Give It a Rest, Hillary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inflating the Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slumlords, Spies, and Subterfuge

 Jared Kushner, jack of all White House trades and master of none, is the latest topic of the official narrative conversation. He "is said to" have established back-channel communications with those damned Russians during the transition period. According to experts on such things, this might not have been totally illegal, but it was certainly unethical and outside the norms of how corruption gets done in official Washington.

Don't get me wrong - I think that Jared is a perfectly loathsome human being. But it's just too bad, and actually kind of silly, that the FBI's investigation is not instead aimed squarely at his serial financial assaults on the poor tenants of his multitude of substandard rental units. An exhaustive investigation published last week by journalist Alex MacGillis reveals that Kushner has amassed a team of lawyers whose sole purpose is to hound tenants for back rent, late payments, and alleged damage to their units. In many cases, the harassment continues for years after they have left his premises.

One of Jared Kushner's goals in life seems to be the financial and emotional destruction of the most vulnerable members of society -  some of whom were and still are Trump supporters. MacGillis reports:

In 2011, Kushner Companies, with Jared now more firmly in command, pulled together a deal that looked much more like something from the firm’s humble past than from its high-rolling present. That June, the company and its equity partners bought 4,681 units of what are known in real-estate jargon as “distress-ridden, Class B” apartment complexes: units whose prices fell somewhere in the middle of the market, typically of a certain age and wear, whose owners were in financial difficulty. The properties were spread across 12 sites in Toledo, Ohio; Pittsburgh; and other Rust Belt cities still reeling from the Great Recession. Kushner had to settle more than 200 debts held against the complexes before the deal could go through; at one complex, in Pittsburgh, circumstances had become so dire that some residents had been left without heat and power because the previous owner couldn’t pay the bills. Prudential, which was foreclosing on the portfolio, sold it for only $72 million — half the value of the mortgages on the properties.

His slumlord enterprise has grown exponentially, with much help from federal subsidies and tax breaks readily available to wealthy real estate moguls.  Kushner coldly describes his low income tenants as "an asset class" with  money-making potential deriving from evictions, withheld security deposits, and other legal finagling. MacGillis continues,

 There is a clear pattern of Kushner Companies’ pursuing tenants over virtually any unpaid rent or broken lease — even in the numerous cases where the facts appear to be on the tenants’ side. Not only does the company file cases against them, it pursues the cases for as long as it takes to collect from the overmatched defendants — often several years. The court docket of (one case) forinstance, spans more than three years and 112 actions — for a sum that amounts to maybe two days’ worth of billings for the average corporate law firm associate, from a woman who never even rented from JK2 Westminster. The pursuit is all the more remarkable given how transient the company’s prey tends to be. Hounding former tenants for money means paying to send out process servers who often report back that they were unable to locate the target. This does not deter Kushner Companies’ lawyers. They send the servers back out again a few months later.

But forget about that. It is because gentrification, and the privatization of this nation's public housing stock, and the deliberate absence of a federal guaranteed housing policy are bipartisan enterprises that it's more expedient to get rid of Trump and his clan by the tried-and-true scapegoating methods perfected during the Inquisition and later during the McCarthy era. If we can only learn to fear and loathe Russia and its treacherous Trumpian stooges more than we fear and loathe the all-American policies leading to the worst wealth inequality in history, perhaps we won't take to the streets in protest of what is really rotten in the state of Neoliberalism.

We'll be so shocked and awed by the treason at the highest levels of the Trump administration that we might forget that our rent payments are eating up greater and greater chunks of our monthly incomes. We might forget that the abusive rental market is the natural outgrowth of the subprime mortgage market, and that unprosecuted banksters now act as landlords on the same housing they so recently foreclosed. Oligarchs like Kushner have discovered that the extraction process can go on, and on, and on. Poverty is such a lucrative industry for them.

