Weekend Open Thread

What are you thinking, doing, watching, reading, listening to?

Smear of RT Backfires

As part of its relentless Russophobic campaign against Donald Trump, the New York Times this week ran a hit piece on RT, the Russian government's TV news network. The article, written by Steven Erlanger, is just one more chapter in the manufactured saga which has the all-powerful and evil Vladimir Putin hacking our election, orchestrating the defeat of Hillary Clinton, and elevating Donald Trump, alleged Russian stooge, to the highest office in the land.

One of the sources for the Times piece is the anti-Putin Atlantic Council, a Washington-based foreign policy think tank composed of about equal parts neocon hawks and liberal interventionists. In other words, it's run by a bipartisan collective of warmongers who get their paychecks from such entities as Goldman Sachs, General Dynamics and Exxon-Mobil. So, to prove just how treacherous a stooge he really is, President Trump proceeded to nominate Atlantic Council Director Jon Hunt as his new ambassador to Russia within 24 hours of the Times article's publication.

Oops. There is so much head-fakery and so much gaslighting going on, it's hard to tell just who is punking who on any given day in this, the twilight of the American Empire. The appointment of the anti-Putin Huntsman does kind of take the wind out of the sails of the anti-RT, anti-Trump critics. It kind of turns this whole Russophobic narrative of the TrumPutin clone right on its ear.

Then again, maybe not. The anti-Russia hysterics have dug themselves into such a deep hole they don't know how to get out of it. This saga will likely continue to the bitter end, if it ever does end. 

Further deepening their hole is the WikiLeaks revelation this week that the CIA has a program which can falsely trace leaks back to any source that it chooses. Spy agency assertions -- that the leaks of DNC emails showing how the party sabotaged the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the subsequent dump of the Podesta email trove proving Hillary's allegiance to Wall Street -- were both traced directly to Russia renders their "high confidence" even more suspect.

And if all else fails, and it does seem to be failing, they'll blame those selfish, disloyal millennials who tune in to such RT shows as Watching the Hawks and Redacted Tonight. Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden has already gone so far as to accuse millennial hires of dumping the CIA documents through WikiLeaks. It's just terrible that the Intelligence Community is turning into an assisted living facility with no other choice but to import hacker slackers to perform the dirty deeds of an aging Establishment.

But back to the RT hit job by the New York Times.

Erlanger, the paper's London bureau chief, begins his particular smear piece by graciously granting RT executives the opportunity to deny that the media group is "an agent of Kremlin policy and a tool directly used by President Vladimir V. Putin to undermine Western democracies — meddling in the recent American presidential election and, European security officials say, trying to do the same in the Netherlands, France and Germany, all of which vote this year."

He goes through a laundry list of so-called experts who opine that RT, despite all its protestations to the contrary, is not only a propaganda mill, it is the actual inspiration for the epidemic of "fake news" currently plaguing the great American psyche.

Erlanger writes:

Even as Russia insists that RT is just another global network like the BBC or France 24, albeit one offering “alternative views” to the Western-dominated news media, many Western countries regard RT as the slickly produced heart of a broad, often covert disinformation campaign designed to sow doubt about democratic institutions and destabilize the West.

Western attention focused on RT when the Obama administration and United States intelligence agencies judged with “high confidence” in January that Mr. Putin had ordered a campaign to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process,” discredit Hillary Clinton through the hacking of Democratic Party internal emails and provide support for Donald J. Trump, who as a candidate said he wanted to improve relations with Russia.

Erlanger then insinuates that RT once hacked C-Span. A technical glitch in a broadcast last January caused a pristine and democratic Congressional hearing to be over-ridden for a few minutes by "Russian propaganda."  Erlanger immediately covers himself by admitting that well,yes, this was only a technical snafu on the part of C-Span itself. But just by writing about the incident again, he slyly succeeds in raising new doubts in the minds of his American readers. It's another variation of the propaganda technique of damaging a reputation through the magic of innuendo.

Erlanger continues by innocently acknowledging his own profound confusion:

Watching RT can be a dizzying experience. Hard news and top-notch graphics mix with interviews from all sorts of people: well known and obscure, left and right. They include favorites like Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and Noam Chomsky, the liberal critic of Western policies; odd voices like the actress Pamela Anderson; and cranks who think Washington is the source of all evil in the world.

But if there is any unifying character to RT, it is a deep skepticism of Western and American narratives of the world and a fundamental defensiveness about Russia and Mr. Putin.

