to World War III.

Needless to say, there will be no peace candidates on the Democratic stage any time soon. Just imagine Taylor Swift in the stands, and your troubles will magically pack themselves away in the old kit bag.

The Liberal Rich Have an Anxiety Attack

Since you can't parse chaos, I'll be abandoning my old Sardonicky shtick of covering presidential debates by grabbing the written transcript and deconstructing/translating the dialogue. I'd pick out both the most outrageous or humorous lies and unintentioanl bursts of honesty and have some fun with the spectacle.

So since you cannot parody what was essentially a self-parody, let's instead deconstruct the corporate media's lockstep reaction to the "debate" in general, and Joe Biden's performance in particular.

The liberal hive-mind  was shocked, shocked I tell you, that Biden suddenly became senile. This admission comes after months if not years of ascribing his cognitive condition to "gaffes," "folksy tall tales" and their favorite standby" "Joe just being Joe." 

They're unable to cover for him any longer.  As Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes tweeted, they can't make you un-see what you just saw.

Joe's debate performance was like an AI app run amok. The stock phrases  and the platitudes were all there. They were just all mixed up. It was like being trapped in a crowd  of desperate shoppers fighting over the last bits of shoddy merchandise in a bargain basement  jumble sale. The obvious cacophony  in his head translated into such a hoarse vocal slurry that his non sequiturs sounded even more deranged than they actually were.

  He seemed to be in a race against his own brain, rushing to cram in all that over-rehearsed debate prep into each single two minute soundbite.  Thus, when answering a question about inflation, he short-circuited into the hackneyed image of a family sitting around the kitchen table freaking out over the bills into the awful price of unaffordable kitchen tables.

Not so funny was his answer to a question about abortion which veered off into a Trump-like remark about a woman being raped by a migrant. He also seemed to confuse Supreme Court sessions with trimesters of pregnancy.

At one point, he did make a cogent suggestion that the cap on Social Security taxes be raised in order to save our national retirement program. But that has already been drowned out by his boast that he "defeated" Medicare. Well, you have to give him credit for trying. Contrary to what Trump  mendaciously responded, that he is destroying Medicare by giving it to those dreaded immigrants, Biden has been stealthily privatizing the program by handing chunks of its over to the for-profit insurance cartel.

Biden had too much debate prep. He should have been resting his voice during the five days he was holed up at Camp David, Instead, his handlers overwound his clock, and the whole mechanism sputtered and sprung. He should probably fire his debate coach.  Or as one Youtuber joked, maybe he should find a new drug dealer.

Of course, the media's "aghastitude" is totally misplaced. How shocking, how sad and how tragic the Biden has lost his timing this late in his career. They're reluctantly urging him to withdraw from the race - not because of his dangerous  and reckless, policies,  but because of his feeble performance on the debate stage. It's not the genocide and the proxy war on Russia and his enthusiasm for more nuclear weapons that bother them. It's that his physical and mental health are inexorably declining.

A guy seemingly on the verge of actual death himself is not the best salesman for the  marketing and the subsequent explaining-away of all the violent deaths of others at the hands of the US hegemon.

One thing that does merit specific deconstruction is the unctuous New York Times editorial which urges Biden to step aside in the interests of said US hegemon.  ("good of the country.") As with other examples of the uniform concern trolling narrative on display by the liberal media hive mind,  the editorial board goes overboard with the flattery.  Genocide Joe is a good man,  a decent man, and a good if not great president. They act as though a politician who's actually been a maniac for the whole past half-century in power developed Alzheimer's overnight. They act as though he is just your standard harmless grandpa with one too many fender-benders and it is now their painful duty to relieve him of the car keys. Or more accurately, to politely request that he voluntarily relinquish his keys for the safety of all the other luxury car-owners traversing the private road.

And if he refuses, they hasten to add that they'd sooner Biden get behind the wheel again rather than let other souped-up geezer-mobile of a Trump hog the road again.

If the race comes down to a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the sitting president would be this board’s unequivocal pick. That is how much of a danger Mr. Trump poses. But given that very danger, the stakes for the country and the uneven abilities of Mr. Biden, the United States needs a stronger opponent to the presumptive Republican nominee. To make a call for a new Democratic nominee this late in a campaign is a decision not taken lightly, but it reflects the scale and seriousness of Mr. Trump’s challenge to the values and institutions of this country and the inadequacy of Mr. Biden to confront him. 