Right before he left office, President Obama secretly gifted the private equity giant Blackstone with another massive government bailout. This gift subsidizes any losses that investors might suffer as a result of evictions and neglected repairs of their plundered housing stock. It does nothing to help the victimized tenants of predatory "rent-to-own" scams. As a matter of fact, the bailout ensures that Blackstone slumlords can continue gobbling up distressed properties at no risk to themselves with the added benefit of artificially inflating real estate prices for regular home-buyers (just another "asset-class") faced with ever-dwindling choices.

It also perpetuates the class resentments that gave rise to Donald Trump. Since Blackstone and other real estate investors now control whole swathes of foreclosed and distressed properties, the resulting increases in rent ensure that manufactured competition between low income and medium income people will continue to grow.

For his own sleazy part, Trump continues to feed these class resentments through what Hannah Arendt has called "negative solidarity." We the teeming oppressed masses are invited to join him, a billionaire demagogue, in common cause against mutual enemies.

In his latest fundraising email, slugged "Kicking and Screaming," Trump writes:

 This month... the media tried to stop us.

...The establishment tried to stop us.

...The bureaucracy even tried to sabotage us from within.

But WE THE PEOPLE FOUGHT BACK! AND WE ARE STILL STANDING AND WILL KEEP FIGHTING UNTIL WE MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

The Washington elites will go kicking and screaming until they’ve all been dethroned.

Right now, we’re just $142,693 away from hitting our FEC end-of-month goal. Will you contribute any amount -- I mean it, Karen, any amount you can -- to help us end the month so strong that the Fake News Media Machine falls into a complete panic? Can you donate $1 to Drain the Swamp?

Meanwhile and ever so coincidentally (of course) Trump and Kushner are solidly and intimately involved with Blackstone, which plans to invest some of "its" excessive cash into a joint Saudi Arabian venture to loot even larger chunks of crumbling American real estate and public infrastructure. This glaring scandal, too, is taking a back seat to the more pressing concern of nefarious "Russian back channels."

I wonder why that is.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it seems quite odd that the media would launch into its latest phase of Russophobic mania within days of the shocking revelations that Kushner is taking total advantage of thousands of poor people, and that a new breed of Robber Baron owns and controls us, thanks to socialized risk-taking for private gain. Channeling the official conversation away from the escalating war on the poor back to #RussiaGate has the added bonus of protecting oligarchs and Uniparty politicians who indulge their own predatory appetites in a more circumspect fashion than the boorish Trump family seems capable of.

Like father, like son-in-law, like unfettered capitalism itself. The umbel never falls too far from the parental hemlock plant. It takes root and multiplies like the noxious weed that it is.

N.Y. Times Is No Longer Impeachment Keen

I see that the New York Times, after months of igniting anti-Trump hysteria to a fever pitch among its readers, is now marching in lockstep behind the Democratic Party leadership. 

In an abrupt about-face, the newspaper's editorial board is softening, if not abandoning, its campaign to destroy his presidency.

Just because the man is impaired is no reason for him to be impeached. Especially not while he is doing the business of the military-industrial complex overseas and selling weapons and American infrastructure deals to the highest foreign bidders. Whenever Donald Trump adopts the traditions of neoconservatism and neoliberalism, the corporate media declare a truce. They euphemise the hypocrisy by using the hackneyed term "reset."

Whenever Donald Trump bombs a country or holds tempting dollar signs out to his critics, he magically becomes Presidential. Reset early, reset often.

So within days of being castigated for insanely spilling state secrets and calling James Comey a nutcase, Trump is at least temporarily seen as rehabilitating himself in the eyes of the ruling establishment. He's maturely forgoing his Tweets and resetting his agenda to more sober goals. Trump has rid himself of extreme anti-Muslim sentiment by abandoning the odious phrase "radical Islamic extremism" and resetting his rhetoric to a more modest "Islamic extremism." Although his anti-Muslim travel ban elicited universal outrage from the whole free world, his sale of billions of dollars in weaponry to the autocratic Saudis has only elicited a yawn here, a moue of fake concern there.

Trump hasn't quite reached the level of Watergate egregiousness, so let's give the psychopath a chance, moralizes the Times. Be patient, everybody. As long as the market hasn't crashed and rich are still growing richer under his regime, no state of emergency need be declared.