Translation: anyone refusing to declare full allegiance to Big Brother USA is a nut. Noam Chomsky is the same person as Alex Jones. Everything bad you ever heard about American wars and the military-industrial complex and Wall Street greed and income inequality and rigged elections? It's all in your head, because obviously you never would have felt disgruntled unless you were totally and unknowingly assimilated by the Russian borg.

 To deflect legitimate criticism of the American mainstream media, where 90% of all information is controlled and disseminated by six corporate-funded conglomerates, Erlanger quotes another expert claiming that RT's only goal is to spread political, economic and media influence. Of course, nothing that you watch on CNN has anything to do with selling forever wars by means of giving non-stop coverage to mass shootings and terror attacks and endless campaign coverage to Donald Trump.

CNN and other American outlets defending themselves against Trump's Twitter attacks are not the same thing as RT defending itself against attacks from American media mouthpieces. Such a defense is just another indication of its propaganda motive, according to Erlanger's sources. What is wrong with them, reporting about the ongoing smear campaign against them? Such complaints only prove their essential guilt. They doth protest too much.

Meanwhile, Erlanger slantingly agonizes, RT "is both a slick modern television network, dressed up with great visuals and stylish presenters, and a content farm that helps feed the European far right. Viewers find it difficult to discern exactly what is journalism and what is propaganda, what may be 'fake news' and what is real but presented with a strong slant."

After briefly reverting to fair and balanced mode and allowing another group of journalists to deny that RT is nothing but an alt-right propaganda mill with a leftist gloss, Erlanger dutifully pivots right back to his Security State sources so as to double down on the smear.

The gist of his whole piece is that if you, the American news consumer, has any doubts about the goodness of the people running your country, then it is just possible that RT has taken over your brain if you've watched any of its programs. Says one NATO public relations flack quoted in Erlanger's article: "Over time, it's more about hard power and disinformation." (So if you're a fan of such respected and well-regarded RT hosts as Larry King, Chris Hedges, Lee Camp, Thom Hartmann or Ed Schultz, you'd better watch out. Hurry on over to CNN and let the stentorian voice of Wolf Blitzer help you overcome any sickly inhibitions you might still harbor about our trillion-dollar wars.)

Ben Nimmo, another NATO flack who now gets paid "studying" RT for above-mentioned pro-war, NATO-aligned Atlantic Council, directly accuses the Russian media network of acting as a conduit for "hacked material" such as Clinton campaign director John Podesta's emails.

Maybe Atlantic Council Director Jon Huntsman, Trump's new ambassador to Russia, can get to the bottom of all this nasty propaganda and hackery once he lands in Moscow. Or maybe not. Just like Barack Obama, who named him his own ambassador to China, Huntsman is well-known for being something of an ideological chameleon with the added charming ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth. "If Trump continues to pursue rapprochement with the Kremlin," warns that other Deep State mouthpiece, The Washington Post, "suspicions will run very high about his motives, and Huntsman will be called upon to defend the policy as beneficial to the national interest."

With all the hysteria over a foreign government influencing American elections, it's notable that the Atlantic Council, with its assignment of a staff person to do nothing but "analyze" RT's nefarious influence, is itself accused of being financially compromised by foreign governments.

 It's received donations from nearly two dozen countries since 2008. 

Under political pressure, the Atlantic Council finally released its foreign donor list in 2013. Besides taking lobbying cash from such repressive authoritarian regimes as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan, it also relies heavily on donations from various oligarch-controlled energy cartels, most notably in Turkey.

Other donors to the Atlantic Council comprise a veritable who's who of the global plutonomy -- a whole panoply of billionaires, multinational corporations and media outlets. The full list, found here, includes Exxon-Mobil, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, 21st Century Fox, Novartis, Pfizer, the Blackstone Group, Coca-Cola, Walmart, and JP Morgan Chase. If you're interested in a definition of the "National Interest," simply refer to this list.

The funding of mainstream media propaganda which insanely equates progressive humanitarian policies with right-wing authoritarianism can be a very expensive proposition. So it's nice to see all these plutocrats sharing the wealth among themselves, isn't it? Smart-sounding, constantly-aired defenses of hyper-capitalism in the Times and the Post and on CNN and MSNBC do not come cheap, after all.

  So it seems that Donald Trump has made a very savvy choice in Jon Huntsman. It makes it even more obvious that the smear campaign against RT is just another one of those sweet-smelling toxic smokescreens giving more cover to the usual suspects of the global plutonomy.

It's somewhat shocking, as well as bleakly entertaining, whenever the oligarchs break out of their self-protective molds and start bashing and bitching at each other right in full public view. Is the Trumplandia crime family really doing battle against the Deep State cartel, or are they only characters in an epic soap opera designed to keep our minds off our own everyday miseries and precarious existences?