What is really needed, says the Times, are "fresh voices" as opposed to fresh policies to make people's lives better. The editorial admits that it's poliitical style that really matters - not political substance. Biden can't even fool a few of the people some of the time. 

The Paper of Record's lead news story today was not about the thousands of anti-genocide protesters massed outside Biden's latest campaign fund-raiser in New York City on Friday evening, let alone the many arrests by police in riot gear. 

It was about the angst of rich Democratic donors over whether their multimillion-dollar iinvestments in Biden may be wasted.

In Silicon Valley, a group of megadonors, including Ron Conway and Laurene Powell Jobs, were calling, texting and emailing one another about a situation they described as a possible catastrophe. The donors wondered about whom in the Biden fold they could contact to reach Jill Biden, the first lady, who in turn could persuade her husband not to run.

 As if every one of the billionaire donor class did not have Jill Biden on speed dial. They're just too cowardly to be the first one to call. It's easier to whisper to the New York Times, where Jill can read about their very pressing concerns. That way, they can hedge their bets on the off-chance that Joe is, in fact, re-elected. They hate to risk their State Dinner invites, not to mention international junkets on Air Force One.

Here's my theory. Joe will not drop out because without the power to commute his son Hunter's sentences on gun and tax convictions/charges, the young prince may not only end up in prison, but the money spigot supporting the whole family will dry right up.

The Bidens have always been about what's good for the Bidens. Jill and the rest would probably prefer the Joe die in office rather than live out a few more good relaxing days on the beach.

Some Thoughts On Julian Assange

Assange is free, but journalism seems more shackled than ever.

With his coerced guilty plea this week  to one felony count under the archaic, repressive, anti-democratic Espionage Act, the United States has essentially declared adversarial journalism to be a crime. To say that the plea deal will have a chilling effect on what is still actually left of independent reporting in the public interest is an understatement, given that such reporting already has been frozen out of existence.

From the news deserts resulting from the mass closures of local newspapers and radio stations and thousands of reporters losing their jobs in the process, journalism has largely morphed into a consolidated corporate behemoth whose main function is not to inform, but to indoctrinate and propagandize. Noam Chomsky called it the "manufacture of consent."

But failing at this task, as evidenced by the polls revealing unprecedented distrust in mass media and with the growing numbers of people out in the streets and on social media protesting everything from wars and genocide to capitalism-engendered climatate catastrophes, to the manufacture of consent has been duly added the manufacturing of fear and polarization.

Take the coverage of Julian Assange in the New York Times. The headline in today's "news analysis" of his release from prison casts him not as a journalist and a publisher, but as a "hacker and polarizing figure."

One of the main duties of our six or seven polarizing media giants  is to divide people for the benefit of the conquerors. Rather than address the inconvenient truths and crimes exposed by the likes of Assange,  the default position is to shoot the messenger. It's easier to accuse people that they consider dangerous to the status quo of having personality disorders or malign ulterior motives,  Assange, the Times sniffed, became nothing but a "sideshow"  before becoming "a ghostly throwback to another time."

For a media outlet that's been so obsessed with promoting a sideshow called Trump Derangement for at least the last decade, that epithet is pretty weak. Then again, classic Freudian projection is one of the  few weapons they still have left in their propaganda arsenal.

Only a hack would ever call Assange a hacker, given that he did not personally download or  steal the emails of the rich and powerful which he published in Wikileaks. Chelsea Manning accessed the initial trove of emails related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

And despite the oft-repeated claim that "Russia" hacked the Podesta emails showing that the Democratic National Committee manipulated the 2016 primaries to boost Hillary Clinton - among other embarrassments - officials have readily admitted in sworn testimony that there is no concrete proof that Russia was involved in the theft. But nonetheless, the Times persists to this very day in claiming that Assange was in cahoots with the Kremlin, and by extension, the Trump campaign.

Clinton, who published an op-ed lauding her Broadway production cred in the Times on the same day of Assange's release. had once suggested, while she was Obama's secretary of state "droning" the Wikileaks founder. She went on to pontificate about the sideshow known as the Trump-Biden debate, scheduled to air on the CNN behemoth tonight.