The media-political complex seems to have reached its next stage of Hillary loss grief. It has overcome depression and denial, and is now straddling the fence between bargaining and acceptance. What I've called the "Deep State" interregnum in the form of an official investigation by a trusted member of the plutocracy (Robert Mueller) is having the desired calming effect on The Times.

As its editorialists pontificate:

The national interest and the integrity of the democratic process are undeniably at stake in the investigation. And it may turn out that the president and his associates have engaged in an attempt to obstruct justice; really bad stuff could turn up. But Watergate? We’re not there yet. That’s a word that summons obstruction on a monumental scale, with evidence to prove overt criminal acts — not least the White House conspiracy to burglarize the Democratic Party headquarters. Scores of administration officials were indicted or jailed when President Nixon had to flee from office on the eve of certain impeachment.

It seems to me that the Gray Lady is confusing peaches with pears. The Trumpian graft and corruption being conducted right under our very noses ( awarding ownership and control of American infrastructure to a regime which cuts people's heads off and bombs Yemen into a state of famine and disease) is not quite as bad as Nixon giving cash bribes to burglars and then lying about it. That's because both sides of the Uniparty have long been selling this country out to the highest bidders, both foreign and domestic. If they make too big a deal out of Trump doing it too, it might endanger their own future profits.

They want American voters to get riled up and resistant, but not to get too riled up and too resistant. Their objective is to eventually replace Trump with a more refined, slimy politician - not to blow up the whole de facto oligarchy.

Plus, it is so much more convenient to just blame the Republicans and paint the Democrats as the virtuous, but powerless, opposition party. And look at what happened the last time the House impeached a president. Their hounding of Bill Clinton destroyed the dignity of the whole impeachment process. We can't make the mistake of impeaching over partisan pretenses ever again!

The Times editorial smarmily concludes,

For Democrats, too much indulgence of impeachment notions could prove a distraction from the more workaday and politically achievable challenge at hand. Their main job is to rouse the public to use Mr. Trump’s unimpressive polling numbers as leverage on Republicans, who already are citing the Mueller investigation as reason to slow down congressional inquiries into the Trump and Russia affair. Beyond that, they and other critics should be working hard to win back a majority next year in at least one house of Congress. This would secure them the subpoena power to shed far better light for the nation on Mr. Trump’s and his enablers’ sorry deeds.

It's not about justice and the greater good at all. That would be so self-indulgent. It's definitely not about campaigning on a platform of Medicare for All, student debt forgiveness, affordable housing, a guaranteed job, and a guaranteed income. It's all about the Democratic Party winning back power by fomenting fear and loathing of Trump while still keeping him around long enough to gin up optimum fear and loathing-- and tons of campaign cash.

 One person's "workaday challenge" might entail coming up with next month's rent check or insurance co-pay. What the plutocracy, represented by its Times mouthpiece, views as a workaday challenge is maintaining the status quo of its own unfettered wealth and power. 

As far as the New York Times is concerned, the only thing we need is to see the light. Food, shelter and medical care can wait for another day, another year, another decade. It's Democratic incrementalism you should believe in.

They want us to delay justice for Trump until the Democrats can be the stars of the show. Even if it risks electing him to a second term, it will be so worth it.

 Trump is certainly not the only sociopath for whom winning is everything and for whom the daily struggles of ordinary desperate people are just a pesky afterthought.

Most Ingenious Paradoxes

-- A reporter was pinned to the wall by security guards and later bodily ejected from the Federal Communications Commission building after he dared to ask a question in a public hallway. An FCC official later explained that when it comes to the agency's brazen attempt to privatize the Internet, the de facto policy on journalistic questions is threat neutrality. A threat is a threat is a threat, First Amendment rights be damned. Therefore, the Federal Communications Commission is refusing to communicate any further about this incident.

-- Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman, profoundly announced to reporters that a private meeting in a public building with Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had "renewed my confidence that we should not have confidence in this administration.” This has renewed my confidence that whatever politicians choose to tell me about secret meetings with no press or cameras allowed is always absolutely true and factual.