Pick a side. Or don't. Stay tuned. Or not.

A Modest GOP Proposal: 21st Century Eugenics

Paul Ryan to the Plutocracy: Eat Poor Children Well

Another year, another Republican health plan. The 2017 edition of Eugenics USA Inc. is even more blatantly savage than usual, given that the GOP now controls all three branches of government. The Democrats are again reduced to feebly defending the market-based kludge grotesquely known as the Affordable Care Act. Countering the Republicans with a single payer, Medicare for All plan is apparently asking way too much of them. 

Ironically, it's the hardcore ("Freedom Caucus") conservative wing of the GOP which may end up granting a reprieve both to the middle class refugees clinging to their Obamacare plans, and to the vulnerable people who now depend on Medicaid for their very survival. According to the Hardcores, RyanCare or TrumpCare or We Don't Care, or whatever you want to call the latest hideous plan, simply doesn't go far enough. They not only don't want the government messing with our health care freedoms, they don't want the government subsidizing and enriching the rent-seeking insurance cartel, either.

Since the package keeps the most oligarch-enriching parts of the Affordable Care Act intact, the Freedom Caucus aptly calls it "Obamacare Lite." If only 19 House Republicans and only one Senate Republican nix it, the GOP bill is DOA.

Trump is therefore actively courting the holdouts, most notably his erstwhile nemesis, Lyin' Ted Cruz. They reportedly went bowling for dollars Wednesday night in the White House basement after an intimate dinner upstairs.

The worst part of the GOP's proposal, meanwhile, the one that is getting the least attention from a mainstream media more interested in protecting Barack Obama's legacy and lambasting GOP math than in advocating truly universal health care, is the proposed transformation of Medicaid into block grants. Long an Ayn Randian wet dream of House Speaker Paul Ryan, this block-granting scheme would give states the right to decide how federal Medicaid money is spent, even getting the sadistic option of rejecting this money out of pure spite.  Several red states, including Texas, have already opted out of the ACA's Medicaid expansion for the simple reason that they'd rather punish brown and black people than give their needy population, including whites, any health care at all.

Ryan's current proposal, which has received preliminary plaudits from Donald Trump, would eventually cut off all benefits to recipients after they have consumed whatever allotment of medical care that any given group of plutocracy-serving politicians deems sufficient. 

If Ryan gets his way, estimates the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, tens of millions of vulnerable people -- children, the elderly, the low-paid working poor and the disabled -- will suffer.

The  slashing of federal benefits effectuated by the block-granting means that "states would likely have no choice but to institute draconian cuts to eligibility, benefits, and provider payments.  To illustrate the likely magnitude of these cuts, an analysis from the Urban Institute of an earlier block grant proposal from Speaker Ryan found that between 14 and 21 million people would eventually lose their Medicaid coverage (on top of those losing coverage if policymakers repeal the ACA and its Medicaid expansion) and that already low provider payment rates would be reduced by more than 30 percent."

 Ryan wants to do with Medicaid reform what Bill Clinton accomplished with welfare reform more than two decades ago. The repeal of FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children forced poor mothers receiving cash benefits to go to work for next to no pay, thereby suppressing wages for everybody, and having their cash benefits cut off entirely after a few years. As a result, Clinton and the then-GOP majority in Congress condemned millions of mothers and children  to lives of abject poverty. It's no accident that the death rate for indigent American women has gone up over this same time period. Hillary Clinton's boast that "by the time Bill and I left office, the welfare rolls had been reduced by 60%" has had the desired effect. The number of Americans living on less than $2 cash a day has doubled since welfare reform was signed into law.

(And they wonder why not enough struggling, depressed people turned out to give the Clintons another chance at governing as "progressives who can get things done.")

Many states, moreover, have used the matching federal block grant money granted by Clinton reform (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) for programs deliberately aimed at shaming and controlling the poor. Rather than receive direct cash aid, mothers are forced to attend parenting seminars and other mandated self-help programs on the supposition that poverty and ignorance and immorality go hand in hand.  A 2012 study conducted by the Center reveals that only 30% of the TANF block grants is spent directly on poor families. And since the start of the recession, this money is increasingly used by cash-strapped state governments for other services, such as policing poor people.

The ultimate core philosophy of the block grant scheme is unaccountability. The federal government would have no say on how the Medicaid money is spent. Rent-seekers are cordially invited to the free-for-all.