And in today's Times news analysis, the reporters even went so far as to imply that any "chilling effect" has been not on journalists, but on poor Hillary herself. To wit:

As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton had to apologize to foreign leaders for embarrassing details in cables sent by American diplomats to the State Department. In one case, the foreign minister of a Persian Gulf nation refused to allow note takers into a meeting with her, for fear that his comments would be leaked.

Fear is the keyword here. Assange inserted an unaccustomed fear into the hardened hearts of  the rich, the powerful and the secretive. Disclosures of their crimes and lies robbed them of that power, permanently. Those shackles they've devised show signs of rusting out, at least among independent writers and broadcasters. That "chilling effect" on journalism that the Assange persecution engendered could, paradoxically, be the very stimulus required to thaw our minds right of the propaganda deep freeze. That is my hope, anyway. The only ting we have to fear is their fear, itself. Cornered predators can be very dangerous indeed.

The eyes of the whole world were opened thanks to Assange and Wikileaks. And they'll remain open despite the best efforts of the overlords to tape them shut, right along with our mouths.

The sideshow is them, and the reviews are pouring in. And they're devastating.

******

I will be watching the CNN sideshow tonight and writing it up either tomorrow or Saturday. Meantime, if any of you would like to weigh in sooner, please use the comment section. Blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute reactions as the action happens are more than welcome.

#Resistance 2.0

Why waste your time fretting that Donald Trump is quite likely to beat Joe Biden in November? It is never too early to wax nostalgic for the halcyon days of #Resistance, Inc. when well-heeled elites giddily took to the streets and kvelled their despair over Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss from high atop penthouse rooftops.

On Sunday, mere hours before the aforesaid Clinton received a standing ovation at the Tony awards from the aforesaid elites, and mere hours after Joe Biden had raked in $30 million from other aforesaid elites at a Hollywood fundraiser. the New York  Times took the  extraordinary step of admitting that Joe Biden is toast.

The narrative goes something like this: it's better to preemptively turn ignominious defeat in November into a moral elite victory right now, by showing how proactive the Democrats can be, even as they continue to foment the fear day in and day out. Just going negative can get so tedious and exhausting. The Hitler comparisons got stale quite a while ago.

It took four of the Paper of Record's star reporters to spin this yarn:

Opponents of Donald J. Trump are drafting potential lawsuits in case he is elected in November and carries out mass deportations, as he has vowed. One group has hired a new auditor to withstand any attempt by a second Trump administration to unleash the Internal Revenue Service against them. Democratic-run state governments are even stockpiling abortion medication.

Never mind that even the right-wing Supreme Court has just upheld the right to obtain the abortion pill. Trump might send iin the troops to prevent their mmanufacture and distribution. Never mind that Joe Biden has granted Trump's cruel immigration wish by closing the border to Latin American refugees. It would be even worse under Trump, who would send the troops to Democratic cities to round up the migrants. The gist of the resistance" will be to protect aforesaid elites from Trumpian revenge where it would hurt them the most - in their pocketbooks. There is nothing in the 'resistance" that will protect ordinary people from the predatory capitalism and endless wars embraced by both wings of the Duopoly - or what the late Christopher Hitchens described as the two tightly fused cheeks of one  gigantic ass. Or what the Times hilariously calls "Democracy itself."

The Times article then goes through a laundry list of corporate-funded liberal think tanks and a roster of Obama-sera lawyers already hard at work writing their briefs and padding their resumes.

Among those approvingly quoted by The Times is the leader of an outfit called the "States United Democracy Center," which purports to fight looming Trump-style authoritarianism by authoratatively protecting/policing democracy with a partnership of former governors and law enforcement officials.

A group of former White House lawyers from the Obama administration have started a firm called "Protect Democracy." They've  moved on from helping former Atty Gen. Eric Holder legalize extrajudicial drone assassinations into making sure that Trump doesn't morph into becoming any more than "an aspiring autocrat."

"He is no normal candidate, this  is no normal election, and these are no normal preparations for merely coming out on the wrong side of a national referendum on policy choices," explained the firm's founder, Ian Bassin.

What policy choices are these Blue Team freedom fighters actually offering to make peeple's lives better? That is the question, entirely ignored by the New York Times.