-- Senator Lindsay Graham (R-Confederacy) sagaciously told MSNBC that he'd found former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates's own public Congressional testimony on #RussiaGate to be "incredibly credible."  Incredibly, he said this two times in quick succession, perhaps to ensure that his audience will always view his constant TV appearances as unbelievably tedious.

-- It is a truthiness universally acknowledged that Donald Trump is the most inept, dangerous, treasonous president in the history of America. But lacking sufficient evidence to back up this claim, the "sober-minded" elders of the Democratic Party are primly lecturing their punch-drunk colleagues and constituents to keep calm, carry on, shut up, and most important, continue raising money and sending money. Just because Dems are attacking Trump mercilessly 24/7 shouldn't communicate that they want to railroad him out of the White House, for goodness sake. Just because he's impaired doesn't mean he should be impeached. Of course it's the pits, but I'm afraid that you'll just have to keep sucking it all up. 

Deep State Interregnum

The media-political complex is breathing a collective sigh of relief now that the Police-Surveillance State has the whole free world in its hands, having been awarded essential control of the federal government during this Trumpian crisis of leadership.

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller's stated task is to investigate Donald Trump and his administration's connections to Russia. His overriding actual task, however, is to provide a place of greater safety during these perilous times for the Powers That Be and late-stage capitalism. He is being portrayed in the corporate media as a Moses with a badge who will shepherd us from the Trumpian desert of chaos back to the  promised land of good and plenty for a smarter, better, non-Tweeting oligarchy.

"Both Democrats and Republicans embrace Robert Mueller as Special Counsel" and "Mueller Hailed By Both Parties" and "Rare Bipartisan Moment" and "New Special Counsel Known For Independence" and "Both Sides Have Utmost Confidence in Mueller" and "Mueller Universally Respected" are the typical and ominous headlines lauding our new unelected Rescuer-in-Chief. He is the wet dream of the extreme center. After all, the FBI under Mueller's directorship concentrated more on scapegoating alleged foreign terrorists and manufacturing homegrown plots than it did investigating the true domestic economic terror unleashed on ordinary people by Wall Street and plundering multinationals.

That Mueller arrives at his new gig through the revolving door from a white shoe law firm which has represented Paul Manafort, himself suspected of Russian wheeling and dealing, along with Jared Kusher and Ivanka Trump, is apparently no cause of concern. These incestuous plutocratic relationships happen. They are pretty much unavoidable in the rarefied world of the .01%. I can already hear the wrist-slapping.

 So we proles are actually supposed to be happy and grateful, now that what is grotesquely called the "Intelligence Community" is taking over and effectively reducing Donald Trump to a quivering blob of jelly. The question remains as to whether this blatant "deep state" interregnum will be temporary or permanent.

The media's war against Trump has surged to epic, nearly vicious proportions in just a few short days, ever since he spilled alleged state secrets to Russian diplomats. Tune in to CNN for an hour, or scan the front pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times. The media mission is clear: remove Trump from office by any means necessary. Impeachment, criminal indictment, gaslighting, the 25th amendment - they're all on the table. The odds of him lasting out his term exponentially decrease with every passing day.

Nicholas Kristof, resident neoliberal concern troll of the New York Times, is typical of the gloating journalistic genre:

By firing James Comey as F.B.I. director, President Trump set in motion the appointment Wednesday evening of Robert Mueller as special counsel. Mueller is a Trump nightmare: a pro who ran the F.B.I. for 12 years and is broadly respected by both parties in Washington for his competence and integrity. If Trump thought he was removing a thorn by firing Comey, he now faces a grove of thistles.

One crucial lesson here: Pressure matters. It was public opinion that stalled the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare, and it is public opinion in part that will ensure the integrity of this investigation.