And if the Reform and Repeal of Obamacare does get through Congress and is signed by Donald Trump, the predatory class will have a trillion more dollars in tax breaks to burn. Less generous tax credits to middle class citizens to use for the purchase of private health insurance policies is a bait and switch tactic, because even the relatively better off will eventually become poor enough, sick enough and old enough to quickly deplete any "savings" gleaned from these tax breaks. This is inevitable, since the GOP plan does nothing to control the skyrocketing costs of medical care. The costs of both health care and insurance will only continue to rise, because the reform package also does away with the individual mandate to purchase the insurance, as well as remove limits on co-pays and deductibles.

"They may be able to afford low actuarial value coverage with the tax credits the bills would provide them" says Timothy Jost of Physicians for a National Health Plan, "but they are unlikely then to be able to afford the cost sharing that coverage will impose."

James Kwak of Baseline Scenario puts it even more succinctly:

  There are more details, but the basic outlines of the plan are simple: Cut taxes on the rich, cut spending on the poor, and expose more families to rising health care costs. The thing is, we’re talking about health care here. People will need the same amount of health care no matter what Congress does. If the government pays less for health care, poor people will have to pay more. If they can afford it, Trumpcare is effectively the same as a tax on the poor. If they can’t afford it, it’s even worse. This is as naked an example of class warfare as you’ll see today.

Trump Nastiness Can Run, But It Can't Hide

It seems that attention addict Donald Trump is trying to quit his lifelong publicity habit cold turkey.

The weekend Tweets accusing Barack Obama of bugging him brought him almost universal public disdain and near-zero defense from his own advisers. Backed into a corner to which his lifestyle is sadly not accustomed, the president is suddenly shunning the cameras and the Internet. Usually one to revel in his own righteous xenophobia, he even felt compelled to sign his revised, but still very nasty, Muslim travel ban behind closed doors. His press secretary has not held a televised briefing in many days.

(Update, 1:38 p.m.: I obviously wrote this post prematurely, because Trump has fallen off the wagon. He was just seen bursting out from behind a portrait of Hillary Clinton, his mouth open and his arms outstretched, to "surprise" a group of school children touring the White House. According to the New York Times, the kids shrieked with joy, or something. Oh, and Spicer was also holding a TV Q&A)

The longer that Trump delays declassifying and releasing any evidence of Obama wiretapping, the more it appears that there's nothing much to his allegations. That is a profound disappointment, especially in light of the new WikiLeaks revelations about CIA hacking of smartphones and TVs. Trump could indeed be "caving" to pressure from the so-called intelligence community as well as from relentless gaslighting by the mainstream media.

Naturally, the liberal commentariat are already seizing upon the WikiLeaks dump as just one more indication of a nefarious (and still totally unproven) Trump-Russia conspiracy. (see, for example, readers' comments in the above-linked New York Times article.) Trump's xenophobia is being countered not by tolerance and facts and progressive ideas, but by rabid Russophobia. An unhealthy allegiance to the Spy State is on full display by liberals and neocons alike.

It's one form of ugliness being pitted against other form of ugliness. 

Meanwhile, the establishment media's psychological warfare against Trump seems to be taking its desired toll. He is in Twitter rant retreat, at least for now. This might be a welcome reprieve for those of us suffering from severe Trump fatigue, but it's very bad for democracy.  With a paranoid authoritarian like him in charge, wouldn't you rather know what he is doing and thinking at all times, no matter how much it nauseates you?

If you're a normal human being, probably not. I know that there are many days when my own stomach and nerves can't bear even a glimpse of his tufted comb-over and his flapping tie, when my ears close at the slightest hint of a whisper of his spittle-inflected voice. There are days when I literally have to force myself to turn on the news and go online to learn about the latest depravity.

As regular readers know, I recently called my cable provider to cancel TV, until they offered me a one-third price reduction to keep me tethered to the freak show. When threatened, capitalism does occasionally offer its slaves a crumb here or there to keep its engine thrumming.

  So as we're both eagerly awaiting and dreading Trump's bodily return to the public stage, it's easy enough to discern the essential Trumpian nastiness of his latest legalistic executive order. The written word can be every bit as vile as the spoken word. No matter how much he tries to tone it down and hide it beneath formal legalese, Trump's psychopathology comes through loud and clear.

By bending over backwards to insist that he is not bigoted against Muslims, the president displays all his irrepressible bigotry against Muslims. He clumsily couches this bigotry in language purporting to protect the interests of "minority religions" in locales with a majority Muslim population:

Executive Order 13769 did not provide a basis for discriminating for or against members of any particular religion.  While that order allowed for prioritization of refugee claims from members of persecuted religious minority groups, that priority applied to refugees from every nation, including those in which Islam is a minority religion, and it applied to minority sects within a religion.  That order was not motivated by animus toward any religion, but was instead intended to protect the ability of religious minorities -- whoever they are and wherever they reside -- to avail themselves of the USRAP (United States Refugee Admissions Program) in light of their particular challenges and circumstances.