I did submit a comment, which was rejected. I am guessing that the uncivil words "pussy" and "genocide" tripped up their  automatic ccensorship filter. It was certainly no more withering than the more than 2,000 other comments from shocked readers Here it is:

 So in lieu of Dems offering voters an agenda of their own for the greater social good, this article implies that because they lack an agenda, they might as well as well throw in the towel regarding Trump-fear to motivate voters.

We may as well start dusting off our pink pussy hats, getting all fired up and ready to go for the good old days of the "resistance." We go high when they go low! The D Team be "fighting for" you, proles. Stay tuned for all the exciting lawsuits, glitzy congressional hearings and bombshell scandals, because they certainly can't promise you universal health care, affordable housing or, heaven forfend, an end to war, mass surveillance and genocide. On the contrary, these professional resisters will once again give Trump even more billions of dollars than he even requested for his military/surveillance budget.

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In Search of His Lost World War

At one year old in 1944, Joe Biden was too young to be aware of D-Day in particular and World War II in general. At 81 years of age in 2024, Joe Biden  is so old and so out of it that he can't even keep  his own lies (what the New York Times calls "tall tales") straight any more.

Unlke the decline in his his actual cognitive functioning, however,  Biden's reptilian patriotic mindset shows no sign of faltering. In France last week to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion at Normandy that marked the beginning of the end of the war in Europe, Biden was in such a state of full-blown nostalgia that he expressed a yearning for a repeat. This time around, the designated Hitler is none other than Vladimir Putin.

Biden and his gerontocratic war cult long with a vengeance for the good old days of World War II, the "good" war, when people waved the flag and planted victory gardens  and hardly anybody protested in the streets. The Americans wrenched themselves right out of their isolationism, saving the entire globe from Hitler. They later absolved themselves from their own official anti-Semitism, for the shame of having closed the immigration door to Hitler's Jewish victims, by supporting the creation of the state of Israel. 

Most importantly, World War II made the USA a superpower and paved the way for the permanent military-industrial complex that D-Day architect Dwight Eisenhower warned us about at the end of his own presidency.

Biden, in denouncing Vladimir Putin as the reincarnation of Hitler via his invasion of Ukraine, conveniently glosses over the actual history of the second world war, and how even before its end, FDR and Churchill  and Stalin had already divvied up the spoils and carved up the planet in a new imperialist world order. Germany was cut in half, as was Korea. American troops  still occupy Okinawa. There are at least 800 American military bases operating throughout the world.

 When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in the 90s, the United States assumed it would now own the whole world into perpetuity. vIt was, as as Francis Fukuyama arrogantly dubbed it, "the end of history."  But far from being inspired to cut back on the military industrial complex,  they created a new enemy in the form of "Islamic extremism."  It morphed conveniently into the permanent war on terror once former CIA asset Osama bin Laden and his Saudi financial backers attacked the World Trade Center. (Once Osama had outlived his usefulness in what amounted to one of several US proxy wars on Russia when it occupied Afghanistan) he did the expected blowback.

America's ownership of the world, and its status as sole remaining Superpower, is now coming to a close with the rise of China and the BRICs economy. This decline and fall of US power is only being hastened by its depraved financial and ideological support of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.

Meanwhile,  Biden  topped off his sales pitch for World War III with a gala four-course state dinner in Paris. In a scene straight out of Proust's Belle Epoque, he gnawed  his way through chicken on "a base of artichoke hearts, slivers of carrots of various colors had been curled into the likeness of a rose. A cheese course led to a finale of chocolate, strawberries and raspberries, again shaped like a rose, enlivened by a coulis of “carnal thorns,” whatever that may be. In any event, it was very good."

The fawning Times culinary review gives off a distinct vibe of Nero fiddling while Rome burns... right down to each individual table bearing the name of a celebrity or a politician. I imagine that guests were fihgting over who got to sit at tables labeled "Nancy Pelosi" and "Antony Blinken."

War and genocide and starvation can rage all they want outside of the palace walls, but for the elite dignitaries running the show,  everything is literally coming up roses. Even as they wined and dined in a sickening display of  war nostalgia,, in grisly remembrance of slaughters past, slaughters present, and slaughters yet to come,, thousands of protesters were surrounding the White House, draping its entire perimeter with a red banner bearing the names of Palestinian victims of US-financed genocide.