It is, of course, the job of Kristof and his media cohort to mold this public opinion, to steer us toward accepting a national police state as the guardian of democracy.  All we should want is that this "cloud over the presidency be removed." Whether this cloud-removal will actually allow the bright sun of government by, for and of the people to ever shine through is not examined in his column. What should matter to us is not where our next meal or loan payment is coming from, but whether Trump and Putin were really in cahoots. Also, we should be bowing down in reverence to the Times and the Post for their intrepid publication of leaks about the crumbling of a man whom they themselves were instrumental in elevating to power.

I can actually envision Trump just quitting. He can't trust anyone. Every time he farts, it's in the New York Times. Whoever is leaking details of internal executive branch chaos to the media is so close to him that even the subtle shades of redness on his scowling face are being reported in the most minute detail.

Despite the fact that the Surveillance State has essentially suborned our remaining democratic processes, Mueller's investigation might at least drag on long enough to also do lasting political damage to Trump's dangerous successor(s). Vice President Michael Pence is even more terrifying than his boss because he knows the system so well. Unlike Trump, he's a diehard right-wing ideologue with friends in high establishment places and a proven ability to get some truly nasty things done. So let's at least hope that enough Trumpian dirt rub offs on Pence and those other two psychopaths, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, to irreparably weaken them right into some premature lucrative retirements.

One example of Trump not being able to get things done while this investigation proceeds is his plan to destroy the entire American public education system. His kleptocratic agenda makes the neoliberal No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top stealth attacks on education by the previous two administrations seem positively benign in comparison:

Funding for college work-study programs would be cut in half, public-service loan forgiveness would end and hundreds of millions of dollars that public schools could use for mental health, advanced coursework and other services would vanish under a Trump administration plan to cut $10.6 billion from federal education initiatives, according to budget documents obtained by The Washington Post. The administration would channel part of the savings into its top priority: school choice. It seeks to spend about $400 million to expand charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools, and another $1 billion to push public schools to adopt choice-friendly policies.

Members of Congress are becoming increasingly loath to work with the White House, given the pressing manufactured concerns about RussiaGate. So these competing witch hunts -- against both Trump, and against public spaces and programs -- may cancel one another out,  paradoxically end up being a very good thing for ordinary citizens despite the best malign intentions of the extreme centrists, After all, were it not for the drama of the Clinton impeachment, Social Security might well be privatized by now too. It was on the bipartisan table then, and it's on the table now.

The Democratic Party leadership, for its part, is passive-aggressively trying to tamp down the Trump feeding frenzy. One must not act too greedy or too hasty too soon before the 2018 midterms, they say, lest one appear too greedy or hasty and risk losing one's own tentative grasp on power. Let Mueller perform his role so Congress doesn't have to perform theirs.
 
So despite the five-alarm fire that Trump is accused of igniting, there's no cause for more than a spritz here or there to keep the funds of fear rolling in to the Democratic Party with every new Trump atrocity outrage.

In the short term, I suppose it's preferable that our ankle-biting elected officials remain too busy and too distracted going after each other and grabbing for power and posturing for the TV cameras to find enough free time to break any more promises to their constituents.
 
  But what about tomorrow, next month, next year, ten years from now?

To paraphrase Ezio Mauro, we citizens have our own bridge to cross, the one  leading from the landscape of inchoate anger and occasional protest to a place of hope, projects and proposals, and mutual aid, a place where we can actually change things.

As J.M. Coetzee writes in Diary of a Bad Year, "The question why life must be likened by a race, or why the national economies must race against one another rather than going for a comradely jog together, for the sake of health, is not raised. Why does the world have to be a kill-or-be-killed gladiatorial amphitheatre rather than, say, a busily cooperative beehive or anthill?" 

Perhaps we can take a break from the very important people's hysteria over RussiaGate and change the conversation entirely while they are so busily and deliberately not paying sufficient attention to us.

Headfake Follies

I'm trying to get the gory details about the latest palace intrigue straight.

My take: Our A.D.D. president breaches national security by dishing to the Russians about some top secret classified intel involving yet another laptop terror plot. And then the media-political complex clutches their pearls and shrieks that Trump has endangered an "ally" even as they themselves dish to the whole entire world about the alleged plot which Trump dished to the Russians. It is not a breach of national security or a betrayal of secrets, apparently, when the right politicians and the approved media outlets dish out state secrets for all the right and high-falutin' reasons.