Trump also has limited the number of refugees granted entry into the US this year to a ridiculously low 50,000. And he will bypass international human rights norms by allowing individual states to reject people based upon whatever criteria they wish. If they want to be racist and xenophobic, they have the full blessing of the Trump administration.

 The misogynistic president further betrays his bigotry by calling for a public database of gender-based offenses against Muslim women... by "foreign nationals"  only. Good ole boys from America are apparently exempt from inclusion in The List. Grab away, guys!

Although he mercifully removed Iraq from the original seven countries subject to his travel ban, Trump made clear that this exception was only the result of the "cooperation" of Iraqi officials in allowing American troops back in to fight the never-ending war in their destroyed country.

Press Secretary Sean Spicer also made it clear in one of those newly-closed "press gaggles" on Monday that the Trump administration's revised order is no admission of fault or correction of error in the original. "Make no mistake, we lost the element of surprise back when the court enjoined this in the Ninth Circuit," he said.

The nastiness just cannot hide itself. Spicer tacitly admitted the utter contempt with which the Trump administration holds the judicial system. He gloated that the only purpose of the "revised" order is to dress the bigotry in just enough concern-trolling fluff to punk the judicial system.

Trump and his minions are trying to become more traditional, adept politicians through the magical use of double-talk. And they're really quite terrible at it.

Victor Klemperer, a German Jew and Enlightenment scholar who kept a diary (I Will Bear Witness) of more than decade's worth of everyday life under Nazism, regularly included critiques of what he called "the language of the Third Reich."

His entry for March 31, 1942:

"The language brings it out into the open. Perhaps someone wants to conceal the truth by speaking. But the language does not lie. Perhaps someone wants to utter the truth. But the language is more true than he is. There is no remedy against the truth of language. Medical researchers can fight a disease as soon as they have recognized its essential properties. Philologists and poets recognize the essential properties of language, but they cannot prevent language from testifying to the truth."

Victor Klemperer: Our Literary Guide to Fascism

The Man Who Cried U.N.C.L.E.

The psychological warfare against Donald Trump has reached such a fever pitch of intensity that it's impossible to avoid the media spectacle of a paranoid president dissolving into a quivering puddle of terminal helplessness right before our very eyes.

Please, mainstream news-consumers: do not let the distraction of Trump's Twitter claim that Obama tapped his phone distract you from the real and true distraction, which is Vladimir Putin's reputed stealth takeover of our great American democracy. 

So admonishes "Career U.S. Intelligence Officer" Malcolm Nance, who has lately pivoted from decades of fighting in Middle East wars to becoming a self-proclaimed expert on the horrifying Russian invasion of the United States within the Trojan horse of one Donald J. Trump. Nance should know. He's such a conspiracy buff that long before Trump's political ascent, he hosted a screening and discussion of The Manchurian Candidate.

In an op-ed published in The Guardian, Nance has decreed that "the story of the week is Trump, Russia and the FBI. Everything else is a distraction."

 Narrative switching. That is what the Trump administration is desperately trying to do around Russia right now. The White House reportedly interfered with the FBI in the middle of an active investigation involving counter-intelligence. This was not only foolhardy but also suspicious, as it directly undermined their apparent objective: distracting us.

So pay no attention to the continued water crises in Flint, Michigan and in Standing Rock, North Dakota. It's a distraction. Ignore the huge crack in the Antarctic ice shelf and the spawning of the biggest, ocean level-disrupting and potentially climate-changing iceberg in all of recorded history. It's a distraction. Hide from the terrible reality that most people don't have enough money in the bank to pay for an emergency car repair, and are just one paycheck away from eviction. It's a distraction.

The only thing that you have to fear is TrumPutin itself. No matter where you come from, no matter what you look like, no matter who you love, no matter how precarious your socioeconomic status, we shall all be Stronger Together for patriotically uniting with the Deep State on the front lines of #Resistance, Inc.

Just in case you've been sensibly averting your eyes from the true mainstream news narrative these past couple of days, here's the scoop on the latest Trump distraction from the Official Washington Distraction. Donald Trump said he found out (he doesn't say how or where) that Barack Obama had tapped his phones during the campaign. Donald Trump called Obama a sick and evil guy for messing with our "sacred" electoral process. Donald Trump wants a full and thorough investigation into the transformation of Obama from glamorous president into glamorous super-spy.