Biden and his Cold Warrior clan, now variously known as Neocons, Liberal Interventionists and Nato Partners, simply were not counting on the masses of people being disgusted by their violent antics around the world. Biden's repulsive boasting that the war in Ukraine and the slaughter of Gazans being good for the economy as they protect weapons manufacturing jobs, has fallen flat on its face and rightly so. He is still counting on the military Keynesism that finally lifted the US out of the Great Depression during World War II to do the trick once again.

He is looking at what Marcel Proust called "the monstrous past" through rose colored glasses. Biden's own search for lost time replaces the horror of past wars with "a miraculous golden age, a paradise in which all mankind shall be reconciled."

Of course he is running, or actually shambling, for re-election. And he is boasting of US-supplied missiles flyng iinto Russia.

This patriotic fervor in combination with senile dementia (and I include Donald Trump and his own twisted MAGA version of wpatriotism in that category) is particularly frightening.

This patriotic fervor is what keeps Biden on his feet even as he breaks off one of his "tall tales" of being arrested in a civil rights protest or graduating first in his law school class with a sudden blank, lost, slack-jawed stare. The mere sight of a flag-draped stage could be the miracle stimulant that snaps him right out of his senility for whole minutes at a time.

Meanwhile, even "progressives" like Bernie Sanders are urging people to re-elect Biden jthosust to avoid a second term of Trump.

He and other liberal apologists would be wise to heed the words of Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee from the real Hitler.

"Those who choose the lesser evil, " she wrote, "forget very quickly that they chose evil."

Some Corpses Are More Worthy Than Others

 In a macabre exercise in  Orwellian double-think, President Biden has officially declared that a "prayer for peace" be uttered by one and all on this Memorial Day. Even the chattering war-mongers of the weapons manufacturer-sponsored  corporate media followed orders and at least shut up for a hot minute of silence - before drowning out the sacred bell-tolling with the normal discussion of who to bomb next.

And even as Biden and his fellow politicians all bowed their own heads in simulation of prayer for peace, the bombs and ammo were en route with a vengeance to Israel, Ukraine,  and wherever else on the planet that fine war products are sold.

Honoring all the dead American troops for having made the "ultimate sacrifice" for the sake of an "idea"  serves the purpose of our never-ending state of war by separating the dead professional killers (potential if not actual) from the killed. Those who die while waring a uniform and holding a gun are declared to be more respectable, and thereby more  more grievable,  than "official" enemy combatants and unarmed civilians alike.

Putting a halo on dead soldiers also lets the masters of war ignore the fact that war is in its modern essence a capitalistic enterprise, designed to protect and enhance the power and the profits of the few.  So if they use words like "freedom" and "democracy" and "sacred" often enough to justify their mass murder, it is that much easier to separate, demote and dehumanize all those non-uniformed men, women and children. At best these victims  are barely sympathetic "collateral damage." At worst they are the complicit "human shields" of the latest designated enemy.

They are deemed not worthy of grief on this Memorial Day. 

As  Simone  Weil wrote in her brilliant antiwar essay, with the epic antiwar poem  the Iliad as her centerpiece, the victims of war are conveniently transformed into "things."  If If the masters of war can magically transform people into things even before  violently killing them, it naturally follows that they are also mere things after their deaths.

Weil's opening paragraph:

" Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors."

War, she continues, makes a person into a thing by literally turning him or her either into a pre-corpse or an actual one. "Somebody is here, and the next minutes, nobody is here at all."

The occult purpose of Memorial Day, therefore,  is not so much about honoring the designated  war heroes as it is  it is about honoring - and fearing -  the force and the power that they represent. It's a bait and switch holiday that allows "us" to mawkishly bow our heads for a minute before firing up the barbeque for the official start of summer.

And even as they're urging us to join in their maudlin festivities of death, hamburgers and fun in the sun, they're also trying to make us feel guilty that we ourselves have not been elevated to their rarefied ranks of either  potential or actual war dead. 

In both the  United Kingdom and the United States, there are renewed calls from rulers for more lumpen folk to enlist for Permawar - euphemized as patriotic "national service."