It's not as though, before Trump's faux pas, we proles couldn't connect the dots and figure out the reason that the airlines were suddenly banning laptops from international flights. It's not as though the media didn't report, all day and every day, the geographical locales where ISIS has set up shop. (Trump apparently let slip the geographical source of the "intel," thus endangering our foreign spy friends.)

The sources for the latest White House leak to the Washington Post, the New York Times and other major media outlets are an anonymous current official and an anonymous past official. We can thus surmise that the current official dished state secrets to the past official, in order that the media could confirm the story and responsibly dish it out to the rest of us in one unified, neat, prepackaged, journalistically "ethical" narrative.

To make the intrigue even more fun, Trump's top security advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, immediately denied that Donald had dished. And then this morning Donald promptly threw McMaster under the bus by tweeting, that yes, he had indeed dished to the Russians. Because as president, he can say whatever he wants to whomever he wants. He broke no laws.

That might be true, say the Miss Mannerses of the Deep State. But what an egregious breach of spying etiquette. We the consuming audience are given   only two choices: Trump is either a clueless oaf, or he is a deliberate traitor. From the New York Times:

 It was not clear whether Mr. Trump wittingly disclosed such highly classified information. He — and possibly other Americans in the room — may have not been aware of the sensitivity of what he was sharing. It was only after the meeting, when notes on the discussion were circulated among National Security Council officials, that it was flagged as too sensitive to be shared, even among many American officials, the former official said.

Hmm. Sounds a lot like those Hillary Clinton emails, which were only deemed "classified" after she unwittingly pushed Send. Sounds a lot like Obama's head of Intel, James Clapper, when he falsely told Congress that the NSA does not "wittingly" collect the private communications of every man, woman and child in America. Clapper is now esconced in his new gig as a latter-day John Dean, telling the Sunday shows that there is not only a cancer on the presidency, but that Trump himself is the core disease.

It should be obvious by now that Trump enjoys chaos for the sake of chaos. He keeps even his most powerful advisers and his most intimate confidantes on their toes at all times. If nobody tries to sabotage him on any given day, then he's always happy to do the honors himself. It's the ratings, baby!

There is no such thing as bad publicity when it concerns Donald J. Trump. And the more he appears to be persecuted by the Washington establishment, the more his fans come to his defense.

And while the media-political complex tries to foment ever more Russophobic outrage among the citizenry, Congressional impeachment still appears to be off the table. In a CNN Town Hall appearance on Monday night, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi admitted that there is no proof - yet - that Trump has committed an offense egregious enough or sufficiently outside the norms of the usual political graft and corruption to justify any official attempt to remove him from office:

 If you're talking about impeachment, you're talking about, what are the facts? Not, I don't like him and I don't like his hair and -- you know, I think, what are the facts? I don't like what he said about this. What are the facts that you would make a case on? What are the rules that he may have violated? If you don't have that case, you're just participating in more hearsay.

If Pelosi refused to consider impeaching George W. Bush for the illegal invasion of Iraq, for torture, and for other war crimes when her party still enjoyed a majority, the chances of them going after Trump are slim to none. As I mentioned the other day, he is a very useful idiot. Every time he says or does something outrageous, the Democrats and their veal pen offshoots go into fund-raising overdrive. Where, for example, would Hillary Clinton's new dark money anti-Trump SuperPac be without Donald to kick around all day and every day? And as far as the Republicans are concerned, the more that Trump can distract the country, the more secretly they can go about ripping up the social contract behind their closed doors.

If the media spent even a tenth of their energy on exploring the root cause of terrorism - unfettered American militarism for the benefit of a reckless oligarchy - they probably wouldn't be wasting so much of their time and ours trying to convince us that Donald Trump is some sort of anomaly. 

All they know how to do is gaslight us to death. If we are made to fear Trump all day and every day, perhaps we'll forget all about the rest of our workaday problems.

Not likely. And their desperation is definitely showing, all day and every day.