Naturally, the Russophobic purveyors of the Official Distraction Narrative are having a field day with Trump's profound ignorance of how our spy agencies work, what with his preposterous supposition that Obama himself could ever have personally and single-handedly bugged all his phones. It's so darned silly that even the Master of the Macabre himself, Stephen King, was inspired to write a satirical short story about a nefarious scissor-wielding Obama skulking in Trump's closet, having only pretended to canoodle on a private island with billionaire playboy Richard Branson in the first leg of his post-presidency journey.

Real, Fake, Distraction, or Counter-Distraction? You Decide

Naturally, the Official Distraction-mongers are disingenuously interpreting Trump in their usual literal fashion. It seems never to have occurred to them that Trump is averse to context. When he says that Obama wiretapped him, he likely means that the Obama administration's intelligence agencies wiretapped him. At least I would hope that's what he means. But it's so much more fun to believe that a deluded Trump imagines that Obama personally ordered the mission instead of going through all the usual plausible deniability channels designed to keep presidential hands squeaky clean.

So when Obama spokesmen and former NSA Director James Clapper and FBI Director James Comey all splutter in unison that of course Obama never ordered any bugs in Trump Tower, they are technically being truthful.

Much of the mainstream punditocracy also pretends to assume that Trump got his info on the wiretapping from the "alt-right" Breitbart website, rather than reading about it in the alt-establishment New York Times like the rest of the sanity-based, content-consuming world.

Even Anti-Distraction Terror Expert Malcolm Nance repeats the salient paragraph from last month's unsourced Times blockbuster in his own Guardian op-ed, thus perhaps unwittingly giving credence and helpful context to Trump's buggy claim:

On 14 February, the New York Times reported that advisers and associates of Donald Trump may have been in direct and continuous contact with officers of the Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, during a tumultuous election campaign in which the American democracy itself was hacked. A major party – now in opposition – was the victim of an unprecedented cyber-attack.
According to the Times, intercepted telephone calls and phone records indicated to American counter-intelligence officers direct contact with the Russians.

Making his counter-distraction efforts all the more scary and bizarre, Trump is said to have thrown a massive hissy fit right in the White House on Friday, unthinkably abandoning even his top aides as he and his short nuclear-itchy fingers fled to Mar-a-Lago for yet another demented overnight Tweet frenzy. The proximate cause of his wrath reportedly is Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recusal of himself as lead investigator into his own alleged ties with the Russkies. The president doesn't like being blindsided.

It's reached the point, says the ever-helpful Washington Post, that even his own aides are no longer defending him.

Here's the Sunday exchange, with bold type provided by the Post for purposes of emphasizing the doubts of the Trump staff, between ABC's Martha Raddatz and Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders (really)

RADDATZ: Was the principal source the Breitbart story, which links to the New York Times? But the New York Times doesn't say anything definitive. Donald Trump does. There is nothing equivocating about what he says. “I just found out that Obama had my wires tapped.” That's not “look into something.” He says it happened.

 HUCKABEE SANDERS: Look, I think the bigger thing is you guys are always telling us to take the media seriously. Well, we are today. We're taking the reports that places like the New York Times, Fox News, BBC, multiple outlets have reported this. All we're saying is, let's take a closer look. Let's look into this. If this happened, if this is accurate, this is the biggest overreach and the biggest scandal.

RADDATZ: The president of the United States is accusing the former president of wiretapping him.

 HUCKABEE SANDERS: I think that this is, again, something that if this happened, Martha …

RADDATZ: “If,” “if,” “if,” “if.”

 HUCKABEE SANDERS: I agree.

RADDATZ: Why is the president saying it did happen?

 HUCKABEE SANDERS: Look, I think he's going off of information that he's seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential. And if it is, this is the greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power that, I think, we have ever seen and a huge attack on democracy itself. And the American people have a right to know if this took place.

…RADDATZ: Okay. Let me just say one more time. The president said, “I bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October.” So the president believes it is true?

 HUCKABEE SANDERS: I would say that his tweet speaks for itself there.

Cry Uncle, Trump! You are toast. You are destined for permanent commitment to an asylum for lunatics with a lot of bread. You are not only a textbook case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, you are hereby officially diagnosed with a galloping case of paranoid psychosis.

I'm actually surprised that the Anti-Distraction shrinks have not yet written a story about how Trump believes that the crazy dude who climbed halfway up Trump Tower last summer with suction cups attached to his hands and feet was actually Barack Obama playing Napoleon Solo, wiretapping gizmos secreted in his backpack.