"Only one percent of Americans serving in the military is problematic"  scolded Rep. Pat Ryan, Democrat (from my own Hudson Valley district). The military-industrial complex sent him and his GOP partner, Mike Waltz of Florida, to a Sunday talk show in order to gaslight the audience on Memorial Day weekend. The public-private war industry made sure to send bona fide US Army veterans. It simply wouldn't have done to use, for example, the actual commander in chief, who during the Vietnam war enjoyed five separate draft deferments due to a case of chronic asthma from which has since apparently recovered.

Ryan and Waltz were quick to deny that their bipartisan push for enhanced financing for military recruitment in any way presages a return to the draft, (which was more egalitarian in the Vietnam era, when even upper middle class guys couldn't always avoid becoming cannon fodder). Recruitment will still be done according to class and be heavily concentrated in low-income school districts.

Moreover, they are insisting that mandatory national service wouldn't necessarily entail putting on a uniform or carrying a weapon. They do understand that there are still some pacifists out there, especially among the young people protesting their genocide of Palestinians.

Rather, they mask their nationalistic propaganda in the rhetoric of  social service, with Waltz gushing that it "could" include "national parks, inner city tutoring, elderly (sic) care."

And we all know (wink, wink, nod) that not only would this national service be either low paid or voluntary, it would also free up more money for the weapons contractors - money which is now being wasted on the public education of poor Black and Brown kids public schools in those "inner cities" and that all that Medicare money going to nursing care for old people could be going to Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, not to mention their  Wall Street investors.

In other words, they have "things"-both with uniforms and without - all figured out.

War Crimes and Punishment

On the same day that a prosecutor from the International Criminal Court (ICC) requested arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister for committing genocidal war drimes in Gaza, Julian Assange has won the right to appeal his extradtition to the United States to face charges of committing journalism.

As far as American officials are concerned,  the exposure of their war crimes is worse than the actual commission, or aiding and abetting of, war crimes. They've already been caught aggressively trying to quash the warrants against Bibi and his fellow genocidaires. Some hardliners in the US Congress had even explicitly threatened  to invade The Hague if Bibi should  ever be captured and held for trial there. (Congress already passed a law that requires the US military to swoop in and rescue, say, George Bush or Dick Cheney if they are ever brought to international justice for their Iraq war crimes. So l imagine Lindsay Graham and Tom Cotton feverishly writing legislation right this minute to codify things and specifically add Bibi to the official rescue list of mass murderers kidnapped by those vicious human rights terrorist folks.)

 At the same time, both political parties in the United States have ensured that Assange continues to rot in jail. This is notwithstanding President Biden's recent vague mutterings that his administration is considering dropping the Espionage Act charges against Assange.

He left the impression that they're running out the clock on the ailing Assange. They have already done their utmost to destroy both his physical and mental health.  By the time Biden belatedly decides to set him free. Assange's condition will have deteriorated to the point that they feel he no longer poses a threat to them, His appearance upon release will be so shocking that it will put the big chill on aspiring truth-tellers all over the world. The lucrative US war racket will survice and thrive while killing and maiming and displacing even more victims.

As I write this post, there still has been no official reaction from the White House concerning the ICC request for the arrest warrants against the Israeli officials as well as for two top leaders of Hamas. There also has been no reaction from the Biden administration regarding the granting of the Assange appeal.

Coverage of both legal stories has been relatively muted in the mainstream media, what with the helicopter crash killing Iran's president and the overheated saga of the ongoing Trump hush money trial, both of which were taking pride of place on the New York Times digital home-page this morning.

The two separate court cases, regarding as they do US-financed and abetted violations of human rights - against Assange as an individual and against innocent civilians in occupied territory in Gaza, the West Bank and in Israel itself - do not put the Biden administration in a good light, as they attempt to install the aging president in another four year term. 

It wouldn't even be a stretch for the ICC prosecutor to include Biden and the entire US Congress in his arrest warrant request. After all, without the billions of dollars in American military aid, this genocidal rampage would not be possible.

One ominous sign that the ICC will never touch the United States with a ten foot pole, and that this legal process is as much about political theater as it is about justice, is that prosecutor Karim Khan singled out human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, wife of George Clooney, for special thanks for her assistance in building the cases against Israel and Hamas leaders.

Her husband is set to headline a gala fundraiser for Joe Biden next month before heading to Broadway to reprise his film role as  legendary journliast Edward R. Murrow. Playing a journalist beats actually working as one every single time. Just ask the stenographers in the modern war-funded corporate media.