Who's That Tapping On My Chamber Door?

Don't laugh. If Ronald Reagan believed that The Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV series was real, why cannot the Reality Show President believe that Obama tapped phones in his spare time? Not for nothing does the Reagan Library contain a whole interactive section on Spies and Counterspies - complete with distracting and fun U.N.C.L.E. memorabilia. And since it was all put together with the help of the C.I.A., who's to say what's fake and what's not?

Meanwhile, Malcolm Nance wants you to believe that the Trump distraction from the Russian distraction is an earth-shattering pastiche of Spy Vs. Spy, the Civil War, and Watergate. Did I mention that Nance also runs his own anti-terror security agency and is trying to sell a book called The Plot to Hack America? It has real potential, given how Nance is feverishly making the rounds of the cable outlets and op-ed pages to plug it.

Like most mainstream Distractionists and Counter-Distractionists, however, Nance walks a very fine line between fiction and nonfiction. From a July 2015 Gawker piece:

Join us at the screening of The Manchurian Candidate (the original, obviously) on July 14, 7:30 pm, at the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn, for the third installment in our It’s A Conspiracy series. We’re thrilled that Malcolm Nance, aka Kinja user kingpindaddyhoho (really), will be joining us for the panel following the movie. We plan on having alcoholic root beer floats and tater tots.
Nance is a 34-year veteran intelligence officer who has worked the Iraq mission since 1987, fighting in all of our Middle East wars since 1983. He has lived in and out of Iraq since 2003. Nance runs his own analytical organization, TAPSTRI, the Terror Asymmetrics Project and is author of, most recently, The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency, 2003-2014.

Here's Looking At You, Counter-Distraction Insurgents!

Georgetown law professor Jonathan Turley, whose sensible blog motto is, like Trump's Tweets, Res ipsa loquitur ("the thing itself speaks") suggests that if Trump Tower were indeed bugged, it was probably done "legally," through the Fisa Court. This does not, however, make such government eavesdropping on political campaigns morally right:

 Trump is correct that, if true, this should be a matter for investigation.  The government should show considerable restraint in targeting political opponents. The Trump Tower was well-known to be the nerve center of the Trump campaign.  However, we still do not know how the surveillance was tailored, if it was requested or granted.

My advice to Trump: declassify any pertinent documents, pronto. And release your tax returns while you're at it.

We're so sick and tired of these fake distractions from propaganda distractions from counter-distractions. It's extremely distracting.

And on that note, here's some distracting mood music to treat your distraction fatigue disorder:

 

Weekend Open Thread

Have at it.

Predatory Bipartisan Follies

Just when you thought that things couldn't get any zanier, the Reasonable Elites are going Donald Trump one better.

The media-political complex folks are almost literally beside themselves. Still reeling from their shock and awe that a president whose acting skills have been honed by decades of real estate hucksterism and reality TV can actually act presidential right on cue, they themselves are going totally totally bonkers.

First, the New York Times broke yet another anonymously-sourced Russian scare story. This one is about how, in the waning days of the Obama administration, officials (who were, of course, not Obama himself) spread alleged dirt about Trump and the Russians to each of the clans of the Intelligence Community.  This was to ensure that the leaks would flow freely from more sources than any one Trump official could possibly contain once he took office.

 At the Obama White House, Mr. Trump’s statements stoked fears among some that intelligence could be covered up or destroyed — or its sources exposed — once power changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that underscored the deep anxiety with which the White House and American intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.

It also reflected the suspicion among many in the Obama White House that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Russia on election email hacks — a suspicion that American officials say has not been confirmed. Former senior Obama administration officials said that none of the efforts were directed by Mr. Obama.

  Translation: Obama, either directly or through his publicists, claims that not only is he not Obama, he was as out of control and as out of the loop as he now accuses Trump of being. Pretty weird.

Thus does the apparent lunacy of Obama signing a last-minute executive order mandating that the NSA share all its warrantless data with the other 16 unaccountable "intelligence" agencies suddenly make a lot of crazy sense. Obama's bequest of even more excessive authoritarian power to Trump, coupled with his smarmy urging that people give the new president a chance to succeed, was a total head-fake all along. Obama was, and is, out to get Trump. And the mainstream media are all too willing and eager to help Obama succeed in the quest to protect his own legacy.

Next in craziness, the Washington Post broke the news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke to the chief Russian diplomat on two separate occasions while acting as a Trump campaign surrogate. The worst part is that he sort of lied about it during his Senate confirmation hearing. In other words, he carefully parsed his responses in that lawyerly fashion so beloved of slimy politicians throughout history. Although he eventually recused himself from investigating himself, Sessions has yet to fire himself.

Democrats, for their part, are acting more shocked about Sessions talking to the Russian diplomat than they are shocked about his racism, which he has now bureaucratized at the Department of Justice. In less than a month, Sessions has already reversed the Obama administration's (conveniently belated) order to phase out private, for-profit prisons, withdrawn a legal challenge to Texas's racist voter ID law, and reversed (also belated) guidelines for the protection of transgender students.

The Democrats don't seem too perturbed that Obama's last-minute, too cute by half executive order enhancing the Surveillance State will make Trump's xenophobic crackdowns all that more dangerously effective. Trump has ordered the Department of Homeland Security, now privy to everybody's emails and phone records, to start a new agency called VOICE: Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement. While at least one critic describes this program as pre-genocidal, most such criticism has been muted at best, in light of the frenzied Russophobic propaganda emanating from the corporate media.

 Democratic bigwigs like Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are demanding that Sessions resign not for his vicious assaults on basic civil rights, but for allegedly speaking to Russian diplomat Sergei Kislyak -- whose alleged dual espionage function has long been an open secret. If he was such a danger to democracy and to our free and fair elections, why didn't Obama expel him when he was seen openly canoodling with politicians at the Republican National Convention over the summer?

(Wild guess: along with 99% of the rest of the world, he thought that Hillary Clinton would win. Powerful countries spy on and hack each other, after all, and predatory elites don't much care unless the rich  (say, Sony execs) are victimized, or it suddenly becomes politically expedient to care.)

The bipartisan nature of the fight against Trump by the entrenched media-political establishment was made all the more blatant and bizarre this week with the glitzy comeback of George W. Bush.

Despite expanding upon such Bush policies as indefinite detention, the drone terror campaign against Muslims, the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, the outsourcing of torture, unconstitutional surveillance, and the continued enrichment, at public expense, of war profiteers and banksters and the Forbes 400, Obama carefully kept his distance. Except for such unavoidable formal events as memorial services and library dedications, the two men rarely interacted in public. Likewise, Bush was very careful to retreat into anonymity and to refrain from all criticism of the Obama administration. Why not? He had much to be grateful to Obama for, not least of which was Obama's vow to protect him and his cabinet against the war crime prosecutions mandated by the Geneva conventions.

That has now changed. Thanks to the simultaneous scourge and distraction that is Donald J. Trump, George is now considered rehabilitated enough to become a sought-after elder statesman and sparkling media personality. All of a sudden, even liberals are just loving him to death. You know you're cool when Ellen DeGeneres has you on her show. You know you've been forgiven when you're remembered for saying "Islam is Peace" and forgotten for having started a war on false pretenses and killing, maiming and expelling millions of Muslims in the process. You know you're going to cash in big-time when the liberal ladies of The View offer to purchase one of your kitschy paintings as the perfect way to #ResistRump.

And you are definitely in the all-clear when you can go on the Today show, plug your latest ghostwritten book, and defend the corporate media against attacks by Donald Trump.

It was Michelle Obama who began subtly paving the way for Bush Jr.'s lucrative comeback years ago, with the two of them photographed cracking jokes at the solemn Selma anniversary, bizarrely swaying in time to The Battle Hymn of the Republic at the service for five slain Texas police officers, and finally reveling in one of those branded Mom-in-Chief hugs, staged for purposes of repairing Bush's damaged global image. He has finally become a living portrait of unassailable shiny goodness, thanks to what Henry Giroux calls The Violence of Organized Forgetting:

 America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and idiotic, but also in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed. 

Idiotically Joking at the Bloody Sunday Selma Memorial

Banally Snickering at the Texas Police Massacre Funeral

Blissfully Misremembering War Crimes at the Smithsonian

Like Trump after him, the truth does occasionally pop out of George's mouth. As he told Ellen about his warm relationship with Michelle Obama, "That surprised everybody. That’s what is so weird about society today, that people on opposite sides of the political spectrum could actually like each other.”

He speaks the truth that when it comes to class and wealth, there is no such thing as a partisan divide. And it's not really weird at all. That the wealthy usually have each other's backs and feed from the same rent-seeking trough is not talked about much by powerful people with a vested interest in pretending that there is such a thing as democracy.

 "There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat." -- Gore Vidal.

 "The two political parties are but opposite cheeks of the same ass." -- Christopher Hitchens.

"The  political parties are two wings of the same bird of prey." -- Upton Sinclair.

There's Something So Weird About Society Today